Someone Tell that Man in the Audience to Shut Up

A few months back, I picked up the first 6 issues of Earth X. I remember seeing a collection of character sketches Alex Ross did in some Wizard issue back in the day and thinking it looked kind of cool. And there were all the mysteries about all the telepaths dying simultaneously, or Reed wearing Doom's armor, Mayday Parker having the Venom symbiont. The fact it's a crappy future isn't much; Marvel's futures are always terrible, but the hows and whys of everything were intriguing.

But holy crap did Jim Krueger pick the worst approach for a framing device. At least through issue 5, everything is presented as X-51/Machine Man/Aaron Stack describing what he's seeing to Uatu the Watcher, now blind as a bat. OK, that kind of puts us at an extra remove from the action, but I can work with it.

Except Uatu is constantly chiding Aaron for how he's describing things, perceiving things, for focusing on the wrong things. For being worried about the people, instead of focusing on what Uatu - vaguely - deems to be the important aspect of whatever they're observing.

Uatu, if I remember what I've read online and in issues of Tony Bedard's Exiles run correctly, is focusing on the Earth being an incubation chamber for a Celestial egg, and that all the superhuman nonsense is just a defense system meant to keep Galactus from eating the egg before it hatches. Why Galactus is doing that escapes me, but whatever.

I'm pretty sure the end result of this approach to the story is meant to show how wrong the Watcher is about what's really important.That those people's lives have meaning beyond being unwitting pawns in the games of a bunch of cosmic dipshits with coffee mugs for heads. But until then, it's annoying as hell to try and read this story when one of the characters is essentially calling the reader stand-in an idiot constantly for being dumb enough to worry about the actual characters in the story.

"Captain America seems so defeated? What's happened"

"That doesn't matter, you fool! You aren't looking at the big picture!"

I keep wondering why Aaron doesn't just walk away. (Really, I keep wondering why Aaron doesn't punch Uatu, but the Watcher probably still has enough power to make that a bad idea. Trusting him to stick to his non-involvement when it comes to self-defense isn't a bet I'd take.) Uatu's a projection on TV screen at this point. A blind projection. He needs Aaron to tell him what's happening. Just go take a walk, leave him stewing in the darkness and see how he likes it. Maybe his manners will improve.