The Wake #8

Part Eight (of 10)
written by Scott Snyder
art by Sean Murphy

Ahab.  Nemo.  Mary.  He's a mechanically limbed, peg-legged pirate mer-captain with a resemblance to her long dead father and an androgynous name from an island refuge for less-than-legal shipmen.  He's also the swashbuckling leader of a band of human parasites based out of Meeks' open-ocean home.  And by great fortune and happenstance, these residents also happen to be in possession of a clean, if incomplete, message from Lee Archer to Meeks' base from his sinking hunting ship.  In what were once presumed to be her final minutes, Archer seems finally to have understood the mers' call.  Their eagerness for communication combined with the sense in Leeward's half-heard signal suggest that perhaps not all of them are enemies.

Archer and Cruz continue their weird, perhaps even siren, dance together.  As noted in earlier reviews, many of The Wake's second-arc characters bear more than passing resemblances to their first-arc predecessors, most extensively and importantly Leeward and General Marlow who align quite closely in looks and personality with Dr. Lee Archer and DHS Agent Astor Cruz respectively.  That Marlow here receives a mer-creature bite to the shoulder, an echo of Part Three's attack on Cruz, is yet another piece to their newly combative entanglement.

But it's Governess Vivienne, following the feverish logic of Marlow's trippy mer-venom hallucinations, that suddenly demands reconsideration and more than a little circumspection.  She's perhaps The Wake's most formidable threat to human survival, a tyrannical, manipulative politician prone to obfuscation and deflection, answering questions in anecdotes and parables and withholding information from even her innermost circle of enforcers and executors.  She's also undeniably, at this point, actively working to bury the "signal" and anyone who searches for it, but her endgame and her motives remain opaque.  But General Marlow may unknowingly be seeing the truth, or part of it at least.

Bitten by a mer after the wreck of the cruise ship, Marlow has a vision of a younger, seductive but still quite menacing Vivienne, naked save her strange neck-piece and surrounded by a menagerie of veined animals in a watery—or perhaps snowy/icy—storm.  As is her wont, she speaks in lullabies and cautionary tales of disappearing girls.  But her similarities to the mers is most striking:  her neck-gear, from which she often spills water, is alarmingly reminiscent of mer anatomy, including the bioluminescent nodule at the suprasternal notch; her facial features are sleek and mer-like; and her bluish-white complexion is inhuman, especially next to the sun-baked tones of her peers.  When Marlow abruptly erupts from his hallucinations after she kisses him, it's a suggestive analog to the effects of mer saliva, and it makes her earlier reference to a "respirator" (The Wake #8: 7)—perhaps the same neckwear—all the more sinister.  Her allegiances to the respective species—politically and biologically—are difficult to determine, especially as Captain Mary as well seems to espouse some elusive and selective biological affinity between members of the different species.

[July 2014]