I just got to Excalibur #42, and I was really surprised by what they did with this one.

I just got to Excalibur #42, and I was really surprised by what they did with this one. They’re in the middle of fighting Gatecrasher and the Technet, who are still trying to capture Rachel Summers, and then Horatio Cringebottom shows up with a technician named Bert. The Technet get frozen in stasis, and suddenly everybody has to stop and deal with these two. Horatio works for Saturnyne’s Ministry for Cross-Time Transport Regulation, Monitor and Control, Sanction Implementation Department, over in Otherworld. That is a hell of a name for a department. Basically, an interdimensional official and his repair guy have shown up because Widget keeps causing problems with travel between realities. What I thought was interesting was how matter-of-fact they were about the whole thing. Excalibur is dealing with an actual fight, and these guys are there to handle Widget like somebody has finally come out to service a piece of equipment. Bert installs a device that keeps Widget anchored to their reality when it detects cross-time activity. So the idea is to stop him from jumping between dimensions while leaving the rest of him alone. Given everything that has happened with Widget, I thought that was a really interesting way to address it. And then there’s Horatio’s reaction to Rachel. He suddenly becomes extremely respectful and calls her Lady Phoenix. Meanwhile, the people he just froze were trying to capture her on Saturnyne’s orders. You can understand why everybody is standing there wondering what the hell is going on. But the part where they reposition the Technet was funny as hell. They know the stasis is about to wear off, so they move the frozen characters around before it does. Then the Technet come out of it and end up attacking each other. I really enjoyed that. They’ve got a few minutes to do something about the people who were just beating them up, and that’s what they decide to do. It was a really interesting issue, and the combination of the Widget situation and that ridiculous bit with the Technet worked well for me. I wanted to mention it while it was fresh in my mind, because I definitely wasn’t expecting the fight to get interrupted by an interdimensional service call.