Where We Choose To Hide

For the last week I've been toying around on and off with the idea of writing something in response to Bill Donahue's latest catastrophically mendacious and cruel attempt to prove to the world that everything can be blamed on the gays by suggesting they are the villains at the heart of the latest round of abuse allegations rocking the Catholic Church.

It turns out, it's harder than I would have thought. Not because he's right, or even close to right (shorter Donahue: since many of the abused children were post-pubescent, it's homosexuality rather than paedophilia, hence the gays did it!!!) but because he's so wrong, so spitefully, hatefully at odds with reality in his attempts to claim that the most important issue in decades of systemic abuse deliberately which was concealed by those in authority is the sexual orientation of the abusers that it's damn near impossible to search through the multiple layers of sheer malignant insanity necessary to actually respond, as oppose to just screaming in confused fury.

Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan - himself both a Catholic and homosexual - is better at this than I am. It's a shame it's taken me a full week to find his article, but it's easily good enough to justify its slight tardiness. All of it is truly excellent, but there are a few paragraphs worth highlighting:

The church teaches first of all that all gay men are "objectively disordered:" deeply sick in their deepest soul and longing for love and intimacy. A young Catholic who finds out he's gay therefore simultaneously finds out that his church regards him as sick and inherently evil, for something he doesn't experience as a choice. That's a distorting and deeply, deeply damaging psychic wound. Young Catholic gay boys, tormented by this seemingly ineradicable sinfulness, often seek religious authority as a way to cope with the despair and loneliness their sexual orientation can create. (Trust me on this; it was my life). So this self-loathing kid both abstracts himself from sexual relationships with peers, idolizes those "normal" peers he sees as he reaches post-pubescence, and is simultaneously terrified by these desires and so seeks both solace and cover for not getting married by entering the priesthood.

None of this is conceivable without the shame and distortion of the closet, or the church's hideously misinformed and distorted view of homosexual orientation. And look at the age at which you are most likely to enter total sexual panic and arrest: exactly the age of the young teens these priests remain attracted to and abuse.

That's the age when the shame deepens into despair; that's when sexuality is arrested; that's where the psyche gets stunted. In some ways, I suspect, these molesters feel as if they are playing with equals - because emotionally they remain in the early teens. I'm not excusing this in any way; just trying to understand how such evil can be committed.

Sullivan is also right on the money when he points out how easily the situation could be reversed if one were to tell straight boys that their proclivities were wrong and evil and never to be acted on, and that marriage between opposite sexes was unacceptable. One need look no further than the studies showing abstinence-only sex education leads to higher rates of teen pregnancy to see that vilifying desire does not end it, it simply ends its chance of being acted upon in an open, healthy way.

Sullivan concludes:

I don't believe, in other words, that you can tackle this problem without seeing it as a symptom of a much deeper failure of the church to come to terms with sexuality, sexual orientation and the warping, psychologically distorting impact of compulsory celibacy in the priesthood.

This seems extremely plausible, which is not to say it seems particularly likely. It's especially difficult to imagine it happening as long as the Bill Donahue's of the world (he's leader of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, by the way, I ain't picking on him at random), for whom the "logic" seems to run roughly like this: those abused were generally sexually mature, the abusers were men, thus the abusers were gay, thus banning gays remains the answer. He can't recommend the Catholic Church doubles down in its attempts to stop child abusers (or teenager abusers, if the qualification is really needed), because it's kinda difficult to tell those people from anyone else. Looking for criminals is hard. Far easier to argue that all the people who are that sort of criminal are also something else, and then slap them around. It's the clerical equivalent of arguing there should be separate search methods for Arab plane passengers, because there are so few white terrorists out there.

I realise that isn't an exact analogy: if it gets even harder for homosexuals to enter the priesthood, they're not going to start recruiting straight men to do their abusing for them. On the other hand, though, the comparison uncovers what the real problem is in all of this. Donahue is screaming so loudly about the solution being stopping gays from getting into the system because he's desperate for us to believe there's a way to stop the crime from ever happening again. Now, when we're talking about suicidal terrorists taking a plane, that makes some sense. You can't punish them once their smoking corpse is lying alongside those of their innocent victims, after all. We catch these people before they commit their intended crime, or they don't get caught at all.

