The Extremists: Part 4

Inali Redpath, a rogue SHIELD agent, has unleashed his newly gained power over the winds to lay waste to the city of Miami, Florida. Captain America has come to stop him, but is undergoing the effects of powerful hallucinogenic drugs that Redpath forced him to drink earlier. Totally tripping balls, he starts seeing the locals as his enemies — the Red Skull, Viper, and the Barons Blood, Zemo, and Von Strucker. When they try to help Cap out of the storm, he violently attacks them. Part of his knows that he is attacking innocent civilians and he promises himself that he will make Redpath pay.

Trying to flee the rocky beach, Captain America sees what appears to be MODOK coming out of the waves to attack him. However, this is an uprooted tree that hits him with enough force to knock him into the crashing waves.

Knocked out, Captain America suddenly has a vision of himself and Bucky hooked up to some strange machines. Steve is screaming Bucky’s name just as he did on the day his partner died in 1945. They are being observed by two government agents who are monitoring the progress of their mental implants. With the implantation process a complete success, the scientists then begin to flood the chambers the two men are being held in so they can be cryogenically frozen.[1]

None of these thoughts make any sense because they go against what he remembers of the final moments before he was put in suspended animation. He and Bucky were trying to disarm a drone plane but it exploded and Bucky died, while Cap fell into the icy waters and went into suspended animation until he was found decades later by the Avengers.[2] While Steve tries to make sense of this all, he is rescued by an Atlantean woman named Hana, who is able to keep him alive under water by breathing air into his lungs that she is able to extract from the water with her gills. She keeps him alive until the storm — and Inali’s murder rampage — is complete. Hana then takes Steve to a ruined hotel to find him a bed to sleep of the drugs in his system.

When he wakes up, he mistakes Hana for his ex-girlfriend, Sharon Carter. He tells her about the strange dreams he has been having that show an alternate version of events that happened on the day he was put in suspended animation. He doesn’t know how he remembers these things and can’t make sense of them because it suggests that Bucky is still alive and that they were both frozen by their own government. However, soon Steve gets his wits about himself and sees that he isn’t talking to Sharon at all. He apologizes for confusing her and Hana formally introduces herself to him. Unable to help himself, Steve kisses Hana then apologizes for being so bold, insisting that it was the drugs that made him do that. They then go outside and Captain America is horrified to see the devastation that was caused by Redpath while he was high out of his mind.

That’s when a military helicopter arrives carrying Nick Fury. The SHIELD Director is instantly suspicious of Hana, finding the story of how she just happened to be there to save Steve from drowning to be mighty convenient.[3] He tells Steve to get aboard as they have a lot to talk about. Steve only complies when Fury gives in and allows Hana to travel with them. When they get aboard the chopper, Cap tries to explain everything that has happened since he was assigned to investigate Redpath. Fury then reveals to Cap that he hasn’t sent him on any missions since Steve shoved him into a brick wall.[4] He then suggests that they start comparing notes to see what’s really going on.

By the time they are reaching SHIELD’s new Sky-Destroyer Fury is all caught up on what’s been happening. First, he tells Cap that the cloning facility that Redpath and Barricade destroyed was not owned by SHIELD.[5] In fact, the agency sent Inali to investigate the facility. A few days later, both Barricade and Samantha Talltrees showed up and while they were both SHIELD agents as well, they were not sent out there by the agency. He also points out that the soldiers that were loyal to Barricade but instantly sided with Redpath after his death. He says that SHIELD captured the ones in the helicopter that Redpath bailed on and no know why and wants to show Steve, as the experience will be very enlightening.

When they land, Steve tries to get Nick to stop being so antagonistic, reminding him that they are on the same side. Fury turns around and tells him that while they are on the same side, they do things differently. He also points out that Steve has been living with blinders up until the recent terrorist attack in New York and has now been going through an identity crisis. Fury criticizes Steve for being Captain America, promising to protect the nation, but spending the last few months fighting gang bangers in Red Hook. Before they head into a briefing room, Dum Dum Dugan tells Cap that Hana isn’t security cleared to enter. When Steve balks at this, Fury finally has had enough and raises his voice.

That gets Captain America to finally follow orders. As they enter the secured room, Fury explains that while Captain America is the perfect soldier, he is one that avoids killing the enemy at all costs. That he loves his country but doesn’t trust his country and now Fury wants to show him what that produces. In the next room are Redpath’s loyal soldiers and they are all clones of Captain America and Bucky![6]

Recurring Characters

Captain America, SHIELD (Nick Fury, Dum Dum Dugan), Hana, Inali Redpath

Continuity Notes

1. These images are hinting at the plot to Ice, the story arc in Captain America (vol. 4) #12-16. In that story arc, Captain America is presented with evidence that suggests that the events told in Avengers #4 are false memories and that Captain America was really frozen by his own government after he protested the planned nuclear bombings of Hiroshima an Nagasaki during World War II. While this is later proven to be a falsehood created by the Red Skull, it doesn’t explain how Captain America could be dreaming about it here. I have posited a theory on how this could be in my index entry for issue #7.

