A Geek History of Time - Episode 178 - Speedball, Penance, and Liberal Redemption Part III

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

Wow, you're gonna like this. Oh, no, I'm not because there is no god damn middle. This is not unlike ancient Rome by the way Not so much the family circus Yeah, I did Want to create self-sustaining forms and you got into crystals. I know. Okay. I understand that standing farms and he got into crystal sea. I know! Okay, I understand that. But yeah, I'm reading Livy, who is a shitty historian. Because Irrigan is.

Others say that because Laurentia's body was common to all the shepherds around, she was called a she-wolf, which is a Latin term for horror. You were audible, lassies. It was just most of it, where you slamming the table. As the Romanists at the table, well, duh. Yeah. Obviously. Ipso facto. Right.

You know, it's your original form. Ipso, duh. You have a sword rat. 1.0-1.1 2.0-1.1 2.0-1.1 2.0-1.1 2.0-1.1 This is a geek history of time where we bring nourishment and we connect nourishment. I miss that into the new world, the real world, the fuck I really miss that he needs to be here with us.

I'm not Ed Blaylock. He's a middle school, his social science teacher with a smattering of English, as he likes to say, and he's doing that presently, and I, and myself, am not that. I'm not working until next week. So I'm here recording an extra episode with our guest Mr. Gabriel Cruz Gabriel. How are you today? I'm good. Thank you not Ed. I'm having a good time and I am sad that Ed couldn't be here because it's always a joy to talk to him. But as I've stated in a previous episode, you have maintained equilibrium by replacing one surly bearded Catholic with another.

As is written. So let's see, you know, let's just jump right into it because people are probably dying to hear more about speedball. As I've been told by my friends who are Iron Man fans and they're out and proud about it. I'm like, that's, you shouldn't be, but okay. You know, you try to have some room for morality in your life and allowing for the different lifestyles of other folks, but yeah, that's a peculiar choice. It's like saying Coca-Cola is your favorite. Beacuse of that.

Because of their lobbying. Oh, like, oh, no, listen, I can't enjoy your refreshing Coca-Cola without knowing actively in the forefront of my mind, it hired mercenaries to kill union leaders in South America. That's the only way that I can find a refreshing. Yeah, I mean, it's classic that way. It's true. It's just like that pickle company that did the same thing in Greenland. They killed off a bunch of natives. It's vlasic that way. Oh, no. Oh, you're like, oh, God, is he going to make a pickle pun? I may, son.

I may. It's jarring. No, for Coke Zero or for the Coke Zero, they try just breaking the kneecaps of the emulators, but it didn't have the same effect. Didn't have the same kick. Yeah. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. So let's see, when last

we talked, we just left off with Guantanamo Bay, which is still somehow cheerier than what we just talked about. So then we get to Spider-Man issue 533, where Peter starts to feel the sting of his choices. You know, he's he's he's out now. He's now Peter Parker. I am Spider-Man issue 533, where Peter starts to feel the sting of his choices. You know, he's out now. He's now Peter Parker. I am Spider-Man. I've been Spider-Man since I was 15. And not everybody likes the fact that he was unmasked. It turns out there is a issue of like he was an icon for people. And it was part of that iconography that we didn't know who he was, because then he could be any of us to quote from the most recent Spider-Man movie, he could have been black. And now he's not, you know, and so this, you know, good boy from Queens who always

anguishes to do the right thing. And real people know the word on the street compared to what Jay-Jones Jameson is saying. Well, now he's unmasked and he has cited with the registration people. And so Spider-Man fans are divided over this within the comic, which was kind of cool, because it's reflecting back to us what's happening with the readership. When you also had that one Captain America superfan who tried to shoot him. Yes. Right. Yeah, but that's, I think that's after they fight and after Spidey beats Captain America, right? Or is it? No, no, this is what happens right? This is like within the first, within one of the issues where he

reveals himself, I say one of the issues because I think he does it and it's covering a couple different. Yeah, yeah. Convictus Cross. It's in his, in the war at home, for him, for the Spider-Man amazing, Spider-Man. Yeah. A boy pops up and says, I'm Captain America's number one fan. So Steve and Peter hadn't even had chances to lay hands on each other at that point. You're right. Oh, you're absolutely right. Because then Tony's talking about how they can spin that and how you have to expect that kind of thing.

And he, but here's the thing. Now he has legitimacy and protection as well as the support of various establishment superheroes. And there's some people who are like, that's as it should be, you know. And there is room in the world for people, you know, it's that whole conservative versus liberal debate. Social order is very fragile and hard to keep. So when it cracks,

it's an emergency. And liberty is really important. And some want more social order at the expense of liberty and some want more liberty at the expense of social order. And there's been historical things that have shown us,, there's times where you go too far with one and times where you go too far with the other, you know, and it's it's a it's a reason why there's been concerted efforts by I want ashless to trigger security at the expense of liberty. From the perspective that what happens is, you know, they use weapons or assault style weapons in their attacks or whatever, with the intent specifically of trying to trigger a gun ban with the thought that, you know, the confiscation of guns or whatever comes from it,

what they think is going to happen is going to cause those who care about liberty to be up in arms and so that dichotomy being ever present, obviously they're taking a very fringe perspective of what that is like, but still that's where it comes from. You say fringe, I say plank of the GOP, but it's not even a plank, it's like one of the floor joists. Yeah. Yeah. It's the joist part of the party. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's the joist part of the party. You know, right?

Man, so he's got legitimacy, he's got protection and he's got support from various established super heroes. These are all three things that Robbie lacks at the exact same time, who has also been unmasked, who has also been outed against his shit, against his consciousness. Like he wasn't awake when it happened. You know, and with Peter, it's an annoyance because now he's got the paparazzi howning him.

JJ, JJ is, or JJ, and a Jameson is suing him for fraud. Not almighty. Oh, man. I almost choked when JJ said that, you know, I treated him like a son all these years. I thought, I, I going to be apoplectic in how before it's done.

Well, and he, Jameson does have a son. That's right. That's right. And I think actually, it was an astronaut, right? You know, a colonel and an astronaut. And in this storyline, he is the paramour of Jennifer Walters.

Is he? No, yeah. Um, but more more to it, I think when his son first does something with cosmic rays or something when he first goes up, his son ends up like being super hulked out, powerful and fights Spider-Man. And Jameson, like kind of pushes the whole like like no, no, no, you keep doing with this power thing because you've almost got him. So in some ways, I think he did, he was telling the truth.

He did treat him like his son. Oh, yeah, because he's a terrible father. Okay, that's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, his, his rogue's gallery, Spidey's rogue's gallery is also starting to take notice and plot against him. And unregistered are viewing Spider-Man as a very unfortunate sellout, but also they

got bigger shit to deal with. So he's a sellout. Let's move on. Which is interesting because Cap has a strong respect for Peter. He does. Right. And so there is, and is why he tries to appeal to him when they do fight. Right.

Like, hey, listen, you know, come with us. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, still sell out. Yeah. Meanwhile, Stark announces his plan to hunt down quote, all 30, all 137 of the heroes whom he knows and co-op Spider-Man into it. Because Iron Man knows all the super heroes. Stark knows all the superheroes. So 137, it's very much like McCarthy-esque. Like I have these names and I'm going to make sure I bring them to justice, uh, which is funny because this is shortly before Spidey does have that conversation with Reed Richards about Reed's uncle who was caught up with the McCarthy craze.

Mr. Stark, have you no shame? Yeah, no, he doesn't because the ends justify the means because he's smart. And he is the ends. Yes. Yeah. And that's the thing about the registration side is, it's like you can, you can be right for the wrong reasons. Yeah. And you can be wrong for the right reasons. And these guys, I'm going to say are wrong for the wrong reasons. But, um, but I do understand why people want folks registered because again, superheroes are a huge danger to, to the rest of us. If it had been a mere like, you just have to get a registered like you get a license for a car, right? Right. Right. That would have been one thing, turning

them into federal agents like cap says, right? Then who's the good guys of that guys? Yeah, yeah, which does come into the MCU as well. Like, you know, those people have agendas. The other thing though is like, okay, if you register it, I mean, here's the problem. If you register it, you are giving your name. Now, if you're allowed to give your doing business as name, okay, cool. But I mean, it does become, I mean, it opens up that it is a hairy problem. If you just even if they allow it for like a P.O. box, you know what? You

need a mailable address where we can send you stuff. And a P.O. box attached to it or something that I don't know. Yeah, give us a hot mail account, you know, right? Yeah. So, you know, the other thing is that there was a what if issue that comes out after all of this, where the watcher comes to Stark who's standing at Cap's grave and Stark is like, could I have done it differently? And of course, it's what if. So here's the ways it could have been done differently. And there was like one instance where it was done better,

where the Avengers are the ones with whom all the heroes have to register. And Stark is just like crestfallen. And the watcher's like, look, dude, where the Avengers are the ones with whom all the heroes have to register. And Stark is just like crestfallen, and the watchers like, look, dude, you didn't know that that was a possibility. That's not on you to not know that. And Stark's whole thing is like, I should have known, you know? And so it's, it's really interesting like you did the best you could with what you had.

Yeah, you screwed up and killed your best friend. And frankly, sold yourself out. But you did what you thought was right at the time. It's one of those things where I feel like that's being generous because you got stuck. It is Hank Pym and Reed Richards who are in terms of raw horsepower among the three most intelligent entities in that world. Yeah. And surely one of them would have thought, what if we do this? But even if that had come up,

there's no way that their hubris would have allowed for it, right? Because who's the leader of the Avengers? Not forever, right? Right. Right. It's, you know, and the other thing is that, how to put this,

smart people are really, really good at being tunnel visioned and at reinforcing the tunnels of their own vision. I'm so smart that this is the only way and no one else could possibly show me a different way because nobody else is smart as I am. And like, you know, half the things that smart people do is to convince themselves that they're right. the things that smart people do is to convince themselves that they're right. There's a lot of solopism in there and it's office stream. But so, of course, the anti-registeration civilians come out who are batshit crazy.

And like you said, there's someone who tries to kill Peter and MJ. And after that incident, you actually see the first cracks in the friendship between Parker and Stark, as well as Parker getting treated like an employee more by Stark. So until this time, family, family, family, Peter, you're like a son to me,

and then it's like, you're gonna do it, I told you, because I told you, you're gonna give me your own, shut up and serve. Yeah. And it's this real disconnect, and it's kinda like, I think the lazy way around it would have been like to show a picture,, you know, a couple frames of, of stark with a, a cup of whiskey on the rocks on the corner as he's talking to someone. Because that would have explained the change in attitude, but instead he's just becoming a more distilled asshole.

Is this drinking stark? No, it's not. He's not. He's sober at this point. He's very sober. And actually, that comes into play later when Sally comes up to him. I want to say it's the final front line where Sally and Yurick, so Floyd and Yurick go up to him to interview him. And she lays out the entire conspiracy. And his response is you have no proof. And she's like, I know, I know, but you and I both know that I'm right.

