Black Science #5

"Lies, Lies, Lies"
written by Rick Remender
art by Matteo Scalera
painted art by Dean White

It comes as a very small, if very welcome, surprise that Grant McKay's most sinister enemy may be himself.  The masked figure pursuing the interdimensional castaways is none other than another Grant McKay, more scarred and hoarier, but McKay nonetheless.  Having killed his own children creating a pillar himself, he and his Sara are now hellbent on stealing the protagonist Grant's Pia and Nathan for themselves.  And there are others, more McKays scattered across the Onion, which has suddenly become an even more troublesome and mysterious model for the universe.

So far, most of the worlds of Black Science have been entirely alien, populated by inhuman, if sometimes familiar, creatures:  frog- and fish-people, cosmopolitan communities of miscellaneous aliens rivaling any Star Wars cantina, and now white-furred, red-eyed apes.  But it is the exception—a dramatic inversion of Manifest Destiny—that makes this new world of multiple McKays with multiple sabotaged pillars and a wake of dead children seem so credible.  Given the theory behind the Onion, there may even be infinite variations on McKay's destructive hubris, every one of them subject to the inevitable momentum of destiny.  The details—including Jen's Onion emblem—are so familiar, in fact so uncomfortably identical, that it would difficult to argue against this desperate fatalism.

But it may very well be this other Grant McKay's thwarted intervention that sets our own McKay on another path.  Whether their world is, as he proclaims it, "not real" or whether this is another lie the other McKay tells his children to ease their trauma, he knows far more about just how the Onion works than the team.  They are punching holes in the universes, threatening to undo it all.  But it is his knowledge accumulated from multiple encounters with more McKays that makes him so valuable.  The warning:  "Every Grant McKay we've ever met gets the children killed" (Black Science #5: 23).  The unveiling:  "Kadir was the saboteur.  Kadir is always the saboteur" (23).

He's always been a slimy, self-serving prick resentful of McKay's genius and (justifiably) irritated by his self-righteous delivery.  (Does he purposefully misspell McKay's name in his conversation with his sycophantic colluder Chandra?!)  But the discovery that Kadir is also so blind in his hatred for McKay that he would murder his whole team by sabotaging the pillar elevates him to outright villain, one whose actions must inevitably backfire.