Kulan Gath's total mind control part II: Ye Olde Mind Control

When we last left Manhattan, the recently revived ancient devil priest Kulan Gath had used a master spell to turn the entire island into a Hyborean citystate. Quickly conquering his many super powered enemies, Gath seemed utterly unbeatable. 

Even the Hellfire Club's Selene, as ancient and malevolent as Gath himself, was the N'garai worshipping sorceror's help (and mouth)less prisoner. But Kulan Gath wasn't satisified with merely mentally controlling the Morlocks, a fair share of the New Mutants and most of the Avengers. No, he wanted more mindless pawns to control...

He got his wish when the Avengers Starfox and Wasp were presented to him after one of the various fights that make up this two parter. By showing them their greatest fears, Gath was able to sufficiently weaken their will so he could bend them to his control. For Starfox, its the understandable fear to turn out like his brother Thanos, the genocidal despot... Understandable, because they share the same genes and upbringing...

But Wasp's secret anxiety is losing her humanity and shifting into a more wasplike form. Sounds horrible, lets hope its just an illusion. I mean, what are the odds of something crazy like that actually happening, right?

Ah well, at least it was still a buck fifty.

But the Wasp in Gath's reality was actually a control leeching vampire that drained her victims of the will to live, while Starfox used his great beauty to control anyone invulnerable to her teammate's pretty boy charms. Like Colossus. 

Still, it wasn't just the bad guys who use mind control. In the approach to the final assault on Gath, Captain America had Rachel Summers resort to some mental nudging to enter Kulan's keep.

"These are not the black leather clad SM slavegirls you are looking for"

Barely covered Star Wars pastiches aside, this was hardly the final time Claremont relied on mind control to help the story get across. After Captain America managed to bring in Rachel and the New Mutant Magma as prisoners, the endgame against Gath quickly unfolded.

The wizard was rendered powerless by Storm who managed to snatch away the source of his power: the magic necklace he carried round his neck. But the battle wasn't quite over yet. Remember how easily Gath managed to overpowered Selene? Almost like she wasn't quite herself, right?

Either Amara suddenly developed telekinesis or something is very, very wrong... 

Proving once again that appearances CAN be deceiving, it turns out that Selene had secretly taken Magma's place, giving the girl her appearance so she would be taken as Gath's slave. Now in possession of Kulan's necklace, Selene was ready to take over the world...

That is, if only Storm hadn't reached out to the dying techno organic New Mutant Warlock who offered a solution...

"There are worse fates"

Say, you don't think Storm could have meant being written by Brian Michael Bendis, do you?

Anyhoo... After changing into a semi-techno organic creature, she attacked Selene... infecting her with the techmode virus that turned her into a techno organic creature herself.

Some beautiful Claremont commentary accompany this rather... interesting... piece of art by John Romita junior. But there are some nits to be picked.

First, there's Warlock/Storm draining Selene's lifeforce, basically killing her. Whatever happened to Storm's sacred vow to never take a life? Second... How can Warlock even exist within the limited reality of Kulan Gath's Hyborean revertion master spell? Its already odd the Avengers member Vision is still a robot, how does an alien techno organic mutant shapeshifter fit into ancient times?

Still, ignoring all logic and established continuity for a second... lets see what happens next...  

With Strange freed from his previous existence as a statue in Kulan Gath's throne room, the master of the mystic arts quickly came up with a way to deal with this whole mess. A bit of a shame Strange's way of dealing with it had about as much emotional maturity to it as a toddler closing its eyes and wishing real hard all the bad things never happened.

"What you just experienced was a temporalspacial claudication..."

An awfully fancy term for: we prevented Kulan's ascension from ever happening.

Sounds fancy and plausible enough, that is if you ignore the simple fact they were only able to achieve this by adapting Kulan's masterspell... A spell Gath  invoked áfter his initial ascension... So if Gath never arose, how could the spell have been there to stop him?

And... erm... My head hurts.

Skipping all that pesky temporal logic just like Claremont did, Strange caused the timeline to skip a beat so the original closing scene from Uncanny X-men # 189 had a rather different outcome...

Doctor Strange managed to prevent Gath's return by making his necklace disappear.

Not by invoking the flames of the Faltine and burning Kulan's presence from the amulet... Not even calling in the ruby ringed might of Raggador to pound it to dust. Alas, not even a single 'the power of Vishanti compells thee!' with complimentary pea soup spitting.

Nope, Strange does this.

Saving all mankind by yanking a mutant massacring Nimrod sentinel to the present, all the way from that far flung future of... 2014.

Yeah. Guess that's why they call the doctor... Strange.

Breaking the mindcontrol mastermold

Is mind control always wrong?

Judging from the 75+ previous posts, the answer might seem obvious... but no, sometimes mind control isn't merely a tired writer's tool or a way to act out fanboyish obsessions with power and seduction.

Even Chris Claremont proved that on occassion... For instance, in today's entry covering Uncanny X-men 246 & 247 that feature two forms of mind control, written from a whole new angle.

The two parter starts with Carol Danvers in New York, visiting Arabella Jones, an old friend from her days as Ms. Marvel.

