Latest / Vigilante Vibes Podcast / Ep. 186. Who is Moira MacTaggert in Marvel Comics?!

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Ep. 186. Who is Moira MacTaggert in Marvel Comics?! · Vigilante Vibes Podcast

• 0:11
  Hello, it is Megan with vigilante vibes and I am here
• 0:14
  with a another character breakdown and I want to talk
• 0:17
  about someone who is it all goes back to her.
• 0:22
  It's the top tier enabler of the X-Men comics.
• 0:27
  Uh, she is always there, always watching and always starting
• 0:31
  something, some kind of drama. So of course, I'm talking about
• 0:35
  Myra Mctaggart. You may remember her from the
• 0:37
  X-Men movies where she was just kind of like just, you know, the
• 0:41
  little love interest of Charles Xavier.
• 0:43
  But she is so much more than that.
• 0:46
  So created by Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Myra first
• 0:51
  appeared in X-Men number 96. So she has been around for that
• 0:54
  long. Myra Ken Ross was born into a
• 0:57
  wealthy Scottish noble family headed by Lord Ken Ross.
• 1:01
  When she was 13, her mutant power triggered, but nothing
• 1:04
  obvious happened. Because her ability was not
• 1:07
  flashy. She could reincarnate.
• 1:10
  Since no one knew she was a mutant, she lived an ordinary
• 1:13
  life. She married a man named Kenneth
• 1:15
  Cowan, had three kids, twins Callum and Dean, and a daughter,
• 1:20
  Abigail, and she grew old. Kenneth died when Myra was 68,
• 1:25
  and she followed at 74 from congestive heart failure, ending
• 1:29
  her first life. Her second life kicked off
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  literally before she was even born, fully conscious in the
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  womb, remembering everything from her first life perfectly.
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  They made her seem like a prodigy, so her parents steered
• 1:46
  her into academics, which she didn't mind because she wanted
• 1:50
  answers about herself. When she was 44, she learned
• 1:54
  about Charles Xavier and realized, OK, I must be a
• 1:58
  mutant. She tried to fly to the US to
• 2:00
  meet him but died in a plane crash before she could.
• 2:03
  I don't. I don't know why.
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  It gets me every time. And her third life, Myra threw
• 2:14
  herself into anthropology and genetics.
• 2:17
  She was at Oxford at the same time as Xavier and looked for
• 2:20
  him, but once she got a read on his ego, she didn't bother
• 2:24
  approaching him. Hating her power, she decided to
• 2:27
  create a cure for the X gene. She actually pulled it off, but
• 2:32
  got the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants on her radar.
• 2:36
  Destiny confronted her, warning Myra never to go down this road
• 2:40
  again and making it clear that she could stop Myra in every
• 2:43
  life. Doubt Destiny, do it now.
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  Destiny also told her that she only had 10 lives total, maybe
• 2:50
  11 depending on her choices. She then ordered Pyro to burn
• 2:55
  Myra alive. Mess around and find out Destiny
• 3:00
  does not make. Destiny does not screw around
• 3:03
  apparently. But Destiny has always had,
• 3:05
  like, I don't know, she's always had this weird ego about her I
• 3:08
  didn't like, but it works well with Mystique.
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  If you don't know, Destiny is Mystique's wife.
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  So in her fourth life, Myra went all in on trying to understand
• 3:18
  the human mutation situation. This time she was more open to
• 3:23
  mutants potential, gave Xavier another chance at Oxford, and
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  they fell in love. They married and founded Xavier
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  Schooled for gifted youngsters together.
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  They stuck together for years until Sentinels eventually
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  killed them both. In her fifth life, Myra decided
• 3:40
  humans only responded to strength.
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  She ran away young, found Xavier about a decade early, told him
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  everything, and basically radicalized him.
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  Instead of building a school, he built a mutant army and created
• 3:54
  a separatist nation called Faraway.
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  Sentinels eventually attacked. Myra was critically hurt and
• 4:02
  fell into a coma, and she died a year later when Faraway was
• 4:05
  wiped out. Her sixth life played out 1000
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  years in the future. Mutants had lost them to the
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  machines and were nearly extinct.
