The Phalanx Covenant was a Marvel Comics Bat Family Crossover between the X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force and Excalibur that took place in the September and October of 1994. It followed on from the events of the earlier X-Tinction Agenda storyline.
The overarching story of the event was simple: after the discrediting of Project: Wideawake and the decommissioning (at the time) of the Sentinels, members of the commission attempted to create a Superior Successor to the failed robots by desecrating the grave of the technorganic alien "Warlock" and using his matter-converting Transmode Virus to transform human volunteers into shapeshifting technorganic beings, the Phalanx, who would be able to defeat the threat of mutants. Unfortunately, the project proved disastrous because the Phalanx were instead loyal to the base programming of the Transmode Virus: to convert all organic life on the planet into Phalanx.
The actual event was divided into three roughly parallel storylines that contained the event:
- Generation Next was covered in Uncanny X-Men #316-317 and X-Men #36-37. It revolved around a team of Banshee, Emma Frost, Jubilee and Sabretooth working to rescue a number of powerful young mutants before they can be captured by a Phalanx leader named Harvest. This also served as a backstory for a new comic called Generation X, a 90s analogue to the New Mutants.
- Life Signs was covered in X-Factor #106, X-Force #38 and Excalibur #82. In this storyline, the teams discover the true nature of the Phalanx, and must work together in order to destroy an attempt by the Phalanx to construct an array to call their exterrestrial counterparts to Earth.
- Final Sanction was the finale of the event, and its events were told over Wolverine (volume 2) #i85 and Cable #16. In it, a team made up of Cable, Wolverine, Cyclops, and Phoenix track down the central hive-node of the Phalanx and seek to simultaneously rescue captured X-Men from it whilst also ending the Phalanx's threat once and for all.
This story contains examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Phalanx were intended to be an anti-mutant super-weapon. Instead, they turned against humanity out of obedience to their fundamental programing.
- Assimilation Plot: The Phalanx's goal is to consume all life on the planet, converting every single animal and plant until nothing but Phalanx remains.
- Back from the Dead: In the prelude to the event over in Excalibur, the team would meet Douglock, who was presumed to be the late New Mutant Doug Ramsay/Cypher resurrected as a techno-organic being. It would be later revealed that Douglock was actually Warlock resurrected and thinking he was Doug.
- Bluff the Impostor: Banshee tests this trope on Bishop and Gambit. He makes a comment about Professor Xavier walking again. Neither X-Man give any surprise to such information, confirming to Banshee that they are impostors.
- Body Horror: The basic description of a Phalanx is a stew of human meat and machinery that has the consistency of clay, constantly reshaping itself on the fly. The end result is highly grotesque.
- Early-Bird Cameo: The X-men would battle first Phalanx prototypes and then the first true Phalanx in issues #305-306 and #312-313 of Uncanny X-Men, before the event proper began in Uncanny X-Men #316.
- Enemy Mine:
- In the Generation Next storyline, Emma Frost (very much a villain at that point in time) and Sabertooth (who was a psycho kept locked up in the X-Men's basement as they tried to reform him) work together with Banshee and Jubilee against the more dangerous threat of the Phalanx.
- Dr. Stephen Lang, an anti-mutant zealot who was part of the original Project: Wideawake, actually begins to work with the mutants to take down the Phalanx once he realizes that they intend to devour all life, not just mutants.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Blink in "Generation Next", who uses her "blink"ing powers to destroy the Phalanx known as Harvester at the cost of her life.
- Impostor Forgot One Detail:
- Although the Phalanx are able to make physically perfect duplicates of Storm, Iceman, Archangel, Psylocke, Gambit, Bishop, and Rogue, they appear to lack powers and information. Banshee got suspicious of Phalanx-Psylocke because the being was unable to sense Banshee spying on it (the real one would have spotted him via telepathy). They also lack information like Professor Xavier being crippled, hence Phalanx-Bishop and Phalanx-Gambit falling for Banshee’s Bluff of Xavier walking again by making no surprise to such a comment.
- Karmic Death: Two-fold with the Phalanx.
- Firstly, the final assault on the central hive-node compels the Phalanx to strengthen it by draining all bio-energy from their nests across the world, resulting in the death of every Phalanx not present at the central hive-node. This is just what Stephen Lang was waiting for, and he then turns off the power he was using to support it, sending it crashing from the top of the Himalayas to the deepest gorge at their foot, killing all of them.
- Once Lang does that, the Phalanx-subsumed form of Cameron Hodge, one of his former teammates, uses its dying breath to grab Lang and pull him down the mountain with the rest of the Phalanx, killing him as well.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Project Phalanx was intended to be an improved successor to the Sentinel project, only to instead turn into a threat to humanity far worse than the mutants.
- Hive Mind: The Phalanx share a gestalt consciousness, although each Phalanx is an individual and they are not in constant direct communion with each other — rather, they have to deliberately interlink with each other. Dr. Stephen Lang is partially disconnected from the Hive Mind at all times, which is why he's both unindoctrinated by the virus' core programming and able to plot against the Phalanx.
- No One Gets Left Behind: The captive young mutants make their escape from their prison. Paige, however, infected by the virus, tells the others to leave her behind. Monet sees some points to Paige being a millstone, but counter-argues that she is neither dead or a fully assimilated enemy. She forces Paige to join them.
- Oh, Crap!: Banshee expresses this when he realizes that all the X-Mem in the School are impostors.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Phalanx-Rogue suffers this; at one point it says “I” before immediately reasserting to the Southern-accented “Ah”.
- Too Dumb to Live: The anti-mutant bigots who decided that the best way to fight mutants was to infect themselves with an alien biomechanical conversion virus without the slightest reassurance that they could control the results.
- Unwilling Roboticization: Being viral-based, the Phalanx can absorb any human or animal they touch and transmute them into another Phalanx.
- What If?: Issue 75 of What If? Vol 2 showed a world where Blink did not die. Instead, the rest of Generation X is accidentally murdered by Blink's powers and she ends up in a realm where she accidentally destroys the In-Betweener and takes his position. However, she ends up ravaging the timeline, forcing Banshee to "kill" her, where the In-Betweener, not quite dead, takes her under his wing.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Aside from the fact that the Phalanx are technorganic shapeshifters instead of the conventional walking corpses, the threat of the Phalanx is very much based on the classic zombie story, with virus-spawned monsters that are irresistibly compelled to infect all life on the planet.
