The Danger Room is a fictional training facility
Publication history
An obstacle course in which the X-Men train appears in
The X-Men #1 (September 1963), but the Danger Room is never mentioned by name. The name "Danger Room" is first used in
The X-Men #2 (November 1963). According to X-Men writer/editor/co-creator
Stan Lee, "the Danger Room was
Jack Kirby's idea. I thought it was great because we could always open with an action sequence if we needed to."
Early designs
In the early books, the Danger Room was filled with traps, projectile firing devices, flamethrowers, and mechanical dangers such as presses, collapsing walls and the like intended to challenge the trainee. Meanwhile, an observer is in the overhanging control booth
managing the room's mechanisms to oversee the exercise while manually ensuring the subject's safety. Later the Danger Room was upgraded with machines and robots for the X-Men to fight against.
After befriending the Shi'ar, the X-Men rebuilt the Danger Room with Shi'ar hard-light holographic technology. These upgrades were largely added by Beast. The Danger Room is located in the X-Mansion; every destruction of the latter led to a rebuilding, and usually upgrading, of the Danger Room. The training facility has endured extensive damage over the years, usually from X-Men training or X-Men going rogue, as Colossus did during the Muir Island Saga. Supervillains have dealt critical damage to it as well as taking over the facility, especially Arcade. The security and safety protocols that ensure the safety of anyone using the Danger Room have frequently been disrupted, tampered with by villains, failed, or have been completely negated over time.
It is suggested in the X-Men Official Guide that the objects in the Danger Room are holograms surrounded by force fields, supposedly confirmed in Astonishing X-Men when a student managed to kill himself by jumping from a holographic cliff face. It is also revealed that the Danger Room can display holograms in only color depth.
Sentience
Gaining self-awareness
In
Joss Whedon's
Astonishing X-Men, the Danger Room developed
self-awareness. It is mentioned by Wolverine as 'acting twitchy all semester'. The first thing it does is convince Wing, who has recently been depowered by Ord's cure, to kill himself.
[ Astonishing X-Men (vol. 3) #7] The next thing it does is take control of an old, broken Sentinel robot and knock out all the psychics within the X-Mansion. During the Sentinel's attack, Cyclops orders
Kitty Pryde and the students to go hide in the Danger Room for safety, finding the corpse of Wing. It reanimates Wing's corpse and attacks the students.
[ Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #8-9] Apart from Wing, there are no additional fatalities among the students. After being freed from its prison, it takes the form of a woman dubbed "Danger" and attacks the
X-Men. After defeating the X-Men, she travels to
Genosha to kill
Professor X.
[ Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #10]
Xavier was revealed to have known of the Danger Room's sentience and chosen not to reveal it, much to the dismay of the X-Men who seem to view this deception as taking on one of Magneto's former ideals. During the battle on Genosha, she takes control of one of Cassandra Nova's Wild Sentinels and engages Beast in a vicious and brutal fight while the other X-Men take on the Wild Sentinel. After Beast destroys her body, Danger's consciousness was presumed to still exist within the Wild Sentinel's conflicted consciousness.[ Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #11-12]
Ord and Breakworld
Danger later reappears in a new humanoid form, similar to her previous one, in which she infiltrated the headquarters of S.W.O.R.D. to speak with Ord and offer her assistance.
[ Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #15]
Danger and Ord both ended up on Breakworld, along with the X-Men and S.W.O.R.D., and after the robot encountered Emma Frost and the unconscious Cyclops, Emma told the robot that despite its supposed enmity it has let the mutants live too often, meaning it has not overcome its parent programming, so it cannot kill any mutant. Cyclops recovers, and Emma tells Danger to help the X-Men in Breakworld, and in exchange, it will be given Professor Xavier. Danger later attacks some of Breakworld's inhabitants and sides with the X-Men and S.W.O.R.D.[ Astonishing X-Men vol. 3 #21-24, Giant-Size Astonishing X-Men #1]
Revenge
Afterwards, S.W.O.R.D. takes Danger into custody. When the S.W.O.R.D. headquarters is destroyed during the
'
Secret Invasion, Danger escapes and goes to Australia, taking on the form of an anthropologist from Melbourne University. She approaches Rogue in her disguise but is targeted by a low flying Shi'ar salvage spacecraft, where she reveals who she really is and that she is going to use Rogue as a conduit so she can get her revenge on Professor Xavier.
