Domino #4
Writer: Joe Pruett
Art: Brian Stelfreeze
Perfect Weapon: Part 4 of 4
Day twenty, and Dom's just been as thoroughly gob-smacked as the rest of us. Turns out the secret weapon is A five-year-old boy, and by the looks of things, they haven't been treating him very humanely. (I can honestly say this is one of the few times I have been completely thrown by a plot twist, BTW.) Dom starts making friends and trying to get answers out of the boy (Lazarus), but is rudely interrupted by a gun barrel pressed into her skull. So she does what anyone would do. Blows up her laptop as a distraction and kicks the crap out of them.
She makes her escape, finds no resistances, and pretty quickly runs smack into the fact that this is because the monks are in town. Here's where things get interesting. Turns out the head Armajesuit is none other than dear old mom. Needless to say, this pisses Dom off--who realizes her own mother has been playing her the entire time. Not exactly a warm fuzzy maternal thing to do. And then the plot unravels in very interesting ways, indeed.
Turns out that dear old mom signed herself up for a government program that was trying to breed the perfect genetic weapon, Domino and Lazarus being the only two children with the mutant gene to survive the testing. Dom was rendered catatonic by it, and eventually secreted away to a priest in Chicago to be cared for. We're supposed to believe her mother did this out of a sense of compassion--those it's hard to believe when she goes on to comment that she never bothered to contact Dom (even after she woke up and apparently ran away from where she was being cared for) because Dom's 'luck' was of no use to her. No, turns out Domino was supposed to be a precognitive--like her mother--and when that didn't pan out, Mom decided she was worthless. Oh, and the cute kid? Can apparently wreak some serious harm on the world, so mom's going to kill him (I think the woman is vying with Madelyne Pryor for Worst Mother Ever status, honestly).
And then the soldiers show up, and the nice general offers us some clarifications, which are as follows 1) mom's name is Beatrice. This was a beautiful little twist, and rather ironic since Dom hates the name, and 2) mom's insane. Right, then. That explains the Armajesuits nicely, then, doesn't it? The general goes on to prove his... well, xenophobia isn't really the right term, but he thinks they're all a bunch of freaks who are only useful for what they can offer the government. One gets the sense that this guy has been devoted to this project for a long time, and doesn't really like the fact that it's probably not high on the government's priorities anymore. He and Beatrice argue--she claims he has no idea what Lazarus can do, he says he knows exactly what he can do, and that's the whole point--and he shoots her. And then at Dom. There's lots of shooting going on, really, and then everything...
Stops. Because Lazarus has stopped them (and is himself hovering three feet off the ground, but that's sort of incidental). Of course, mom was only playing dead (Hello? Precog. She probably saw it coming last week... this is why Military Intelligence is an oxymoron) and it turns out that Dom--as with a few other mutants--is immune to her brother's powers. A short stand-off ensues in which Beatrice reiterates that she's seen the future, and that this is the only way to prevent a future in which Lazarus has manipulated the minds of the planet into a blind, mindless sort of tranquility. Dom is, understandably, not ready to let her skewer the boy. So *she* shoots her, grabs Lazarus, and takes off before everyone recovers. Ironically, the sense of peace his 'perfect weapon' brings is too much for the general, who promptly shoots himself in the head. Good riddance, I say. Dom takes Lazarus to the priest who took her so many years before.
Day forty-nine: Dom visit's Jonathon's grave, and gives a little speech about how she doesn't have him, and how he taught her something about opening her eyes... Yeah. Anyway, she says something about having taken a chance--one that had nothing to do with her powers. One can only presume this refers to having left Lazarus at the church.
On the last page, Beatrice returns to claim her son. Even without the precognitive abilities she possesses, it probably wasn't hard to figure out where Dom would stash him. It's clear she's still determined to kill the boy, too. Stelfreeze outdoes himself with the art on the page--there is a beautiful juxtaposition between the statue of the Madonna with Child in the first panel and Beatrice holding her son in the last. And that's the end.
This was, in my opinion, a stunning conclusion to a great LS. All the questions I had were pretty much answered, and the plot twist was a great one. We get new information on Domino--surprising information--that blends with previous continuity instead of tossing it out the window, which seems to be the new fad at Marvel. If there is one thing I have to admit to being dissatisfied with, it's the whole Jonathon angle. We never really get an explanation as to who he was (aside from a slime-ball, and someone Dom's probably known for most of her career) or why, despite the fact that he seemed to be nothing but a grade A jerk, he manages to evoke the kind of reactions out of Dom he does. It's out of character for her, and it lends a sort of psudo-moral to the story that just wasn't needed, and could have very easily been excluded.
On the whole, I give the LS a 4.