Talk:City at War, part 6 (IDW)/@comment-995426-20191017110055

From a coldly strategic viewpoint, what Hob just did vastly complicates Bishop's plans. Bishop, being the unhinged sociopath he is, will want to target the countless new mutants in front of him as a threat to his twisted notion of human survival. He's fully capable of doing it without hesitation&mdash;he killed his own father just to deprive Hob of leverage during a confrontation with the Mutanimals, and he also tried to have respected veteran agent Ravenwood killed for being a mutant herself and having too much compassion for mutants. But this new crowd of mutants are all also established humans not living in the shadows, and their mutation happened in public in broad daylight in front of a crowd of even more humans and surely live television cameras who were already there to cover Stockman's victory gathering. Bishop likes to contain and control situations on his terms, but this is now a lot bigger and a lot more public than he can reasonably hope to contain. Bishop could try to exploit the panic and confusion of the situation to start attacking everyone, which is similar to what he did when the Triceratons tried to make peaceful first contact, but that was much easier for him to do because the Triceratons were abrupt alien newcomers and no one else witnessed the EPF making first strike, and the EPF was able to claim enough of a cover story, however shaky it was, to get away with it. But now that there are so many witnesses, any decision Bishop makes will now be in a very uncomfortable limelight of public, legal and political scrutiny which he has thus far been able to avoid. If he tries targets the mutant crowd, he potentially faces immense blowback from the people in power supporting the authorization of the Earth Protection Force, like Senator Robert Lawson, as well as the risk of public opinion and/or the legal system falling on the side of these human-born mutants. Unless Bishop has some plan B up his sleeve to seize absolute power in a coup d'état, Hob just royally screwed him. Yet this also makes Bishop's next decisions all the more volatile and more dangerous. I wouldn't be surprised if the decisive fate of Bishop and the EPF are decided by the end of this story arc.