Gosamyr enters the story through the alien slaver Spyder and the effort to free her family. She needs the New Mutants’ help, but her presence immediately makes the relationships…

Gosamyr enters the story through the alien slaver Spyder and the effort to free her family. She needs the New Mutants’ help, but her presence immediately makes the relationships inside the team more complicated. Her ability to affect emotions is central to that complication. Attraction, jealousy and rivalry become intensified around her. The boys’ reactions and the hostility that develops among the group are therefore part of a situation involving manipulation, rather than a straightforward record of everybody’s normal feelings. In New Mutants #67–70, the attempt to rescue Lila Cheney and Gosamyr’s family takes the team away from Earth. The students face a society where people can be treated as property, while also struggling to cooperate with the person who has asked them for help. Gosamyr’s motives do not fit neatly into a single label. She has been exploited and wants to save people she cares about. She also uses abilities that interfere with the choices and emotions of those trying to assist her. Recognizing what was done to her does not require pretending that her own conduct has no consequences. Her alien nature brings additional danger, and the group learns that her species cannot be understood only from the youthful appearance she presents. That is another reason to keep her separate from the school’s ordinary mutant-student roster. She remains involved with the group as the story moves into Inferno, but her association is temporary. This spotlight is about that specific stretch, not a claim that she becomes a long-term member of the class. Gosamyr widens the book’s world while making a familiar team problem harder: how to help somebody without allowing the desire to help to excuse everything they do to the people around them.