As you can see from the cover, this story is an attempt to unify the various identities of Carol Danvers. I’m not sure it’s successful, but it does a nice fan service of revisiting some major touchpoints in her past.
At the end of last issue, the alien known as Cru returned and attacked Ms. Marvel. This story starts with the big fight, with SHIELD and Machine Man trying to help. Ms. Marvel is defeated, Cru steals her powers, and then abandons her on Monster Island.
Machine Man’s body is destroyed in the battle, so SHIELD sticks his head on the body of a Monica Rambeau LMD.
I think that counts as gender-bending cosplay.
While dodging monsters, Carol finds herself communicating telepathically with Cru who recasts herself as a victim of the brood. This is a little confusing but it makes sense in context: Male Cru that attacked Carol is with her on Monster Island while psychic Cru appears as a woman and is explaining to Carol that the brood destroyed her own planet, and now they’re coming Earth–explaining that the reason Cru tried to destroy Earth the last time was to prevent the brood from expanding onto the planet.
(So Earth is facing two alien invasions simultaneously, by both the brood and the skrulls.)
The Brood end up killing Cru, but Cru is able to embed her consciousness within Carol before her death. Having another mind competing for space inside her own body is reminiscent of Carol’s identity having been completely wiped by Rogue way, way back in Avengers Annual #10.
Cru/Carol fight the Brood until she finds herself facing down the Brood queen.
This is a call back to Danvers’ battle against the Brood back when she had the codename Binary in the old Chris Claremont/Paul Smith Uncanny X-Men days. Apparently, this is the same Brood Queen–she survived that old battle and has been looking for revenge on Ms. Marvel ever since.
There’s some confusing retconning here about what happened during that last battle, and apparently she was infused with some power that actually belonged to Cru or something. It also tags back to several strange things that have happened during this run, where Carol has been able to heal from injuries and has had other quirky power changes. Honestly, I don’t think it’s ever brought back up after Brian Reed’s run and it’s all a misdirect anyway (see below).
While that’s going on, Carol’s team are looking for her and Sleepwalker gets a bit of a power-up that lets Rick Sheridan control the Sleepwalker transformation but is eventually going to turn his mind to mush. Do you care? I don’t.
That time arrives in time for a big final fight. They win fairly easily, which is a bit of a letdown given how much build up there’s been here and how it seems to tie into a lot of mysteries planted during this run.
But at the end we learn that Carol is really a skrull, which kind of undoes everything about this run. Or at least I think it does. Next issue is the Secret Invasion tie-in.
English (US) · 