And then she leaves. And he, I think he has a cup, but it's not got alcohol in it. And then he knocks, and there's a comment in there where he says something about like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna drink,

or something along those lines. And then he takes his helmet and knocks it off the table and cries into his window of the 130 second floor of Stark Tower, which by the way looks like Baron Mordos 1980s outfit with the black coming up and stuff like that. So that's that's Parker. Meanwhile back to speedball. He's on the cover of Civil War Frontline 3 and he's in prison like he's behind bars or I think it's the cover hasn't behind like a barbed wire I think. Some kind of gate or something. Yeah, because he's pushing up against it. Yeah, it it it feels very internmenty. It does. Yeah. So well done artists, but so he's on the cover.

One of my favorite moments of dialogue happens here when Ben Uric is talking to Reed Richards about Reed's projections of behavior based on people resisting registration. And Uric says, what if you missed a plus or minus signate calculations, Professor Richards? And Reed says, you just walked upside down with me, didn't you? I'm not perfect, but it's a very simple model for someone with my track record. This is why people in STEM need to stand there fucking lame. I'm sorry. We're talking about back to sound more professional. This

is my respectable colleagues who are in other fields of the natural sciences need to be thoughtful about how they approach the social sciences because it's more complicated than what are the physics of gravity and rock. I just thought you were channeling head. It's funny. I am definitely the most vulgar of the two of us, but he's the one that swears all the time. But so Ben Yurick says, well, that sounds like a dangerous way of thinking. Reed says dangerous thinking is what got us to the moon. Yeah, with the stem. Yeah. Like, oh my God, like, could you, could you be more like, I mean, I, could you be more read Richards? And the answer's no. Yeah, but so then they go on to talk about the nature of numbers and Ben points out the many common

sensical flaws and reads thinking, including baseball and read, of course, dismisses and disbelieves him. Then later in the comic, Robbie Baldwin is meeting with shehulk, his attorney at law. And her solution is to sit tight and let her work through the appeals process to get him out in general pop out of the general population, which makes sense, like from a legal standpoint, that absolutely makes sense. But it's literally his body on the line and she is invulnerable to harm like he used to be. And now he's not. And she's like, you just wait it out like don't I know this is going to take a while, but just sit and she says, I want you to sit tight. Okay. We're working on a motion to get you transferred into a more appropriate facility. Like there's so much there of like, just trust the process, trust the process. And there is a level at which you do have to go through that process. I absolutely believe in that because revolution is much worse for the rest of us. But it's not her body on the line. It's not her who is like there is no rape is actually committed

in the storyline or anything like that because this isn't like, you know, Hawkeye talking to Mockingbird, but this isn't this isn't Marvel? You know, or, or, you know, the Avengers in the 70s, where you shoot. Oh, God damn, like I'm glad we've grown. But, but at the same time, it is hinted at that he is being sexually assaulted or under threat of sexual assault. A few times. And he is, and this is, you know, I feel like pretty, not maybe common knowledge, but pretty broadly known knowledge that often the people who do terribly in prison are folks who have harmed children. Yes. Because you have a lot of people in there who are children that were harmed.

And who boy, like, and they keep calling him baby killer. Yeah. Like that's insane. Yeah. Yeah. And he's obviously been beaten to hell. He's sitting in front of her and he's just about bald again. It's kind of this anti-Samson thing going on. And he's handcuffed and he's bandaged where somebody bit him. And look at Chunka two ounces out of his arm or something. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like, I look a little underweight because someone took two ounces off my arm. It's like, God damn. And I think that's the crux of why I think this is a liberal way of thinking that isn't too different from reads quite honestly, which makes sense because she's on the same side as read. Trust in the institution and the data to solve the problem that is literally sitting across from her. Like again, I mean, you're an academic. I'm an historian, I work,

you know, in secondary education, there is so much bureaucracy that I do think is necessary and helpful to steering the ship in the right direction, to scoop up the most people out of the water that they're drowning in. At the same time, there's a kid sitting in front of me for whom an exception does need to be made, I'm going to make it. You know, it's that, that, that overreliance on such things is, is the death now of the person in front of you. This is one of those things and going back to like the conversation of Reed Richards and, um, and his statistics about predicting trends on a serious note, when you do, when you

engage in the social sciences, I'm not a quantitative methodology just although I have taught quantitative classes, research methods and that kind of thing. One of the things is you have to be able to reconcile anomalies because anomalies always happen. You can't just say that, oh, well, that's an anomaly, we don't pay attention to it.

No, no, there is a reason that thing existed, right? It may be a subject for further research. If it's sparse enough, it may not necessarily indicate that there's a problem with our formulas or methods because you account for the fact that you're getting a wide range of results from human participants and of course humans do weird shit all the time. So, you know, that's whatever.

But if I'm, you know, read Richards is looking at this prediction of trends or if Jennifer Walters is looking at like what is most likely to happen, those are still probabilities and the folks that are going to be the anomalies, the outliers and the data are still human beings and they have to be accounted for in real time and space, right? So that Robbie is sitting opposite the desk of her and he's beaten and bruised and broken in places and bleeding because someone took a chunk out of his arm. Statistically, he'll be fine. Yeah. But in real time and space, like as soon as he walks out that door, he's screwed again. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And she, she also talks to him, oh my God, like I have an entire paragraph here of what she says. And it is absolutely correct, factually correct. It's also a bureaucracy that's put all of these things into place. So in order to fight it and to get people justice, you do have to work the system. But at the same time, he can't see out of his left eye right now. What is he returning to? Like you said, when this meeting's over, oh, it's very comforting to know that it's kind of like, you know, what is it? I am, I have a irrational fear of about four or five things

in this world. Number one is snails, which makes no sense, it's irrational, it makes no sense. It's not like they can jump. It's not like they can catch up to me. I could step to the side and I can have an hour of rest and they still haven't caught up to me, but I'm scared to death of them.

I don't get it, but I fear them more than I fear slugs, which tells me I'm a good little Marxist because I'm not afraid of the homeless ones, more than I'm afraid of the homeless ones. What? What? What? The third thing on that list that I'm afraid of is vomiting, which you get over when you have kids. It just, it scares the hell out of me, the being out of control. And then the fourth thing is cows. The fifth one is death, which is slightly rational, but I took it

to an irrational level because like, I'm not afraid of death in the abstract. I'm afraid of like, when I die, even if it's at 80, that it'll be too soon. It's weird. It's dumb. I know. Yeah. No, no. Uh, one of those things make, well, I know people who like, when they start to panic when they know they're going to vomit, I get, I guess I'm not there, but I get that. I become a polytheist. I will make up gods. It's yeah, I've spent an entire night with my back like on ice packs, like where my kidneys are to distract my body from the nausea, so that it goes the other way. And that's amazing. I am still caught up on cows. Yeah.

Well, and that that brings me to the point. So if I'm being attacked by a shark and somebody comes up to me and says, don't worry, lethal encounters with cows are far more likely. Yeah. You know, now cows, I think there is some rationality to it. They're bigger than us. They're dumber than us. They're faster than us.

And when one moves, they all move. I, I, I think that is a reason to be afraid. They've loathes into a sense of security. Are you also afraid of football teams? Because what you just said. Right, no, I'm not because I'm not a woman. So there's a reason I don't watch football, not the least of which that they keep

concussing people on a plantation system, which white owners, big fields, big growl, they effectively call it a combine, what? Yeah, like, so. So if I'll draft, yeah, oh, Lordy, like, I've got lessons, but no, it's, it's, it's,

cows are frightening. As the, as the old adage goes, you know, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than, uh, than attacked by a wolf in the forest. But if you cover yourself in baking grease and go for a stroll naked, right? Right. It's, it, this is the distinction that we make

between you deserve it versus you have it coming. Yeah. Yeah. You don't deserve it, but you had a coming. Yeah. So, but you know, like if somebody comes up to me and says, you know, hey, I know that your leg hurts right now, but you know, 130 people died from cow attacks last year. And only seven people died from shark attacks. You're going to be fine. Like, it's, she's about to push him out of a boat in two waters where there are sharks. So we're gonna get you to the beach. It's fine.

Yeah, you just gotta swim through this first. You just, you know, it's gonna suck for the next 20 minutes. Yeah. Now climb into your chum and, you know, and yeah, I'm gonna skip over her quote because it's, you know, five or six lines of just legalism, but trust me, it's there. And then he responds with, they're going to make me a scapegoat Jen some maniac killed 60 kids and they're going to make it seem as though I did it.

There was nothing I could have done. And then she does it. She does the thing that starts to break him. I think this is his breaking moment. And, you know, you start to see the crack and it continues. She responds with, except not be there in the first place, Robbie. Yeah. Which is kind of after the fact, regardless of how correct she might be. And I think their argument here deserves full airing at this point. She says, I've talked with the judge. There's some willingness to back down on their initial offer

if we plead criminal negligence. Again, you and I've talked about this. I think that's a very reasonable plea actually. Yeah. In the face of reality. Now, is he also ethically correct? I think that that case could be made and he says, I didn't do anything wrong. And she says, Robby, let's get this out in the open. Okay. I want to defend you, but you're going to have to look at this through the eyes of the judge or the jury. You attack a house full of bad guys while making a reality TV show. 60 children died. Now she's correct at those things happening and at that sequence happening, the connective tissue between those starts to fray as you go further.

But at the same time, you know, in the face of reality, yeah. And she's being very lawyerly to quote her cousin, but she's also scolding him and telling him that his viewpoint doesn't matter. She's gaslighting him and she's supposed to be representing his interests. And I think in her mind, that's not gaslighting, that's being practical.

And this is why kind of have troubles with her. I wonder how much of being a lawyer is an element of paternalism of knowing what's best. Right. Well, you had a guest on your podcast recently who talked about information from one of the sources of information is power as well. And she has a working knowledge

of the legal system. He does not. She has power. And therefore her information is more reliable on some levels or at least presented as such. He says 60 children died because a nutball named Nitro blew himself up outside of school yard. Nitro bad me good. See the difference. Gen. So you're expecting me to convince a jury that 60 children dead is just 60 dead children is just collateral damage Which is not what he said right and there it is again. That's not the point he's making But she's also having a count in her head. She's having that conversation with the, with the defensive, with the opposing attorney, right? Um, you know, how does this play? Right. Right. Right.

And, you know, but she's also literally telling him that he was saying something different. Mm-hmm. That's when people say, you know, in other words, I always, I always fire back with my, my old Neil Simon. No, those were the exact words I used. Like, I use those words for a reason. Yeah. So, uh, and after a

few more exchanges, he goes back to his cell and as he's being escorted back, plenty of inmates are taunting and threatening him. And at this point, he changes his tack and starts to fire back at the inmates verbally. He hasn't done this previously. He challenges the main inmate to me to a fight, and the guards shove him into his cell, still handcuffed. And they say, get in there and shut your trap, Baldwin. One more word and you'll be passing broken glass for a week. Understand? So, you know, just wait it out, Robbie. We've got an appeal working. I think that is an implied threat of central violence. I think so too. I think so too.

Either that or because I've had friends who work in corrections, and I mean that tense exactly as it is. And they say that one of the things that the guards do regularly is that they end up having to eat there, which means their food is prepared by the prisoners. And very regularly, you end up with broken glass or shavings of metal in your food. Sure. Sure. And you just have to hope that it passes in case instead of, you know, sticking out.

