MIND ERASER
Classification: Extraterrestrial (Kree) technology
Creator: Unspecified Kree scientists/technicians
User/Possessors: Captain Mar-Vell
Subject: Jeremy Logan
Aliases: The M.E. (see comments)
First Appearance: Captain Marvel I#5 (September, 1968)
Powers/Abilities/Functions: The Mind Eraser is a Kree device capable of selectively erasing memories from the brains of those upon whom it is used. It has been shown to be effective on humans and is presumably also effective on Kree.
The Mind Eraser can be programmed to erase all memories created within a specific time period. Once activated, it can wipe out several days of memory in only a few seconds. The procedure is painless and physically non-invasive, but subjects are left with a disturbing feeling that they have lost a part of their pasts.
The Mind Eraser (or maybe just its active component) appears to be a thin disk about 2 inches in width. It apparently has to be placed on the head of the intended subject at a location adjacent to the correct quadrant of their brain to function properly.
Since no upper limit on the amount of memories that could be erased from any individual was specified, it's possible that the device could be used to erase a person's entire memory, effectively erasing their mind. However, it hasn't been revealed if the Kree Empire ever used it for that purpose (but they probably did).
Limitations: In order for the Mind Eraser to be effective, the operator must know the precise cerebral quadrant of the subject's brain where their memories are stored. This quadrant apparently varies depending on the species of the subject, with that of a human from Earth being different than that of a Kree.
The Mind Eraser presumably would not be effective against non-corporeal beings whose memories were not stored within a physical, organic brain.
It has not been revealed if the Mind Eraser could be used to erase memories stored electronically within computers.
History: The Mind Eraser is a device developed by unspecified Kree scientists which has proven useful on covert military operations on alien worlds.
(Captain Marvel I#5) - After a recent mission had ended in failure, Captain Mar-Vell was accused by Colonel Yon-Rogg of the ultimate crime of being "un-Kree" and was subjected to an interstellar trial over which Ronan the Accuser remotely served as both judge and jury. At the trial's conclusion, Ronan declared that, although much of what he had been shown of Mar-Vell had given him cause for anger and concern, he was also aware of Mar-Vell's record of loyalty and resolve. Ronan then announced that he had decided to not decide Mar-Vell's fate, but instead to let his future actions be his judge, and he told Mar-Vell to go forth and prove that he was not a traitor born. Mar-Vell thanked "great Ronan" for his wisdom and mercy, and then brought up the matter of the hospitalized Earthman (Jeremy Logan) who might well know that Mar-Vell was an alien walking his planet. Ronan stated that the Earthman must die before he could recover from his coma and betray Mar-Vell's true nature but, when he asked if the captain agreed, Mar-Vell replied that his death might draw the very attention they were trying to avoid and suggested that they should instead employ the mind eraser. Ronan agreed with Mar-Vell's thinking and caused the device he had requested to materialize aboard the starship. Ronan then ordered Mar-Vell to use it to wipe the Earthman's memory clean of all suspicions or, if that failed, he was to kill the human.
Mar-Vell then flew down to Earth, resumed his "Walter Lawson" identity and went to the Cape where he had a brief interaction with a suspicious Carol Danvers. After leaving the base, he hailed a cab and asked the driver (Chester) where the local hospital was. After being told that it was the county hospital in Hayes City, "Lawson" was driven there by the cabbie, with neither of them becoming aware of the fact that the Metazoid, who had been ordered by his Soviet Communist masters to kidnap Lawson, was now riding on top of the taxi.