No, no worries, its not an error, that ís Rogue talking like she's Carol. Because, well, she kind of is. Rogue once used her absorption powers to drain Ms. Marvel, but she didn't just get her powerset, Carol's persona was imprinted on Rogue's mind as well. 

Until recently, it had remained dormant but during a traumatic trip to Genosha, Rogue was forced to relinquish control of her mind to the Carol aspect of her persona in order to survive... Causing the two to fight for dominance ever since.

Quite frankly, I'm not quite sure why the X-men were cutting 'Carol' so much slack. It may sound cruel, but she really wasn't much more than a psychic imprint of the real Carol Danvers... A woman who was still very much alive... Fighting alongside professor Xavier and the Starjammers in space at the time, as the cosmically powered Binary. Having this bitter afterimage torture Rogue seems cruel.

Of course Claremont didn't allow himself an easy way out and went out of his way to point out that the two personas in Rogue's head caused a form of static that made it impossible for telepaths to go in and sort stuff out. How... convenient.

Still... its powerful stuff, if you're willing to consider 'Carol' to be a real person. Speaking of people who aren't exactly real... Does anyone remember how Doctor Strange and Illyana altered the timeline to make sure the Hyborean wizard Kulan Gath wouldn't rise to power and turn Manhattan into his own private barbaric playpen?

Well, they did... and due to their tampering, a supersentinel from the future called Nimrod was shifted to our present. Nimrod is like the Terminator, capable of assuming humanoid form and learning from his mistakes... yet he always seemed unable to adapt his nigh fluorescent pink hue into something a little more imposing.

Anyhoo, whenever Nimrod wasn't wiping out mutants or fighting crime, he was enjoying a relatively quiet life as Nicholas Hunter, foreman of a New York explosives crew. So far so good, until one day he picked up a piece of metal on a jobsite that wasn't simply debris...

Turns out what seemed like an ordinary piece of shrapnel, was actually the command module of the prime Sentinel Master Mold... the grand poobah of all mutant hunting robots... and a very early predecessor of Nimrod. Which would explain why he would be mostly pink as well... Sigh.

One might argue that this, shall we say, familiarity allowed the Master Mold to take control of Nimrod... But following that exact same logic, shouldn't my Windows 3.11 from 1992 be able to completely hack and control Windows 7? After all, it came before... right? Ahh, suspension of disbelief.

Getting back to the story, Master Mold quickly used the materials of the building site to grow to gigantic size, adapting the advanced Nimrod technologies to gain even more upgrades in the process. Psylocke and Rogue (with 'Carol' behind the wheel) were the first to take notice of this threat and Carol flew into action wearing her old Ms. Marvel duds. Lets see how it went...

  

The Master Mold knocked out Carol, giving Rogue her own body back... Groggy or not, she helped the innocent bystanders get to safety and before long the X-men showed up to fight this massive menace. But, as it turns out, Master Mold was forced to fight another opponent on the inside as well...

So... when two entirely artificial intelligences are combined... a human telepath can still affect them? Wow, that's a real brain zinger. 

In the end, the X-men were able to blast the Master Mold to bits... but by then it had already incorporated Nimrod's capacity for preservation. If only a single shred remained intact, the robot could and would recover... and the nightmare would start again. Also, the internal bickering between a pink faced father of mutant killing robots and a futuristic killing machine who for no other reason dan too bee distinctive, started toiking like a Nooow Joisey tough guy... Ahhh, feggedaboutit!

Dazzler came up with a solution to the problem: simply send the Master Mold through the Siege Perilous... that mystical portal to the afterlife and reincarnation Roma gave the X-men a while back. Anyone who passes through the Siege, will be judged based upon his or her actions in life and given a new life based on the outcome.

Despite their inner monologues, Master Mold and Nimrod are still very much machines... So, Dazzler basically sent two toaster ovens to be reincarnated... And a few years later we ended up with Bastion and Operation: Zero Tolerance.

So much for balancing the scales and granting a new lease on life... There he is, still robotic, still fulfilling his notion of the prime directive.

And he STILL dressed in pink. I guess karma really is Boy George's bitch.

Diamonds are a man's best friend

"Yield me thy soul... so small a price for so great a gift..."

Owww brother... now even jewels do mind control.

In Uncanny X-men # 189, the Hyborean sorceror Kulan Gath was about to make a comeback.

Gath had been around to fight Conan the Barbarian. When his life seemed over, Gath used ancient magics to transfer his consciousness into a dark jewel of unspeakable evil. In recent times, the jewel came to New York City where a briefly revived Gath fought Spider-Man and Red Sonja (don't ask) in a very enjoyable Claremont/Byrne issue of Marvel Team Up. 

Now, Gath was about to claim a new host: Jaime Rodriguez, an honest, hard working Puerto Rican sailor who dregged the jewel from the bottom of the New York harbour. Pretty soon, Gath started to work Rodriguez, tempting him to give into his dark desires.

But he was getting nowhere, until this happened:

Gath quickly won over the already greedy crook and that led to all of Manhattan reverting into an Hyborean citystate ruled over by a revived Kulan Gath.

Sometimes, you just can't win...