Roche Limit #5, by Michael Moreci (writer), Vic Malhorta and Ben Holliday (artists), Jordan Boyd and Marissa Louise (colors), Ryan Ferrier (letters) - Looks like a couple of crazy kids unlocked the power of love there on the cover. Not sure that's going to help them in the current situation.Alex pulls Bekkah back out of the Anomaly, so her body is once again devoid of a soul. Now they can return to the colony and find her soul (which is the glowy pink thing those teens found initially, which has since fallen into Gracie's hands), and recombine it with her body. The doctor behind the whole thing dies in the landing (Alex having apparently learned his piloting skills from either Indiana Jones or Launchpad McQuack), but asks them to go find the soul that they just ejected from Bekkah's body. One thing at a time, though.
Moscow, formerly kingpin of the colony, now loyal servant of what is emerging from the Anomaly, kills the three founders who had been lurking in the shadows, even though they were also presumably servants of the same thing as him. Then he and his horde or sorta-zombies storm Gracie's place, kill everyone in there, and take Bekkah's soul. Alex arrives and somehow kills his way through the cannon fodder, and even takes out Moscow with one of those nifty, "slide under the sword strike, then shoot" moves. Soul recovered, he tracks down Sonya and Bekkah, who have procured an escape craft, reunite Bekkah with her soul, and take off. Except Alex still has that bomb in his chest, with a proximity sensor, so he can't go to Earth. He says his goodbyes, gets in a spacesuit, and drifts until he blows up. Back on the colony, that dark mass disgorges three creatures (they remind me of some of the Dark World creatures from Metroid Prime 2), which find that soul Watkins asked Alex to find. Because Alex couldn't be bothered, I suppose.
Which is an interesting place to end, I think. Before Alex dies, he takes a bit of his Recall drug, so he can relive a moment when Bekkah told him something that meant a lot to him. Namely, that she loved him for who he was, but also for the great person she thought he could be. But the supposed "great person" made no attempt to recover the soul that had been inadvertently placed within Bekkah's body, even when Watkins told him where it would appear. Alex just couldn't be bothered to even try. Bekkah's soul was important enough for him to risk going and getting, but that other person? Pfft, who has time for that?
It's an odd thing. The colony itself corrupts people, either because of the radiation coming from the Anomaly, or just something in the air and the soil (I wonder if the planet came from the other side of the Anomaly originally, wherever that would be). If you take Alex' drug, which uses minerals from the planet and refines them, it accelerates the process of making you one of the loyal followers of the Black Sun. A drug that encourages people to live in the past, rather than moving forward and making new memories, makes you a slave of this strange thing. But just living on the colony will do the same thing, if you stay long enough.
The Black Sun seems to be one of those set-ups where they want to remove the uncertainty and need, by removing everything about the person. Like how Darkseid wants to bring "order" to the universe, by eliminating any will other than his own. So how does that intersect with a drug that keeps one stuck in the past? I guess if they're in that happy or loving moment, they want for nothing, so the search to fill any emptiness inside them evaporates. But they stagnate?
Why are some people seemingly mindless zombies, but others, like Moscow, seem to retain some aspect of personality, and possibly even individuality? I have this feeling Moscow, and those three founders came to the Black Sun under other circumstances, but I'm not sure what. The founders were explorers originally, so they could have traveled all the way through the Anomaly, but I can't picture Moscow subjecting himself to that experience. My guess is the founders contacted the Black Sun, whatever it may be, directly, trying to make a bargain with it. Power, eternal life, something. Moscow notes before he kills them that they were looking for fulfillment through greed, though that can take many forms.
I can't put it all together. How does the Anomaly separate a person from their soul? Why is the body still capable of functioning without it, or with another person's soul in there? Why doesn't the person seem any different with someone else's soul? Bekkah seemed like Bekkah (as far as Alex and Sonya were concerned) even with someone else's soul, and that soul didn't fight to avoid being booted out of that body at all. Which seems odd. I'd think it would struggle to avoid becoming disembodied again.
The next mini-series is supposed to be set 75 years in the future. If the Black Sun has had that long to establish itself on the world, we might get a better idea of what it's after and what it is. That's my biggest issue with this mini-series, it was hard to care about most of the characters, because we didn't really get to know them much. Gracie clearly had a long backstory, and it probably heavily involved both Moscow and her subordinate, Woodbury, but we never got much of it. As a result, I didn't feel much of anything when they died.
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