Maybe you see the spotlight first as it shines down into the cavernous city below, seeking out its prey. But it’s when you look up that your heart races and you break out into a sweat; there they are, those enormous robotic forms flying in the night sky, grotesque parodies of humanity devised to hunt down those that are different. As their chest beams arc toward you, the only question now is: Are you a human, or are you a mutant?
These are the Sentinels, and with the new X-Men series The Gifted hitting FOX, it’s time to take a closer look at how their nightmarish war against mutantkind began!
Debuting in X-Men #14 in November 1965, the Sentinels are the ultimate final solution to the mutant problem, serving as emotionless automaton hunters that are directed to corral and even destroy mutant captives. Since their original appearance, the Sentinels have gone through a constant evolution, both in design and allegiance. As mostly robotic entities, they’re the perfect controllable henchmen for whatever X-foe might be trying to defeat the mutant team and their ilk.
Over the years, they’ve served their creator Bolivar Trask and his son Larry as well as other members of the Trask family, Stephen Lang, Sebastian Shaw of the Hellfire Club, Reverend Stryker, the mummudrai Cassandra Nova, and even… Tony Stark! The Master Mold – a sort of Sentinel-creating hub – often appears as a giant Sentinel on a throne. Then there’s Nimrod, am advanced evolution of the Sentinels from the future that makes him a far more capable, singular threat. Perhaps most creepy of all, the sleeper agents known as Prime Sentinels combine human and technological components into a cyborg form.
Most of the time, the Sentinels are massively built, towering several stories above the average human (or mutant), and therefore capable of performing various extraordinary physical feats purely due to their size and metallic, mechanical bulk. But in addition to their advantages in size, strength and endurance, they also have computer brains that drive their inner workings and enable them to fly with the help of boot jets, project beams of light and energy via a chest-mounted unit, and detect mutant prey based on a wide array of pre-programmed characteristics. There are even Sentinel models that possess Transformer-like ability to modify their structure or rebuild and rise again after an apparent defeat. Still others accrue knowledge and experience and improve their abilities based on that data.
A collective, Borg-like Sentinel power hierarchy has been observed through the leadership of the Master Mold. The future Sentinel known as Nimrod can cloak himself in a human appearance and maintain his consciousness outside his physical form for an indeterminate amount of time; he can also teleport and manipulate metal objects. Prime Sentinels can even affect mutants by suppressing their natural abilities or inject nano-devices that mimic the functionality of the Borg from film-era Star Trek; that is, they can create new Prime Sentinels by assimilating human hosts.
Although the Sentinels were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the classic X-Men #14 (with able assists from additional artists Jay Gavin, Vince Colletta, Wally Wood, and Sam Rosen), most people remember the Sentinels best from arguably their most important and surely most impactful appearance in the X-mythos: the “Days of Future Past” story arc. The Uncanny X-Men #141-142 (January-February 1981) featured the story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, with art by Byrne and Terry Austin; the cover of #142 featured a Sentinel blasting Wolverine with the cheerful blurb: “This Issue: Everybody Dies!” The epic tale of time travel and tragedy followed an adult Kitty Pryde coming back in time to prevent a horrific, Holocaust-like event in the future that leads to massive mutant internment camps. So indelible was this story, it has inspired a number of media adaptations, including X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), a feature film version that switched Pryde for Wolverine and made some other alterations to suit the movie universe.
By the way, that far-flung dystopian future in which the Sentinels rule the world and hunt down the last of the mutants? It was set in 2013! The basic premise has since been retold via television, print, video game, and a number of comic-based sequels that revisited or made use of characters and settings first introduced or implied in the original “Days of Future Past” story. Even other fictional realities have taken a page or two from the X-epic, including the TV show Heroes.
Many folks remember the Sentinels from the 1990s animated television series that ran from 1992-1997 as well as appearances in various X-films (again, many of these derive from adaptations of “Days of Future Past”). They’ve also put in a heck of a lot of time as video game antagonists, usually mixing it up with their mutant foes as normal-sized characters and not as the cold colossi familiar from the comics.
Time will tell how the Sentinels will be portrayed in The Gifted, or if they'll show up in any of the various upcoming X-Men movies like Dark Phoenix, New Mutants, Deadpool 2, or X-Force. But no matter where they show up, one thing is certain: If you’re a mutant, you’re not going to have a good day!
Find Arnold T. Blumberg on Twitter at @DoctoroftheDead.
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