Marvel has changed a lot over the decades. Once, years ago, the “adults in the room” of the superhero universe, like Iron Man, Reed Richards, Black Bolt, Namor, Doctor Strange, and Professor X were trusted voices that everyone respected. That got boring to creators and editors, so the House of Ideas decided to flip the script. They showed these leaders as good people making tough decisions and getting it wrong, leading to them losing respect. However, the one affected the worse has been Professor X. For over 20 years now, Xavier has been shown to be progressively worse in the steps he’d take to save mutantkind. Many fans hope for better from the character, but Marvel keeps showing that for Xavier, there’s no ground floor in Hell.
Dungeons of Doom is dealing with the fallout of the death of Doctor Doom after One World Under Doom, with the world rushing to Latveria to pick the bones clean. Doom had spent years creating a menagerie of secrets, and this first issue of the book sees readers learn a shocking secret that Xavier kept with Doom. It was revealed that there was “a mutant who shouldn’t have been born”, and the professor sent them to Latveria for safe-keeping. This is a shocking violation of everything that Professor X claimed to stand for, but after all of these years, most X-Men fans aren’t all that shocked. Xavier has been doing stuff like this for the last several decades.
Xavier and Dark Secrets Go Together Too Well
It all started 22 years ago in the Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) story arc “Dangerous”. Issues #7-12 revealed that the Danger Room had become sentient at some point in the past and Xavier basically enslaved it, reasoning that mutants needed to be trained more than the computer needed to be free. He’d eventually be revealed as a member of the Illuminati in 2005, and it would go on from there, including the reveal that he mind-wiped an entire team of X-Men from the minds of Cyclops and Moira MacTaggert. This was the beginning of a huge change to the character, one that would define him from then until now.
Xavier was always about doing everything that he could to make sure that mutants survived. This was the reason he founded the school and started training the X-Men; he wanted to create a way for his people to prosper and grow. He wasn’t only an idealist, he was also rather pragmatic, and this picture of him grew and grew as we learned just how far he was willing to go. The Krakoa Era changed the X-Men, and it changed the way we looked at Xavier as well. He was fine with keeping secrets, working with anyone that he believed could help him. He kept his students and allies in the dark, and did what was “necessary”. Knowing all of this, it makes him teaming with Doom make sense.
“A mutant who never should have born” could be a lot of things. In the past, we saw mutants like Proteus and Legion, powerful mutants who could wreck the world, hidden. Xavier personally did his best to keep Legion out of the limelight, and the neglect turned his son against him. Xavier has never had a problem hiding a mutant from the world to protect others, but sending them to Doom is another story. Usually, the professor would have an ally look after a dangerous mutant, or at least gotten in touch with the Illuminati to work something out. These mutants were always taken care of, and weren’t just left in the dungeon of the world’s greatest villain.
There are plenty of mutants whose powers have made them dangers to the world, but before, Xavier at least tried to help them when he found out about them. We have no idea what this mutant’s powers were and how potentially dangerous they are, but there’s one thing that we do know: Xavier sending them to Doom is against everything that he’s always stood for. Even taking into accounts time like the Krakoa Era, Xavier has worked, ostensibly, to help mutants. There’s no way that sending someone to a dungeon in Latveria was helping them; it would only make them worse or a future weapon for Victor Von Doom. Xavier threw away any hope of the ethical high ground in this situation, reaching a new low.
Xavier Has Betrayed Everything that He Once Stood For
Professor X has been getting more villainous for years, to the extent that readers are used to this kind of thing. However, Dungeons of Doom takes it to another level. There’s a difference between sending the mutant to a fellow super-scientist and sending him to Doctor Doom. Xavier was almost certainly afraid of what this mutant’s very existence would mean to the world, but that doesn’t mean what he did was right. Before, his actions have been immoral, but they were meant to help mutants. You could understand the reasoning; it was wrong, but it made sense to an extent.
This action makes no sense at all. The monarch of Latveria would use whatever he learned to make himself more powerful; he almost certainly didn’t keep the mutant in the nice parts of the palace, meaning that they won’t be happy about their fate. If their powers are that dangerous, Xavier’s action weren’t just wholly immoral and against everything he stood for, but also made a dangerous situation even worse. It’s the antithesis of everything the X-Men stand for.
Dungeons of Doom #1 is on sale now.
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