A quick sketch of Eddie Brock's chronology in Venom vol. 5

[Clive_Reston]

As requested by Leoparis in the King in Black to AXE: Judgment Day thread, here's what I gather to be Eddie Brock's path so far:

(EDITED to include Michael's corrections, or at least how I understand them!)

V5 1 (4 - 10) -FB and (15 - 19) -FB : Eddie is projecting his consciousness into symbiotes out in space--but then there are murders, and he gets a warning from the possessed "Ringo" symbiote.

V5 1: Eddie wakes up in a motel, has a fragmented vision of the future, calls Dylan and leaves a voice mail (which we see as a VO in V5 2 (6-8)), and as Dylan arrives just then, Eddie gets blown up. He falls through time and lands in the Garden, where he meets Meridius.

V5 5: Eddie and Meridius, in the Garden, meet Wilde, Tyro and Finnegan, and then Bedlam shows up and attacks.

V5 8: Eddie, in the Garden, sees a vision of Dylan being attacked in V5 7, and jumps through space-time to Kang's ship. It's their first meeting as far as Eddie is concerned, but Kang tells him about a conversation they had 10,000 years earlier.

V5 9: Eddie talks to Kang, then travels through time to six days before #1 and emails Archer to say "I'm going to die in six days." Then he travels forward through time again to find Dylan in the Alchemax facility (in V5 4 (11-15)), and talks to him there. He moves back a bit in time, occupies his own body (while his consciousness is elsewhere during the outer-space scenes in #1), calls Dylan, and tells him "don't say the word" and "don't bond with the symbiote" (as seen in V5 1 (22-24)). Then he's pulled away into the inside of Bedlam as Bedlam's stabbing Dylan in V5 7 (20).

V5 10: Eddie is pulled out of Bedlam and lands back in the Garden, where he has now become Finnegan, and they run through the sequence from V5 5 again.

V5 11: What appears to be Eddie in this issue is just a manifestation of his memory in Dylan's mind.

V5 13: Finnegan, in the Garden, encounters Wilde, who tells him that Dylan survived the stabbing (which he knows from having seen it as Bedlam). Finnegan goes to Limbo and runs into the Goblin Queen.

Dark Web 1 and V5 14: Chasm makes Eddie-as-Finnegan forget who Dylan is. After a fight with Synch, he turns into Bedlam.

V5 15-16: Bedlam fights Dylan (who appears first as Venom and then as Codex), and then encounters Meridius. The Goblin Queen summons him, and he's sent through a portal in Dark Web: Finale 1...

V5 17: ...and lands in Limbo, still as Bedlam, where he encounters Darkoth and branches out into two possibilities.

Now we diverge into two paths:

PATH THE FIRST:

Still in V5 17, Bedlam beheads Darkoth, then dives through a portal into the Garden in V5 5.

V5 5: Bedlam shows up and attacks. He grabs Finnegan and carries him off...

V5 10: ...and is about to kill him, when Meridius shows up and convinces Bedlam to re-form in his flesh when Meridius is talking to Carson Wyche in the past.

V5 4: Bedlam manifests from Meridius at the end of the conversation with Wyche, reprised at the beginning of V5 5.

V5 6: Bedlam is hanging out in a bar and sees a news report about the symbiote in Baywater.

V5 7: Bedlam hitches a ride to Baywater, fights Dylan/Venom there, and stabs him in the heart.

Then Bedlam apparently just hangs out in the bar in Baywater, until Eddie shows up there in V5 20 (see below).

PATH THE SECOND:

V5 17: In the second path, Darkoth stabs Bedlam, whose body discorporates (and Darkoth goes through a portal to Thor #27, covered in Bedlam-spawned symbiote...). Eddie falls again and lands in the Un-Beyond/Engine Room.

V5 18: Eddie has a conversation with the Eventuality, and has a vision of Dylan/Venom beating up the Gold Goblin (in V5 19 (16)).

V5 20: Eddie re-forms out of his bones, which are in the Absent Throne laboratory. Then he comes to Baywater, where he finds Bedlam and...

