SENTINELS

When Loki’s Acts of Vengeance scheme collapsed in 1990, the god of mischief threw one last tantrum. He took three prototype Sentinels built by Shaw Industries — prototypes meant to anchor the government’s secret Project Nimrod — and magically fused them into a single robot: the Tri-Sentinel, three-faced, six-armed, with tripled logic capacity and three times the Sentinel charm.

In The Amazing Spider-Man #329 (1990), by David Michelinie and Erik Larsen, Loki aims his creation at a nuclear power plant, intending a meltdown that would kill thousands. Standing in the way is the least Sentinel-qualified hero imaginable: Spider-Man — who happens, at that exact moment, to be wielding the cosmic powers of Captain Universe. Even so, it takes universe-level power to put the fused monster down.

And it did not stay down. The Life Foundation later rebuilt the Tri-Sentinel as a private security system; the moment it woke, it rejected their programming, restored Loki’s original directive, and had to be melted down by Spider-Man and Nova using an Antarctic vibranium fail-safe. Marvel’s own Sentinel field guide notes the oddity: alone among Sentinel-kind, the Tri-Sentinel has always aimed at Spider-Man and other non-mutant heroes — a mutant-hunting robot that mostly hunts the wrong guy, forever, because a god told it to.