Fate of the Scarab
Written By: Keith Giffen
Art By: Scott Kolins, Romulo Fajardo Jr., Josh Reed
Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: March 22, 2017
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
The quest to turn Jaime's alien scarab into a mystical object continues as we previously saw Dr. Fate jump into the mix after the Blue Beetle went and had his damn essence pulled out of him by Mordecai, making the scarab drive on auto-pilot........... or the way it always wanted to go now that Jaime wasn't holding it back. Who knows what's up with the scarab now or what its intentions are........ you know, since we had that big flashback about five issues ago, where it looked like the scarab was a kaiju monster trying to rampage its way through Egypt before the ancient Dr. Fate stopped it. Either way, whatever the scarab is up to, I hope it will be a good time because now it has to go blow to blow with Fate. Let's jump into this issue and check it out.
Explain It!:
Our issue begins with us realizing that the Reyes family is well and protected since Jaime's initial confrontation with Mordecai, but now it's up to Ted Kord to go after the kid after his emotional blow-up last issue because even though Ted has seemed to be in this whole thing only for himself, it looks like he wants to go and do the right thing and try to play the hero again.......... even though we've never really seen him play a hero in this Universe. One piece of information about that though, it seems like Ted may have quit being Blue Beetle because of a bad heart, but all we get out of this is a single line. Heart Shmart though, it's time to go underground and save Jaime from himself and to Ted's surprise when he gets down there, the scarab itself.
Throughout this issue, we see Dr. Fate taking the scarab on as Fate thinks back to their previous encounter in Egypt thousands of years ago and we see that after Fate defeated the kaiju beetle, he was then confronted by a magic wielding Atlantean named "Arion", who now wants the scarab because at some point, the bug promised him that together they could stop Atlantis from falling and being lost to history, but since we know what we know, it looks like Arion didn't get his way. The weird part is, Fate takes Arion on in this flashback and while that's going on the scarab shrinks in size and disappears underground and after Arion's defeat, the Atlantean mage just starts laughing. I know the scarab got away to kaiju again another day, but for how dire Arion seemed to want to save his homeland, laughing this off didn't seem like the way to go.
In the end, Jaime's body is released by the scarab and joins with his essence just in time for Ted to show up and save him, but at first it looks like Dr. Fate will need someone to save him because the scarab grabs the helm of fate and crushes it......... releasing Kent Nelson from whatever spell he was under so Fate could act on its own, but it doesn't seem like Kent will be able to get back to his life because the helmet rematerializes and we end this this issue with Fate sending Jaime and Ted back to Kord Industries and we also find out that the big bad that has been trapped in a prison under the Earth for all this time that has been orchestrating the events of this book is actually Arion and the power of the scarab and Fate fighting has released him from his confinement.
That's it for this issue of Blue Beetle and man it was a doozy!........ I'm not in anyway talking about it being a good story or anything because man it was overly complicated for no reason, the reason it's a doozy is because this single issue really says that the Doctor Fate series from the DCYou is completely out of continuity now and because it really took a long ass time to get us nowhere. We were shown the villain Arion in a flashback in this issue and then come to find out that the big bad villain of this series is........... can you guess? That's right Arion, who is now gigantic from what he originally appeared as and even with all that and the flashback about Fate and the scarab's original encounter, we still have no idea what the scarab is or what its true intentions are.......... Hell, I don't even know how it allowed Jaime to leave it since we previously saw that it was mutating his skeleton and was a part of him. If that wasn't enough, we also have this whole new take on Dr. Fate that I can't really get my head around because it wasn't really explained here either. So yeah, a shit ton of magical fighting that led to Arion escaping and we got to find out that Ted Kord has a heart problem. That's what we got here along with some pretty decent art, which is probably the most enjoyable aspect of this series. I just wish this series would be a little more user friendly since it's going out of its way to rewrite all this continuity that readers have come to know over the years for not only Blue Beetle, but for Dr. Fate as well.
Bits and Pieces:
This issue goes balls to the walls nuts in it's new directions for not only Blue Beetle, but for Dr. Fate as well and while I could get behind that normally with a proper explanation; here, concepts are just thrown at us willy nilly and I don't know if we're expected to understand or not. The art remains the strongest factor to this series because everything else is just random shit and ultimately, it's not very much fun.
4.9/10
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