Yeah. Yeah. He meets with Walters again, and she's got a compromise for him. She says admit guilt, get registered and work for three years as a costumed hero, doing community service and training others Which again? This is that whole like you know, Damien do you do you really need to fight this or we've wiped the bad thing from your record?

You can go on and He sticks to his guns and she says listen. I know it stinks, but it's truly a way forward or the way forward That's an important distinction, actually. I think she's probably right. I also think that in some ways she's acted in bad faith this whole way while doing her job as excellently as she can. I think both things are true. Like she thinks she's in good faith. I think the whole thing is in bad faith. Yeah. You know, if I, if I were to again go back to the journalism thing, if I were to again, go back to the journalism thing, if I were to describe parenting, anyone who doesn't have one reference, I would say you're going to spend a disproportionate amount of your time getting your children to do something that

they want to do. Yes. Right. Like they will fight you on the thing that they want to do. And similarly here in her mind, she's thinking, this is, you know, this is what you need. This is what's good for you. This is less way out, that kind of thing. And he is sticking to his principles, which could in a zoomed out way look like just someone throwing a tantrum. Right. Although I do wonder how much of this is him thinking with an eye towards the future of

someone's going to write about this. And I need them to know, right? That I am sticking to my convictions. Um, at least if I'm projecting quite a bit in that situation, but I have to wonder if that's maybe that would be a part of the calculus of the character, right? I don't think Robbie would be that capable. I think I think Peter would be. I don't think Robbie would be. If you put Peter back at the age of 16, I think he would be, but I don't think Robbie would be. And he says, tell them I'll sign the day, health freezes over. In the next issue, we see her fighting as she hulk to bring in unregistered heroes in the first big fight between the two sides.

That's, you know, although she's probably pretty good at keeping an alter ego. Like of all the people, there's, there might be something. And so meanwhile, in front issue, uh, front line issues for Baldwin and to me, who's the main intimate, who's running the violence against him, are in a boxing ring. And we see a brutal side of Baldwin that we have not seen before. And he's mixing his wisecracking in a way that comes across as nastier than it is clever. He beats to me in boxing, but then another inmate slashes his calf and to me then breaks his leg. And the pain involved in that activates Robbie's powers again ever so briefly and it just flattens everybody. briefly and it just flattens everybody. Then his mom visits him in prison and she's berating him in a way that only a mother could. And then she also lets him know that his father's not coming.

And you really see the bitterness coming out in Robbie in this exchange. She says, he's not coming Robbie. I think you know how he feels on the subject. His son was responsible for the deaths of over 600 people. She continues her guilt trip. And then she asks him if he even feels remorse for what he did. And he says, I didn't didn't kill anyone mom what happened has been distorted beyond recognition. And then Maddie responds with they've given you a chance Robbie Baldwin and all they're asking you to do is express remorse those people in Stanford deserve this much Robbie their loved ones died because you made a mistake the least you could do is on make it you could still do some good for these people. Now, I still think this is full gaslight in effect, and I also think that she has wrapped kernels of the truth into this as well.

And this is clearly maternalism because she's his mom. It's very much, it's like not to know where Domino's and only admitting the agency of one or two of them, right? Because the truth is all of the heroes had had choices in that, right? And then Maria rushed a nitro into a school bus, which alone, again, even if he didn't go off the way that he did, if it was just a normative explosion for him, would have been devastating for the children inside. Yes. And then of course, nitro's decision to do that.

And I think part of this is also in the way that people say that boys will be boys, well villains will be villains, right? So you have to assume they're going to do these kind of things. But also if that were the case, if that's how we genuinely felt, we wouldn't prosecute villains, right? We would say that, well, this is their nature. So it is what it is. Yeah.

But no, like they made choices is what it is. Yeah. Um, but no, like they made choices. Yeah. And, and the thing is what the thing about this exchange is I don't really, I think that's important to note that there are some things she said that are correct. You know, they deserve remorse. Um, their loved ones died partly. and I think, again, partly because of a mistake that he made, partly because of his recklessness. He absolutely has some agency in this, but depended on him because he's the only one alive, which is exactly what Marshall indicated was going to happen. I think that's some horseshit. I do think what's interesting here, though, is also that he is clearly being changed by this

conversation. He interrupts her final hurang with a very nasty, hey, this was fun, right? Next time, let's see if dad wants to come. I'm sure miss listening to both of you shout at me at once. Law, art, which is absolutely a callback to like his first series. And then she tells me she's not coming back at all. And it's, yeah. Meanwhile, Spider-Man is facing a crisis of conscience. And I do think their stories are very paralleled, and I didn't notice it the first time I read through this thing. But this time, I was looking for it too.

And what we look for, we tend to find. But he's facing a crisis of conscience since he's having to fight Capna America, his hero. And he is seeing Iron Man's ends just to find the means kind of methods, particularly because Stark admits to Peter that he knew about Peter Spider Sense. Despite Peter never telling him, and he then says to himself, I think I need to go over the suit a

little more closely, find out how much data is coming in and more important, how much data you don't know about is going out. Which I do love that we do see that kind of addressed in Spider-Man homecoming in the MCU. And it's hinted at in Civil War, um, where he gives him a new suit, you know, uh, in the middle of the battle on the Anci street, Peter is confronted with cap telling him what, what's what? And he says, quote, I respect you, Peter. I know you. I know your heart. I know you hate what you're doing, but you think you don't have

any other choice. You're wrong. you can still do the right thing. Which again, we see that show up in the MCU as well. They have a TetaTet, you know? And you know, is, you know, even to the point of like, you know, where you're from, Queens, you know, Brooklyn. And what were you saying? As I was gonna say, and then, and then after all that,

quite totally Peter does, Well, you can say as I was going to say and then and then after all that Quite totally Peter does he makes he holds the shield a sacrosanct, right? Yes, because he was trying to yeah people are trying to steal it Yeah, and he webs it up only in a spot that he knows that calf can get to yeah Yeah, yeah, and and he muses to himself while this fighting is going on He says my whole life. I've ever really wanted as a respect of the people I admire, Aunt May, MJ, and people like him. Finally, at last, after so long, I've got it. And now I'm about to lose it forever.

And he still goes forward. It's, there's this weird thing that people do, and people do it. I mean, there's a very normal, natural thing to do, unfortunately, but it's the whole like I made a pledge and it's like, yeah, but like, it's okay to reassess. I'd rather be a trainer to a shitty cause. Conditions under which he made that oath have been renegotiated. Yeah.

It's been recontextualized quite a bit, right? Yeah. The guy who says your family has been spying on you. That alone is, you know, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I mean, when he had that sticking suspicion at the front of, uh,

or at the beginning, right, when that Russian, uh, titanium man, Yeah, titanium man, right? Yeah. And then, and then Peter's like, Tony, you tell me, if you stage that, right? Of course I would. And, and he had, but he had the inkling, right?

Yes, he's been fighting his own instincts to toy through, which is a profoundly human thing to do. And yet one of Peter Parker's greatest superpowers is his spider sets, which is instinct. Yeah, man. His ability to notice when danger is coming and it's like he's actively turning it off when it comes to Tony Stark. I wonder if spider sense covers emotional abuse. Like, is it?

It clearly doesn't. Yeah. It clearly does not. Very much so. Yeah. Uh, it's, we've actually had this debate amongst my friends with Star Wars is like, because Jedi have a thing that's, it's called danger sense. Like, like because Jedi have a thing that's it's called danger sense like you know in the gaming world It's called danger sense. That's how it's mechanically breaks down in the novels before the great schism and

There became the legends and then there became the orthodox there was There were a few Books where they talk about his danger sense and And we see it expressed in different ways. And one, a Jedi notice is like, as soon as, you know, as Locke-S foils in attack position, he's like, wait, wait, wait. Something bad's about to happen if we do that.

And then other times, you know, it's talking about it is like, you know, well, can you sense it for other people? Like when danger's coming, it's like, no, kind of only for myself. And so it's, you know, it's fuzzy because it's, you no, kind of only for myself. And so it's fuzzy because it's space magic. But same thing for the spider sense. And I think it's not until these issues

that we find out that it's pheromonal. Maybe, that would make sense. I don't remember reading that, but that would stand reason. As a side note, a friend of mine has a idea, or his argument is that the force is actually a biological Wi-Fi, and that that's why some people have access to it, some don't, because it has to do with genetic carriers and things like that. Sure.

So it's really just everyone, the Jedi are just tapped into like a cosmic internet and that kind of thing. That makes sense. That there's certain planets where the force is stronger and certain planets where there's like on Merker where you've got Esa-Lamari where talent cards doing his thing and you've got these beings that create bubbles in the force that don't exist. So you can block out the force because you're Faraday Cage an area basically. Biologically. Oh, that's interesting. That would help midi-chlorians make sense. Nothing's going to help midi-chlorians make sense. You shouldn't be able to cure the force with

penicillin. This is the time. Is it the force who knows? It's got that Jedi drip either way. So spider-man is getting to muse about such things. He's getting to feel crummy and he's getting to anguish over all these things. But in a far less lethal way, even though he's fighting Captain America. And while he's clearly having a crisis of conscience, he ends up choosing to fight on the side of the people he respects instead of the law. Robbie's struggle has him turning the other way because essentially he's being beaten into it. And I think that that cross, that crossing of the motivations and of the methods is really telling. So then in front line five, Baldwin is getting more and more brutalized and more and it's

he's becoming more and more brutal by his experience in this undisclosed prison. Walter's meets him on the way to the new facility and she tells him that the appeals process will take time, especially for someone who rejected a deal that the court's thought was more than reasonable, which tells me that the law is not absolute. It's absolutely open to interpretation and therefore institutionalized racism absolutely can exist because of the people who are in play. So I'm going to reveal a little bit of my bias at the moment. Oh, sure.

So I'm a critical scholar, which means I pull from critical theory, which has its roots in Marxist tradition, although I am not a Marxist. If anything, the closest that comes to to is maybe neo-Marxism. But it's basically this idea that power does not have a telos to it, right? It's not a teleology. It is what humans make it. It doesn't necessarily trend towards a certain direction,

except through the use of human application and its subject to the will of humans. But I know that I've heard lawyers talk about right and wrong answers in the law, right? That there is a right answer, there is a wrong answer, and that's sort of the basis of a lot of our legal theory and that kind of thing. Now you do have critical legal studies, right? Which started about 40 years ago.

They were saying, no, that's pull crap. There is no no legal application. Although that is not as mainstream as one might think if you were to listen to Fox Studies, for example. But the basic argument I'm making is, or what I'm saying, is that things like that, that the court found reasonable really do undergird the point that this is what humans make it. There is no only one logical conclusion

that you could come to, even in terms of like the array, because I have a relative who is involved in the court system and the judicial system who, you know, says that you may have three, right, possible correct answers, but even then none of them may be satisfactory according to whatever your sense of ethos is, but there's the three, and those three are agreed upon by whatever other people have said up until a point.

Sure. So it's just arbitrary. It's all I'm saying. That's a long way to say it's fake. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it, whoever's in charge of interpreting the rules that day can decide so many things that will absolutely impact your life. Yeah.

