For a writer who chooses to work mainly in the superhero genre, Brian Bendis never seems all that interested in having a well structured plot.  First and foremost he’s interested in his characters, which is fair enough.  His actual stories can often end up as rather meandering, or as sketchy gestures to provide his characters with busy work between conversations.  His rambling Avengers run is pretty much the epitome of this.

So “Uncanny X-Men vs S.H.I.E.L.D.” is fairly unusual for a Bendis story, in that it sees a bunch of story threads being drawn together in a clear attempt to resolve numerous plot points at once and create a Big Climax.  And what do you know, it largely works.  Largely – and with one glaring exception that brings me back to the point above.

For the entire run of this series, Cyclops’ team have been harassed by Sentinels who pop up to attack them whenever they show up in public.  Cyclops (wrongly, but not unreasonably) suspects SHIELD are behind it, or at least turning a blind eye.  Maria Hill knows she isn’t behind it, but isn’t exactly confident that SHIELD has nothing to do with it either.  Meanwhile, Mystique has kidnapped Dazzler, and taken her place as a SHIELD agent (an imposture no doubt helped enormously by the fact that this is a Bendis comic, so that she is never actually called upon to demonstrate her non-existent light powers, merely to talk at length).  Dazzler is being kept prisoner in Madripoor where she’s being used to create MGH to power up de-powered mutants like the Blob.  Magneto’s gone off on his own to investigate what’s happening in Madripoor.  And Hijack has been kicked off the team for being a useless prat.

That’s a lot of plot threads, all of which come to a pretty neat conclusion in this story.  And at least when you read them as a whole, these last few issues are nicely paced when it comes to dovetailing things together.  Everyone ends up gathering at the proper X-Men’s school – Cyclops because he thinks the Beast might be behind the Sentinels, SHIELD because they’re going after Cyclops, and Hijack because he’s trying to redeem himself by offering himself up as a student to the branch of the X-Men he can still get in touch with.  And Magneto rescues Dazzler and turns up with her at the end too.  Chaos duly ensues, the villain is exposed and defeated, Hijack gets his big moment of redemption (though he remains essentially a well-meaning bozo who happened to have the right powers for the moment), Dazzler switches sides to rejoin the X-Men, and so forth.

All this is quite well done – and it turns out that there was a point to kicking Hijack off the team beyond his own short-term storyline, namely that the plot needs him to be out of the way before the Sentinels start developing ways of counter-measures to everyone’s powers.  Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to show up at the end and save the day.  So, fair enough.

True, the whole thing makes SHIELD look like the Keystone Kops – but unless it’s their series, SHIELD pretty much are the Keystone Kops.  That’s the age-old curse of being characters without your own book, who can never get to overshadow the stars.  You are going to end up looking like losers who need to be bailed out by the real heroes.  SHIELD have been a clown show in the comics for thirty years; Bendis is hardly the first offender here.  Maria Hill, admittedly, is starting to seem a problematic character – she’s meant to be the hypercompetent ice queen archetype, but since stories rarely afford her any opportunity to actually be competent, she ends up as simply someone who yells a lot.  You could be forgiven for thinking that her talents might better suit her to a junior management role in a call centre.  But this isn’t ultimately the X-Men’s problem; in the context of this book, SHIELD are indeed just the foils.

And true also, Dazzler’s arc is a bit minimal.  Since she spends most of the story unconscious, there’s no real opportunity for her switch of sides to mean anything; of course she doesn’t want to work for Maria Hill, who, as aforementioned, is a shouty nitwit.  The real problem here is that she never had an adequate motivation to work for SHIELD in the first place, and thus has needs no great motivation to stop.  But that’s pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things.

And yes, there’s also some remarkably clumsy storytelling where the story reveals that the X-Men’s powers are being affected by nano tech.  The problem here is that Bendis is running two different “powers not working properly” arcs at the same time – the one that was attributed to the Phoenix at the start of the series, and one from a few issues ago which affected everyone in the cast whenever the Sentinels were around.  I’m pretty sure that the resolution here is intended to relate only to the latter, but it’s not made explicit, and the confusion I’ve seen online is both understandable and entirely predictable.  There’s no reason why this couldn’t have been cleared up in dialogue.

But the big issue here is with the reveal of the Dark Beast as the villain behind the Sentinels.  If that seems to come out of nowhere – well, yes, it does.  Entirely.  And then he’s abruptly killed off within a few more pages.  This doesn’t work at all as the resolution for a major plot thread, and I strongly suspect the reason is that Bendis simply isn’t that interested in it as a plot in its own right.

The point he’s trying to make – I think – is that this plays into the idea that it’s worryingly plausible that the real Beast could have been behind the Sentinel attacks.  After all, he hates Scott (both for turning the X-Men into a paramilitary travesty and for killing Xavier); he has access to the technology; there was some evidence suggesting the Sentinels were really on an information gathering mission instead of seriously trying to kill Scott’s team; and he’s done some seriously erratic things lately, like screwing up the timeline to make a point.  So the idea that he might have been behind this wasn’t completely off the wall, at least from Scott’s point of view.  And the point of bringing out the Dark Beast is to reiterate the plausibility of Hank being behind it.  So it’s meant to play into a much longer storyline of Hank becoming dangerously erratic.

But you can’t do that – you can’t build up something as a mystery for the better part of two years and then not have the reveal work as a story in its own right.  And it doesn’t work as a story in its own right because Dark Beast has no sensible motivation here.  His stated motivation is that he’s dying from all the experiments he’s carried out on himself, and he hates Scott.  But these are largely reflections of Hank’s feelings towards Scott; they don’t have much to do with the Dark Beast’s own established motivations, which are largely about pursuing knowledge with disregard for ethics, and acquiring a position of personal influence, preferably as a power behind the throne.  He never cared about the X-Men; he has no reason to be particularly bitter towards Scott, and certainly not for the reasons Hank does.  And on top of all that, his reveal is treated as an anticlimax and his story swiftly tied up almost immediately thereafter.

So yes, that doesn’t work in the slightest.  It’s the point at which I groaned heavily and resumed reading with a sigh.  But it’s in the middle of a story that otherwise builds pretty nicely to a more effective climax than I often get from Bendis; certainly a story with a reasonable amount going for it, despite the major problem at its centre.