After arriving at the county's general hospital, "Lawson" entered the building, watched from afar by the Metazoid, who had been ordered to avoid capturing Lawson in front of witnesses and was waiting for him to be alone before he struck. Within the hospital, Mar-Vell was careful to locate Jeremy Logan's room without being detected (so that he could not be accused of inducing the old man's imminent amnesia). Once in the hospital room and alone with Logan, Mar-Vell attached the memory eraser to the human's head and, after a brief delay as he located the precise cerebral quadrant of an Earth brain that had to be targeted, he activated the mind eraser. At that moment, the Metazoid broke through a wall, declared that he had come for Walter Lawson and begged him not to resist. Since he couldn't afford to attract any attention, "Lawson" dove out the the window so that, once out of sight, he could change into "Captain Marvel." When the Metazoid then began smashing through the hospital in search of Lawson, Captain Marvel arrived and began fighting the powerful creature. Worried that the battle would attract unwanted attention that would endanger his mission, Marvel shifted the battle away from the hospital but was soon almost killed by the Metazoid, surviving only because the creature did not want to become a murderer. Realizing that, if the mind eraser were to be discovered, it would be recognized as being from another world, Marvel used the radiation from an X-Ray machine against the Metazoid, intending only to stop his foe but inadvertently killing him instead.
With the battle now over, Captain Marvel quickly flew back to Jeremy Logan's room where, upon discovering that Logan's memory of him was now gone, he detached the mind eraser seconds before two doctors entered the room. When they demanded that he stop because the police were searching for him, Mar-Vell claimed that he was merely checking the patient's Blue Cross coverage, told them to give his apologies to the police because Captain Marvel had no time to waste, and then flew out the window. As the doctors checked the patient and saw that he was beginning to awaken from his coma, Mar-Vell continued flying away, pleased that the hotel clerk would recall none of his suspicions of "Walter Lawson."
(Captain Marvel I#7 - BTS) - A few days after being released from the hospital, Jeremy Logan was on duty at the hotel when "Mr. Lawson" returned, greeted him and told him that he was looking better every day. Logan replied that he couldn't look that much better because he had only been out of the hospital since Tuesday. Logan then mentioned that one thing that was still bothering him was a kind of memory lapse that was causing him to be unable to recall what happened for about six hours before he landed in the hospital. As Logan said that he guessed it would come back in time, Mar-Vell thought to himself that it wouldn't because he had stolen that piece of memory from Logan to prevent him from recalling that "Lawson" was an alien.
Comments: Created by Arnold Drake, Don Heck and John Tartaglione.
At first glance, calling this device the "mind eraser" seems to be a bit of a misnomer since it apparently only erases memories. However, as mentioned above, there is no indication that it could only erase SOME of a person's memories. Therefore, if the device could be used to erase ALL of a subject's memories, leaving them a blank slate, then that would mean that their mind would have effectively been erased. A total erasure of a subject's personal memories (commonly called a mindwipe in fiction) would effectively "kill" that subject's personality and that would be like killing the person even though the body remained alive. Of course, that's assuming that such a total erasure did not negatively affect the part of the subject's brain that controls their body's autonomic functions.
On a related note, the fact that one panel showed Mar-Vell thinking, "Now to activate the M.E.--!" bugs me a bit. Yes, I know that, as a Kree, Mar-Vell was (probably) thinking in his native language and those thoughts were just translated into English for the benefit of we readers, but it was still odd to see that acronym (or that initialism?) show up in his thoughts. Maybe the training of Kree spies who were assigned to infiltrate alien planets includes some form of mental programming meant to ensure that they wouldn't be able to accidentally expose their true nature by using their native language even if caught by surprise. Then again, maybe the edu-tapes used by the Kree to teach themselves about, well, any subject just happen to give their users the ability to speak and think in alien languages so completely that it was like they were native speakers.
The Mind Eraser only appears in two panels of Captain Marvel I#5. The first image, the one used as this profile's main image, shows the device just after Ronan had caused it to materialize aboard Yon-Rogg's starship, in the rectangular platform of the transferral machine. The second image shows Captain Marvel removing the mind eraser from the side of Jeremy Logan's head. Unfortunately, the mind eraser doesn't seem to have been depicted consistently in those two panels. In the first image, the device appears to be an oval plate with a circle in its middle, and the oval is on top of a rectangular shape that is perpendicular to the oval's longer axis. In contrast, the device in the second image is clearly a round disk. Unless the machine was capable of shape-shifting, the only explanation that occurred to me that might explain this discrepancy is that the disk was actually the circle seen in the first image. It's possible that the disk was just a component of the larger machine, one whose smaller size made it more mobile and thus easier to use covertly. Maybe the disk was a remote sensor that scanned the target brain and transmitted its data back to the main machine which processed that data to determine the precise areas that would have to be targeted to achieve the desired effect and transmitted that information back to the disk which then did whatever it did to erase the explicit memories from those areas. Or maybe the disk was the entire machine and the larger oval was just some sort of charging stand?
