Profile: Moira MacTaggart

Moira MacTaggart
First appearance: Uncanny X-Men #96, December 1975. A scientist of Scottish heritage, she’d been a close associate and at one time a paramour of Prof. Xavier’s for many years.

Current status: dead

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: Mystique, assisted by Sabretooth, infiltrated her laboratory on Muir Island in X-Men #108 (sans-adjective series), 2000, where the villainess had the idea of forcing Moira to use her research talents to turn the legacy virus into something that would only affect non-mutant humans. Having no success, they destroyed Muir Island’s research center and gave Moira a lethal injury. Moira died while the X-Men were trying to fly her to a hospital and was later buried in her native Scotland.

What’s wrong with how this was done? Is it just me, or is the list of death victims among the X-Men’s cast higher than I previously thought? But Moira’s death was definitely another one totally uncalled for, as I think she made as much of a backbone for the series’ cast as Xavier did, even if her role was smaller.

To make matters worse, when House of M came out, dredging with it its whole alternate-reality theme that we’ve seen done much better in anthologies like What If, they had the sheer chutzpah to spit upon her corpse even more by declaring her a criminal because she’d wanted to cure her son Kevin of the mutant gene, and his psychosis. It even seemed to tie in with Exiles in an extension of the alternate reality thing. If she’d had a decent burial in X-Men #108, they certainly insulted it in House of M. Put another way, they desecrated her tomb.