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  Only Myra, Wolverine, and a few others remained, kept in a
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  preserve ran by the Librarian. He revealed that mutants
• 4:25
  misunderstood the true enemy. Humanity had become post humans,
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  fully controlling biology and technology, making mutants
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  obsolete. These post humans planned to
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  upload themselves into the machines and be absorbed by the
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  Phalanx. The next day, Myra realized the
• 4:44
  real threat wasn't mutants or machines, it was humanity's
• 4:47
  self-directed evolution. Wolverine killed Librarian, as
• 4:52
  Wolverine tends to do, and Myra let Wolverine kill her too so
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  she could reincarnate with this knowledge.
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  This led to her seventh life to revolve around stopping
• 5:03
  Sentinels at the source. She haunted down and killed the
• 5:06
  entire Trask bloodline, assuming that without them, Sentinels
• 5:10
  would never exist, but someone else still built them.
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  Myra was eventually killed after discovering a master mold
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  factory. This failure pushed her to even
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  more extreme thinking. In her eighth life, she teamed
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  up with Magneto and helped him conquer America and form the
• 5:30
  House of M But during the War of M, Magneto was defeated by the
• 5:36
  combined forces of human and mutant heroes, and Myra was
• 5:39
  imprisoned and eventually killed.
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  Trying to escape her ninth life was her most desperate.
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  With only a few shots left, she woke Apocalypse and let him kill
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  Xavier and Magneto. She and Apocalypse built their
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  own version of the X-Men and fought in an endless conflict
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  called the Apocalypse War. This war led to the rise of the
• 6:02
  Man Machine Supremacy and Nimrod, the nearly
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  indestructible Next Gen. Sentinel.
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  Myra and Apocalypse tried to destroy Nimrod but were
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  ambushed. Myra was gravely wounded,
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  Apocalypse put her in stasis. 16 years later, the new ex team
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  Apocalypse, War, Rasputin, Cardinal, Famine, Zorn, and N
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  fought to learn the exact origin point of Nimrod.
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  With everyone else dead, War delivered the crucial Intel to
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  Myra and then killed her, letting her restart the timeline
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  with everything she'd learned. After all this, Myra decided she
• 6:44
  needed a new strategy for her 10th life.
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  She found Xavier again at Oxford, let him read her mind,
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  and he saw all nine previous lives.
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  She wanted to unite mutants by bringing together the three
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  major mutant leaders she'd work with in her all her lives,
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  Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse, and shaped them into the people
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  she needed. She was dating Joseph Mctaggart
• 7:09
  at the time, but broke up with him so she could be with
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  Charles. They stayed together for years
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  and eventually got engaged, but Joseph manipulated Charles into
• 7:18
  believing he needed military service to be worthy of Myra.
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  She promised to wait, but after Charles left, Joseph slid right
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  back into her life. Myra sent Charles a breakup
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  letter, gave no real explanation, and returned to
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  Scotland. She married Joseph soon after
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  that. Joseph turned out to be an
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  abusive monster. Myra eventually fled to New
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  York, but Joseph tracked her down, beat her and S aid her if
• 7:48
  you pick up what I'm putting down.
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  Leaving her hospitalized and pregnant.
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  From then on she lived apart from him and kept the existence
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  of their son secret for 20 years.
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  Later, Myra's journals revealed she had re entered a
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  relationship with Joseph on purpose.
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  She and Xavier had planned for both of them to conceive reality
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  warping children, Proteus and Legion, who could one day help
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  mutants conquer death. She broke things off with
• 8:17
  Charles completely because she was afraid that she was breaking
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  him emotionally and ruining her own long term plans.
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  Meanwhile, Myra became one of the world's leading geneticists
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  and even won a Nobel Prize. She founded the Mutant Research
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  Center on Muir Island. She and Xavier reconnected while
• 8:35
  he was studying psychiatry in England, and she became his
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  silent partner in forming the X-Men.
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  When her son Kevin's powers became dangerously destructive,
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  she tried to cure him but failed, leaving her no choice
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  but to imprison him. She also took in Ron Sinclair as
• 8:53
  her ward, raising her as though she were her own biological
• 8:57
  daughter. During the early Xavier school
• 9:01
  years, Myra ran a second, quieter training facility.