Donahue is hoping no-one notices the difference in this case. He wants everyone to concentrate on how the Church is going to stop abusers getting through the door because that way he doesn't have to discuss how the church should deal with abuse when they discover it's happened. Because the instant he's faced with that, the very moment he has to start talking about how the church has failed in this situation, rather than those individuals guilty of the abuse itself, he's got nothing. He blames the gays for the abuse, and the media for reporting the abuse, but ask him why church authorities covered all this up, and how it plans to change in the future, and he hasn't anything to say at all.

And that's - to steal an ending from Christopher Bird - how you know he's full of shit.

Quz 2

A somewhat easier quiz this time around: 36 is the score to beat!

Round 1: Words

Each of the answers to this round are palindromic, i.e. they are the same word read backwards as forwards.

1. Flat and even. (Level)

2. A system by which electromagnetic waves are used to detect objects. (RADAR)

3. A musical note twice the length of a crotchet. (Minim)

4. An Eskimo canoe with a skin cover on a light framework. (Kayak)

5. To have made a God of. (Deified)


Round 2: Dragons

1. What is the common name for flowers of the genus Antirrhinum? (Snapdragon)

2. Who flew the Welsh Dragon as his personal banner in 1485 as he marched his army towards Bosworth Field? (Henry Tudor)

3. According to local legend, the Lambton Worm was a malevolent dragon that could reattach severed pieces of itself and so was almost impossible to dispatch. By what method did John Lambton eventually kill it? (By donning spiked armour)

4. Who voiced the dragon somewhat unimaginatively named Draco in the film Dragonheart? (Sean Connery)

5. Doragon sake is a drink made by fermenting a mixture of water, koji mold, and what other ingredient? (Rice)


Round 3: Mushrooms

1. How are psilocybin mushrooms better known? (Magic mushrooms)

2. In 1976 Professor Linda R Caporael suggested the consumption of rye tainted by ergot, a fungus which grows on wheat and can cause hallucinations, may have been responsible for the hysteria which led to and surrounded which events of 1692 and 1693? (The Salem Witch Trials)

3. In the original Lewis Carroll story, who or what does Alice find in Wonderland smoking a hookah and sitting on a mushroom? (A caterpillar)

4. Which mustachioed tradesman is regularly required to save the inhabitants of the Mushroom Kingdom, especially Princess Peach, from invasion by Bowser, in a series of video games that span from 1985 to today? (Mario (or Luigi))

5. The Alba truffle is so named because it is most famously found in the Piedmont region of Northern Italy, and particularly in the area around the city of Alba. By what other name is the Alba truffle commonly known? (White truffle)


Round 4: Comic Strips

1. Often considered one of the most popular and important comic strips the medium has produced, which strip did Charles Schulz draw and write for fifty years, leading to it being described as “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being?” (Peanuts)

2. Cartoonist Jim Davis’ creation Jon Arbuckle has two pets. One is a yellow dog named Odie, what is the name of the other? (Garfield)

3. Since its second issue, released in 1977, the comic character Judge Dredd has appeared in almost every issue of which science-fiction and fantasy comic anthology? (2000 AD)

4. Which comic book writer and editor co-created the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Iron Man and Spiderman, receiving cameo roles in each of their associated first movies? (Stan Lee)

5. Active between 1929 and 1976, how is the comic book artist Georges Prosper Remi better known? (Herge)


Round 5: The Moon

1. Where on the moon did Apollo 11 touch down in 1969? (Sea of Tranquility)

2. Which writer, who is behind only Agatha Christie as the most commonly translated author in history, wrote the novel “From the Earth to the Moon”, which was first published in 1865? (Jules Verne)

3. The 2009 film “Moon”, starring Sam Rockwell, was directed by Duncan Jones, who is the son of which British musician, born in Brixton in 1947? (David Bowie)

4. Which of Beethoven’s sonatas is popularly known as the “Moonlight Sonata”? (14th/Opus 27 No.2)

5. A 17th Century Wiltshire legend in which smugglers sunk brandy barrels into a lake claimed to be raking in the moon’s reflection when caught by the authorities led indirectly to the coining of which same for illegally distilled corn whiskey? (Moonshine)