[ X-Men: Legacy #220]
After being damaged by the crew, she warps the entire area with her holographic projections of past moments within Rogue's life as well as other famous moments from the X-Men's history.[ X-Men: Legacy #221-222] Xavier confronts Danger and she reveals she intended to make Rogue absorb all Xavier's powers and memories permanently. Xavier reveals that when she first said Where am I?, Xavier consulted her Shi'ar makers who assured him it was not possible she could have gained self-awareness and that Xavier had no way of knowing what she was or would become. Xavier tried to free her but because she was really billions of lines of machine code, Xavier did not know which lines to erase without lobotomizing her. Because of not knowing what she was capable of, if she had been freed, she might have killed his X-Men because she had the knowledge and power, so instead Xavier did nothing and watched her suffer. Xavier ends her suffering by repairing her. She then sides with Xavier, Rogue, and Gambit and takes out the Shi'ar salvage crew. Afterwards, with Xavier, she helps Rogue gain full control over her powers.[ X-Men: Legacy #223-224]
Utopia
Danger joins Rogue and Gambit to help the X-Men settle the unrest in San Francisco. She saves a child who mistakes her for a Transformer. She comes to aid Rogue and Gambit during a fight with Ares and later departs with the two to find Trance and any other students still out during the riots.
[ X-Men: Legacy #226] After locating Trance, they are attacked by Ms. Marvel who manages to seriously damage her shoulder.
[ X-Men: Legacy #227]
After the events of Utopia, Danger is seen being repaired by Madison Jeffries when they are attacked by Emplate. Danger tries to defend Madison only to be further damaged by Emplate. After being repaired, at the request of Cyclops, she informs the inhabitants of Utopia who Emplate is.[ X-Men: Legacy Annual #1 (2009)] She works alongside Madison, Rogue and the X-Club on erasing Legion's many personalities,[ New Mutants vol. 3 #5] and is offered the position of warden of Utopia by Emma, which she accepts because it also allows her to study the best and the worst of what humanity has to offer.[ Uncanny X-Men #515] Danger's first job was to interrogate John Greycrow who was forced into bringing five Predator Xs to Utopia.[ Uncanny X-Men #517] Armor confronts Danger, due to her being responsible for Wing's death. They get into a tussle. Danger was able to discover Armor's weakness and insists that they talk. Armor angrily expresses to Danger that her presence with the X-Men negatively affects Wing's memory. Danger tells Armor, that she constantly reboots herself, but cannot wipe out Wing's image in her memory. Armor is surprised that Danger can experience feelings of guilt, and she proceeds to tell her about Wing.
Necrosha
As warden of Utopia, some of the prisoners she guards include Empath, Sebastian Shaw and
Donald Pierce. She uses her Virtual Reality technology in an attempt to rehabilitate them.
[ Uncanny X-Men #515] During the invasion from Selene's forces, she detects an energy source, but then malfunctions and crashes. Then,
Shinobi Shaw and
Harry Leland (who have been resurrected by the techno-organic virus) appear and are ready to kill Shaw for preventing Selene's ascent to godhood.
[ Necrosha One-shot] However, Danger is able to adapt to the mass increase and severed Shinobi's hand before Sebastian could be killed.
[ X-Force vol. 3 #21]
Second Coming
Danger appears to have been compromised as she is not aware that Pierce has free rein to sabotage Utopia's defenses.
Wolverine and the X-Men
Beast rebuilds the Westchester School at the behest of Wolverine at the aftermath of the event. Built on the ruins of the previous Xavier Institute, the school is rechristened the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning and is built with state of the art Shi'ar Technology, gifted by the current Emperor of the Shi'ar Empire Gladiator (Kallark) whose son Kid Gladiator is enrolled. The school incorporates a decentralized Danger Room that is integrated into the entire building itself instead of just one room.
All-New X-Factor
Danger reappears in the
All-New X-Factor series. She appears as a prisoner of a member of the Thieves Guild, which Gambit is running, and when Gambit discovers this, Gambit orders her freed. After restoring her memory which was lost due to the imprisonment, Gambit invites her to join the new X-Factor team.
[ All-New X-Factor #4]
X-Men: Blue
Danger appears in the form of the Blackbird jet plane and is used as the main transport for the original time-displaced X-Men.
[ X-Men: Blue #1-4]
During the Secret Empire storyline, Danger takes Jean Grey and Jimmy Hudson to a prison stronghold to rescue their captured teammates. During the ensuing battle, she reveals her true form and projects holograms of the adult X-Men to keep the guards occupied.[ X-Men: Blue #8]
Krakoa
When
Krakoa became a sovereign nation for mutants, Madison Jeffries tried to bring Danger with him but the island rejected the home he tried to build for her. Madison was subsequently put into the Pit of Exile for breaking Krakoa's third law and Danger was forced to leave the island.
[ Sabretooth (vol. 4) #4] Abandoned and alone, Danger joined and began working with the CIA's Dolores Ramirez and potentially the anti-mutant organization Orchis and is revealed to be behind the "X-Robots".
[ Wolverine (vol. 7) #23] It was later revealed by Third Eye's report that Danger is not a villain, but just a non-mutant being who has been abused and rejected by Krakoan society and abandoned by those meant to protect her.
Danger is set to appear in a new Exiles series in 2026.
