Beast is one of the original X-Men, and to this day remains one of their most popular members. The furry blue bundle of joy was a gentle giant as much as he was a genius, and was a wonderful mix of contradictions that captured people’s hearts. He was a genius whose mutation granted him purely athletic gifts and a renaissance man who looked purely animalistic. In the early years, Beast was the unendingly optimistic heart of the team, and that’s the interpretation most fans know, but over time, Hank McCoy changed. Constant threats of extinction and compounding tragedies drove him to paranoia, bitterness, and a ceaseless drive to do whatever was necessary to protect mutantkind.
By the Krakoan Age, Beast had committed countless atrocities, from subjecting an imprisoned alien race to inhumane experiments to literal war crimes and wiping a country off the map. Eventually, it got to the point where Beast was a true villain, but people missed how he used to be, so a compromise was made. A clone of Beast with memories only up to when he was still a true hero was made, who helped defeat the evil original Beast and his own army of clones. The original died in a final act of heroism, but now, I believe Marvel tricked us all and secretly brought him back in X-Men’s newest event, “Age of Revelation.”
The Mysterious Leader of 3K
Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
For the entire From the Ashes era, Cyclops’s X-Men team has battled the organization known as 3K, whose goal was to forcibly transform humans into mutants and wipe out humanity by the year 3000. The enigmatic chairman recruited several of the X-Men’s most dangerous enemies from over the years, including Wyre, Astra, and Cassandra Nova. They call themselves the true heirs of Krakoa, and genuinely believe they have mutantkind’s best interests at heart. The Chairman has also shown a distinct interest in clone Beast, trying to recruit him. The Chairman clearly knows the X-Men well, is a brilliant genetic scientist, and believes he’s doing the right thing for all mutants.
All of this evidence points to the Chairman actually being the Prime Beast, resurrected in another clone body that was hidden away from everyone else. While this is bad enough on its own, if this theory is correct, then Prime Beast might have already infiltrated the X-Men in “Age of Revelation.” The inciting incident for the audience is the consciousnesses of the present-day Cyclops and Beast being yanked ten years into the dystopian future to help stop Revelation. While Cyclops is actually exactly like he did in the regular X-Men series, Beast is acting very strangely.
A Beast in Hero’s Clothing
Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
The first piece of evidence that the Beast in the future is not the stars-and-garters-swearing fuzzball we love is his reaction to being brought here. He had to be restrained because he tried to attack everyone out of rage, a very un-Beast thing to do. And he was brought back first, as if his future self expected this response and wanted to hide it from Cyclops. Alongside that, Beast acted strangely nostalgic around Cyclops, saying that working with him reminded him of the good old days. Why would Beast say this if he was currently on a team with Cyclops, and those good old days weren’t even that long ago for him?
There’s also Beast’s fascination with the mutant virus, something that 3K itself is desperately working on manufacturing. When confronted with various pieces of futuristic technology, Beast took it all in stride, recognizing the work of himself and other prominent Marvel scientists, despite the clone’s multiple statements that he still needed a lot of time to catch up with the modern-day tech. Also, when multiple X-Men are killed when the Angel of Death Wolverine shows up, Beast doesn’t waste a second mourning for them or trying to prevent death, which his self definitely should with his aversion to death.
The biggest piece of evidence, however, is how he treated Jen Starkley. She is an artificial mutant created by 3K, and just before the “Age of Revelation,” the two of them began a romantic relationship. Yet, Beast simply referred to her as Ms. Starkley here. This is a lack of familiarity that her boyfriend obviously wouldn’t have, but the evil scientist who experimented on her would. This is especially prominent because Hank calling Jen by her name for the first time is a very important scene for their relationship, with time spent on it, so his not doing so here is extremely weird unless it wasn’t the Beast she knows.
We still don’t know why the Prime Beast would be the one brought to the future, or what his plan is, but given that it was Swartzchild who did so, one of the Chairman’s X-Men, it only gives more credence to the idea that Prime Beast is the X-Men’s newest enemy.
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