After receiving the Mind Eraser aboard the Kree starship, one would presume that Mar-Vell took it with him when he then flew back down to Earth. However, an image from that trip shows him flying through space with both hands open and empty. Since he wasn't shown carrying any containers and his uniform doesn't seem to have any pockets, how was the Mind Eraser transported to Earth? The fact that he also wasn't shown picking the device up or carrying it within the starship suggests a possible explanation. Given that the Mind Eraser appears to have not been standard equipment, maybe it was considered to be too valuable to simply be carried through space, and so the Transferral Machine was later used again (between panels) to transport the device down to Mar-Vell once he had safely returned to Earth's surface? This is only speculation but, in the absence of any in-story explanation, it's a reasonable theory.
Captain Marvel I#5 was the third (and perhaps last) time that the Transferral Machine aboard Yon-Rogg's starship was seen. This device, which seemed to function like a miniature Star Trek transporter, was first seen in Marvel Super-Heroes II#12 when Medic Una, on Yon-Rogg's orders, used it to "transfer" a Wrist Monitor from the starship directly onto the wrist of the temporarily-paralyzed Mar-Vell in his hotel room on Earth. Its second appearance was in Marvel Super-Heroes II#13, when Una, after using Morpheo-Gas to put the rest of the crew to sleep, used the "Transferral Machine" to instantly beam a capsule of the breathing potion to Mar-Vell, wherever he was at that moment. However, this third appearance is different because it was the first time that something was seen materializing on the machine (instead of disappearing from it) as well as the first time that the object in question was being transferred from across an interstellar (or intergalactic) distance.
The fact that the Transferral Machine's size restricted it to only transferring small objects was also odd. Captain Marvel I#7 would soon establish that the Kree had the capability to teleport people across interstellar distances by using their science of "bionics" to transmute each living cell into naked energy that was then transmitted by "Beta-Ray" at a velocity of 5-SL ("five times the speed of light") across space until the bolts of energy were caught by a "bionic-receiver" aboard the starship in near-Earth orbit. And, yes, writer Arnold Drake did appear to think that "energy" that was somehow traveling at five times the speed of light could cross an interstellar distance in a brief time. The only way that could happen would be if the place where Mar-Vell was interrogated in the Truth Chair was located REALLY close to Earth, somewhere that was definitely within Earth's solar system. This is clearly an example of what the TV Tropes website calls "Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale."
Also, if the Kree could teleport people across interstellar distances, why did the starship initially have to get close enough to Earth that Mar-Vell could use his air-jet belt to disembark? Did the Beta-Ray teleportation process only work if there was a bionic-receiver at the destination? If so, then how was the Transferral Machine able to transfer objects to locations that didn't have any sort of receivers in place? Was it because they were two different forms of teleportation that operated on fundamentally different principles?
In 2019, just over fifty years after Mar-Vell last posed as Lawson, the real Walter S. Lawson turned up, alive and well and seeking vengeance against the Kree, in Marvel Team-Up IV#4-6.
Profile by Donald Campbell.
CLARIFICATIONS:
The Mind Eraser has no known connections to:
images: (without ads)
Captain Marvel I#5, page 5, panel 3 (main image)
page 19, panel 4 (being detached from Jeremy Logan's head)
Appearances:
Captain Marvel I#5 (September, 1968) - Affable Arnold Drake (writer), Demure Don Heck (penciler), Jovial
J. Tartaglione (inker), Smilin' Stan Lee (editor)
First Posted: 07/28/2024
Last updated: 07/28/2024
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
Non-Marvel Copyright info
All other characters mentioned or pictured are ™ and © 1941-2099 Marvel Characters, Inc. All
Rights Reserved. If you like this stuff, you should check out the real thing!
Please visit The Marvel
Official Site at: http://www.marvel.com
Special Thanks to http://www.g-mart.com/ for hosting the Appendix, Master List, etc.!