Round 6: Granada

1. In the 14th century the Moors built a fortress palace atop the hill of the Assabica in south-east Granada. What is its name, which in the original Arabic translates as “Red Fortress”? (Alhambra)

2. What is the capital city of Andalucia, the region of Spain which contains Granada ? (Seville)

3. In what century did the Umayyad general Tariq the One-Eyed invade the Iberian peninsula, leading to over 500 years of Andalucia being ruled by a series of Muslim states? (8th)

4. Granada lies in the foothills of which mountain range, which contains Mulhacen, the highest point in mainland Spain? (Sierra Nevada)

5. Granada was one of the many places visited by a young French boy and his Pyrenean mountain dog in their eponymous 1980’s children’s TV show based on which mid-twentieth century novel by Madame Cecil Aubrey? (Belle & Sebastian)


General Knowledge

1. What was stolen from outside Sir Henry Baskerville‘s room at the Northumberland Hotel? (His boot)

2. CIA Agent Kermit Roosevelt was head of Operation Ajax, launched in 1953, which contributed to a successful cout d’etat in which country? (Iran)

3. Which filmmaker lost his wife in 1969 when she was murdered in LA by members of the Manson family? (Roman Polanski)

4. In which Commonwealth country is the University of Waikato? (New Zealand)

5. Which chess piece was known as the vizier until the end of the 10th century? (The Queen)

6. Abel, Baker, Charlie, Dog. What comes next? (Easy)

7. Which newspaper ran an April Fool's article last week suggesting Labour were launching a new ad campaign featuring Gordon Brown's face and slogans such as "Step Outside, Posh Boy", "Do You Want Some Of This", and "Vote Labour, Or Else."? (The Guardian)

8. Which series of sculptures were purchased at the end of the 18th
Century from the Ottoman Empire by Thomas Bruce, and are now on display in the Duveen Gallery in the British Museum? (The Elgin Marbles)

9. The alphabet of which language runs from Aleph to Tav? (Hebrew (or Phonecian))

10. Aside from field hockey (in which one can wield the stick in the left hand even if left-handed sticks themselves are forbidden), which is the only sport which you cannot play left-handed? (Polo)

The Best Prescription Possible

Continuing my (deeply) irregular series of reasons why dogs are amongst the greatest things on this Earth, I present a New York Times article on training dogs to help soldiers with PTSD.

If Mr. Hyde says “block,” the dog will stand perpendicularly in front of him to keep other people at a distance. If he asks Mya to “get his back,” the dog will sit facing backward by his side. The dogs are trained to jolt a soldier from a flashback, dial 911 on a phone and even sense a panic attack before it starts. And, perhaps most important, the veterans’ sense of responsibility, optimism and self-awareness is renewed by caring for the dogs.

This reminds of two things. First, dogs are damn awesome when you train them right. Jolt a soldier from a flashback? That's a whole new level of canine genius. Second, someone somewhere has medical data that having a dog increases your optimism. Not that I needed anyone to tell me that, of course; even just from visiting Storm at my parents I've assembled some pretty conclusive proof. It's nice to know that it's not just me that gets it, though. Without wishing to go anywhere near the politics of the USA's current military endeavours, it makes me abnormally happy to think that dogs are being given to broken people, in the hope that it will heal them.

And who can we thank for this? That would be Al Franken. You know, that guy various Republicans predicted would bring shame to the Senate because he used to write jokes for a living, and who last hit the headlines for sponsoring a bill that would force government-funded organisations to allow their employees access to the legal system. Not bad for a guy who spent a year thinking up as many nicknames for Rush Limbaugh as he possibly could.

h/t to Anne Laurie, whose post includes a truly beautiful photograph that I would feel like an absolute cad were I to swipe it. That's why I settled for the picture above, which depicts my latest cuddly toy, kindly given to me by A for my birthday. I still haven't thought up of a name for the little thing. I considered Josh for a while, but I ultimately decided that that would be too strange. Besides, I'm pretty sure she's a she. Any naming suggestions welcome. You people are good at that. I still have fond memories of asking for ideas for the name of a battlecruiser and eventually whittling them down to "Lord Bastard."

That does not mean my puppy is going to be called "Lady Bitch".

In Which I Surprise Precisely No-One By Loving The First Post-RTD Doctor Who

Well, that worked extremely well.

