Zeb Larson reviews Roche Limit #5…
Alex, Sonya, and Bekkah desperately try to get off of Roche Limit and escape the escalating destruction. Learn the secrets of the anomaly in the final issue of the first volume of the critically acclaimed breakout hit!
Well, Roche Limit has come to the end of its first story arc. For anybody hoping for a straightforward happy ending, this is probably going to be a disappointing issue: there’s no getting out of the colony clean. We also have a setup for the next story arc, which looks as though it’s introducing more bad news for humanity’s place in the cosmos. I will be discussing some of the philosophy of this first arc, so read on at your own discretion.
Alex narrowly manages to save Bekkah from the anomaly before helping Sonya crash-land the ship back on the colony. Moscow has begun slaughtering just about everybody he and the mob can find by the time they get back, including the three original CEOs. Gracie and her people try to hold off the angry mobs while Alex has to go into the city to search for Bekkah’s soul. Even as he goes, we know that he isn’t going to be able to go home to a happy ending. And after all of this wrapped up, the anomaly is still there.
If the earlier issues seemed at times like they were verging close to nihilism, this issue tries to pull it back a little bit. Moscow’s bizarre nihilism still appears to be in the service of something else, the “gods” that he references a couple of times in the book. This arc’s ending philosophy is not that the cosmos is completely empty or that all endeavor is pointless. However, the search for something, particularly when it’s tied to greed or pride or self-aggrandizement, is a very dangerous thing. Our worst traits crashing up against the universe’s indifference creates real monsters, monsters that should be familiar to anybody who has studied history.
The solution that Moreci posits is love. Alex is finally redeemed by love and by being connected to somebody else, something Langford never experienced. Can we create anything meaningful? Perhaps if we try to build it for somebody else and not for ourselves. That’s the message of Roche Limit. The colony failed because it was about somebody else’s search for greatness and approval. Langford, while not an inherently bad person, never really stopped and asked why humanity needed to go into the cosmos.
There are still a lot of questions about this series, mostly about the anomaly and what the hell is coming out of it. Moscow talks about gods, but whether we should regard him as a reliable voice is certainly a matter of dispute. Still, we as the reader know that there’s something more at play here.
Spoiler
The comic’s epilogue really ends on a fascinating note. The last spoken words of the series are “and don’t look back.” We then see a scene of Dispater and something coming out of the anomaly, eating one of the leftover souls on Dispater’s surface. Apart from the general horror of the scene, it raises the question whether or not we should look back. Should we look back at the monsters we help to create? Those things are still going to be there. Moreci hints in the last pages that the next volume is going to be more like Aliens or Pitch Black and will be set 75 years in the future. It seems that the awfulness we left behind on Dispater is going to come back to haunt us.
End Spoiler
Honestly, my only complaint with this issue is the absence of back matter detailing the backstory of the universe, a feature which I really started to take for granted in this book. I wish we’d spent more time with Gracie and her people, who never got quite the same level of attention that Alex and Sonya did. No matter. This was a great run, and I’m expecting more from the second volume. We’ll see you in May, Roche Limit.
Zeb Larson
Originally published February 25, 2015. Updated November 14, 2019.
