I’ve never been a huge fan of Cable for the same reasons that a lot of people aren’t – Rob Liefield over-design, ridiculously complicated retconned backstory, liberally “borrowing” from the Terminator 1 and 2′s aesthetic and tropes – but I was reading a bunch of articles on Cable that various sites are putitng out b/c of Deadpool 2 and I’d listened to the X-Plain episode on Cable’s intro, and I realized that there was something else that kind of bugs me about Cable.
He’s too many things: he’s both a powerful psychic (hence the glowy eye and whatnot) and he’s a military badass (hence the hardware that outdoes the Punisher for sheer tonnage). And often the comics haven’t really figured how to do both at once – hence the techno-organic virus, which is most often used as an explanation for why Cable doesn’t use his psychic powers, so that the creative team can focus on Cable doing one thing at a time. Which is both a bit of a waste and contributes to the argument that Cable is a juvenile Cartmanesque overstuffed grab-bag rather than a unified concept.
But you know what would be interesting to see: rather than Cable just being a military badass in a universe that’s hardly lacking for them, what if Cable was a psychic who’d been trained to harness his powers for military purposes and nothing else?
After all, 616 psychic mutants are normally trained in more defensive and quasi-spiritual methods that make them the wizards and clerics of their D&D parties: whether it’s Jean Grey or pre-transformation Psylocke or Emma Frost or Charles Xavier, psychics generaly specialize in communications and coordination, protecting their allies via some form of shield, going to the Astral Plane so that they can fight the other psychics while the normies engage in fisticuffs, and they often get hit with various feedback effects or whammies just long enough to keep them away from the combat, once again separating them from the brawlers and bruisers.
But in a future apocalyptic war against Apocalypse, I would imagine that the grizzled leaders of the Resistance would insist on a more applied approach to psychic powers, and thus you’d get a Cable who did things very differently: it’s a complete waste of his abilities for Cable to actually fire a gun by hand no matter how long and hard and thick it is (wouldnt be a post about Cable without some Freudian subtext) when he could use his telekenesis to remotely control entire platoons’ worth of firepower. Likewise, Cable’s ability to telepathically surveil and then disrupt enemy command hierarchies is far more useful militarily than punching people with his metal arms.
So I guess what I’m interested in is a Cable who’s less 80s Arnie and more late-career Liam Neeson, Tom Hardy Mad Max, or Keanu as John Wick.
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