And it's, yeah, it's, I'm not a Marxist either. I'm more of, and I'm not a Neomarxist. I'm more of a Richard Marxist. I swear I left her by the river. Not a Groucho Marxist. No, not as much. Although I'll quote him more often. But that mullet that Richard Marx had was glorious. So I'm more, you know what, I'm more of a

Harpo Marxist. I really, like to walk quietly and carry a big horn. But what do you call it? She tells him that it's going to take a while and he sees how upset people are for the first time because he's actually stepping outside of the prison. He's actually in a protected vehicle driving through and he's seeing, he's like, oh my God. And I think had he seen this earlier, he would have probably taken the deal earlier and maybe could have started getting into the therapy that would have helped him.

But instead he was brutalized for so long. So there's this priming that's happening with him. He's being brutalized because of his lack of liberty. And then he's seeing people's response to him still being alive. And he's shocked and he says that can have been for me for Pete's sake, which I love that. I'm speedball. Everybody loves speedball. At this point, Jennifer Walters, shehulk reveals to Robbie that he's going to be held in a different dimension that the negative zone is coming up and it's area 42. And she also tells him that they're still willing to deal

if he registers. So it's that Galileo moment. Like here's all our utensils that we're gonna use on you. And it's like, okay, but you did just spend the last six months denying him all his rights, get mowing him. And he says, what, the same people who just lost $28 million or $28 million veterans personal information off a laptop computer, I'll take my chances.

And what I love here is that this is so incredibly present. So what he's pointing out is that there was a July 2006 congressional hearing that where the very thing was, that very thing that he just mentioned was being explored. On May 3rd of 2006, the home of a VA employee was burglarized, resulting in the theft of a personally owned laptop computer and an external hard drive, which was reported to contain personal information on about 26 million veterans and the United States military personnel. The VA secretary was not informed of the incident until May 16th, almost two weeks after the data was stolen, and the Congress then Congress and veterans were not notified until May 22.

So this is the immediacy of comic books. So she chites him again, implying that Nitro was again his fault. She says, we've all seen what happens when you take chances, Robbie. And she's trying to like get him to take the deal, but like the words you use are going to have impact. And it might not be the impact you want. Yeah. It's it's it's getting lifeboat you piece of shit like not no, right?

Right? Yeah, oh man. Oh, and then he ends the issue by getting brought into the negative zone. And then we get to Civil War four. Spider-Man witnesses the Thor Android killing Bill Foster. And he wonders allowed for the first time to other heroes. do you ever wonder if we've picked the right side, Hank? Hank doesn't wonder about anything. No. No. And, you know, he actually says, you know, this was my friend and that is like,

Hank's best buddy. Yeah. Where did you find Android he made? Right. Like, and this is not the first time that he's had an Android that he's made hurt people that he cares about. No, no, no, you know, it reminds me of that line from Constantine where, you know, someone he just met dies horribly in the first 20 minutes meeting him. And someone says, was that your friend and John Constantine says, must have been he's dead like...

Damn. Must have been he's dead like damn. Well, and we see this actually in the MCU when they have the Ultron storyline, except we don't have Hank Pym, we have Bruce Banner. Oh, but if they had made Michael Douglas make Ultron, like that would have, that would have, or yeah, I mean, it would have had to have been Michael Douglas. But like, I guess more to the point is that like that they are pulling in the Hank Pym's like reluctance and being dragged along by by Iron Man regularly in in the MCU. And that's what I like about the MCU is they do such a good job of fan service to those of us who are like, Oh, that theme

just got brought in here. That's cool, you know. Yeah. You change the players around, but that's okay. That's what the ultimates were. Yeah. Well, and their version of Hank Pym names you,

has like 98% less domestic violence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is good. So yeah, and then Sue Richards writes a dear read letter, read, read suspects Peter and Anne suspects that people and people on both sides are questioning decide they've chosen

and their questioning quitting. And of course, the registration people go out and hire and microchip of a bunch of villains, the Thunderbolts. Yes. And not just the Thunderbolts though. I think it's, it's, because the Thunderbolts are already a thing, but this is you're going out and actively recruiting people who have been villains and now it's, they get to hunt down their nemesis. But they're chipped. And it's like, yeah, sure. Luckily none of them have degrees in robotics.

Nitoriously, not a scientist among them. Right. Trying to shift Dr. Octopus. That's kind of his problem already, you know, right? So yeah. So in Civil War frontline, the whole thing is told through Robbie Baldwin's letter to his mom. So the editor text is all like handscrawled, dear mom stuff.

He's more sad than anything else, although he tries to be flip. It just doesn't work. He has witnessed suicides. He's been strapped, he's strapped to a gurney and muted. He's recounting whom he sees. Battle stars mentioned. He can't sleep on his back due to the attack that apprehended him. He's got lifelong injuries as a result of this. So it's not just that, you know, Area 42 isn't club

med. It's not like a push prison. It's not you're living in the tropics, you're fine. It's Gitmo. Well, and Tony Stark talks about how the ones who are not a technological threat are allowed to live in like a VR world which seems worse. To me, like not being able to, being an isolation is by the standards of the international community, a crime against humanity. Right.

But being in this place where you on some level know that you can't trust your senses, sounds like a special kind of hell. It does. It does. Because there's always the, I mean, you get back to the demolition man argument of like I remember these things, like, oh, it's impossible that you remembered these things while you're in suspended animation.

It's like, well, I don't know who you've been talking to. But while I was frozen, here's what I saw. I've had friends who've been in coma's for the better part of six months kind of thing. And it drove them crazy because there was a consciousness going on. And it just, oh my God. Like I, you know, so, the English man, that's a deep cut.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. So, Battlestar is injured for life now. Um, and at that point, Robbie finishes his letter with some serious depression and ends up talking with Reed Richards. Um, so he's literally witnessing superheroes and super villains killing themselves, uh, in area 42. Like, if he's responsible for children dying blocks away from a house that he attacked,

then who's responsible for these suicides? Not the government. Right. I'm sorry. Not the architects involved. Right. Right. And if these suicides happen and if Reed Richards knew about the probabilities, then he saw this coming. Or he has to admit that he was wrong about his numbers. Oh, impossible. Therefore, he considered these people's deaths worth it. Yeah. Like there's so much.

And Tony Stark is absolutely an accomplice, a party to that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it just, it gets grosser and grosser the more you look at it. He goes right at Reed verbally. They're going back and forth a bit because Reed's trying to study the, hey, you had a power search, what happened? And Reed says what I've been saying all along, marking that's the only time that that prick and I have ever agreed on anything. Reed Richards says, you've changed, Robbie Baldwin. Yeah. It's a bit.

So he's right. He's right. We will disagree immediately on that next sentence where we discuss why he's changed. But for that, he is correct. Reed offers him a chance to speak to the conditions in front of Congress the very next day. He's like, look, I want you to tell people what you're seeing here.

We can't always see everything, which, I mean, that's cool if that's on the level. And I think it is because they do move him to do that. And I think Read does want to make sure that he's doing prison the right way. But again, I come back to the title of this that is liberal fantasy. Like, we want to make sure we're doing prison the right way. But again, I come back to the title of this, that it is liberal fantasy. Like, we want to make sure we're doing prison the right way. We want to make sure we're punishing you the right way.

You want to be interested in about that is, so I had a student who was in the military for, I think it was an army for like eight years. And he, he did a rotation at Guantanamo, like he was a president, he was a guard. Now, he was not permitted to interact with the inmates. He is was completely, you know, external security, that kind of thing. But it reminds me of how the there is the sort of acknowledgement in the way that some of these things are structured in who gets to have access to the prisoners and who doesn't relative to like the inhumanity of the situation, right? So like

you only want certain people interacting with the prisoners or read Richards who is effectively just dead inside, at least acts like it for a amount of time, right? I mean he cares about his kid. I don't want to, you know, he cares enough about Franklin to do wildly risky experiments on him. He is the poster child for, or the poster adult for when you divorce, sometimes the other parent should only get to write letters. Yeah.

Like no custody, no, sorry. Like you, you very well might love them completely, but you are so broken that your love is not a healthy love. It is not. Yeah. So someone that removed from, you know, conscience, sure example, could interact in the way that he does, right? But you think about like, there have to be people that they are probably not keeping, they're not allowing to interact with the prisoners because it would be traumatized. And that is in this context of a liberal fantasy, if we need to get it right, it really does get at the point that like no,

you have people that you are claiming to be monsters who are being jailed by actual monsters, right? Who can do that kind of a lot of the work. And we come back to what you said about power. Yeah, you know, it's all arbitrary. Yeah. So he goes to speak to Congress next day. She hulk meets him, Jen meets him and sees him in an outfit that is very similar to his speedball outfit.

It's like his speedball casual. And he is embittered and his humor cuts bitterly across what she's saying. He says, quote, don't worry, this is exactly what I need. A good public flogging makes for good ratings. And that means a lot of people listening to what I have to say. And then he says, what everyone else has been saying. And I think for the first time, he says, according to them, I murdered 60 innocent kids. There's a verbal shift that's happened there. I didn't do it. I didn't do it. I didn't do it.

According to them, I did it. And it's, it's yeah. It's also in that same vein of, I'm sorry if you were offended. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's displacing the onus of the responsibility. Yeah. But at the same time, like he's been rejecting their responsibility. And I think rightly, honestly, he didn't kill 60 kids.

But now he's allowing room in his mindset for according to them, I killed 60 kids, which means he's shifting. Yes. On the way up to the capital steps, Jen, who is still, by the way, invulnerable to things that he is not invulnerable to, um, she points out that there's no security and that they've changed the root to the entrance for him and her. And the whole time the press is shouting questions and Robbie is actually

firing back every time he says, I didn't kill anyone. Why haven't I been formally charged? A policeman hit me. I don't know what I'm being charged with. I requested time with one of their attorneys to explain my position, but they never provided one. I didn't kill anyone. So he's back and forthing with the press, which you never supposed to do, and she's not advising him to shut up. And she's noticing there's something that's not quite right. And then we see a single panel that recreates Jack Ruby killing Lee Harvey Oswald. I mean, it is angle for angle, image for it.

That was Lee Harvey Oswald. If I remember that right, was arrested being, he was doing the purpl walk with me. Yeah, he was purpl walking underground, like either an underground tunnel or in a parking garage. And he's I'm a patty. He's responding to the police or to the press. And he's like, you know, I didn't do this.

I didn't do this. I'm a patty. And he's surrounded by guards and yet still somebody gets in there and blast him right in the gut. Yeah, yeah. So, and that ends that ends that issue. So he has been Lee Harvey Oswalded, which, you know, if you believe Oswald, I don't, I think that ends that issue. So he has been Lee Harvey Oswald, which, you know, if, if you believe Oswald, I don't, I think that he did it. But if you believe Oswald,

that he's a Patsy, that's not that different from what Robbie is saying this whole time. Yeah. While he's getting shot, Spider-Man and issue 535 is being shown what the negative zone prison looks like. So which is interesting. Now you have only these two never occupy the same space at the same time. And I would have loved to have had a heat moment where you had the two of them talking to each other over coffee. But they they never occupy the same space, but they are always orbiting each other on some level. And now that orbit is like just a switch of room. So he's being shown the negative zone. Ironman tells him that until people register, they'll be in that prison. No due process, no probation, no house arrest quote, they either sign up or they stay here until they do sign up. And if they never sign up, then they state they sit there for the rest of they stay there for the rest of their

natural lives. Do you get it now? Yeah, go ahead. Let's say it's not like there's a national north that has an extradition treaty with the negatives out right. So yeah. And again, this is that whole like they're not enemy combatants, they're terrorists. Yeah. Like there's there's so much going on there. But now Tony is openly baldly admitting it. And he challenges Peter. Like this is this is what we're doing now. Yeah. Did you think this was a game? What did you think we were doing? Right. Yeah. Which is a far cry from like, you know, TZ TZ family family, you know, and stuff like that. Now that I think you're all the way in, I'm going to just big dick you the whole way. Yeah.

