| SYNOPSIS: Elijah Snow calls a meeting of the Planetary field team, despite the protests of both Jakita Wagner and The Drummer. Snow's cold demeanor silences them. He tells them that his memory, the gaps in which he has been worried about since encountering William Leather in Issue #6, is coming back to him. Telling Jakita he's aware he knew her before she found him in the diner in Issue #1, he queries The Drummer, threateningly, as to what a Planetary guide is. Told it's been published underground annually since 1925, he asks (although it's clear he already knows the answer), "And who writes it?" "You do," responds The Drummer. Conveying his displeasure by shattering his desk, Snow extracts from Jakita that he in fact created the Planetary guide himself. Hinting at recollection of a closer relationship with Jakita, he announces his knowledge of Sherlock Holmes, by whom Snow apparently was trained to be a detective. Striding abruptly from the room, with Jakita and The Drummer in pursuit, Snow leaves the Manhattan offices and enters Central Park, continuing to talk -- of the need to open a file on John Stone, who he suspects played a factor in his restored memories; and of the intriguing fact that the Hark Corporation must have intentionally exposed the shiftship that they "discovered" in Issue #4. And then Snow reveals his key recovered memory: "I'm The Fourth Man." When Snow reprimands Jakita for tracking him down, Jakita laments that they were tired of waiting for his return. The mention of Ambrose Chase (Issue #9) jogs Snow's memory further, and as he struggles to come to grips with Chase's death, Jakita yells "You weren't supposed to remember!" At which point it comes out that The Four's Randall Dowling had threatened to kill Snow's Planetary team unless he submitted to surgically implanted memory blocks several years previously. Jakita and the Drummer attempted to get "the old Elijah" back without dislodging the blocks, but their dissolution has now put them all in deep trouble. "No," says Snow, adding that it is Dowling and company who are in trouble. Freezing a large "4" symbol, the size of Central Park itself, into the Earth, he tells his team, "The game's afoot." In orbit, a satellite bearing the distinctive marking of The Four observes. REVIEW: I can't claim to have accurately predicted The Fourth Man's identity, as some visitors to this page certainly can. But I at least theorized on my 4th Man page that it was Elijah Snow, albeit an alternate reality one. Turns out that the correct answer is in a way the most obvious, with the "I like white suits" line in Issue #9 a solid clue. It's also the right answer, because Snow has been the focal character since Issue #1. Now we get confirmation that he's not just some burnt-out old guy that Planetary dug up to fight the good fight. He created the Planetary guides which have (apparently) chronicled strange world anomalies since 1925; created Planetary itself (again, apparently); and as The Fourth Man, is not just a soldier in the world of mystery archaeologists uncovering the secret history of the 20th century, and not just a soldier in the critical battle against Randall Dowling's awesomely powerful and corrupt Four. He's a commander. Knowing this provides a whole new perspective on what we've seen Planetary do for the past two years of stories. This is Elijah Snow's work.  Naturally, I loved this issue. I was ready for the mystery to end and for things to kick into another gear with this whole Planetary/Four conflict, and this issue did it, from the opening page of an icy (man, every description of this guy comes out sounding like a pun...sorry) Snow to his final defiant message to The Four. And then there's the cover...I first saw the cover sketch online a couple of months before the issue came out. That didn't prepare me for the finished version, which features a mosaic of every page of every issue of the series so far, miniaturized and laid out as a backdrop to Snow's face. Pretty cool.
The early part of this issue has one thinking that Jakita and The Drummer are somehow behind Snow's memory gaps, with sinister intent. I was relieved to see that they were in fact trying to help him, especially because I didn't want to contemplate Snow carrying out his threat on Page 4. I also wanted the team to stick together...losing Ambrose was hard enough; I really didn't want to lose The Drummer too. As an old Agatha Christie fan, I felt like I was reading the last chapter of one of her mysteries, with Snow a slightly more violent Hercule Poirot, slowly approaching the answers using clues and snippets of information from the first eleven issues to get there. And then there's the way the horror of his memory gaps is revealed: We see a spooky, dimly lit Dowling looming over a bedraggled-looking Snow, lashed to an operating table, and hear Dowling's voice as he raises his instruments. "Go and hide. Or I kill your team." And then a cut from those images to the next page, where the Planetary team stands in a bright and beautiful Central Park beswept by Fall leaves. And Snow saying, "No." Like all the best issues of this series, this one raises almost as many questions as it answers. And this is one of the best. | |  Random Thoughts: I've seen some fans on message boards griping that writer Warren Ellis "lied to them," having denied in the past that Snow was The Fourth Man. I guess my comment would be, if I bought a loved one diamond earrings for Christmas, and a few weeks before Christmas she asked me, "Did you get me diamond earrings?", my answer to her would be, "No, sorry." What choice did the man have? If he'd replied, "I can't say," we would have all assumed it was Snow. I was glad to be a bit surprised. Raises as many questions as it answers indeed. Why not simply kill Snow? Why does The Four need him alive? Is it really just because they "bore easily"? Why did Snow submit to memory blocks before...and why is he now not afraid for himself or his team? Why is it now The Four who, according to Snow, are "in trouble deep"? What has changed? Also: "Or I kill your team." Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but why not, "we"? And along those same lines, we've seen Leather's powers and know that Suskind possesses some of her own. So how about Dowling? He was a cold, evil bastard before going into space. What powers did he gain? And while we're on the subject of The Four, it seemed that Leather wanted Snow to remember his past. Did John Stone have something to do with the dissolution of Snow's memory blocks? Snow thinks so, and it certainly seems that way. He gives him a cigarette in Issue #11, right before Snow's memory comes back to him. The fact that he works for Anna Hark also raises questions about both him and her. Dowling, of course, worked for her at one time too. If not still. "Don't you Elijah me, damnit. I used to change your damn diapers." Speculation abounds over this line. Is Snow Jakita's father? Or has he just known her a very long time? I think it's the latter, but even assuming he's not her father, he was clearly very close to the man -- and it's someone we'll find out more about eventually. Will we ever see a Planetary guide? Snow was trained to be a detective by Sherlock Holmes, who we of course know to be a fictional character. Generally fictional characters for us are fictional to comic characters too, but this implies that Holmes is real in the Wildstorm Universe. (The cover of Issue #13 implies that Holmes isn't the only such character who is real in the Planetary world, either.) Could any of this tie into the fictional character who escaped from Planet Fiction in Issue #9? RATING: 10/10. The way a mystery is supposed to end. |