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  She gathered troubled young mutants, took them in, and
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  trained them gently. Very different from the X men's
• 9:12
  militant style. When Krakowa captured the
• 9:15
  original X-Men, Charles actually went to Myra's kids first, not
• 9:19
  the second X-Men team. Everyone thought.
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  He mentally compressed their training into what felt like
• 9:25
  months and then sent them to rescue his team.
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  They all died. It's Xavier erased them from
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  everyone's memory, including Myra's, leaving only project
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  tapes and a ruined facility as evidence.
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  And people say like people say Charles Xavier is not a bad guy.
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  He's he's a villain. I don't care what anyone says.
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  Later, when Magneto was de aged into a baby, Xavier left him
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  with Myra. She altered his genetics, hoping
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  to stabilize his powers and sanity.
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  When Magneto was restored to adulthood, Xavier showed him
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  visions of Myra's past lives, convincing him to join their
• 10:08
  secret plan. Myra formally entered X-Men
• 10:12
  history by showing up at the mansion, pretending to be their
• 10:14
  new housekeeper. Soon, the team learned her real
• 10:17
  identity and visited her facility.
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  She fell in love with Banshee, who is Sean Cassidy, and stayed
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  with him for years, but Proteus escaped, possessed and destroyed
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  people, including taking over Joseph Mctaggart's body and
• 10:33
  ultimately fight died fighting the X-Men.
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  Myra later discovered Ron's wolf form abilities and brought her
• 10:41
  to Xavier, helping establish the New Mutants.
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  She worked with multiple men, took in Tom Corsey and Sharon
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  Friedlander after their demon bear ordeal, got to know Gabriel
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  Holler, and treated Gabriel's powerful and unstable son David,
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  who is Legion, who is a very complex character.
• 11:03
  So if you want to know more about Legion, just check out my
• 11:06
  channel. She kept trying to help David
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  reintegrate his personalities even as he periodically attacked
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  her and Ron. After the mutant massacre, Myra
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  took in Morlocks, warpies, and a transformed Polaris.
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  Moore Island was attacked by the Reavers and Myra organized its
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  defense. She later had Legion use Cerebro
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  to locate the X-Men, which allowed the Shadow King to
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  possess him through Legion. The Shadow King also controlled
• 11:36
  Polaris. Who is my favorite female
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  character? My favorite female mutant.
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  I mean, Polaris is amazing and spread corruption across the
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  island. Myra ended up in the de facto
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  leader of a Possessimer Island, presiding over gladiator fights.
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  When Banshee returned with Xavier and the X-Men, the Shadow
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  King forced Myra to shoot Banshee.
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  Forge eventually freed her from the possession.
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  When Magneto learned Myra had tampered with his genetics, he
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  lashed out and left her and Xavier behind, forcing Myra to
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  reconsider how involved she should be in mutant affairs.
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  Myra was also the first human infected with the Legacy virus
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  and worked desperately to cure it, even isolating herself when
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  Mystique and her Brotherhood destroyed Amir Island.
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  Myra had discovered the cure for the new strain of the virus,
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  which targeted humans, but she was fatally wounded.
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  She used the Shire Golem to fake her death, letting it survive
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  long enough to pass the cure to Xavier.
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  This allowed Myra to disappear and quietly begin testing early
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  resurrection ideas with Xavier eventually perfected by the
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  Five. Myra stayed hidden for years,
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  known only to Xavier Magneto. They tasked technopaths like
• 13:01
  Cipher and Sage with creating Sleeping Giant, a surveillance
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  system to detect the technological milestones leading
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  to Nimrod or Mother Mold. They later sent the X-Men to
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  destroy a Mother Mold and delay Nimrod's creation.
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  Eventually, Myra and Xavier and Magneto launched the creation of
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  Cracoa, a mutant nation recognized by the world thanks
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  to the Cracoan miracle drugs. Myra lived in a secret area
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  called Myra's No Space. Before the 1st Quiet Council.
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  She expressed concern over Emma Frost's unfilled seat and
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  Mystiques demand that Destiny be resurrected.
