Destiny makes Freedom Force unsettling before anyone throws a punch. The others are deciding how to handle the next assignment. Irene may already be struggling with what comes a…

Destiny makes Freedom Force unsettling before anyone throws a punch. The others are deciding how to handle the next assignment. Irene may already be struggling with what comes after it, and knowing more doesn't necessarily give her a way out. She continues beside Mystique as the Brotherhood takes its new government role. Precognition gives the team information no ordinary intelligence briefing can provide. It also puts her in the miserable position of having to explain danger to people who haven't seen what she has. Her warnings around Dallas are especially difficult because Rogue is involved. Irene sees death surrounding the X-Men and tries to pull Rogue away from it. This isn't a detached prediction delivered by somebody with no personal stake. She cares about the person she is warning, and that makes the inability to simply change everything much harder to watch. The quiet material before Muir Island is just as effective. Her disturbing dream in #254 has the beauty and terror of something she cannot comfortably explain. Mystique can put her arms around her and promise they will face what comes together, but even that tenderness can't turn uncertainty into safety. Irene's blindness and her extraordinary perception coexist throughout these stories. She needs neither to be treated as helpless nor to be written as somebody who understands absolutely everything. The power gives her an unusual relationship with time, not a guarantee that she can save everyone she loves. Her death in #255 hurts because the book has allowed those ordinary, intimate moments to sit beside the ominous ones. Freedom Force loses its forecaster. Mystique loses Irene. Those are very different losses, and the second one reaches far beyond what any replacement teammate could fix.