Written by Mark Gruenwald – Pencils by Paul Ryan – Inks by Sam De La Rosa – Lettered by Janice Chiang – Colored by Max Scheele
The issue opens with a very traditional superhero sequence: the Squadron training.
It’s basically a super-powered game of capture the flag. It gives us a chance to see the new recruits and old guard working together, while their inner monologues show us that everyone has their own motivations.
Power Princess reflects on just how much the Squadron has changed. Four members are dead. Four others have left. Now there are five new recruits joining the team.
And those five recruits are secretly working for Nighthawk.
The Squadron looks like a team that’s rebuilding itself. Underneath, it’s being infiltrated from within.
The five members of Nighthawk’s resistance are officially inducted into the Squadron, and several of them are visibly conflicted about swearing loyalty to a team they’re planning to betray.
It’s a strange picture of a team that appears to be coming together while everything underneath it is pulling apart.
The Reality of Purpose
Nighthawk’s team looks much more fractured from the outside.
They’re made up of criminals, former adversaries and one disgraced hero, and they don’t all have the same reasons for being there.
Nighthawk wants to bring down the Squadron because he believes the Utopia Program is morally reprehensible.
Master Menace has very different motivations. He wants to reverse the Behavior Modification Machine because he wants to prove he’s smarter than Tom Thumb and the Squadron. He isn’t following Nighthawk because he believes in his idealism.
Mink is happy to have a purpose. Remnant is content to sit around Nighthawk’s mansion. Black Archer is itching to get back into action and redeem himself.
They should be a group that can’t possibly work together.
Yet they ultimately have a shared purpose that overrides their individual motivations.
Take down the Squadron Supreme.
The irony is that the supposedly dysfunctional resistance may actually understand something the Squadron doesn’t: people don’t have to want the same things, or share the same motivations, to work together.
The Asimov Paradox
AIDA alerts Ape-X that someone has copied the Behavior Modification plans. She investigates and discovers that Moonglow is responsible.
Now Ape-X has a problem.
Moonglow is a member of the Squadron. She has also betrayed the Squadron.
Ape-X is supposed to protect the team, but she also can’t betray a member of the team. The two directives collide, and the conflict drives her into a mental breakdown.
AIDA faces a similar problem after discovering what happened to Ape-X. She could tell the other Squadron members, but instead decides to keep it secret until she can understand why Ape-X broke down.
AIDA’s directive to keep members of the Squadron safe means withholding information that could put them in harm’s way later on.
We’ve seen conflicting directives cause problems before, but this time the conflict doesn’t just affect one character.
It opens the door for the entire system to come apart.
…Become A Monster
Master Menace successfully reverses the Behavior Modification Machine. While Nighthawk doesn’t completely trust him, he has no reason to believe Menace is lying. Their shared purpose temporarily overrides their adversarial motives.
Now they have the ability to undo what the Squadron has done.
The first test is Lamprey.
Haywire tricks him, Nighthawk’s team uses the machine, and Lamprey is returned to his original state. He immediately agrees to join the resistance and help get revenge against the Squadron.
They begin reversing the Behavior Modification of the former Institute members one at a time.
Then they discover that Blue Eagle has followed a few of the new recruits. Earlier, he argued that these new recruits should have been Behavior Modified. His mistrust of the new recruits eventually leads him to Nighthawk’s team.
And to a conundrum.
Master Menace has the obvious solution. Use the Behavior Modification Machine on Blue Eagle.
Nighthawk refuses. Behavior Modification represents everything he is fighting against. Taking away someone’s ability to make their own choices is exactly what Nighthawk has been fighting against.
But when faced with the reality of the situation, Nighthawk realizes it may be the only way to ensure the Squadron Supreme does not uncover their plans.
So, against his better judgment, Nighthawk agrees to use the machine on Blue Eagle and protect the resistance.
Final Thoughts
There is a danger of slipping into fanaticism when fighting a system you believe is wrong. It’s easy to convince yourself that the rules don’t apply when you believe the stakes are high enough.
Blue Eagle has already started down that road. When Redstone and Moonglow arrive, his first solution is to Behavior Modify them. He repeats the idea later, before the new members are sworn in, because he believes it will ensure their loyalty.
Later, Master Menace makes the exact same argument when Blue Eagle discovers the resistance.
These two men, who are ideologically opposed, suddenly mirror each other.
Nighthawk believes that taking away people’s choices is fundamentally wrong. But faced with the possibility of the Squadron discovering the resistance, he compromises his ideals.
The Squadron has spent this entire series taking away people’s choices because they believe they’re doing it for the greater good.
Now Nighthawk convinces himself that he has to do the same thing to protect the resistance.
And that’s where Squadron Supreme keeps getting more interesting. The heroes aren’t immune to the flaws they’re trying to fix in everyone else. They’re just as capable of making bad choices, rationalizing them and convincing themselves that their reasons are different.
That’s the danger of fighting monsters. You can become so focused on defeating them that you start adopting the very methods you were fighting against.
And sometimes the first step isn’t becoming a monster.
It’s deciding that, just this once, you need to think like one.
Squadron Supreme Entry #13