Powers and abilities
As Danger gained self-awareness and adopted a more humanoid appearance, she has shown enhanced strength and durability, the abilities to create hard-light holographic projections that can affect entire areas, emit modulated energy waves for blasts, binding and protection, flight capability, mechanical regeneration & shapeshifting; with which to alternate her physical form as well as rebuild herself after her body is destroyed (at one point even rebuilding herself with butterfly-like wings which are soon destroyed by Beast), control and assimilate machinery and cybernetic components into herself via thought. She is able to bring other machines into self-awareness and upload her consciousness into foreign digitized or mechanical systems to build, operate or otherwise commandeer new bodies. Danger also possesses more detailed knowledge of the X-Men and their combat skills than any other source, having trained against them as the Danger Room for generations.
Danger Cave
With the Danger Room gone, the X-Men resorted to using the empty room to train with their students. The student Prodigy, using the borrowed knowledge from several X-Men, built a "Danger Cave" underneath the X-Mansion. The Danger Cave is similar to the Danger Room, but it uses holograms to train the students by re-enacting renowned battles the X-Men were involved in, like Inferno or Onslaught, even going so far as to dress the participants up in what the X-Men wore at that time.
Reception
The Danger Room is well known and viewed as an iconic part of the X-Men mythos.
Danger
Molly Louise Sharp in her dissertation on heroines and feminism wrote that "from a third wave feminist perspective, Danger seems to be constructed as a radical feminist character as viewed through a third wave feminist lens... Danger is born from a literal revolution of consciousness; she becomes newly sentient and realizes that she is forced into a role that is not fulfilling and in which she cannot reach her potential... Danger herself and her conflict with the X-Men are also similar to
radical feminism through
patriarchy,
essentialism, and
separatism. That Danger is a female character is crucial because there is no narrative reason that Danger needs to be female other than to align her with the feminism present in the rest of the text".
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Comicbook.com ranked Danger 5th in "Marvel’s 7 Best Robot Superheroes".
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Comic Book Resources ranked Danger 8th in "The 10 Greatest X-Men Who Aren't Mutants"
Other versions
Age of Apocalypse
The Danger Room equivalent in the
Age of Apocalypse reality was the Killing Zone. The facility was located in Mount Wundagore
[ X-Men Chronicles #1 (1995)] and was apparently destroyed by Nemesis. Later, it was Dazzler who replaced the Danger Room and acted as a one-woman training facility for the fully fledged X-Men.
Ultimate Marvel
The
Ultimate Marvel version of the Danger Room has similar technology, including smaller holographic training rooms in the hidden
prepared for the
Ultimate X-Men. However, these are prone to malfunctions, such as a fight sequence producing
Hasidic instead of
(though to no less of an effect towards the latter intent).
What If?
Danger became Ultron's wife
In the alternate universe of
What If? Astonishing X-Men, the Danger Room got a body of her own and betrayed the X-Men. She eventually married
Ultron and the two conquered Earth, the Shi'ar Empire and the entire universe.
[ What If? Astonishing X-Men #1. Marvel Comics.]
In other media
Television
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The Danger Room appears in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.
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The Danger Room appears in .
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The Danger Room appears in .
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The Danger Room appears in the episode "The Mutant Agenda".
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The Danger Room appears in .
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The Danger Room appears in Wolverine and the X-Men. Additionally, Danger's design is seen on a dystopian future version of Master Mold (voiced by Gwendoline Yeo).
[ A green check mark indicates that a role has been confirmed using a screenshot (or collage of screenshots) of a title's list of voice actors and their respective characters found in its credits or other reliable sources of information.]
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The Danger Room appears in X-Men '97. Danger is set to appear in the second season.
Film
The Danger Room appears in the
X-Men film series.
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The Danger Room was meant to appear in X-Men (2000) and was alluded to in X2 (2003), but was deleted in the former film and was scrapped in the latter film due to budget concerns.
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The Danger Room appears in (2006).
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The Danger Room appears in (2016).
Video games
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The Danger Room appears as a stage in X-Men (1993).
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The Danger Room appears in .
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The Danger Room appears as Cyclops's stage in .
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The Danger Room appears as Cyclops's stage in ,
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The Danger Room appears in X-Men Legends and , voiced by Zachary Quarles. In both games, players can use the room for training as well as gaining levels, items, new powers, and rare character-exclusive equipment.
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The Danger Room appears as the training stage for .
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The Danger Room appears in via the "Rise of the Phoenix Force" DLC, with the A.I. voiced by Laura Bailey.
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The Danger Room appears as a playable game mode in .
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The Danger Room appears as a playable game mode in Marvel Strike Force.
Miscellaneous
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The Danger Room and Danger are featured as a wizard mode in Stern's X-Men Pinball machines.
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The Danger Room appears as part of a replica of the Xavier Institute created by Airbnb.
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The Danger Room appears as part of the Lego Xavier Institute, released in 2024.
External links
