Mind control is a staple of superhero stories, and the MCU’s quota is growing. It’s an opportunity to explore the moral dilemmas of the superpower.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special scores its biggest laughs with its central plot point. Concerned about Peter Quill and a little fuzzy about the cultural significance of Christmas, Drax and Mantis travel to Earth to abduct Kevin Bacon — playing the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s version of himself — and present him as a gift. Naturally, he’s not interested, so Mantis uses her powers to control his mind. That makes him happy to go along with their plans, until they realize he’s only an actor and she removes her control. The proverbial zany mayhem ensues.
Everything turns out all right in the end, as Kevin Bacon spots the good intentions underneath the felonious kidnapping and all is forgiven. But as Mantis graduates from empath to full-blown mind-controller, it’s a reminder of how much that particular superpower has proliferated in the MCU. Indeed, it’s one of comic-dom’s most subtly overpowered abilities, with characters who are able to appropriate any else’s powers simply by taking control of their will. Considering the number of MCU characters who can now practice it, the moral implications are becoming increasingly pertinent.
Mind Control Is a Staple of Both The MCU and Superhero Comics in General
Conceptually, mind control offers a number of easy benefits for comic book stories. It provides a viable dilemma for ostensibly overpowered characters to overcome, as well as setting up battles between heroes who otherwise would have no logical reason to fight. It’s also an easy way to signal a villain’s depravity since a mind controller clearly has no respect for the autonomy of others. It can also be quickly reversed simply by destroying or incapacitating whatever’s causing it. Children’s programming in the 1970s — such as the vaunted SuperFriends cartoon — often used it as a way to express conflict without excessive physical violence.
The MCU hasn’t been shy about delving into it, almost to the point of excess. The most prominent example is Scarlet Witch, whose introduction in Avengers: Age of Ultron entails her getting into the heroes’ heads and shorting out the wiring. She later applies the same techniques to the town of Westview in WandaVision, forced to act as extras in her ongoing sitcom version of reality. But she’s hardly the only one.
Loki uses The Scepter to turn Clint Barton and numerous others into “his personal flying monkeys” in the first Avengers, while Druig has a village of (more or less consensual) minions in Eternals. Carol Danvers begins Captain Marvel as a brainwashed minion of the Kree, and the bulk of the plot concerns her efforts to break free and remember her previous identity. The most terrifying example, Killgrave in the Jessica Jones series, isn’t officially canon as of this writing, but nevertheless points to how pervasive mind controllers have become. Things may only get worse when The X-Men and their bevvy of telepaths enter the equation.
Mantis is Typical of the Complexities of Mind Control
Now comes Mantis, whose empathic abilities have always been potent, but also largely passive. The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special takes them to another level, however, and the way she can impose it on even cosmic-level figures (such as Ego) make them as potent as Wanda’s in many ways. That leaves the franchise littered with characters who have a fearsome ace in the hole against anyone they face, along with a thorny moral dilemma to boot.
To its credit, The MCU has often approached its subjects with more complexity than the comics that inspired them. Most of the figures who wield mind control are ostensibly heroes — even Loki has his good side — and their abilities allow for an exploration of those complexities. With the exception of Killgrave, most of them possess good intentions which their abilities put to the test in interesting ways. Mind control becomes a tempting shortcut to get what they want, and they don’t always grapple with the ethical consequences of doing so until the deed is done. With so many mind controllers popping up in its ranks, the franchise would do well to address those implications in a more forceful manner.
The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is currently streaming on Disney+.
