Futility Of Evil

Do you know that this is my third blog post I've made in the last two hours, all on different blogs?

Man, I need a life.

Setting that aside, I'm going back to X-Factor #10, what with New Comics Day being shoved back until Thursday (Boo!). Specifically, I want to look at Singularity, and what they're up to.

Right from the start, they've been set against X-Factor finding out why mutants were depowered. Well, technically, they were trying to stop Madrox from somehow repowering all the mutants, but you would figure he'd have to know what caused the powers to go bye-bye before he could undo it. So if that's the case, Singularity has failed. X-Factor knows about the Scarlet Witch and what she did. And with Pietro apparently able to restore mutant powers (or mess you up in the process, it sounds a lot like that promycin stuff from the season finale of The 4400), Singualrity's desires seem well on their way to being thwarted. So why did the scientist matter? Yeah, Singularity was developing a virus to kill mutants, another Legacy Virus.

(I'm going to step away for a moment here to say that I think that not even Madrox was as horrified by this revelation as I was. We do not need a repeat of the Marvel's Boogeyman of the '90s, the Legacy Virus.)

But why would that virus be any big deal? Mutants are almost eradicated. Even with Pietro's efforts , combined with Marvel Editorial's seeming repowering of a mutant every other week, and the occasional mutant child being born (unless Wanda somehow put the kibosh on that) it would take years for mutants' numbers to recover.

If we step back out of the storyline, and look at the idea from where we live, that magical world the Animal Man is aware of, we know that any new virus is a waste of time. Basically all the mutants left are major characters, so they'll obviously be immune to its effects, regardless of how absurd that is. I mean, realistically, what are the odds that of the millions of mutants that lost their powers, but the five that have Summers' genetics all came through OK?

And don't think that doesn't annoy the hell out of me.

So we know Singularity is wasting their time. The virus cannot exterminate mutants, anymore than Sentinels, or Nimrod, or Bastion, or whoever the hell else has tried to wipe them out in the last forty years. Setting aside that they don't know this, what if they aren't sure about what's going on?

Maybe Singularity thinks their virus worked differently than planned. Instead of killing mutants, it just depowers them. I'd bet they would really like to cover that up, both to protect themselves from reprisals by the remaining mutants (I can already see the X-Men just wildly blowing shit up), the former mutants, not to mention the government would almost certainly. . . "appropriate" such a bit of ingenuity. So it's the sort of thing you'd like to not have become common knowledge. True, Mr. Tryp appears to have a future version of himself to consult with, and so he should know, but the "old man" admitted that Decimation threw everything into a big mess, temporally speaking, so he may not be able to be sure. For all he knows the virus may have existed in the other reality (Hank Pym was trying to unlock the key to mutation, if I recall, maybe he hit this instead), and been released there, and the effects carried over.