Black Science #6

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

What a tremendous sleight of hand!  While Remender has been gradually adding nuance and definition to the sci-fi stereotypes he introduced in the opening issue of Black Science, the sudden and abrupt glimpse of Kadir's interior thought is pleasantly disorienting.  He's still a vindictive, capitalist scumbag with a professional grudge against the scientist, but he's also as, if not more, ideologically driven as McKay.  He may revel in the prospect of watching McKay fail spectacularly and publicly, but he also just doesn't want the world to be destroyed by the machine he's building.  And, perhaps, Kadir finds himself equally propelled by cosmic destiny.

For nearly all of Black Science's opening arc, we readers have been led to believe Grant McKay was our protagonist, a deeply flawed and sometimes willfully myopic scientist convinced of his own limitless value, certain that he will save the world, and selectively blind to the considerable dangers of his research.  And now McKay lies broken and pinned under yet another destroyed pillar.  His death is uncertain, though I somewhat hope he does die, at least this version of McKay.  His longing, in his closing thoughts, for a world where he and his pillar do not destroy the Eververse is a compelling call for that McKay, one I'd like to meet if he exists.

After all, our McKay is one of many to tear a destructive path through the different layers of the Onion, and he's hardly the first.  His encounter with his plant-spirit-possessed ape counterpart, building his own massive pillar and wearing his own Onion emblem, is yet another reminder that McKay's ambition is ubiquitous.  But it is his underestimation of Kadir, once again, that steals the issue.  Unable to think in any less narcissistic terms than a conspiracy against him, McKay sees only Kadir's hatred of him, like Kadir sees only McKay's monomaniacal reckless crusade.  But it is McKay's final charge to Kadir—to get his children home, whatever the cost—that might just transform them both.

Meanwhile, the travelers keep picking up alien companions.  The kidnapped shaman wordlessly continues to jump with the scientists and their glitchy pillar, though unlikely ever to return to his own world, and now Chandra is unknowingly possessed by one of this latest world's fiery plant spirits, an alien mole among refugees already at each others' throats.