Zeb Larson reviews Black Science #13…
The Dimensionauts take on a new mission: leave every world they visit better than when they found it. But their mettle is put to the test in a plague-ridden society that wants to burn them all at the stake.
I’ve been really enjoying Black Science since the first issue, but I can say this might be the best issue yet. We get to spend some time with characters we haven’t had a lot of exposure to, learn some backstory for this world, and see some amazingly illustrated action panels. Sure, there’s death, feelings of disappointment, and a sense of everybody’s anguish, but if you disliked any of those things you wouldn’t be reading Rick Remender.
We get a flashback of Grant and Sara fighting in their old life before we jump back to the present. In this reality, Grant and his fellow scientists brought back a particularly virulent virus which killed most of the crew, and despite traveling to other worlds and infecting them, alternative Grant failed to find a cure. More seriously, most of this crew has failed to follow quarantine protocols, so they’re all infected now as well. Shawn and Grant narrowly fight off one of the survivors as Shawn retrieves spare parts for the Pillar, while Pia and Sara have their own flashback. There’s no time for memories, though, and it’s not going to end well as the legionnaires of this world close in on them.
Despite the bleakness of this particular issue, there is a humorous shot of Shawn looking at an alternate version of himself who killed himself and muttering “I’m never going to get used to seeing this kind of shit.” Black Science really needs moments like this, because the last few issues have been so unremittingly depressing. And don’t get me wrong, this is a pretty crushingly depressing issue as well. The team is really having their faces rubbed in their failures by seeing a world so clearly devastated by dimensional travel. Grant has a bit of time in between being attacked to wonder whether he’s doing the right thing at all, or whether their deaths might actually make the Eververse a safer place. Grant’s past life is no better either, and the flashbacks highlight Grant’s crappy parenting style, through both his presence and his absence. The fact that there are more deaths on the team makes it even more painful to read, as Grant has one more failure to cut into his belt.
We also finally get to spend some time in Shawn’s head, one of the last characters to get some of his own narration. His development is especially important because we need it to understand how Grant McKay managed to end up leading a team at all. If you only listen to the members of Grant’s family, he comes across as an utterly self-absorbed, myopic jerk that can’t see the consequences of his actions. While all of those things are true (at least for his family), Shawn has a more nuanced view of Grant as a lunatic, but one who always manages to pull it off in the end. Perhaps it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome, but it explains why everybody else has fallen in behind McKay, his flaws notwithstanding.
In the closing material, Remender notes that they’re going to be subverting the trajectory of the book from here on out, and that he and Matteo Scalera have planned it out as far as the fiftieth issue. Where are we going from here? That’s a good question, and it raises exciting possibilities for this series.
Zeb Larson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ONsp_bmDYXc&list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published April 1, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
