Zeb Larson reviews Caliban #7…
The final issue of the Caliban crew’s frightening story delivers a devastating conclusion! Fans have called GARTH ENNIS and FACUNDO PERCIO’s Caliban ‘the best horror sci-fi since Alien’ and the tale has lived up to the hype. Down every alien corridor a hybrid of human and extraterrestrial horror waits to slaughter the unsuspecting. Human kind is all too trusting of the dangers hidden in the limitless depths of space. Now their mistake will usher in a new era of fear and misery unlike anything they’ve ever known. No one is safe in dead space.
Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting what I got this issue. A (by Garth Ennis standards) happy ending? Of course, it’s a happy ending tinged with incredible sadness, and it basically ends on an intensely down note, but it wasn’t the dark ending that we were all promised in the promotional materials for this series. This was a good finishing issue, but it ended with a few questions that I wish could have been resolved. I will be discussing the ending here, because otherwise it is impossible to review the comic book and the series as a whole. Read on at your own discretion.
Spoilers
The alien, speaking through Karien, tells Nomi about the discovery of a perfectly embalmed mummy that was destroyed the moment that it was discovered. He deflects her questions about his nature and instead merely says that the former occupants of the ship thought of themselves as shepherds, but were really just sheep. Karien tells her that he plans to take over her body as his current form is at its limit, but before they can move the ship, San returns and impales Karien to the floor. San had injected herself full of the stimulant, as it turns out, and her wounds were less fatal than previously thought. San plans to put the ship’s core into critical mass, and when Nomi objects, San knocks her out and locks her in a sleeper pod. Nomi is left to drive safely in space toward a beacon while San beats Karien to death. She had deliberately given herself an overdose, so that the possessed alien is left in her useless body as the ship explodes.
Honestly, the happy ending felt like a bit of a cop out. I was really pleased with last issue, where it looked like San was dead and a true terror was going to be unleashed on the human race. That certainly would have been a properly horrifying end to the series. Instead, disaster is narrowly averted and one person walks away, a story we’ve all heard before. To be fair, it doesn’t come through any cheap Deus Ex Machina, but instead through San carefully outwitting the alien. Still, this played out by the numbers. You could tell who would survive from the first issue onward.
Furthermore, I wanted to understand just what this alien’s endgame was. In the first three issues, it seemed like it was nothing more than a sadist. His torture of Pierce suggested he wanted to understand the limits of the human body. Was that just so he could modify Karien further, or did he regard his work as something else? What did he want with the original aliens? What did he want with humanity? Where did he come from? Asking for a monologue in which Karien outlines his dastardly plan would be cheap, but the alien didn’t seem entirely averse to talking about itself either. We see how the humans think of the being, but I’d be curious to see exactly how it saw itself.
End Spoilers
So the series didn’t end quite as I had hoped it would. I still enjoyed this series a lot, partly because the alien made Karien so overwhelmingly creepy. Issues #4 and #6 were probably the strongest, when it seemed as though everything was lost. That’s how most horror seems to go. Facundo Percio’s art was great whenever he dealt with Karien and his progressive transformation into something else was both beautiful and horrifying to look at. I wish it could have gone on longer, but it still played out very well. I also have to tip my hat to Garth Ennis for not overly sexualizing San and Nomi and making their relationship into the clichéd, fetishized view of two gay women. Instead, it felt organic and never pornographic.
Zeb Larson
Originally published October 10, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
