Black Science #4

written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

Black Science occupies very grey moral territory.  If McKay's design for his dimension-jumping "pillar" weren't already troubling, mining and pilfering other worlds for technology and resources to instantly solve his own world's self-made problems, his team's desperation for survival once the plan went to hell has motivated some questionable decisions.  McKay's distaste for social injustice, which inspires his rescue of the exploited fish-lady in Black Science #1, does not entirely extend to his security officer Ward, a man of principle himself having jeopardized his military career by exposing U.S. attacks on civilians.  Faced with McKay's imminent death, without hesitation or compunction, Ward abducts a medical shaman, rips him out of his own world with no real hope of return, and would compel him at gun-point to save McKay's life.  It is the shaman, in the obscure and mostly unseen corners of Remender's script, who is humane.

Rebecca:  "Crew pulled it off.  Got a medic.  An old shaman.  He didn't want to help at first.  Not until he saw Nathan and Pia in tears over you."  (Black Science #4: 16)

Landed in the trenches of a war they cannot understand, blinded by their own memories of its corresponding reflex in their own, and panicked for a way back home, Rebecca drowns a young German soldier in the mud to keep him from raising an alarm, Ward, Kadir and Shawn mount an unprovoked assault on the American Indian ranks, and Kadir willingly abandons fellow team member Ward to die at their hands in order to save himself.  For the team's idealistic but foolishly head-strong scientists, this odyssey must prove to be a humbling experience, one that forces them to confront their own hubris.  For the more unscrupulous members—Kadir and Chandra, who's not above using sex to leverage allies—their journey provides equal opportunity for profiteering and redemption.

The obstacles McKay and his team pose themselves seem to be nothing compared to the potential threat that's following them, literally, across dimensions.  An unknown tracker, working for a distant and disembodied voice on his communicator, has pursued them to their most recent world.  While the "him" the masked, blue-suited hunter speaks of is unidentified, we assume it is McKay himself, the genius behind the pillar.  The longer McKay is at sea among dimensions, the less their misfortune looks like accident, and the more it begins to look like dimensions might not be the only things being jumped.