WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Beta Ray Bill #2 by Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer and VC’s Joe Sabino, on sale now.
The Marvel Universe has never been shy of strange beings living through even weirder encounters, and nowhere is that more prevalent than in the pages of Beta Ray Bill. The horse-faced Asgardian has been through more barely explainable situations than most heroes could dream of, and somehow he still finds himself caught completely off guard by yet another curveball.
In Beta Ray Bill #2, the alien Asgardian hero comes face to face with his beloved sentient ship Skuttlebutt, who’s taken on a new humanoid form in a storyline that’s straight out of Doctor Who.
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Beta Ray Bill has not had an easy time of things lately. While he has made up with his old friend Thor after the new All-Father destroyed Bill’s own Asgardian hammer Stormbreaker, Bill still hasn’t found a replacement for his dearly held weapon. Without it, Bill is left trapped in his equine form, and as such is unable to have a meaningful relationship with his true love, Lady Sif. To remedy this, Bill has set out across the cosmos in search of Odin, who he hopes can put a new hammer in his hands.
Along the way, Bill picks up none other than the recently self-resurrected Asgardian Skurge before being pointed towards a particularly dangerous corner of the universe – Muspelheim. There Bill can find Twilight, the fabled sword of Surtur, the demon god of fire. As Bill’s ship Skuttlebutt traverses the deadly landscape of Muspelheim after passing through the Stygian Gate, the ship begins to come apart from the inside out. Skuttlebutt’s A.I. isn’t sure what has gone wrong t until Skuttlebutt appears on the bridge in a brand new robotic body.
The concept of a sentient vessel finding itself endowed with a humanoid form is new for Beta Ray Bill, but fans of Doctor Who will be familiar with the idea. In the Neil Gaiman-penned episode, “The Doctor’s Wife,” the titular time-traveling hero and his allies travel to a pocket universe after receiving a message from a fellow Time Lord. There, the consciousness of the Doctor’s TARDIS is transferred into the body of an unwitting woman name Idris. Not long after her arrival, Idris and the Doctor found themselves romantically attracted to one another, which came naturally considering their decades-long history and preexisting deep connection with one another. While Idris’s time came to a relatively abrupt end during the same episode when she died from the strain put on her body by the TARDIS’ matrix inside of her, her consciousness continued living on inside the TARDIS form.
While there’s no telling if Beta Ray Bill and Skuttlebutt are going to become romantically involved in any way, though they certainly have the kind of long-lived friendship that could facilitate one. They’ve been a pair since their mutual debut in 1983’s Thor #337 by Walt Simonson, so there is no doubt that they will get along just fine even if one of them has taken on a shocking transformation.
However, that kind of weirdness is par for the course where Beta Ray Bill and the rest of his crew are concerned, and there are far more pressing concerns for them at the moment than one of their own’s newfound humanoid shape.
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