How 'Powers of X' #6 Reveals the Inevitable Truth of the X-Men

Warning! This article contains SPOILERS for POWERS OF X #6, So read on at your own risk, True Believers!

“We always lose.”

That’s the inevitable truth that Moira X has dealt with across ten lifetimes. HOUSE OF X revealed Moira’s immortal journey, and now Jonathan Hickman and R.B. Silva have put an exclamation mark on that tale in POWERS OF X #6. The two stories that are one have come to a close. And now the fallout begins. 

To start the issue, Hickman and Silva revisited the moment in HOUSE OF X #2 where Moira X revealed her past lives to Charles Xavier. Except this was an expanded version of that scene, which was rich with additional context. When Moira says that she’s both loved and hated Charles, we know that she means it; when she sided with Apocalypse in her previous life, Moira actually helped kill Charles!

The tragedy is that Moira openly tells Charles that she has to break him and cure him of his idealism in order for their people to survive. That goes a long way towards explaining Charles’ present state in which he declared his dream of peaceful co-existence with humans to be a lie, and the way that he never removes his Cerebro helmet. Charles seems to be emotionally detached from the compassionate man he used to be.

Moira’s journal also reveals a few troubling details that reconcile some intentional incongruities in the story. Mister Sinister’s clones in Bar Sinister are at least a decade too early, but how and why that happened are a mystery for now. The alliance with Sinister was made without Moira’s knowledge, and she was very much against it. Moira also hints that she and Xaiver sought out Joseph McTaggart and Gabrielle Haller as their respective romantic partners specifically to create mutants who could rewrite reality. That’s why Proteus and Legion are unique to this lifetime.

With so many dead mutants coming back to life, we now know why Destiny and Blindspot aren’t among them. Moira is afraid, for good reason, that any mutant pre-cogs will immediately see through her design. She doesn’t want the newly unified mutant nation of Krakoa to know that their destiny is to lose. They always lose to humanity, and often in horrific ways.

Although Hickman previously withheld the details of Moira’s sixth life, POWERS OF X #6 reveals that we’ve been watching it all along. The future era of 1,000 years from the present is the one where the remnants of humanity, the Homo Novissima, are prepared to ascend as part of the Phalanx collective. This also revealed that Moria survived for so long thanks to blood transfusions from Wolverine. (Recent events with Brother Voodoo in SAVAGE AVENGERS seem to have confirmed that Logan’s blood does have healing properties.) But this is the first time we’ve seen Wolverine share a part of his immortality with anyone for such a grand length of time. This is also the second time we’ve seen Wolverine kill Moira to send her back to the beginning armed with new knowledge.

Hickman previously established that Moira spent her seventh life wiping out the Trask bloodline in an effort to prevent the Sentinels from existing. That’s because Moira’s sixth life was a revelation that the union of man and machine was the ultimate enemy of mutants. Sentinels and Nimrods were just a way to give humanity to find a way to outlast the mutants before making their own artificial evolutionary leap forward. Once again, this offers additional context for why Charles sent his top X-Men on a suicide mission to prevent Nimrod’s activation. Nimrod is only the beginning, and this is a war that has to be won in the present.

If Moira dies again, all of this may be undone. Her life holds the timeline together, and now she’s once again in hiding somewhere on Krakoa. But there are still a few mysteries left to uncover, and a few of Moira’s journals are intentionally blacked out. What secrets remain hidden?

Time will tell, but the Dawn of X is among us.

This week, X-MEN #1 starts a new era in mutant history.

Read POWERS OF X #6 at your local comic shop right now! Then head to Marvel.com/X for more on HOUSE OF X and POWERS OF X!