Who is the Deadpool 3 villain? That’s been the question even before Marvel Studios unsheathedthe Deadpool & Wolverine trailer during Sunday’s Super Bowl, revealing self-professed “Marvel Jesus” Wade Wilson’s (Ryan Reynolds) arrest by the Time Variance Authority: the timeline-monitoring organization seen on Marvel’s time-travel sci-fi series Loki. And while the footage shows friends, foes, and frenemies alike — including a berserker Logan/Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), TVA Agent Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), and the flame-manipulating mutant Pyro (Aaron Stanford) from the X-Men movies — the trailer offers a glimpse of the backside of what appears to be the bald head of Emma Corrin’s Cassandra Nova.
It’s a twist that the fourth wall-breaking, genre-skewering Deadpool would lampoon: in the Marvel comics, Cassandra Nova is the evil twin sister of the mutant telepath Professor Charles Xavier, founder of the X-Men.
Introduced in 2001’s Grant Morrison-penned New X-Men #114, Cassandra possesses similar telekenetic and telepathic powers she uses in her crusade against “the mutant menace.” Cassandra commands an army of evolved mutant-hunting machines, the Sentinels, and murders 16 million Homo Superior in an extermination that devastates the mutant nation Genosha. (Among the victims: Negasonic Teenage Warhead.)
Dr. Hank McCoy, a.k.a. Beast, determines that Cassandra is “the first of a new unforeseen species”: she appears human, but nothing like her exists. Beast discovers a genetic trigger for extinction buried deep in the human genome, an “E-gene” that “turns on when an entire species is about to be turned off by Mother Nature.” Humankind will be extinct in three or four generations, replaced by mutants or something stranger — something like Cassandra Nova. When Wolverine questions why Cassandra looks like Charles, she attacks the X-Men and makes her way to the Cerebra System: a device that amplifies the user’s telepathic abilities, allowing them to connect with the minds of mutants across the globe. The X-Men stop Cassandra before she can use Cerebra to extinguish every mutant mind on the planet.
After Charles’ consciousness is trapped in Cassandra’s comatose body, the telepath Jean Grey uses her psychic powers to discover the truth about Cassandra Nova: “Professor X tried to kill his twin sister while they were both still in the womb.” Charles never told his X-Men about his pseudo-twin because he never knew he had a sister. Jean explains that the Xavier twin was born without a body — using Charles’ cells to survive and mimicking human traits.
In reality, Cassandra is what’s called a “Mummudrai”: a formless being of living emotional energy. The body-snatched “Charles” then plans to take control of Cerebra and the highly-advanced interstellar empire of the Shi’ar, led by Charles’ love, Empress Lilandra, and exterminate mutantkind. The X-Men eventually free Charles from Cassandra’s control of mind and body, imprisoning Cassandra’s mind inside a synthetic brain programmed to learn. She’s since returned as a recurring X-foe, seeking new host bodies as a psychic parasite. That sounds like a job for Deadpool and Wolverine.
Marvel Studios’ Deadpool & Wolverine is in theaters July 26.
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