Commentary for “Root and Branch” part three

I’m thick into midterms season currently, so my commentaries this week and next will be on the scantier side, which may be a bit of relief to those of you that have been suffering my increasing long windiness.

First off, I just have to say that, while cool, Julien’s ability has me turning up my sardonic nose. I can understand being able to slowly grow a clone, but to spontaneously spurt one out would require him to consume at least his own body mass in materials for the clone. That is, unless he has a special hyper-effective photosynthesis element incorporated into his ability.

As the white text tells us, things are going to get a lot more complicated. I’ll admit that I’m a bit confused as to the meaning of the last line. To add to this, we have our favourite invisible man showing up in the Easter Eggs, which should appease the Claude-as-Evs crowd.

We see our old buddy Noah more prominently in this GN, which was foreshadowed with the shared glance in the last GN. I have to wonder about Noah and his ranking in the company. All throughout the first season he’s a regular joe bag and tagger, butting heads with Parkman and Nathan. From what we can gather about the company in these last few GNs, bag and tag is the first assignments that agents usually get. With Johnson  Sr. as his direct superior, and the assumption that Johnson would be as high up as Gael, then we get the impression that Noah isn’t that much in the know at all. Maybe it’s just seniority or something. He is in charge of the Odessa Primatech Papers afterall.

So Sabine frees up Julien Alpha and now the clones are dying. I’m not quite sure I understand that, as Julien seems to be fine. Perhaps he has to be in a certain state of mind in order for all the clones to function properly. Or perhaps his aggravated thoughts of having experience multiple deaths at once is tormenting his cohorts. All my explanations seem to only explain things temporarily. If the clones are dead dead later on, I’ll be fresh out of ideas.

Now Evs helps out. Either Evs is right there and watching the whole thing unravel, or he/she is just really familiar with the company’s watch guard schedule and action protocol. In the last panel of this page, we can see Donna in a neat skirt and Thompson Jr. in another one of his dragon jackets. I’ll guess that the others are Devin and Gael.

A nice set of panels for the fourth page. Aside from the sickly glow on everyone’s skin, I’ve been very happy with the art for this arc. From this page we see that Julien’s clones are in better shape than he is. That is, they are born fresh and full of energy. Either that, or Julien chose to give his energy over. 

Donna’s got some muscles! I like the ominous effect that the shadows have on the pursuer’s faces. And in case you’re not entirely convinced that it’s Donna, we see a little eagle eye handgun sniping. 

Here’s the confusing part. We don’t know if Sabine is asking her question to the driver or to the Julien clone. The target of her question changes the meaning of the clone’s reply significantly. As well, we don’t know which clone this is. The blood from his head could either be from Julien Alpha’s awakening, which was apparently killing the other clones, or it could be Sabine’s lover clone still recovering from an otherwise fatal headshot (remember that the clones can withstand death). The clone is wearing a green shirt, same as the clone that Sabine killed in the forest in Utah. However, a quick perusal of the other clones in the cells and we see two others with green shirts, meaning that Julien isn’t that creative with his fashion statement. Very confusing and no real leads to answers. The good news is that I get the feeling that we’ll find out who Evs is fairly soon.