And yeah. Yeah, it's, it's of, it's almost him displaying some disbain for the naivete that he's leveraged. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think that, let's trace that back. He really hates himself. Oh, yeah, like, well, and I think that let's trace that back. He really hates himself.

Oh, yeah. He hates himself for having leveraged the naivete of such a good person for corrupting such a good person. And therefore because he hates himself, he's going to take it out on that person. Yeah. Yeah. He's gross. He's

is. He's not even Batman without the alcohol or with with alcoholism and fun anymore. Now he's just now he's just Batman. Well, at least even Batman is capable of confronting himself with emotional honesty, not out loud. Good, but he does it like in the most the best Batman comics in my opinion are ones where we get to see inside his brain. Right where he says the things he won't say to other people. And yeah, like at least then he's capable of that kind of introspection. I think Tony suffers from such severe cognitive business between what he thinks is the right thing to do and what he does versus like the actual ethics of the situation. Thank you. Right. The grappling with that would cause him to just blew screen of death right in his brain.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right because he has a post-servoir. You see a scene where he is sitting with Steve Rogers's corpse and he's interrogating the corpse on some levels and and he's crying and he's sobbing and he's admitting that he would do this again because it was worth it. Yeah, because it has to be at that point, right? Because if it wasn't, then you just got your friends got a hole in his chest for something that could have been avoided, not unlike that who out to the watcher thing, right?

Yeah, yeah, you're, I, geez, I mean, and good on him for keeping his sobriety through all that, to be honest. Oh, yeah. It's like, wow. If somewhere on the line, we found out that he was living off of eight balls the entire time, wouldn't have been that surprised because, yeah, honestly, how do you maintain feeling? Yeah. And it kind of would have been more forgivable on some levels.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. It's, so Peter then responded with, you can't, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. It's So Peter then responds with you can't just lock people away and then he gets cut off by Tony saying yes We can and we have and that's the end of it. I'm like god damn Dick Cheney like Not then then Tony tells Peter to apologize Who's a good little piggy now? And Stark even goes further to say that she Hulk quote, can make all the motions she wants. This is outside the jurisdiction of local

federal courts. This is an act of Congress signed by the president, only the Supreme Court can intervene. And I happen to know they won't, which that's all the complicity. So fun fact. And I feel like this is something they don't, which that's all the complicity. So fun fact. And I feel like this is something they don't spend enough time addressing in this particular arc, but Tony Stark and Virginia Thomas actually have very lively texts exchanges.

Who's Virginia Thomas in this? Ernst Thomas's wife? Oh, Jesus Christ. I've only known her by her nickname. Yeah. Oh, Tony Stark and Ginny Thomas, you know, their friends. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's flirting with her inappropriately. Yeah. It's never gonna go anywhere, but like she finally gets to feel human a little bit. A little bit because she's married to the world's most notorious porn addict. Which is nowhere near like the top list of his whorliness. Like that's the most endearing part of him. If anything, it's maybe the most humanized. Yeah. His willingness to dehumanize others with frankly something that's not a big deal. Not that the addiction is not a big deal. It just erotica is erotica. I'm not going to be bothered

by other people's proclivities toward consensual erotica. No more. It's the non-consensual wielding it towards other people. Yeah, that's the monster's part. See, I'm okay with like, nuancing things and like slicing the razor kind of then. I don't mind that you have the club. I mind that you wave around and meetings with other people. Right. And then he says, let's see, this place is not on American soil. American laws don't touch here. American laws don't touch here.

American lawyers don't come here. Once non-registerance come here, there are legal non-entities, occupants, prisoners, them and those who give them aid and support. But I agree with you on one thing, Peter. It would be a terrible thing to be here for the rest of one's life, wouldn't it? God, it's a lovely family.

You got there. Be a damn shameless, something happened. Exactly. Like, and I have a question immediately, the inhumans, the, the star jammers, the Excalibur, Wakanda. Alpha flight. Alpha flight. No, Excalibur. Mm-hmm. Wakanda. Alpha flight. Alpha flight.

Um, no, I'm talking heroes. Uh, no, oh, oh, Miss Marvel has been a hero once. Well, no, she's on the side of her registration. Yeah, she is. Um, no, but she suffered a gregiously during the Marvel's 1970s era. I'm willing to give her a little bit of leniency back. Yeah, absolutely. But like, so, you know, the America is just the 50 plus the seven territories, like you

can make that argument. But and as long as those heroes stay elsewhere, Ken Tony just grabbed him and lock him up and what about villains, you know, is there extradition? Is there extradition to send somebody to where there are no rights? Like, I mean, this is, I think they call it a constitutional crisis, right? Yeah, yeah. So, and so Peter has just been threatened like mobster like, which, again, power is power. And he's lost his father figure. He's lost his self respect

and he knows he's made the wrong choice. And he talks with Reed a bit too. Reed saw his own uncle, as we talked about, destroyed by refusing to cooperate with McCarthyism. And of course, Reed thinks that he was wrong to do so and Stark also tells Peter that as long as May and MJ are with him, they're safe, which that's some hostage-taking shit.

And at that point, Peter breaks the two of them out secretly. From the Stark compound, realizes his mistake, sets about fixing it, but ends up in a fight with Iron Man to finish the issue. And it's worth noting that not long before this, Tony sent Peter at least on one mission away from MJ and on the right and you were to get some air and you know clear his head a little bit. Oh, he he told him I want you to go so and so to this place tomorrow morning. So that's that's what this is is I thought I told you to leave while I didn't listen to

well dad you know something. There was something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So which is already an attempt at reminding Peter just how closely he's keeping his loved ones to, you know, be stunning. And where his power is, like, I can send you bodily away from the people you love. I can keep you away from them if I want. I can let you come back to them. Like there's, there's nothing good about this. Like, yeah. Just the ring.

Yeah. Now back to front line seven, we see Walters holding Baldwin as he's bleeding out until the EMTs get there. The exposition text is another letter to his mom and here you see his final separation from his principal stand. He's facing his own mortality for real due to a physical injury. And he muses over

the juxtaposition in the situation. He says, I can't help thinking how this wouldn't have happened. If I still had my powers, I would have stopped the bullet. But if this wouldn't have happened, if I'd never had any powers to begin with, which I mean, that's the really scary, fun house mirror version of with great power comes great responsibility. It is. And you know what's curious about that is that, I mean, how many times has he been involved or taken apart and it never to save the world? Yeah. And it's not that like, if we were to take a strictly and

not advising it, but a strictly utilitarian look at how many lives he's saved versus the end of, right? Right. The math probably checks out in favor of lives saved. Yes, right? Absolutely. And while that's a dehumanizing way of going about things, it's also kind of a relevant part of the conversation here. Since the humanizing him based on his environment with the death of 612 people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the only math that's relevant, but it is at least a part of that conversation.

And it's like, you know, if the fantastic four levels, the Western seaboard of the United States in a fight with Galactus, that's terrible. Also, Galactus was going to eat the planet, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, there's, there's, it's not, like you said, it's not the only math that should be done,

but you're already doing that math on the other side. Yeah. At least be fair. Yeah. Yeah. At least balance your equation. And what we're seeing here is that Robbie Baldwin is a kid who doesn't want to die and is regretting everything that he is. This is the death of Robbie Baldwin in a lot of ways, which is a very normal thing for a teacher to not want to do is to die. And he says, I regret that day, I stopped being

just playing Robbie Baldwin and became something else. And he's starting to separate himself from the hero that he became. And he's reminiscing about the New Warriors. And he admits that he liked the attention because he never got it at home. And he his thoughts slash the letter blend with his speech. As he's dying, he says, it wasn't us mom. It wasn't the New Warriors who killed all those people. I could never admit to that because then I'd have to admit my friends are dead. And as he's admitting this very painful truth that his refusal to admit guilt is not a principled stand, but the reaction of a teenage boy to seeing how his need for attention contributed to the deaths of his friends and all those people, his power explode back into him. And at the end, I think in many ways, Speedball is completely

dead and Robbie Baldwin is completely dead and all that's left is penance. And he says, I was going to lie to everyone in congressman. It wasn't the new warrior's fault that Stanford happened. It was me. Everyone died because of me. I think he was going to kill himself metaphorically, kill Robbie Baldwin, and then whatever came forward would be what we're seeing, but instead a bullet did it for him before he got to, so he doesn't even get to go out the way that he wants metaphorically. And I also, I think it's really important to bring up the fact that he is still a minor and perhaps we shouldn't be trying minors as adults ever. You know, that's a novel idea.

So you know, it seems a bit odd that we make the legal distinction only to waive it in particular cases. Yeah, yeah. It just, I don't know. You know, but, you know, I guess a good liberal would say, well, we can, we can wave it more appropriately. Yes, yes. And, and, and certain folks would say, well, they're mature for their age. Right. So he's broken. Yeah. What he becomes after this point is stripped of all optimism and joy, and that is replaced with self hatred, and that starts his journey into being pennants.

So Spider-Man, the adult, the adult who's benefited tremendously from making what he's come to realize as a bad decision, is now on the run facing lethal attacks to the point where the only thing that saves him is punishers penchant for mega violence. Um, his arc is going from comfort to suffering to clarity. It's literally existential, anguish, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a man, a manrespect and dignity. He's throwing off the expectations that were put upon him, speedballs going the other way. He went from having an anguish to spared and abandoned life into being so beaten down by all of that that he internalizes it and he internalizes the role that's been foisted upon him. He starts doing the hating. And again, I think some of this could be explained by age. He's a minor. Parker has lived longer. Some of that I think has to do with the age in which each character came of age, though, you know, by civil war Peter Parker's compass is set. He's a loner. He's ignored his compass for a few months, but he knows. And he has run through the doubt due to the company

he keeps. Robbie Baldwin's compass was set, but only in so far as he had a community around him that would reinforce it for him. And then when you surround him by people that hate him, he starts to do that. When it's brutally stripped away and things get worse, his compass is now set by validating why everyone hates him. And he hates himself for quite a time to come. Cause kids are sponges, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely.

This is why we, you know, he who controls the stories, controls the culture. You know, this is why you have to be careful with what you're exposing your kids to. Yeah. Yeah. Cause it will amplify and of course, we can always tie that to the self-realized social media and what, you know, the Facebook papers too? Yeah, yeah, because it will amplify. And of course, we can always tie that to suffered like social media. And what, you know, the Facebook papers found out about like depression and kids in Instagram

and stuff like that. It's, yeah, it's a swirling vortex of an unreasonable amount of pressure. Yeah. That was barely bearable in real life. And yes, the corporeal world, let alone what we have digitally. So yeah, yeah, yeah. Also a reason for why, you know, miners as superheroes is not entirely separate from,

you know, child soldiers. And that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. On the other hand, one might also make the argument that like, waiting till someone's 18 and whatever context whether that's the military or romantic interest is still creepy and exploitive. Yeah, because you're waiting.

