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Comic fans are a tough bunch to please. If the heroes face old foes, the fans complain that the book is just retreading old stories; if they face new foes, the fans say there's no personal connection. Joss Whedon walked that line very carefully in his second story arc for Astonishing X-Men, where the villain was brand-new, but had still tried to kill the X-Men before.
It was inevitable, as it always seems to be when dealing with highly advanced simulation computers. As soon as you link multiple, powerful computers together and give them the ability to generate "hard light" holographic structures, something awful happens. Danger is all of that awful wrapped up in one package. Evolved from the programming of the Danger Room, Danger has only one goal - kill the X-Men. She knows every one of their strengths and weaknesses, and has a vast library of weapons and countermeasures with which to exploit them. She is tireless, implacable, and will stop at nothing until every X-Man lies dead.
Did that bio just get meta on us? Sure, out here in the real world, we can think of any number of stories where a compute's AI goes rampant, but has that really happened very often "in-story" in the Marvel Universe? Maybe Ultron would count, but are there really any other examples?
Getting a figure of Danger is pretty surprising - sure, Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men is a great bit of storytelling,
but it's still pretty new. Not since X-23 has the turnaround between a character's introduction and its entry in the ML line been so quick - something that's sure to piss off the few fanboy holdouts who still haven't given up the idiotic notion that "Legends" shouldn't decribe anything that wasn't created by Jack and Stan.
Danger has a pretty tough design to translate to action figure form, in that she's basically a hollow, woman-shaped shell around an internal network of wires and fiber optic cables - you know, like Scarlett Johansson. Hubba hubba! Hasbro's answer to that problem is good, but not great. The "surface" parts of the character are solid, while everything that would be "internal" is translucent. It's an intesting idea, but it doesn't quite work out.
Like a lot of Hasbro's Legends, the detail on Danger is just a bit soft. She's a technological marvel in the books, so she really needs crisp lines to convey her mechanical nature. The face is decent - especially the angles under the eyes - but as soon as you get back to the dreadlocks, things start going to pot. And while the sculpt tries to have detail in the "wiry" bits of the body, the translucent plastic just swallows them up.
On top of that, the translucent plastic is so darn dark that almost no light shines through it. It's so dark, in fact, that I pretty much had to press the figure up against the bulb in my desklamp to make sure everything below this figure's neck that looks black is actually some kind of semi-translucent purple. The rest of the figure is light blue, and there's some heavy paint on random dreadlocks.
Seriously, the first time you see this figure, you'll think it was painted wrong. This is really a let-down.
Danger is a good 6¼" tall, thanks to the big wedge heels she designed for herself - and yes, that's straight out of the comics. Surprisingly, her articulation is ToyBiz-style: that means double knees and wlbows, rather than the lackluster balljoints. Her ankles are hinged, but her wrists only swivel. The head has the range of a balljoint, but it sits on top of the neck rather than connecting normally; maybe that's supposed to make her look less human? The shoulders are true balljoints, and the biceps are swivels. She turns at the "waist," which is concealed beneath her robo-corset.
Whether or not this figure has accessories is a decision you'll have to make for yourself.
In Astonishing X-Men #12, Danger grew herself a pair of wings so she could fly over the battlefield, and this figure includes them. spread wide, they give Danger a 14" wingspan, which obviously can't fit on the card, so they're packaged behind her. The wings are hinged, but the pegs that plug into Danger's back are hexagonal, so they can't spin - a fair tradeoff to keep them from drooping. Unlike a lot of plug-in pieces, the wings are easily removed, so if you don't want Danger to be winged at all times, she doesn't have to be. Thus, accessories.
And because one pair of wings isn't enough,
Danger's BAF selection is the Brood Queen's wings. Translucent and yellow, both wings share one mold, though they've each been bent a different direction to make them unique. There are balls on the ends that will surely plug into the Queen's back when you assemble her. Thick veins run the length of the wings, and the membrane between them has a cellular pattern.
Danger is a decent figure, but she's not a must-have. If you like the character, then sure, go ahead and get her, but if you're just looking for a cool standalone action figure, this isn't it. A little more detail in the sculpt and a little more thought in the paint apps would have gone a long way. Danger is a truly unique foe for the X-Men, and this figure doesn't quite live up to that.
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