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  Myra was adamantly against Precogs returning because they
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  could expose everything, especially her knowledge that
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  every single lifetime ended in mutant defeat.
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  When Xavier and Magneto failed to prevent Nimrod's birth, they
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  came to Myra for guidance. She told them Mutant Machine
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  Alliance was a dead end and that they needed to make sure Destiny
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  never came back by removing Mystique and deleting Destiny's
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  backups. But Mystique had already
• 14:10
  resurrected Destiny behind their backs.
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  Furious, Myra demanded they kill her, but since Magneto wouldn't,
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  they agreed to bring Emma into their secret.
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  Myra showed Emma all of her memories.
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  Emma pretended to go along and then immediately told Mystique
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  and Destiny everything. Orcas kidnapped Myra, but
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  Destiny and Mystique intercepted her, cut off the arm of her
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  tracker, and dragged her away using Forge's Neutralizer gun.
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  They de powered her so killing her wouldn't reset the timeline.
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  Under torture, Myra admitted she'd given up on mutants and
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  plan to depower the entire species using the cure from her
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  third life. Right before Mystique could kill
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  her, Cypher intervened, forced them to stand down, and gave
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  Myra a Warlock limb before letting her escape.
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  With Mystique and Destiny still intent on hunting her, Myra fled
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  through a Cracoan Gate to Scotland, her homeland,
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  destroyed the gate behind her, and eventually reached New York.
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  Dr. Jane Foster informed her that she had stage 4 lung cancer
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  and as Valkyrie, had to save Myra from another assassination
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  attempt by Mystique. Myra later cut and dyed her
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  hair, went back on the run, and discovered the cancer was caused
• 15:29
  by a Cracoan Floronic agent, meaning Cacoa itself was killing
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  her. Furious, she severed her Warlock
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  arm and murdered Mystique with a bomb.
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  She also learned that a Phalanx infected Wolverine Omega.
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  Wolverine was hunting her, which is not good.
• 15:48
  Myra sought out Arnab Chocolate Art, founder of Epiphany, and
• 15:53
  told him everything about resurrection mutants and her
• 15:56
  reincarnation powers. He believed her and helped her
• 16:00
  create a synthetic backup body containing A mnemonic copy of
• 16:04
  herself. Myra then left to assault
• 16:08
  Krakoa. She trapped and killed Banshee,
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  used his skin to disguise herself, and infiltrated Krakoa.
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  She tried to use the Neutralizer gun to restore her powers, but
• 16:18
  Xavier noticed her mind the moment she entered the gate.
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  He warned her that as a human, Cerebro wouldn't back her up
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  anymore if she died now. All of her lives and memories
• 16:29
  were gone forever. While she hesitated, Forge
• 16:32
  ambushed her, though she still managed to depower him.
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  By this point, Myra fully leaned into hatred and revenge, wanting
• 16:40
  to wipe mutants out entirely. She tried escaping with Destiny
• 16:44
  as a hostage, but Omega Wolverine struck at the last
• 16:48
  moment, fatally stabbing her. Myra shot him with the
• 16:51
  Neutralizer, letting the Techno Organic virus consume him as the
• 16:56
  X-Men scrambled to handle Omega Wolverine's rampage.
• 17:00
  Myra died, cursing Xavier and swearing she'd get revenge.
• 17:04
  But her backup plan triggered. Her synthetic body activated
• 17:08
  crawled out of her grave on her. This is her 11th life now a
• 17:14
  machine coded consciousness, Myra was essentially A precursor
• 17:18
  to the human mutant supremacy she'd seen in her futures.
• 17:22
  Feeling betrayed and desperate to survive, she fully committed
• 17:25
  to eliminating mutants. Orcas brought her in and she
• 17:28
  joined Phelong, Dr. Stasis, Omega, Sentinel, and Nimrod as a
• 17:34
  machine. She learned about their plan to
• 17:36
  turn Mars into a world mind and attract a Dominion.