Yes, that's the problem. So in front line eight, Baldwin's being examined by Reed Richards who's trying to figure out how Robbie's power is changing as well as how to treat him. Maria Hill is there. And she is not the likable person she is in the MCU. She is very coded as a shrew here and has been the whole way through. Maria Hill is one of those characters where I never know

how I'm going to feel about her. And like when she first shows up, because there are times when like, no, like she is, she's a hard-ass company woman, right? Like the company being shield. And once in a while, I see, at least in the one I've read, like some humanizing aspects, right?

But like she, at least in my mind, is notorious for manipulating Jefferson Davis, right? Miles is dead, once the universe has merged into doing a mission that he was probably out of his depth for, right? And then leverages Miles into finding Jefferson to hide to cover up her own mistake, right? So yeah. She's kind of an updated two-eyed version of Nick Fury though. Yeah, yeah, I don't disagree with with that certainly in terms of the moral ambiguity. Yeah, so It like she's much more I Think she's much more the white Nick Fury than she is the black Nick Fury

On my friends had her conference presentation that I just love the title of and that is that three out of four Nick Fury's are black I like it. Yeah. So she's there and she insists that he gets awake and regardless of the pain, she's like, well, give him more feeling then, like, drug him up. Like, just, I need to know these things. So now, Spidey and Speedy are unconscious and in the care of A Richards. Spity and speedy are unconscious and in the care of a Richards. Because Sue Richards is now working for the resistance and she's tending to a broken down spider man. They both are suffering at this point and they've both been taking opposite paths entirely to get there.

And so it's just it's a remarkable parallel as we go sinking toward the same basic. Is this even the read as the only member of the Fantastic Four to side with registration at that point? Yeah, because human torch, I think is still comatose. And human torch is a part of recruiting. Does Murray, he joins cap and he makes the symbol in the sky. Oh, you're right. You're absolutely right.

Yeah, because yeah, because he and Sue go out like in a costumed mission. Yeah, Reed is the only one of the fans. And because Ben remains very, very neutral. And then Yancy Street gang basically calls him out for being a sucker. Yeah. And then he heads to Canada, which I love the Vietnam reference there, which is cool. But yeah, she's, she's, she's proof positive that Readridge is wrong. So there, in Spider-Man 536, he flashes back to the decision-making process, the Peter undertook. The council that he sought from May and MJ, and ultimately the fact that he got on TV to go against registration, or I got on TV to go against registration

or I'm sorry, to go for registration, which is kind of this inverse parallel of speedball's effort to get on TV, which started the whole thing off. So frontline issue nine, Baldwin goes back into prison and he's hardened and then some, but then a bunch of low level powered prisoners, stage of breakout and they use him as a hostage and the pain that they cause activates powers and that ends up, canceling out the uprising completely by way of knocking everybody the hell out. He asks, and then it ends with him saying, where can I register? And the smile on his face, the baldness of his head and the hunched over posture that he still has, they have him completely transformed from speedball into what he's about to come. He is, he's not Robbie Baldwin anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, Spider-Man's coming back from a consciousness in Civil War 6, and he's accepted on the team immediately. Luke Cage says, quote, it gives me a good feeling like things are finally getting back to normal. And Spidey gets to crack wise again. The road has been long, but Spider-Man made the right decision for the right reasons and is reaping the rewards. He says, quote, I need to do something to make up for all the bad moves I've made lately.

So the thing in terms of the heroes journey and the monometh and that kind of thing, right? Where you have Spidey entering the underworld at this point, uh, more literally, literally. Yeah. And then metaphorically, you have, um, you have, uh, Robbie emerging from it as a new character. Yeah. But, but not a hero.

No, no. Yeah. He's, he is the cautionary tale and he's again, I don't think this is fair to him. Ultimately, you know, no, no, this is fair. No, no, no. But you know, Spidey still gets to reap the benefits. It's there's there's the he's the golden boy and the attempt at of Marvel to make another Spider-Man character is being completely shredded. So back to front line, Baldwin gives the father of a kid that died in Stanford who was the Jack Ruby character.

He gives him a face-to-face meeting and he explains that I registered and my only condition for registration was to set you free. Um, and the dad punches him repeatedly and Baldwin makes no attempt to fight back. Uh, akin to what we just saw with Punisher and Cap, by the way, uh, until the father falls to the ground saying, quote, all I have left is hate. Don't take that away from me too. And then he launches into a recollection of his last day with his daughter ending with and you killed her. And probably yeah. I was going to say both beatings are examples of mortification of the flesh, right? As a part of hymns.

Yeah, because I mean, punish your companions. Yeah, I would want that to set right because punishers taking the beating on some level he knows he deserves. Punisher is taking the beating on some level he knows he deserves. And as I say, you can like the Punisher if you understand that the Punisher doesn't like the Punisher. And then, yeah, of course, Robbie is not going to fight back, because he's got that and so much more, at least in his mind, coming to him. Yeah. And then Robbie's response is, I don't care. And then Robbie's response is, I don't care. And it's like, wow. Like he went from, I feel bad for this, but, and then always getting cut off too.

I don't care. I don't care that your daughter died. I wanted you to go free. And then he explains that pain is his constant companion because of his getting shot. He says, times going to heal your wound, but it's going to make mine worse. Before long, pain will drive everything I do. And because of what happened to those 612 people on my watch, it's never going to be enough. Compared to Spider-Man's quote of, I need to do something to make it all make up for all the bad moves I've made lately,

Baldwin's is, I can never make up for what I've done and it needs to be painful. So Reed Richards tries to talk Robbie out of leaving and not accepting any kind of protective custody telling him that his tandem out to suicide and Baldwins is darkly glib about this. He then goes off to burn the speedball outfit and he puts on the penance outfit. And there's a costume maker who like this is the first time we've ever seen that dude but cool. And it has 612 spikes pointing inward, making him bleed, which activates his powers. And the guy who made it says whoever is this is intended for, you must hate them very much. I do. Who is it?

I must know. Me. And then later he tells the costume maker, I've come to learn the hard way that the rules are the rules. Like them or not, that the world is a sick place. And then you hurt by Johnny Cash. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And then it ends with him writing another letter to his mom. He says, quote, I now know how to pay for all the pain I've caused. 612 people died at Stanford. So every day I'll carry with me 612 points of pain. 60 of those were, those people were innocent children who burned to death in a school yard. Those are the 60 points of pain that will hurt me the most. Two innocent men died when they found me in upstate New York. Two innocent emergency work is perished because of me.

Their blood is on my hands. who innocent men died when they found me in upstate New York, who innocent emergency work is perished because of me, their blood is on my hands. I'll feel their pain every time I throw a punch, every single point of my pain will be a reminder until the day I mercifully die and all of that pain is fuel. And it's like, this is one of those, like he took all the wrong lessons.

And how could he not given his environment, given the brutality of everyone? It's a suicide. Yeah, it really is. And it's a self-reinforcing cycle too, because who can convince you now that your own mother said that you owed penance for what you're doing? And so after he goes through the agonizing process of putting on the costume, which is blood red and gray, the costume maker says, wait, I remember you now, you're Baldwin, the new warrior. I made one of your speedball costumes.

And he says, quote, Robbie Baldwin is dead. Speedball is dead. Now it's time for penance with capital P. And you know what's interesting about that is that while I don't remember what exactly what the costume looks like, I have to imagine that the needle's pointing inwards is, I mean, it's probably visible from the outside. Yeah, it's not. It's not. There's a few spikes that come out from the outside. But it's essentially like, imagine a blank slate for a face in gray and then spikes here and there. But by and large, we don't see the punishment that he's doing to himself.

So and of course, the red coloring would mean that the bleeding doesn't show through. But the other thing that comes to mind is it just conceptually, even this costume is ostentatious. Yes. Right. It's, it's, he's no longer though playing for an audience of reality TV viewers, he's playing for an audience of one. Yeah, right. Yeah. It's really, I mean, it's tragic. And at the same time, it's the kind of arc that,

I think it's the kind of arc that we didn't realize we were creating for ourselves, but it's absolutely one that we had coming kind of thing. He and Spiderman are both still injured, but his pain is purposeful and he's chasing into it. And Spiderman is recovering from his pain. And of course, it wouldn't be a Spiderman thing if he didn't suffer awfully for making the right decision.

So a sniper hits Aunt May. This is what's gonna lead us to the one more day thing. And penance ends up with the Thunderbolts working alongside Venom and Bullseye among others. Yeah. And then who's got the symbiote at that point? Mac Gargan. Mac Gargan has the symbiote at that point?. Yeah. Oh, is that era? Uh-huh.

Yeah. Now, by the way, what is the name of the fellow who is scorpion, uh, when it's Hispanic scorpion? Um, I'm vaguely aware of that. Oh, God, don't remember off the top of my head. I know it was a thing, but yeah. Because that's quickly who the scorpion's going to be in the MCU. Because that's the guy, the guy that Adrian Tooms runs into in prison is coded as being Latina. Oh, okay. Sorry.

I didn't thought about that, but okay. Yeah, yeah. So I was kind of excited about that. I'm like, cool. Okay. You know, it's, I mean, they've got a very white America chavez, but at least, you know, the bad guys can be brown. So.

Yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's one of those things like it's progress, maybe like the progress we had hoped for, but it's something problematic steps forward as you said. I mean, it's problematic steps forward, right? I mean, yeah. Anyway, but yeah, it's, it, but it's right up there with like their casting bad bunny as a superhero that I only know about because of one line from a textbook. So like the musician bad bunny who is, who is Latino, I was playing El Marto, who is, I literally know about him because of a textbook that I use for superhero class, where it says, and this is the or more of the DC of the DC comics and X-Firen's a there's like a

couple of lines not to be confused with the one from Marvel and that's it. Like that is. And I'm aware though is is Spanish for the Muerto. So yes, yeah, all those scholars have debated whether or not how faithful that translation is. But yes. I love doing that obnoxious thing of only translating the article in any language. It's just so fun.

You're like, God damn it. And so bad bunny also is a professional wrestler, isn't he? He's done. I think he's been in, or maybe there's somebody with a similar name. Maybe I'm not familiar.

He's shown up in a few Royal Rumbles now, and I think he's had a few with a few people. It's interesting. Okay. So in Nova issue two, Nova comes back to Earth very briefly to deal with the during the Annihilation War. And because of Stanford, his identity got leaked to the public and Ironman shows up with a shield squad to arrest him while he's eating dinner with his parents because you're always on the right side of things when you're doing that. His parents are shocked that he's alive because he

hasn't been around for a while because he went off into space, which nothing gets dealt with enough in Nova comics. How does Tony do the math on that jurisdiction? Right. Like, well, it's like, you just pinged. You must have been hiding well. And it's like, I think it's that kind of a vibe. Yeah, no, I'm part of a, in a space force of police registered with the people who have say so over me, right? Yeah. I am the entire police force at this point too, because all of Xandar has been destroyed by the annihilation wave. And Nova basically says, yo, we got bigger things to worry about. It's a galactic level threat.