V5 21: ...absorbs him, in the course of "Pages 2-19: They Fight" (a great title).

THE TWO PATHS MERGE AGAIN HERE

V5 24: Eddie arrives in Latveria, busts up some Doombots in Bedlam form, meets Doom, and smashes the time platform.

V5 25: Doom and Eddie crash in the Cretaceous (where they fight a Venomsaur who turns out to be Meridius); then go to France in 1942, where Eddie inadvertently interrupts Flexo's mission; then to New York and the Latverian embassy where Eddie meets Peter Parker shortly before ASM 5; then to Kang's ship (before Timeless (2022), by Kang's timeline). Kang gives Eddie Rosebud II (the Fantastic Four's old time-sled); Eddie gives Kang some symbiote goo that it's implied will become Rascal, then goes off to crash the sled into the Garden. Kang explains to Doom that the version of the Garden before Eddie's current exploit is going to be "shunted sideways, into its own pocket reality," and that Eddie will now always have been going to and from that alternate future. (Doom, subsequently, goes to a near-future New York where there's a Venom War happening, then to 1942 to see Flexo and give him the speech we saw in the last few pages of V5 22.)

V5 29: Eddie/Bedlam appears in Rosebud II on the final page.

Now, this is where it gets tricky. What we've been told is that Bedlam eventually becomes Wilde (from Meridius's narration in #29: "Bedlam squats in a biker bar until his rage turns bitter--and shrinks into Wilde"), who becomes Tyro, who becomes Meridius, and maybe eventually becomes the Eventuality. However, we have not yet seen Bedlam become Wilde--we've just been told that he did. So there's a gap here.

In V5 13, after the fight from V5 5 and 10, Wilde has a conversation with Finnegan, who heads off to Limbo; then Wilde turns into Tyro (right before we start following Finnegan in Limbo).

Presumably there are some Tyro exploits in here, during which he travels backward in time again at some point.

V5 29 begins from the point of view of Tyro, who wants to become Meridius. We see the conversation and fight from V5 5 yet again. Then he goes to the symbiote hive, meets the Eventuality, and goes off to meet Kang--it's the first time as far as Kang is concerned--and they have the conversation Kang referred to in #8. Kang trains Tyro until he has a vision of Venomworld, at which point Tyro becomes Meridius.

Things Meridius does after that include (we don't yet know in what order, for him):

* joining forces with Kang to kill all the symbiotes in the final hive near the end of time in #29

* acquiring Eddie's bones at the end of #1

* talking to Kang in #8-9

* encountering Bedlam in #16

* appearing as the Venomsaur in #25

* appearing, initially disguised as Venom, in Thor #27-28 ("centuries," for him, after he encountered Darkoth when he was Bedlam)

* and a sequence that starts with him visiting Wyche in V5 4, then returning to the Garden for the big conversation and fight. Then he possesses Ringo in V5 1 (and gives Eddie the warning seen there and in the FCBD 2021 issue), takes Eddie's form to wake Dylan up in V5 1, and listens in on his conversation with the real Eddie.

BUT: during the "look at those cavemen go" conversation as we see it on the final page of #29, Eddie/Bedlam in Rosebud II is about to crash into the Garden, as we saw near the end of #25, and break the loop and/or create a pocket reality.

Further corrections to this are VERY welcome!

[Clive_Reston]

Oh, and also: Thor vol 6 27-28 involve Darkoth, a symbiote spawned from Bedlam, and Meridius (posing for a while as Venom), at some point that appears to be centuries (for him) after Bedlam's encounter with Darkoth in V5 17.

And the second story in Free Comic Book Day: Spider-Man/Venom (2021) starts with what would subsequently be the first five pages of Venom #1, and then gives us two pages of flash-forward images (some to scenes we haven't even seen yet as of 2024!), accompanied by Meridius-as-Ringo's dialogue that ended up on V5 1 (18).