I have to confess three fairly important biases in what follows. Number 1, I got so thoroughly, abysmally sick of the shit RTD kept serving up in the name of "entertainment" that Mr Moffat could have turned in a sixty minute script in which the Eleventh Doctor played backgammon with a caravan and I'd have offered bonus points just out of relief over the change. Number 2, my weakness for Scottish redheads makes me uniquely unqualified to judge the performance of Matt Smith in this first episode. I was asked earlier what I thought of New Guy, and all I could offer was "New Guy was stood next to a beautiful redhead." Which, y'know, is undeniably true, but still not particularly useful.

Number 3, and this is the most important (and when I describe something as more important than gorgeous redheads from Inverness, you know that it's something pretty fucking vital), I find it all but impossible to judge a Doctor Who episode by any criteria other than "How close was that to what I remember as a child"? It isn't the only concern, by any means, but if you can manage to tie an hour of contemporary BBC entertainment into the feelings I experienced as an eight year old, then you've pretty much won already.

Naturally, this means that Moffat has pretty much won already. For the first time since Doctor Who returned to our screens, this felt like I was watching the same show I adored as a child. This, at last, was what I was waiting for all this time. After five years, it feels as though I'm watching the same show everyone else is. This is exactly what RTD thought he was giving us, back when he would write down a list of what he wanted to convey and then drunkenly stick it together in the dark the night before filming. The key difference is that this was funny and adventurous and a little bit sad all at the same time but also made sense. That's exactly what Doctor Who - Hell, fiction in general - is supposed to be. RTD had five years to sum up the show, and - to indulge a rare moment of objectivism - the previous run had twenty-five, but I'm not sure anyone managed a soundbyte explanation of what the show was about than the Eleventh Doctor's choice to recall the Atraxi, followed by his three questions. Hell, you don't even need that. "Basically, run," gets you there. Rationally, I know that the montage of the ten previous Doctors was rampant fan service, but I don't care. In this context at least, "fan" just means "knows what we're dealing with". I read an article yesterday about how Charlie Schulz's Peanuts was perhaps the longest story ever told by one person. Clearly Doctor Who can't compete with that record, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the character has been around in one form or another for forty-seven years, and I can believe it's all the same story again, in a way that was far harder when RTD was in charge, and determined to constantly imply that the show and the BBC and his own ego were almost synonymous.

I could mention how much more I liked Smith than I thought I would (he seems determined to play the Doctor as a demented Michael Palin, and I'm entirely OK with that), how well he interacts with Gillan (which he does, though I feel pretty sorry for Rory; sooner or later we must surely get a companion who hasn't been waiting their whole lives for the Doctor to sweep them away from the horrible fate of settling down with a decent bloke who happens to not have a fucking time machine). I could note how happy I am that Moffat realises it's possible to include four-second explanations of previous events which will tie the episode together without ruining the experience by making people stop to remember that stories are supposed to make some kind of sense (I wonder how many of the Who apologists are online right now complaining about how much time was wasted justifying the story's flow; my guess is zero, because every single one of those people is an unthinking, hypocritical turd). All of that would be entirely valid, but I'm not sure that in my case it's really the issue.

All that really matters right now is that I got my Doctor back.

Oh Noes! Graboids!

Whilst we wait for one resurrected lynchpin of my childhood, why not pass the time with another: Tremors: The Flash Game.

h/t to MGK.

Radio Good Friday: Whiskey In The Jar

Thanks to two trips to the Angel over the last week this song has been in my head pretty much constantly. Fortunately for me, it is incomparably awesome.



Altogether now: WHACK FOR MY DADDY-O!

Everyone have a good Good Friday.

SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men #31: The Ragin' Cajun

People love mysteries. Always have, probably. Ever since the first caveman watched a bolt of lightning immolate an unfortunately-placed mammoth and demanded to know what had just happened, who had done it, and how exactly they proposed to furnish him with a new mammoth, humanity has prided itself in pricking up its collective ears in the presence of Questions to which they do not have Answers.