• 17:43
  Then she caught the attention of an Enigma, a Dominion created by
• 17:47
  Nathaniel Essex. The Beyonders had restricted
• 17:51
  Enigma to the 616 timeline, but absorbing Myra would give him
• 17:55
  access to her previous lives. Enigma explained that Dominion
• 17:59
  existence erases individuality, but he offered Myra a special
• 18:05
  exception. She could remain an independent
• 18:08
  subroutine. Myra agreed as Orcas fell to the
• 18:12
  X men's counterattack. Myra hit and waited for Enigma
• 18:15
  to absorb her. She wasn't supposed to speak to
• 18:18
  Xavier, but she sought him out anyway.
• 18:21
  Charles revealed he had travelled back in time to kill a
• 18:24
  13 year old Myra to prevent all of this, but changed his mind
• 18:29
  and instead implanted A telepathic fail safe in her.
• 18:32
  As Myra and Xavier talked, Enigma fought the Phoenix, which
• 18:37
  was chasing him through time. Xavier begged Myra to trigger
• 18:41
  the fail safe so the Phoenix could follow the signal to her
• 18:44
  and destroy Enigma. Though she desperately wanted to
• 18:48
  escape her cycles of lives and deaths, she agreed.
• 18:52
  Before they could say a real goodbye, the Phoenix burned her
• 18:55
  away and destroyed Enigma through her.
• 18:58
  In the timeline the Phoenix created afterward, Myra was
• 19:01
  reborn again at 13. She waited anxiously for her
• 19:05
  mutant power to manifest, but it never did.
• 19:08
  She was finally free, able to live a normal life.
• 19:11
  Originally, Myra seemed warm and caring, worried for her son,
• 19:16
  devoted to mutants, raising Ron like her own, but that was more
• 19:20
  complicated than it looked. In truth, she began.
• 19:23
  She began life kind, but the countless failures across her
• 19:27
  many lifetimes hardened her. By her third life, she was
• 19:30
  disgusted by mutants and tried creating a cure out of fear and
• 19:35
  selfishness. After Destiny's warning, she
• 19:38
  tried peaceful paths with Xavier in her 4th, 5th, and 6th lives,
• 19:43
  but repeated defeat pushed her toward a harsher methods.
• 19:47
  She murdered the Trask family in her seventh life, embraced
• 19:51
  Magneta's violence in her 8th, and apocalypses in her 9th.
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  Her 10th life, she pretended to be a sympathetic while secretly
• 20:00
  wanting to depower all mutants. In her 11th life as a Cyborg,
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  stripped of empathy, she fully turned on mutant kind, even
• 20:08
  mocking and rejecting Proteus as nothing but an experiment, not
• 20:12
  her son. So that is Myra Mctaggart.
• 20:18
  She is such a weird character she's she's hard to keep up with
• 20:25
  unless you actually know what life she's in when you're
• 20:29
  reading. So that's something to keep in
• 20:31
  mind. But like always, I have some
• 20:35
  comics for you to check out. So I would say the Proteus Saga
• 20:40
  is pretty good. Uncanny X-Men numbers 125 to
• 20:45
  128. Those it's pretty pivotal in her
• 20:50
  life. I think you should check it out.
• 20:54
  Powers of X numbers 1 and #6 inferno #1 through 4 ex deaths
• 21:03
  of Wolverine. That's from 2022.
• 21:08
  I mean, she's all over X-Men comics.
• 21:11
  Like she's there's no shortage of her.
• 21:14
  It's just it's complicated to keep up with.
• 21:18
  But yeah, I know there was a lot of people who were a little
• 21:22
  curious about like why did they? Why are people mad about how
• 21:25
  they did Myra Mctaggart in the movies?
• 21:27
  Or, you know, they see her as just just a love interest and
• 21:31
  it's like she's so much more than that.
• 21:33
  But in all honesty, she is a lot of it feels like she's a lot of
• 21:37
  characters put into one, which it's fine, but she's every
• 21:44
  character, almost every character breakdown I do of the
• 21:48
  mutants of Marvel Universe, she is in them.
• 21:52
  So I feel like it's the best thing to do is to know about
• 21:55
  her. And if you made it to the end of
• 21:56
  this video now you do know about her so I'm glad.
• 22:00
  So with that being said, be sure to like and subscribe so you
• 22:03
  don't miss any more of my character breakdowns.
• 22:05
  Sorry this one was so long editing it is going to suck.
• 22:11
  But with that being said, have a marvelous day.