In this week's issue of Amazing Spider-Girl, we learn that the Carnage symbiote was broken up into a bunch of separate little specimens (I suppose at least 297 of them, given the escaped one is Specimen 297 after all). Later, we see the President speaking with a shadowy figure about the situation.
First of all, let's give G.W. Bridge a big hand. From being kicked out of SHIELD and having to hunt Frank Castle on his own in the current Punisher War Journal, he's ascended to the level of President of the United States in the MC2 Universe. Way to revitalize your career, big fella!
More to the point, President Bridge mentions that certain members of the opposition party have discussed dropping "Carnage bombs" on unfriendly countries. OK, let us set aside for a moment the question of how many people know that SHIELD scientists are experimenting on the symbiote, and the question of what is the proper venue for bringing up the fact you want to drop a living, possibly psychotic, organism on another country, and just focus on the actual idea.
The way I see, there are two possibilities: One, you let the symbiote bond with your soldiers, then drop them in a superhuman killing machines, like a Super-Soldier Program. Two, you drop the containers with the symbiotes inside, let them bond with members of the indigenous population, and let them do the killing for you. Ultimately though, it boils down to what you do with them when you're finished. I mean, the whole point of dropping them in unfriendly areas would be to eliminate those you find unfriendly, right? But how exactly are you going to keep a Carnage from eliminating everyone they come across, including people you might not want killed?
It's the same lack of thinking you see in any Aliens movie, where the financial powers want to capture the aliens to use them for some sinister purpose, without considering certain problems involved. Or else they plan to sell them to people who won't consider those problems. Either way, somebody's being an idiot.
Ponder it for a moment. How are they going to control these bio-weapons? If they solve that problem by simply killing them when they aren't needed, how do they replenish ranks for the next dirty job? Need eggs for that (or more symbiotes), and need a queen to get those (or a symbiote to spawn more), and how to ensure that doesn't backfire magnificently (Queenie gets loose, symbiotes bond with people they aren't supposed to, start running amok)?
"Control" would really be a joke, you know? You try and implant something in the aliens, the acid internal juices probably melt it. Try it with the symbiote (or the person it's bonded to), the symbiote will get inside the person, and short out whatever doohickey you're using (Witness the attempt to modify Cletus Kasady's behavior with a chip in Spider-Man/Batman. Symbiote took care of that in about five seconds).
It's a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. There's so much destructive potential, and military contracts are where the money is, so I suppose it's natural to think in those terms. But it's like discussing using a volcano as a weapon. Sure, it's highly destructive, and if you can get it going it'll probably get the job done, but how do you stop it once you're done with it?
As a final note, a little off this specific discussion, I was interested to see President Bridge also discussing the hopes that the symbiote could help in a cure for cancer. They have demonstrated regenerative abilities (like when the Venom symbiote saved Spider-Girl from a stab wound in the chest), so there is a precedent. But I was more interested because it's similar to the idea Bendis put behind the symbiote in the Ultimate Universe, that the symbiote, which at that point only really augments abilities, could be used to treat cancer, or diseases. Might be interesting to see that explored a little more somewhere, seeing as I kind of doubt it'll come up much again in the Ultimateverse (I think "symbiotes" , along with "clones", are strictly classified as weapons over there now).
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3 comments:
If its the soildier idea, maybe they're thinking they'll stay sanish long enough to deploy sonics once they're done.
Enemy troops, maybe they just hope the enemy doesn't have sonics.
An obvious weakness is the only clear advantage the symbiote plan has over the aliens, but that's enough to at least see why it'd ever be on the table.
The thing is, the Carnage symbiote isn't like a volcano because it's sentient. It can be reasoned with (sort of). The deal they want to make is this: They give the symbiote these jobs to do, and in exchange, it'll attack only the area they tell it to. No more police shooting at it when it's in the middle of a really creative kill, no more heroes breathing down its neck... it just gets airdropped, a nice long time to butcher whoever it wants, and then picked up again. The only downside is that it will occasionally have to be patient until it's time for another dictator to be disappeared or another insurgency to be massacred.
In Squadron Supreme, this deal was made with a super-powered serial killer. Of course, killing people like that is evil even if they are just backwards foreigners [/SARCASM], and their sentient WMD/assassin eventually broke free anyway. I'm just pointing out the way it was done before and the reasoning of the people behind this deal.
anonymous 1: Seeing as that symbiotes are usually portrayed as just really wanting to bond with someone (to survive), you probably could reason with them, if you assure them they'd have a permanent host.
Of course, they might jump hosts if they come across a better one, but I guess that's where sonics would come in.
anonymous 2: Good point about the sentience factor. I'm a little surprised that DeFalco is showing the symbiote as being murder hungry. I'd always interpreted the symbiote as just trying to be helpful to its host, who loved to kill. Which could still work, if they had the right people to bond with it.
I still think there's the issue of keeping the symbiote with a single host, one the Powers That Be could control, but you're right, there should be some grounds for negotiation with it.
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