It is this phenomenon (as I have argued before) that makes horror films so engaging. Strip away the layers of blood and screaming and musical stings and, yes, an awful lot of titty, and what you're generally left with is a good old-fashioned mystery. Sure, a lot of horror films got unglued in the '80s when the Question always seemed to be "Who has drawn up a list of local teenagers in strict order of sexual promiscuity and started doing them in with a common house or garden tool?", and took a further dive more recently when the Answer repeatedly proved to be "A profoundly unconvincing slice of CGI," but the point still stands.

With few exceptions, however, films are required to present and (hopefully) resolve their mysteries over the course of an hour or two. Deeper mysteries - who killed Laura Palmer, where the Hell are Jack, Kate and co., or why should anyone in the 21st century be allowed to imply a baby wizard was saved by the "power of wuv" and expect to get away with it - need to pieced together over a longer time period. Which means TV, or books, or comics.

When Remy LeBeau sashayed into view in 1990, the aura of mystery clung tighter to him than that ridiculous pink armour of his (I promise that's the last time I'll mention it). In many ways he was the harbinger of the entire '90s ethos, which can best be described as replacing characterisation with mysteries, dialogue with quips, dramatic conflict with constant surly disrespect, and superheroic beat-downs with... well, more superheroic beat-downs, in truth, but with an extra dash of "My man is best and he hits all your mens and all your mens is dead" on top. In fairness, this was a process had already begun thanks to Wolverine's enormous popularity (along with other characters to a much lesser extent), but to the best of my knowledge, and certainly within the X-books, Gambit was the first character who was seemingly deliberately assembled wholesale from the traits Wolverine had organically grown into [1]. Only a few years later, this process had progressed to the point where Marvel was apparently prepared to introduce us to characters like Bishop, someone who's entire point was to not actually have a character at all, but just be endlessly, horribly violent and not care in the least. As usual, though, I digress (besides, Bishop is up next in any case).

Even as a fourteen-year old, and even discovering comics four years after LeBeau's debut, I understood what was happening, and I didn't like it. The laziest shake-up of an ongoing franchise imaginable is to stick in a combative, viciously effective fighter with a shadowy past and a problem with authority; the only surprise is that they didn't preempt Voyager and make Remy a top-heavy blond in a skin-tight sparkly jump-suit. It still goes on today, as anyone who watched the various line-up changes of Stargate Atlantis will attest. Any character judged insufficiently interesting can expect to be given the chop at any minute and replaced with someone stronger and silent-ier, or sexier and, well, just sexier, pretty much.

The one thing that I did love about Gambit, though, was the mystery. Like I said, it's mammoths and lightning bolts (which may or may not be the title of my second record with The Desolation of Smaug). Perhaps this is what made me a mathematician; I have a deep-seated compulsion to tear apart things that aren't even real and poke around until I can figure out how they work. Gambit might never have particularly interested me as a character, and even his value to me as an enigma was limited by the constant eruptions of "Ah want you Roguey, but ah'm just too dark an' tortured, chere!" I was forced to endure, but the puzzle was there, and so it neeed to be solved.

It should be noted that whilst everything else about Gambit seemed factory-assembled to appeal to the basest instincts of teenage boys (well, not the absolute basest, probably - though if it did I'm not judging), Gambit's underlying conflict was actually genuinely really interesting. More so than Wolverine's, actually. Wolverine's fundamental question, at least whilst he was being written by Larry Hama (which was the case when Gambit was introduced) was this: how can you know yourself if you don't know your own past? Logan's quest to solve that conundrum, which he attempted both by uncovering and facing the past and proving himself as more than a slavering killer in the present, was the consuming obsession of his life, telepathic red-heads notwithstanding.

Remy's question is more intriguing, I think: how can you redeem yourself if no-one else knows your past?

Something that always bothered me about romances is how often you find you can only make up for the mistakes you make in one relationship in the one that follows. Far too often, you can only make up for all the shitty things you did by finding someone else who doesn't know about all the shitty things you did like the shitty shit you are. In theory, you might have worked out you were being a shit at the time [2], but probably not. Probably, you were too busy being a shit to notice. You've learned your lesson, with any luck; you know not to pull that same crap a second time, and you try desperately to prove that to yourself once you're granted the chance. Which, y'know, is all very well and good, but the whole time you're terrified that somehow your new beau is going to figure out all the hideous things you've done in the past, and the fact you didn't mean to do them, and you're massively determined never to do them again, isn't going to matter at all. You will, quite simply, be fucked.