2. Again, this is a reference to Avengers #4. At the time of this story, Captain America believes that the exploding drone killed Bucky. However, it’s later revealed that Bucky survived and was transformed into an assassin called the Winter Soldiers by the Russians. Steve won’t learn the truth until Captain America (vol. 5) #14.

3. It’s later revealed in Captain America (vol. 4) #16 that the Sub-Mariner dispatched Hana to keep an eye on Steve because he was being targeted by the Interrogator, a man in the employ of the Red Skull that will soon be targeting him.

4. Fury is referring to when he confronted Steve at the site of a terrorist attack in Captain America (vol. 4) #1. This suggests that the Nick Fury we’ve been seeing from that moment between that issue and this one was an impostor of some kind. However, according to Avengers, Thor & Captain America: Official Index to the Marvel Universe #13, the real Nick Fury is credited as appearing in those stories. See below for more details.

5. This facility was destroyed in Captain America (vol. 4) #7. In the following issue Steve was led to believe it was owned by SHIELD.

6. This also suggests that the false story that is told in the Ice story arc. However, since the revelations are walked back it raises the question: How were these clones made? See below for more details.

Topical References

• References to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks as happening recently should be considered topical.

Fake Nick Fury?

As stated in point #4 above, when Nick Fury appears here he claims that he hasn’t spoken to Steve since he confronted him at the site of the terrorist attack in issue #1, suggesting that the man who appeared to be Fury seen over the course of these past 10 issues was some kind of impostor.

As I pointed out in my primer for this decade of Captain America, this run of Captain America was rife with delays due to requests for re-writes by Marvel editorial. The way writer John Ney Rieber tells it, what he wanted to do with the Captain America went against what then editor-in-chief Joe Quesada wanted for the character. As a result, Rieber left the book after issue #7. The rest of The Extremists story arc was then heavily re-written by Chuck Austin. Already in this issue, you can see that Austin is walking back some of the things that made it through the editorial process when Rieber was the sole writer, namely the portrayal of Nick Fury who was becoming an untrustworthy character that is more concerned with keeping government secrets and maintaining conspiracies than protecting the American people.

It’s odd that they would walk back that aspect of Fury since he’s always kind of been like that. This was very much where he was in the mid-to-late-90s because everyone was trying to ape the popularity of the X-Files. Ironically, this is the direction that Fury kept on going after this, all be it not quite so nefariously (he was trying to stop the Skrull’s Secret Invasion of Earth). I think this was more a product of attitudes after 9/11 happened. As I mentioned in my primer, there was this over emphasis on patriotism, supporting the troops, and trusting the government that enveloped American culture at the time. To question the government during these early days was seen as an insult to America, the troops and blah blah blah. Hell, the aforementioned X-Files ended up getting cancelled because people weren’t interested in government conspiracies anymore and viewership tanked.

I can’t say if Joe Quasada was one of these people, but what I can believe is that he was probably mindful of backlash from those kind of people. Marvel, sadly, has been playing it safe for decades. The company where Jack Kirby offered to come down and personally beat up Nazis that got upset at Captain America punching out Hitler on the cover of Captain America Comics #1 was suddenly worried about pissing right wing not jobs by having stories that asked important questions about American foreign policy because ‘Remember 9/11” is a sad state of affairs. This cowardice apparently continues to this day when Marvel quietly cancelled Ho Che Anderson’s Luke Cage: City of Fire limited series for fear of backlash because it was coming out around the time of the decision in the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. But I digress.

Anyway, since the Official Index doesn’t make a distinction between Nick Fury and a possible impostor, it raises the question as to how this is supposed to make any sense.

My theory is that Fury has been known to use Life Model Decoys as proxies and there have been instances where an LMD has been misused by bad actors. We will go on to see this in particular during Civil War when Fury goes underground following Secret War and SHIELD continues to use Fury LMDs to make it look like he’s still working for the agency. Captain America would know that Fury LMDs have been used by others in the past and Fury could be using that to his advantage, suggesting that this was a LMD impostor in order to create plausible deniability. In this story, Steve is coming down from some powerful hallucinogenic drugs. You know what psychedelics can do to your mind? Make it open to suggestion. So perhaps Steve accepted this lie because he was coming off drugs and his mind was still vulnerable.

How Do the Cap and Bucky Clones Exist?

The clones here appear to sell the deception that it was the American government that was responsible for Cap being put in suspended animation. However, by the end of Ice it is revealed that that entire story was false and created by Dell Rusk, aka the Red Skull. The Red Skull getting access to Steve Rogers’ DNA isn’t that hard to believe since we’ve seen that the Skull harvested some of it when he created a new body for himself using Cap’s DNA in Captain America #350. I couldn’t tell you where he could have gotten a DNA sample of Bucky, but that doesn’t strike me as something that would have been impossible to obtain.