Powers of X #3 Hickman Breaks All the Rules (Spoiler Review!)

A few days ago, I said it seemed that Powers of X would focus on four time periods: year zero, ten, one hundred, and one thousand. So, I was wrong. Powers of X #3 focuses solely on Year 100, and seems to wrap up the Year 100 storyline in a viscously surprising way. So, once again, Magneto is here to warn you:

(20th Century Fox)

Powers of X #3: The End is the Beginning is the End

So far during the Year One Hundred storyline, the remaining mutants in our solar system were working on a heist. Two of them died off the bat just to get the information needed to get the information they need. Well, now that they have that, it’s time to act. First, we get some confirmation on the mysterious figures surrounding Apocalypse:

Image via screengrab

Yep—these are the future four horsemen, but they are not the villains—they’re the X-Men. And they have one last mission to try and save their kind. They just need to talk to “Mother” first.

Powers of X #3 and the Hickman Left Hook Punch

The information they needed to get? Well, that happens to be the history of the Nimrod sentinel program—specifically where it started. It happens to be the same information that Mystique stole in the Year Ten timeline. It’s like time is folding on itself, and maybe it is. We knew that Moira had multiple lives. Hickman led us to believe that the four timelines in Powers of X were linear, but issue #3 breaks that. Turns out that Year 100 is the ninth lifeline of Moira, when she teams up with Apocalypse. Moira and Apocalypse have a bigger plan here. They know she’ll be reborn with all of her memories, so they essentially download the information into her..

Image via screengrab

And reboot her…

Image via screengrab

This Changes Everything

Now nothing is certain. The four timelines aren’t joined, as far as we know. And then there’s that secret sixth lifeline too. We all assumed that Hickman was steering a ship—turns out it was an armada going in all different directions. Instead of simply seeing a single X-Men story throughout time, we’re possibly seeing many. There’s little doubt this story all fits together, but instead of using time as a highway, they’re using time as a weapon.

Grade: Forever’s End

(Featured Image: Marvel Comics)

Roman Colombo finished his MFA in 2010 and now teaches writing and graphic novel literature at various Philadelphia colleges. His first novel, Trading Saints for Sinners, was published in 2014. He's currently working on his next novel and hoping to find an agent soon.