It's more than possible that I'm uniquely bad at relationships, admittedly, but that's not really the issue here. My point is merely that Gambit is running on the same principle; the only way to redeem himself for what he did is to help the X-Men put the hurt on the local mutant supervillains, and the only way they'll let him do that is if they have no idea what he's done. It's a fascinating Catch-22; either way he can't actually pay for what he's done. Or at least, it's a Catch-22 when viewed through the lens of superhero fiction. In reality, of course, it would hardly be difficult to conclude that what LeBeau needed to do would be turn himself in to the authorities. In our fantasy world of POW and ZZZARK, however, Gambit's dilemma works very well.

It was also a very smart move to pair Remy up with Rogue, at least in theory (as I say, the execution was problematic), and not just because it made the link above between redemption in general and in relationships specifically more strong. I'm not sure that there was any other X-Man at the time with such a checkered past (with the possible exception of Wolverine, and as noted we still didn't really know what exactly his history entailed at that point) as Mystique's adopted daughter. Rogue spens her years before the X-Men running with a group of mutant criminals. Much of her power set, including her powers of flight, strength and invulnerability, is deliberately stolen from a superhero she then attempts to murder. And all of this is common knowledge. By the time Gambit arrives, Rogue has had to earn her place on a team that knew exactly what she had done, and exactly why they should kick her to the curb. Having Remy fall in love with Rogue but be too afraid of losing her to actually follow the same path she's taken was a clever move.

It would be too easy to simply label Gambit as less brave than Rogue, however. Whatever else he is, or perhaps precisely because of what he is, LeBeau is an excellent judge of character. He knows all along that Rogue won't be able to withstand hearing the truth. And he's right. When the Crystal Wave sweeps towards Earth in the wake of the Age of Apocalypse, and the universe seems to be mere seconds away from ending forever, Rogue grabs Gambit and kisses him, figuring it doesn't really matter whether they're still breathing at the point all of reality is frozen in crystal. The Wave is later reversed; the kiss is not, and whatever it is that Rogue glimpses in the mind of her lover forces her to flee the mansion, beginning a cross-country road trip with Iceman that in an paradoxical attempt to both distance herself from and discover Remy's secrets. When he finally catches up with her, in the hollow ruins of a theatre in Seattle, he finally offers to tell her what he did. To finally offer her the chance to know the truth, and decide whether to forgive him or not. It's possibly his finest moment. He's finally prepared to allow someone else to have a say in deciding his fate, which isn't the worst definition of love I've ever heard.

She doesn't accept. What little she has seen is already too much. She runs again, this time with no intention of returning. When at last she does come back, it's in the company of the mutant Joseph, a man believed to be a rejuvenated and amnesiac Magneto. This combination is even more inspired, because Joseph is exactly who Gambit wishes he could be. Not only can he touch Rogue, but - and this is I suspect far more important - rather than carrying around a secret no-one else can know and which weighs him down like the lead in a coffin under the Louisiana bayous, "Joseph's" violent history is already known to everyone, but he gets a free pass because he doesn't remember any of it himself.

In truth, that situation brings its own problems, as we'll discuss when we get to Joseph in a few month's time. For Gambit, though, the comparison is almost unbearable. He already knows, having essentially been told by Rogue, that revealing what he has done would be the end of him. After all, if Rogue, the woman who loved him with the intensity you only ever get to feel the first time, was prepared to leave him knowing only a fraction of the truth, he can't possibly believe that the other X-Men, so many of whom had never entirely accepted him in the first place, would ever allow him to remain. The implication, at least as far as Gambit sees it, is that what Magneto did, killing the crew of a Russian submarine, ripping the adamantium from Wolverine's body in a moment of supreme spite, assisting in the creation of Onslaught, who almost destroyed the world and cost it so many of its mightiest heroes, is somehow easier to forgve than his own crimes. To the rest of us, the flaw in this reasoning is obvious; Magneto's crimes are known, and can thus be quantified, and Joseph, morally speaking, is not to blame for them. For Gambit, though, that's even worse, because it means a mass-murderer has been given the gift of forgetting the truth and then been rewarded for receiving that gift. In a lot of ways, I think Joseph was something of a wasted character, but the strange love triangle formed between him, Gambit and Rogue was absolutely one of my favourite moments of the rather directionless period between Onslaught and Operation: Zero Tolerance.