[Michael]

Meridius says in issue 29 that his anger cooled in the bar and he became Wilde. who became Tyro. So that was an alternate timeline.
Basically there are 3 Eddies:
1) Our Eddie
2) Bedlam- He wins the fight with Darkish. goes back to the Garden in Time and attacks his younger self, then travels back in time and attacks Dylan, then waits in the bar until Our Eddie fights him and convinces him to help him stop Meridius.
3) Meridius- He doesn't fight Our Eddie but instead turns into Wilde, who turns into Tyro.
And according to the Eventuality, somehow, all three Eddies wind up becoming him.

[Clive_Reston]

Hm. I think there may actually be two Bedlams.

To clarify a little, one version of the fight in V5 17 (which is narrated by the Eventuality) ends with Bedlam beheading Darkoth--for whom this appearance seems to be just after Excalibur #39!--then seeing a vision of Eddie and Finnegan and heading to the Garden to yell HATE YOU! and fight them in V5 5. That's the Bedlam who has just been through Dark Web (where he became Bedlam for the first time) and had his memories of Dylan removed by Chasm (and his hand and eye restored by Meridius); it's also the one that Eddie absorbs in V5 20.

The other version of the fight ends with Darkoth stabbing/discorporating Bedlam and being sent over to Thor 27 covered in the new Bedlam-spawned symbiote, while Eddie heads down to the Engine Room.

But there's also the Bedlam that Meridius generates at the end of V5 4/beginning of V5 5 and says "Scare the boy a little for me, will you, Bedlam?" That's the one who stabs Dylan (and clearly knows who he is).

Also, we only know that the order goes Eddie > Finnegan > Bedlam > Wilde > Tyro > Meridius because Meridius says so (and that the Eventuality is at the end because HE says so). We've seen Eddie become Finnegan and Finnegan become Bedlam, and we've seen Tyro become Meridius. But Wilde is the wild card here, and it would not surprise me if he was lying.

[Michael]

Hm. I think there may actually be two Bedlams.

To clarify a little, one version of the fight in V5 17 (which is narrated by the Eventuality) ends with Bedlam beheading Darkoth--for whom this appearance seems to be just after Excalibur #39!--then seeing a vision of Eddie and Finnegan and heading to the Garden to yell HATE YOU! and fight them in V5 5. That's the Bedlam who has just been through Dark Web (where he became Bedlam for the first time) and had his memories of Dylan removed by Chasm (and his hand and eye restored by Meridius); it's also the one that Eddie absorbs in V5 20.

The other version of the fight ends with Darkoth stabbing/discorporating Bedlam and being sent over to Thor 27 covered in the new Bedlam-spawned symbiote, while Eddie heads down to the Engine Room.

But there's also the Bedlam that Meridius generates at the end of V5 4/beginning of V5 5 and says "Scare the boy a little for me, will you, Bedlam?" That's the one who stabs Dylan (and clearly knows who he is).

In Venom 10, Meridius says:

"In the past, I'm talking to a man named Carson Wyche. You can jump back to that temporal location-- grow in my symbiotic flesh. And then attack the boy. Give him... a little scare.A little knife in his heart. "

And Bedlam disappears.

So after fighting Eddie and Finegan, Bedlam travels back in time and stabs Dylan. Then after that, he wanders into the bar.

The confusing part is the way that Ewing and Ram V handled Bedlam's memory loss. When Bedlam was first introduced it seemed like he had all of Eddie's memories. And Our Eddie regained all his memories a few hours after Ben's attack. But Bedlam seems to know about Meridius, Dylan, etc., all the while claiming he doesn't remember them.

Also, we only know that the order goes Eddie > Finnegan > Bedlam > Wilde > Tyro > Meridius because Meridius says so (and that the Eventuality is at the end because HE says so). We've seen Eddie become Finnegan and Finnegan become Bedlam, and we've seen Tyro become Meridius. But Wilde is the wild card here, and it would not surprise me if he was lying.

We saw Wilde become Tyro in Venom 13.

[Clive_Reston]

Thank you, Michael! Made a bunch of corrections above.