What’s unnerving is that she’ll never know if he was telling her a truth she’s convinced herself was false or lying to himself because the one thing he and all his minions are good at is hating their powers.

Let’s be fair, here. Alison is so strong she sometimes has trouble telling if something is locked since the resistance is so minimal. Something like simply puffing out her chest could likely send him flying.

She had her arm up in panel seven, while it’s down it panel eight. It looks as though she may have shoved him.

UGH Patrick stop it with the 50 Shades of Supervillain thing

Oh, he crossed a line there.

It looks that way to me, as well.

Ouch, right in the sexual insecurity. And getting thrown across the room looks like it hurts, too, I guess, whatever.

So, when I was a 21-year-old feminist virgin like Allison here, somebody accused me of being “desperate” for a boyfriend. It wasn’t a huge insult in the grand scheme of things and had nothing to do with world-saving career choices, but it was still the most humiliating argument I ever had with that person. It hurt way more than it should have, for a couple of reasons. First, there’s the ingrained sense that a woman should be the pursued, not the pursuer, and that she shouldn’t have an unseemly level of sexual desire. On the other hand, if you’re a young, self-conscious feminist, it feels embarrassingly prudish to be postponing sex for a relationship and pathetic to care so much about finding a man. Patrick seems to be hitting Allison more from the feminist angle. What a gentleman.

I really want to yell through the fourth wall at her that it is okay to want sex and okay to want love and okay to want both at the same time. But Allison is in a really tough spot when it comes to her sex life. Her doctor may think she can have sex safely, but that’s an untested theory right now. She must feel morally obligated to avoid anonymous hookups–the person she gets busy with should know who she is and be willing to accept some physical risks. Since she’s self-identified as straight, her prospects right now are either Patrick or some kind of FWB thing with Hector, whom she’s known since she was 14. Poor woman. No wonder Patrick knew this would make her snap if the murder confessions didn’t–it’s a pretty fundamental human problem.

And now she’s going to psychoanalyze herself over and over, decided that he played her on purpose because hes afraid of huring her, and is going to have it even worse. My god, he’s good.

Did she just pull a Superboy trick there? Upgrading her tactile-telekinesis-based powers to full-on telekinesis?

Someday I’m going to open up a safe making company and call it The Safe Space.

What did she bounce him with? Her hands are at her sides.

Going back and reading through this conversation, he’s very intentionally made it a rollercoaster; up and down, sweet and cruel, love and hate. One theory we haven’t heard yet is that he’s simply experimenting with her emotional range; he’s a scientifically curious telepath, and what’s going on in Alison’s brain throughout this conversation isn’t something he’d just overhear by listening in on people’s everyday thoughts at the supermarket. *Why* he’d be doing that– name any scheme, good or evil, that requires him to understand how Alison’s mind works under more extreme conditions than he’s had occasion to observe so far. Or, simple curiosity plus the arrogant certainty that he knows exactly what to say to make it all better anyway once he’s done and the willingness to get smacked a few times in the pursuit of science.

Here’s another. Throughout this conversation, Patrick talks about the inherent value, or lack thereof, of people and how to determine it. Everyone else’s mind is an open book to him, so he always knows exactly what to say to have people do what he wants them to, perceive what he intends them to, and so on. He can fool anyone he wants to; what does anyone’s opinion, good or bad, mean to him, when he can change it so easily? But that also means that he can’t trust the opinion of anyone except himself regarding himself; whether he’s a good person, whether he’s lovable, whether anyone values *him* without being deceived by means of his powers, knowledge, intelligence, or simply being attracted by his appearance. Can you imagine any way to be lonelier? Throughout this conversation we see him challenge Alison’s judgment of him and try to debunk it and get her to second-guess it, intellectually and emotionally, trying to prove that he’s deceived her too, that she only likes or values him because she believes in abstract fantasies about all people having value, because doesn’t really actually know him, and if she did, she’d hate his guts. But what he truly wants is to break out of the solipsism, to use his own word from a few pages ago, such that someone else is truly real for him; he wants to have her value him such that he can believe it. Just another interpretation.

Incidentally, I can’t imagine what’s in that box, but it must be *some* birthday present, considering he started this conversation with it. I can’t wait.

get whoomph’d!!