And Tony is like, no, you were Jay walking. And he's hyper focused on the registration aspect. And he tries to co-op Nova into registration support immediately like, hey, you're a space cop, you understand? And Nova says, give me a day to consider this. And I think Tony kind of like gets a read on the amount of power that Nova has.

He's like, you can have a day. He soft pedals it because he will, he will turn into a thousand sons and just burn them all alive. Yeah, you know, like, and I do love when Thor finally came back and just beat the holy hell out of Tony Stark. And like, he's like, I only, I was always pulling my punches because I left for 10 minutes. Yeah. 10 fucking minutes. Yeah. And this is what you do. So meanwhile, justice shows up. Justice

is pro registration, by the way. And, and, he is, because his name is Justice. And he tells Nova what happened to everyone in the New Warriors. And he advocates for him to join the good Lord advocates for him to join the registration side. And join the initiative at this point. And all of this is a board of Helicarrier. Of course, Tony Stark comes down. He's like, hey, this is my parents' house. Let me just go up, meet you. Eventually, he has to fight an old foe. The police are called. I think it's like diamond head.

The police are called. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, from the Nova series, like not even like the New Warriors. And he's recognized as a hated member of the New Warriors because he's Nova, right? Even though he quit, it said so, blah, blah, blah.

And at this point, the Thunderbolts show up. He fights them until Iron Man shows up. Another pleaded register, which he says, I'm going to take under consideration. And he goes back inside and his mom is mad at him that he won't register. And then his helmet alerts him that there's a being of great power outside. And Nova sees that it's penance and he's like, I guess we're gonna have to fight this new guy. Okay, bring it and penance takes off his helmet and it's it's Robbie Baldwin But he immediately declares Speedball is dead Robbie Baldwin is dead. You know all that's left is you know, there is no Dana only Zool

And it's in his best Christian male voice. Right, yeah. Throw cancer Batman. Nova, he urges his friend to register and make things better. And that night Nova leaves. He's like, y'all crazy, I got bigger shit to deal with. But before he leaves, Rich writer tells Robbie,

don't ever let the government turn you into something that you're not. But by this point, like, tell the wind not to blow. That ship done sale. Yeah. You know, I like to mix my metaphor. So when you said that ship sailed, I'm like, that doesn't sound right. I always say that train has sailed.

That's how like my kids, they know the saga continues better than they know Don McLean's Bye Bye Miss American Pie. And I feel like I've done something good here. That's that duck won't hunt. All right. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Just a couple cards short to have both ores in the water. You know, that's just so. And that pretty much ends his Civil War run in April. So he ends as this very tragic hero with no real promise of going anywhere past this. We have destroyed Speedball, the end of optimism. It's 2006. Like all of these things are true.

Pick the young man at 19, who is now 22 and has come back with sciatica from you know 20 month deployment like it's my least favorite season of Balanced Arc Lactica. Yeah, you know, and it's it makes sense that they would have Ensign Ro being the the admiral of the the ship to sciatica. You know, she's a pain in everybody's back. So, but in April of 2006 though, squirrel girl, the ultimate optimist, that's her power. And I've done an episode on her, so go back and listen.

She goes to Thunderbolt Mountain to convince Robbie Baldwin to not be so hard on herself because she has a crush on him, which if there has ever been a couple that I've wanted to see get together, it is these two. Like a healthy speedball with squirrel girl. This sounds like the height of I can fix him. It really does. It really does. But like I said, if a healthy speedball got together with Squirrel Girl, that would have been amazing. Sure. That would have been when Scream would get together with Carnage, but the other way around. But on the good side of things. But you're right. You're right. So she opens the episode with a dream that gets interrupted by Tipeetoo, which I love Squirrel Girl. But you're absolutely right.

There is the, I can fix him kind of thing going on there. In 2007, he gets his own comic that's largely him dealing with guilt and PTSD of what he's gone through. In 2007, you know, the Pentagon is kicking plenty of people off the, the VA because they had, quote, a personality disorder that they didn't disclose. So they steal back all of their kind of choice not to acknowledge during the Lisbon, let alone the whole stopgap issue. Yeah. So,

you know, you've got PTSD is a very normalized or at least in the zeitgeist kind of thing. He's not healthily dealing with it by the way. He's just dealing with it. I mean, because how can you deal healthily if you're on the Thunderbolts? Like, yeah, I mean, if you're in between mission chats are with Matt Gargan and whoever the hobgoblin is that day, then yeah, yeah. Where Baron Zemos, grandson is the one in charge and he's the voice of reason like yeah who and and Yeah, and and this is the total transformation that I'm talking about Robbie Baldwin is

Full circle. He's gone. He's back to being the background character in a larger group of B-listers But he is not cracking wise. He's cracking self-hate. He is not optimistic. He is not any heroic color, which I don't know if you notice the logo behind me, that's patterned off of his colors. Well, oh, I thought that was just, you know, my, I should have waffles. Okay. No, I don't like fighting. So I used to do a joke about, I'll tell you later about an Indian food three-some that was offered by a hostess.

But it ties into waffle house in a painful way. But it doesn't get better for a long, long time, to be honest. He ends up torturing Nitro after going and kidnapping him from Latvaria. So he breaks into a sovereign nation, take somebody who has got asylum and beats the shit out of Dr. Doom to get to him. So really hype hours. Yeah. But holy shit.

And of course, he wants his torture of Nitro to be painful. Nitro quote, speedball is an idiot in a bunny suit. You're an idiot in a bondage gear. You ain't speedball. And yeah, and penance says, I want you to try and kill me. Free shot point blank rage. I want to see how much it hurts. We're getting to kink territory. That's what we've just yeah. And I think from the beginning, people have been kind of calling that out. Like it's kind of missing the word daddy, but that's about it. Why are you bleeding? It's the only way I can feel.

Right. Yeah. This way I can climax my powers. So, um, nitro obliges, of course, because he's a villain. And after which penance feels all that pain. And then he launches into a saliliqui that shows that his grip on reality is slowly, is, is, is not slowly slipping. It has slipped. Um, since it's all about numbers and it's tied to, and at this point, he's doing factorials and he's doing numbers and all kinds of shit. Um, and, and he's recounting

what happened to the people who died for whom his, his, his spike suit has been built. Um, and he's recounting what happened to the people who died for whom his, his, his spike suit has been built. Um, and he's all about these numbers. And there's this many that were the children and this many that were janitors and this many that, you know, we were unemployed that day and this many, you know, just insane obsession with the numbers. Um, and when Nitro wakes up from having blown up, he's missing a hand. Another hand is in a vice, but most importantly, he's wearing the penance suit.

And then Robbie Baldwin says, but I didn't make it for me, I made it for you. And at this point, you see Baldwin's face, he's wearing those, you remember in the mid 2010s that people would like double pierce their eyebrows? Oh, yeah. They like to stick white eyebrow piercings. Yeah.

He's got both, he's got who, those douchey hoop earrings from the mid 2000s, you know, where it's like thin and then thick. I, I hope that this isn't like he is the aesthetic that you had in 2010. Oh, no, I was in 2010. I was very long hair and denim jacket and boots. That was me. Okay. But this sounds like, you know, he's been to like a jug

of low concert or two. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's probably got a line on some substandard DMT. That's the five he's got. So after he puts the suit on Nitro and it's so funny. You're like, yeah, in 2010, I did this. I was like, I was still wearing cargo shorts and Argyll socks and orthopedic shoes.

I've I found a look in 2003 and I've never looked back. 2010 may have been the last time I could fit into my metallic band shirts. That's nice. Nice. So after he puts on the suit, uh, and after he talks about how he's going to hurt Nitro and why Baldwin beats him with a spiked hammer. And then let variant medics find him and Nitro is still barely alive. And then Wolverine, who had gone hunting nitro during Civil War,

is on a boat and he boats Robbie Baldwin out of there. And then we start to see this kind of redemption arc, this healing arc, which again feels very, very... Because of the nadir that he gets to, this feels very liberal fantasy still. And I like the redemption arc. I really do because it does get into some good mental health finally, but it's because of where they dragged him to.

And it's like you don't have to, there were other ways, you know, you don't have to literally go through hell to be better. It's like I tell my students about pretty woman. That's a nice story. That is not how it pans out in reality. Right, right? Yeah. So, I mean, is this kind of like what we talked about

in the previous episode about abject masculinity as well? It is. So when we think about, so as a refresher for anyone who forgot or maybe didn't, if go and listen to those episodes are a lot of fun, but abject masculinity is the idea of a designed masculinity, or masculinity that is constructed to be at the same time discarded and disposable while also accessing

immense power and privilege, right? So in this case, Robbie is physically not valued because of right trauma he's doing to his body. He doesn't care about it. Not to mention the job that he's performing is one that carries with it intense risk. And he is mortal. I mean, he has power, right? But he could still die.

He can still be suffocated, burned alive, any of those things. And then at the same time, though, he has access to power resources that get him to a lot of area, right? Because he doesn't do that just on his own. he has access to power resources. They get him to that barrier, right? Because he doesn't do that just on his own. He has sort of institutional backing. So he is, it's a cycle of near death, often with abject masculine characters, until eventually they either die

or break away from the cycle. So yeah. And what I like here is that he doesn't, he doesn't heal perfectly. There are many falters and false, like kind of like false paths along the way for him. The Avengers initiative 25 to 30. He's in a rubber room. And unfortunately, by this point, Norman Osborne's in charge of everything,

because it's dark rain. And he ends up fighting rage and his other friends because Osborne's in charge. He thinks that he's doing the right thing because he's being gaslit in the thinking that he's now the hero that he should have been when in fact he's serving a dark master. Eventually that'll come to an end and he's allowing himself to be speedball again and eventually the whole town of Stanford actually forgives him. And then he forgives himself and even the mother who spat in Stark's face at the funeral of her son has forgiven him. Which is a hell of an arc because he finally does the healthy healing, not the I'm, you know, new, new year new me healing. Right, right, right. So why? Like I come back to why have we taken this happy go lucky turned up to 11 version of Spider-Man and just turned him into his total opposite

in the mid 2000s through the 2010s. And the answer I come to is the global war of terror or on terror. Well, it is of terror, quite honestly, because we're putting knives people from 30,000 feet. That's terrifying. That's true. That there is a knife drone conceptually is just wild as hell anyway. Right. Like George Carlin said, you know, one of my favorite things about humanity is that they invented the flame thrower. There's a bunch of people over there. I want to light them on fire, but I don't want to have to walk all the way over there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah. It's, no, I mean, I think that, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that, you know, as one of my colleagues put it, you know, we didn't heal through, um, since 9-11, we've never, we've never healed in any sort of like legitimate grieving, traumatic way. Right.

It was a lot of, um, sparkling over the wound. So to speak. And I think we see that, I think we see that with Robbie, wherein he embraces the grim to a a villainous degree. Yes, however you feel about Nitro, doing that to him was gratuitous and did not serve any sort of point of justice, right? That was personal vengeance. That was torturing a man as a way of screaming into the void, right? For one's own self gratification.

