It’s a stormy night with waves crashing against a rocky coast. Lightning strikes the lighthouse, causing a mysterious purple light to come from a nearby cave. Those are the first images of the issue.
Dr. Reed Richards is obsessing over calculations for his project at the New York Institute of Technology. During a meeting with the university committee, Reed is officially stripped of his tenure and fired for gross negligence and bad behavior.
Why? We can see why. He is so obsessed with his calculations, he tried to make the committee wait on him. The committee was trying to tell him why he was being fired when a bird flew into the window, dying instantly. The committee proceeds in telling him he has been grossly negligent with his teaching duties and they no longer believe he is capable of “doing great things”. They tell him his research and equipment belong to the university. He is to leave the keys to his office and lab.
Outside of the office building, Reed sees the dead bird on the sidewalk. He picked it up, thinking of giving it a proper burial or putting the body under a tree when he saw tentacle-like growths come from the body. Terrified, Reed drops it and runs.
Later that night, Reed breaks into his lab by smashing a window. His grad student, research assistant Victor von Doom, is waiting. Reed warns him about jeopardizing his potential career being there. Remember, Reed is not supposed to be there. Victor begs Reed to stop taking purple pills, which makes Reed’s eyes turn purple.
Reed brushes him off because he is obsessed with his research, claiming he finally cracked the formula to fix his past mistakes. There is a large inter-dimensional gate in the lab. Reed told Victor, if he is going to be there, he can power up the gate.
Because Reed is focused on calculations, he did not realize Victor was still working with the gate when he hit the activation button. A blinding blue electrical surge rips through the lab, lifting Victor into the air and consuming him in an explosion that shakes the whole city skyline.
Reed Meets Sue and Grimm
Two weeks later, a battered Reed is sitting in a jail cell covered in bandages. He’s still obsessing over mathematical formulas, scribbling them on the walls. That’s when Sue Storm and her security advisor Ben Grimm show up. Sue tells Reed that her legal team is taking over. The university dropped the charges because she bought them a new science building.
Reed refuses because he feels guilty. Sue pulls out his bottle of purple pills to tempt him. Desperate, Reed lunges through the bars like a maniac, gets zapped by the security on the bars, and crashes to the floor while Sue coolly remarks that it went better than expected.
Reed being zapped reminded him of Victor. We see a flashback of the lab explosion. Reed is grieving over Victor, whose body mutated into a monstrous, grotesque shape. He tells Victor he’s sorry but he has to ask, “Did you see anything?” Victor responds: hell.
Back in the present, Grimm carries Reed away onto a plane. Johnny Storm is piloting the transport aircraft while Sue and Ben prep a sedated Reed for a medical flush.
The plane taking off causes an electrical type charge that coincides with a castle being hit with lightning in Latveria. Inside a high voltage lab, a hooded figure who looks like Cynthia von Doom shocks and revives Victor’s severely scarred and mutated body. As Victor screams in agony with glowing purple eyes, Cynthia wants to know what Reed and Victor were experimenting on.
Storm Systems HQ and the Negative Zone
Back in the states outside San Francisco, Sue’s ship lands at Storm Systems HQ, a high tech compound secluded by trees. We learn that Johnny was involved in a crash previously, causing him to have prosthetic feet.
While an unconscious Reed receives the fluids to flush the drugs out of his system, one of his eyes oozes black fluid. Reed sees the cave with the purple glow mentioned earlier along with the Oath of the Lightkeepers.
Ben subjects Reed to a brutal ice water bath to check if he is hallucinating. Once Reed is coughing and sputtering, Sue tells Ben to get him cleaned up and fed.
Reed ends up eating breakfast with a robotic assistant named H.E.R.B.I.E.. But right in the middle of talking to Sue, Reed has another hallucination. He bites into an apple, writhing, tentacles pop out of it, causing Reed to start spitting it out. To Reed, the tentacles have attached to his face.
Shaken up, Reed goes for a walk with Sue and questions her motives. Sue shows him footage of a rocket launch site. The Trinity site in New Mexico, the exact spot of the first nuclear explosion from the Manhattan Project. She hands him his notebook, shocking Reed because he thought it was destroyed in the lab blast.
Sue points out that her drones captured high speed footage of her own rocket exploding at forty thousand feet. That is the same altitude where the Trinity nuclear mushroom cloud hit its peak. When they pull up the drone recordings from milliseconds after the blast, a massive tentacled monster appears.
Reed realizes the nuclear blast created a tear in the boundaries of reality. Sue tells him that he is not the only one who knows about the Negative Zone.
She brought him here because she wants him to open the gate to it.
Unanswered Questions
- What pills are Reed taking? Do they take Reed to the Negative Zone?
- How did Sue get her immense wealth?
- Is Victor in the Negative Zone? Because Reed can see beyond the gate, is that why Victor was able to respond and say hell? There wasn’t a thought bubble, it was a speech box.
- Is Victor mistaking hell for the Negative Zone?
- The hooded figure seems to be Cynthia von Doom, Victor’s mother. Does she know about the Negative Zone?
- Where was Cynthia bringing Victor from? Hell or the Negative Zone? “I had to bring you back my son”. Victor’s eyes were purple.
- Considering Cynthia went to hell in the main universe, is this the “switch” in this universe? Cynthia is the villain?
- If Victor is in hell, what evil things did he do for him to be sent there?
- Will Victor want revenge?