I realise that up until now I haven't actually mentioned what Gambit's secret actually is. This is entirely deliberate. I've been saving the reveal, because once that's dealt with, I'm honestly not sure what's left to be said about Remy LeBeau. Once we finally learned the full truth of the matter during "The Trial of Gambit" in UXM #350, it was the beginning of the end. To be sure, contra David Lynch - whose repeated insistence that Twin Peaks could have run indefinitely if only the network hadn't demand he reveal Laura Palmer's murderer rather confirms that he was almost entirely unaware of just why the show he'd created worked in the first place - a mystery can only be spun out for so long. But then resolutions bring their own dangers, too. It's almost always the way with these things that the answer is always less satisfying than you were hoping for. Perhaps too often these things are not truly thought out in advance, perhaps it is merely that it is better to journey than to arrive. In this case, though, I think the reason lies in a third option, specifically in Marvel's attempt to provide a satisfactory explanation of Gambit's misdeeds and his years of secrecy which did not render him entirely unsympathetic after some seven-odd years of being a popular hero. I'm not sure if that needle could be threaded, but it most certainly wasn't. Instead, we were told that the black stain on Gambit's soul was that he had once worked for Sinister, under whose orders he had assembled a team of mercenaries, and unknowingly led them to the site at which the Morlocks were massacred.

In fairness, this was hardly out of the blue. Several hints had been dropped along the way. A former relationship with Sinister and Sabretooth, an interest in mourning the dead Morlocks, killed in a massacre before either the X-Men or the reader had ever met him. The problem with the story, however, is that it just didn't feel as though it was disgracing enough to have made all the years of secrecy worth it. He put together a team of mercenaries? We already know he was a thief, with connections to the assassins' guild, as well, which is to say that worse things about him had already been revealed. He was working for Sinister? The man quite literally saved Gambit's life. It's made very clear that Gambit didn't know the reason why the mercenaries were assembled - he must remain sympathetic, after all - but presumably we're supposed to conclude that the shadiness of the characters involved should make him directly morally culpable.

Well, maybe. I wouldn't want him over for tea and biscuits, certainly, and not just because I suspect he would steal all my favourite stuff. Ultimately, though - and as mentioned, I completely understand why they went with this - it felt like all those years of watching a man trying to atone for the deliberate and terrible choices he had made were actually spent following a man trying to make up for a single event he didn't know was going to happen and which wouldn't have been prevented had he walked away from a man he had given his word to serve. Put another way, by lessening Gambit's crime, Marvel lessened Gambit's story.

Which is a double shame, because it was pretty much the last interesting one he had. With the best will in the world, it's difficult to imagine people sitting around twenty years from now discussing how awesome it was when Gambit was revealed as the New Sun, or was almost seduced by his girlfriend's foster mother, or became the latest incarnation of Death with quite possibly the worst redesign in 21st century comics history (see below). I literally cannot think of anything Gambit has done since his return a year or so after his trial saw him abandoned in the Antarctic that feels worthy of comment.

With his past and his crimes revealed, Gambit is really little more than another '90s throwback. Everything he does is supposed to say moody and dark and too-wild-to-be-tamed, but those guys are ten a penny in the Marvel Universe - and fiction in general - these days. Hell, I can't even work up the energy to dislike the guy anymore. He's just there, cluttering up the place. Without the mystery, there's quite simply nothing left; just an assembled jigsaw puzzle, lying on the shelf, useless as it is but not worth the effort of playing with again, because you've already seen the picture.

Next time on SpaceSquid vs. The X-Men, we prepare for various time paradox-induced headaches, take more than one cheap shot at the world's most ludicrous mullet, and discuss what happens when an X-Man really does turn out to be a crazy-evil motherfucker.

[1] Just try reading some of the earlier Wolverine stuff. He was always a bad-tempered rebellious loner, but there is actually a fairly significant distance between how he started and where he ended up. Of course, there are very few comics characters in general for which that isn't true, to a greater or lesser extent.

[2] I must confess to being curious as to what point in that paragraph the various filters used by my readers' office computers judged this post too offensive to be shown. Seriously, I get letters.