#9 “Dangerous” 3/6 (March 2005)

The Story: Kitty Pryde (hero moment!) is inside the Danger Room with over a hundred students looking at an environment based on the rubble-strewn land of Genosha, complete with a giant Magneto sculpture. The Room taunts and threatens her through an image of the re-animated corpse of Wing. If she leaves, he’ll kill the students, though that seems to be a likely outcome regardless. The Room also keeps talking about its “father,” but we don’t know who that is.




Emma Frost feels that the Danger Room is sentient and angry; she proposes that its new form should be counted as a mutation. Seems like a wonky analogy, but OK. The X-Men dither around outside the Danger Room door for a while, cope with a remote-controlled Blackbird, break into the ceiling, and smash the Danger Room’s control module. This allows the computer consciousness that runs the Danger Room to manifest in the form of an android who will be known as “Danger,” which explains the title of this story arc.





My Two Cents: I have to confess, this issue is pretty skimpy on plot. There’s a talky Kitty half in the Danger Room in which she unsuccessfully bargains with Danger (through Wing’s grisly corpse) to stand down. And there’s an action X-Men half right outside the door where they end up freeing Danger from the room rather than actually damaging Danger. (She? It? I guess if Jocasta is a “she” then so is Danger.) With some smaller panels, the story of this issue could easily have been combined with the previous issue, and there’s not a lot of brilliant characterization to make up the scarcity of the plot either. We could really have used a subplot where some of the kids in the Danger Room did something besides cower. Or maybe the Cuckoos awaken outside and do something clever and spooky.

Let’s take advantage of this pause in story momentum to consider Kitty and Peter’s romance. When she joined the X-Men as the geeky girlfriend that every junior high boy wanted to have, Peter was the quiet, supportive guy that every junior high wanted to be—or at least, to be perceived as. But the age difference between the characters, much more on the minds of the X-Men creators (especially Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter) than on the minds of the readers, led to a mandated break-up.



Colossus was given an ill-fated romance with an alien healer during the original Secret Wars. He broke up with Kitty when he got home, and they had their respective recoveries. Kitty went on to relationships with Peter Wisdom and Peter Quill. But in a 2016 interview on the podcast “Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men," Chris Claremont x-plained that his plan for decades had been that “the love of Kitty’s life” was… Rachel Summers?



This was not at all evident from the Rachel/Kitty evident in X-Men up through 1986-7 when I stopped reading; they seemed to be close comrades-in-arms, but not more than that. There was a later sequence in Excalibur in which Kitty was seduced by the femme fatale Saturnyne, though.



When Claremont put Kitty and Karma together in the 2003 Mekanix mini-series, at one point he had Karma fiddling with Kitty’s hair, and then later they had one of those “fell on top of each other, averted kiss” scenes commonly used to build sexual tension in cinema:




Then in 2004 when Claremont was writing X-Treme X-Men, he brought both Kitty and Rachel into an already crowded roster and carved out plenty of space for them. Also, Kitty is constantly shown as drinking water. What is that about? An Ecstasy addiction? Some sexual innuendo? Something else?






Whedon is pushing back against all this to make room for a renewed Kitty/Peter romance. Whedon’s vision has prevailed over Claremont’s, at least for now. As of 2018, Kitty and Peter are getting married.



Fun fact: Can you see Charlie Brown here in the Danger Room? He just can't catch a break!