Cassandra Nova Is The Perfect MCU Villain

Some fans claim that Cassandra Nova is Xavier’s evil sister, and that’s correct…up to a point.

In the mother of all retcons, New X-Men #121 revealed that Charles Xavier actually had a twin sister whom he shared a womb with. But this twisted sister was bad news from the beginning: she tried to strangle Charles with his own umbilical cord, forcing the unborn Xavier to use a psychic blast on her.

After that, Cassandra Nova emerged from the womb stillborn, and you might think that would be the end of it. However, it is later revealed she is a mummudrai, a name that comes from an old Shia’ar legend (the same space empire Xavier has been palling around with in X-Men ‘97).

At least, that’s the name given to what is basically a parasite from the astral plane (as in, not Xavier’s literal sister). She rebuilt herself from old cellular matter and became Xavier’s evil twin, out to tear down everything he had built up.

With any luck, Deadpool & Wolverine won’t bog us down with Cassandra Nova’s backstory…the point is that she is someone with all the immense telepathic powers of Xavier and absolutely no sense of morality.

In the comics, she is the architect of the destruction of Genosha, combining her telepathic abilities with her ability to rebuild her body in order to copy the DNA of Donald Trask III.

This gave her access to the wild Sentinels used to destroy Genosha, something we saw happen onscreen in X-Men ‘97.

In the comics, Cassandra Nova then body-swapped with Xavier and heads into space to meet with Lilandra.

With Xavier’s telepathic abilities, she drove Lilandra crazy and took control of the Shi’ar space fleet.

She came to Earth with this fleet and tried to destroy the X-Men once and for all. Emma Frost basically saved the day by getting the evil entity to transfer its consciousness into a programmable alien body.

The character gets into some pretty forgettable comic misadventures later involving body swaps, government takeovers, and getting imprisoned billions of years in the past. It probably goes without saying, but the X-Men comics have always been delightfully insane.

The bigger point is that thanks to her wild power set, Cassandra Nova is a perfect foe for both Wolverine and Deadpool.

As we can see from a brief moment in the trailer, she has the ability to take control of these characters and make them do whatever she wants, effortlessly redirecting every strike Wolverine tries to make.

On the most basic level, Cassandra Nova could make our heroes fight to the death, which would at least give a plausible explanation for the frequent comic trope of good guys inexplicably fighting each other before teaming up.

On a larger level, though, this is a villain capable of controlling any mind and taking over any body. Nothing keeps her from launching nukes and destroying the world; in fact, given the desolate wasteland we see in the Deadpool & Wolverine trailer, she might have already done just that.

In other words, she’s more than just a solid villain for Deadpool and Wolverine…she is, in fact, probably the scariest villain in the MCU since Thanos. There is no hero that she can’t control, no government she can’t take over, and no line she is unwilling to cross.

Throw in her ability to heal herself and we’ve got a foe that could take on the entirety of the Avengers without breaking a sweat on her bald head.

That’s bad news for the heroes, of course. But it’s great news for those of us who have been hoping Disney still had the ability to create killer villains for the MCU. As someone who has re-read Grant Morrison’s New X-Men countless times, my fanboy cry matches that of our onscreen heroes: let’s f****ing go.