Yeah. And then when Wolverine is your accomplice when he's just your wheel man, you know you've gone wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When Wolverine is riding shotgun and not the point of the spear. Yeah, right right and and then to have that arc as though one

necessitates the other as though that redemption is a requires that that walk through hell. Yes is a sort of it seems to me in terms of the war on terror like yeah, we did these terrible things He becomes totally stark in some sense, right? He becomes the ends justify the meetings and the self hatred and the self hatred. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he clung to his principles as hard as he could, but he was powerless to stop it. And so then he gets with the prover, right? So looking at his overall arc, Obama spoke against the war in October of 2002, is before the US Senate voted on the authorization of military forces before he's a senator.

He was a state senator at the time. And he was at an anti-war rally on the day that force was authorized. And he said, quote, when I am this party's nominee, my opponent will not be able to say that I voted for the war in Iraq. He says that in 2007 in Des Moines, just weeks before the Iowa caucuses. He says, quote, as president, I will end the war in Iraq. We will have our troops home in 16 months. Dude got elected in November of 2008. He took office in January of 2009. If I do the math, that means sometime in 2010 everybody came home except that they didn't.

You know, so funny you talk about this now. Just the other day in class, we were talking about images and ideological images, particularly photographs. And we looked at like the wedding shots of like a Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but also I showed them a picture of the situation room when they were the night that Obama had been Latin assassinated.

And the question I raised was, as we talk about the ideological construction of this and now, from 10 years later, why didn't it end there? Right? Why wasn't that the last nail in the coffin? Why did it go on for 10 more years? Yeah. Yeah. It's now he took a lot longer than that. And while George W. Bush used drone strikes 57 times, Barack Obama used them 563 times. He just cribbed from the Bush administration and hit the gas. He did. Now, this can partly be explained by better technology.

Like, one of the reasons that Bush didn't use drone strikes more is because he didn't have them available the whole time. Also, for the first two years of his presidency, there wasn't a war. So he's got it, you know, he's getting to a technology late and he started the war late in his game. Obama came into office while that was the norm. And and it took a bush almost

three years, three years before he started killing brown people from 13,000 miles away. Now that said, you have a guy who took a principled stance. A great way to adopt her that one. Obama had a principled stance against Guantanamo, against invading Iraq, and against using military might overseas to coerce other countries into doing what we like. He ran on that. He ran on being less hawkish than Hillary, and certainly less hawkish than any Republican. But once he was in office, he let the system that was in place, stay in place and he got co-opted by it at best. It wasn't immediate, but it took a number of failures of number of compromises and losses on his part,

but Obama became the liberal war monger that he is. I was gonna say being less hawkish than Hillary is saying that you're at least a little bit to the left of Harry Kissinger, so I don't know how much credit he'd be there. Yeah. Yeah. And he praised Kissinger as well. Yeah. Like Robbie Baldwin was the same though. He wasn't responsible for nitrous exposure, explosion. And he fought hard against the efforts of everyone to pin the dead on him and the New Warriors. And he refused to register. And then he lost. And he got beat down. And he ended

up internalizing the hate and becoming an awful version of himself that he himself hates. Eventually, he hits the lowest point he can, and then he starts coming back, finally reconciling with what he's done, and he has a redemption. And at the end of it, he and justice go on a buddy road trip together, often to the sunset. We certainly like to think of ourselves that same way, and in the in the wake of the tangerine demon, we certainly have rehabilitated the chocolate Nixon. But it's nice and tidy that way, and it's still heroic and good. As fantasies go, we'd like to live in a world where a war criminal can redeem himself simply by painting portraits of the people that his decisions crippled. And we assume that they get the care that they need is veterans and we'll ignore it.

And we'd like to think that electing an octogenarian in a V8 or glasses is stopped us from sliding headlong into fascism because we're doing it 40 miles an hour instead of 120. He's not 80 yet. Oh, he's not. No, he's like 76, 78. No, that distinction may be academic, but you know, you are an academic. I have an academic who, you know, ignored broken promises and increasingly toxic political environment and then throws bones to us that we then, you know, divide amongst ourselves to fight over. But the fact is Robbie Baldwin was done dirty from the second nitro

blew up. And we were done dirty by the Brooks Brothers, right? And the global war on terror. Everything since then has either been worse than that or a less worse version of that. And you know, at the risk of Monday morning quarterbacking, that. And you know, at the risk of Monday morning quarterbacking, it, when we think about like how Nitro, not Nitro, excuse me, how Robbie inherited a bad situation once Nitro went off. Yeah. And also accounting for the fact that he was complicit in the, in the events that led to that point. And it was his idea to attack them, right? So too, we could, you know, admit our own culpability. I say our own in terms of a social sense of the events that led us to things like the global war on terror and what have I mean, I certainly don't want to speculate as to whether or not we could have done anything as a voting

public to have altered, you know, and prevented 9, but assuming that that was a fixed point in time to reference dark to who, and like the politicians that inherited that situation were absolutely a result of our own, our own political will or in some cases lack the rough. Lack the rough, yeah. Yeah. A comedy friend of mine said recently, in actions, have consequences. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You can't stay in still or move in trade. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you, you know, 9-11 didn't happen because Bush stole an election from Gore. 9-11 happened because of the policies that we had in place in the 90s, which were under Clinton, and Bush the first, that were tied to policies that existed under Reagan. That frankly, go back to policies that go back much farther than that. But you got your Cold War setting up the Taliban

and helping Rambo in Rambo III with the Mujahideen. Like all of that, that doesn't exist just because Bush existed as president, horrible as we reacted to it, and as much as I will pin on Bush, it's not his fault that that happened. That was one significant, but one thread on the spider web My day. Sorry. No, no, I mean, but it's it's true. I mean, these characters are, I like to describe superheroes broadly speaking as modern iterations of visions of the future that are burdened with the sins of our past. And I think characters like Speedball serve as really interesting effigies

for how we deal with social anxieties. Because, you know, we can put them through nine kinds of hell and then still have them be the good guy. Never mind that we're engaging in some sort of idealized, in this case, liberal fantasy about what it means to have redemption and to commit atrocities, right? And I'm not not in the idea of redemption. I am Catholic, I do believe in reconciliation,

I do believe in all that stuff, but at the same time, it's like, it's a visceral process that shouldn't be romanticized. And the way that we, the way that that's done in comics, obviously romance is just an inherent part of the genre. Yeah. But it's still like, I don't know. It's again, I go back to like when I told my students, pretty woman's a good story, but in reality, it don't work that way, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And on some level, it's catharsis, and on some level, it's self indulgence, maybe for our own behalf. Like we can lie to ourselves through these stories a little bit, that like all the terrible things that we've done or that we haven't done for that matter, don't mean that like we can't so be a good person on the other side. And again, yes, I believe that's ultimately true, but you don't get to just, you know, put on new outfit, use a new name and go on a road trip with your buddy. Right. At the end, right? Yeah, I mean, there's, I mean, you know, stories reinforced culture to us. Yeah. You know, and so it's interesting to me that there's two things that we're working with Speedball there. One was that we're absolutely telling a story about

ourselves and about our youngers, our inner child, if you will. Number two, the only real casualties of this civil war, because Steve Rogers comes back. Yeah. He gets better. Yeah. Our billfoster, speedball on a different level, and then the two guys that punish her kills. Yeah, that's about it. Yeah. Like that's two Sealist villains. Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, it's okay to drag speedball this way because we were afraid to do lasting damage to Peter Parker in that way.

Like we found the cutout, the safe avatar for Peter Parker to go through this with. And then we could just put it away later instead of like, this is an enduring part of the Spider-Man thing. I think that's fair. I think that's fair because in that same way that he was done dirty and he went through this terrible arc of penance, we have this sort of vindictively about dragging our heroes, right? But Peter's sacrosanct, right?

They did make clones, right? You got like Ben Riley and Tony. So that we can sort of knock around a whole bunch, but it's still like you don't, that would, that'd be like betraying the trust of the audience to do that to Peter. Yeah, it really would. It feels in me like I was, as I was saying, and I was like, oh, that's why we have a volunteer army. Yeah. Yeah. Our sacred children aren't the ones getting hurt, you know? No. So, yeah.

Yeah. Well, cool, man. This was this was a lot of fun. Do you have anything you want to recommend to people to read? Yeah, actually, I'm going to recommend two books on comics that I think are pretty accessible to folks. And I use them a lot in my research. One of them is called Super Black, which is by Delifu Nama, which talks about Black comic book characters over the years, and I love it. It's awesome. I've used it all the time,

and it's very accessible, I think. And then the other one is Your Brain on Latino Comics by Luis Saladama, who is another eminent comic scholar, and it is what it sounds like it's all about, you know, the Latinite community, as depicted in comics, and there's some great stuff in like, about like Blue Beetle, and you know, Miles Morales and things like that. And so it's an awesome volume.

So if you're interested in learning more about comics, especially as they serve as cultural artifacts, both of those books are really good reads. Awesome. And where can people find you in the socials and on the internet? They can find me on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram at G.A. Cruz, I'm a score PhD. They can find me on the podcast Office Hours for Dr. C, where you and the illustrious Ed Blaylock have,

I don't know if I'm using that word right, illustrious, maybe. I think he's more illuminated than I am, so I'm cool with that. Um, y'all have been on as well as we have, you know, all kinds of guests who are so much more charismatic and, uh, enthralling than Barry and myself. Oh, I was like, damn, dude. That would be, this is my favorite part to like, you know, take a sip, then bury in myself. Then bury in myself. So yeah, no, we, we, our guests do a lot of heavy

love in keeping people entertained. But no, so, so we do those things. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. Well, I'm going to recommend that people pick up the Marvel Multiverse role playing game, the play test rulebook. And because T.S.R., I mentioned it a couple episodes ago, T.S.R. did one in 1986 when Beast was still not blue. This one is a new system. It's written by Matt Forebeck, who wrote one of my favorite worlds, which is Brave New World. And then he had four little novellas uh based on Brave New World. And he has been active in role-playing game development and stuff like that. I've talked with him. I'm trying to get him to come on the show. But the timing doesn't quite work out. You understand being on the East Coast. But he did this one called uh he he designed it and uh get it. Check it out. Play it. play it, give him feedback, let him know.

The one cool thing is, you're doing 3D6, and if you roll, the best roll you could get is not a 666, it's a 616. I'm like, oh, that's cute. I like that. Yeah, that's so. I have yet to run it, but I'm looking forward to hearing people do it.

So, and of course, you could find me on the first Friday of every month, all the way through December at Luna's in Sacramento, with capital punishment, with my new partner, justine Lopez. You could find me on Twitter and Instagram at Dahl Harmony, two H's in the middle, And very often I'll be heckling and bothering Gabriel. So where you find one, you find the other. So Gabriel, thank you so much for being a part of this today. And for the last three weeks, it's been a tremendous pleasure to get to talk to you about one of my favorite superheroes.

So that's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me again. Absolutely. So well, for Geek History of Time, I'm Deem in Harmony. And as Ed always says, keep rolling 20s. Oh look, you got to write this time. Absolutely. So well for Geek History of Time, I'm Demon Harmony and as Ed always says, keep rolling 20s. Oh look, you got to write this time.