We don’t get many stories that focus on Rachel Grey these days.  I suspect that’s because she looks increasingly like she could have been productively put out to pasture some time ago.  When she was added to the cast back in the 80s, she was a high concept character – a refugee from a nightmare future that the X-Men had already averted, where she had been the daughter of the then-deceased Jean Grey, and thus the presumptive heir to the Phoenix.

That gave her a bunch of potential story directions, but they’ve pretty much been followed through to their logical conclusions.  She came to terms with being the next Phoenix; her home world got a resolution in which the day was saved.  Her mother came back (and then died again).

She could, I suppose, have settled into a relatively straightforward role as a character who represented a reminder of what could happen if the X-Men ultimately lost.  Instead, she’s largely wound up as a sporadically grumpy background character.  A decade or so back, Chris Claremont had a stab at re-energising her by having the Shi’ar wipe out her family, in the hope that this would stop the Phoenix from finding another host.  This wasn’t a very good idea, and it’s rarely been mentioned since; it felt at the time like a rather heavy handed attempt to top up her angst quota, and it still does.

But here we have Marc Guggenheim trying a Rachel Grey story, and that long-dormant plot thread is dusted off again, albeit perhaps in an attempt to provide some sort of closure to it.  “Exogenous” is certainly gunning for some sort of emotional weight, but it feels like a story a good few drafts away from actually working.

The basic story involves SWORD picking up Deathbird, who is inexplicably found floating outside their space station.  SWORD call in the X-Men, on the perfectly reasonable basis that they have three telepaths and they know about the Shi’ar, so they ought to be able to find out why she’s there.  Examining her reveals that she’s pregnant, and that she’s escaped from people who were experimenting on her.  Well, that’s what the dialogue says the telepaths uncover, at any rate; the actual art shows a recap of her career, which seems like a weird storytelling breakdown.

Two other groups show up in pursuit of Deathbird – the Providian Order, who were experimenting on her, and the Shi’ar, who’d like to sling her back in prison.  The Order turn out to be basically obsessed with developing crossbreeds between various alien races, apparently because this will somehow result in a galactic population where everyone has all the same talents.  As for the Shi’ar, they turn out to be led by the guy who recommended killing Rachel’s family in the first place, which is obviously a Source Of Tension.  Fighting ensues.

There are some reasonably good ideas in here that feel like they could have been developed into something effective but the actual result is a bit half-formed.  Given that two pencillers and five inkers are credited for it – the styles of Harvey Tolibao and Dexter Soy mesh reasonably well but by the final issue there are some moments that looked decidedly rushed – you have to wonder how tight the deadlines were on this one.

The story’s multiple plot strands tie together coherently enough (though we never do get an explanation of why Deathbird was floating in space), but only in as much as the plot logic largely dovetails.  What we don’t get is any real sense that all these threads have any particular theme in common.

The core of the story, obviously, is Rachel’s reaction to D’Keth, who is a reasonably interesting character in his own right.  He freely accepts that killing the Grey family only made sense if the Phoenix was indeed linked specifically to them, and that subsequent events have proved that he was wrong about that.  But, he argues, that’s all hindsight, and the decision was a fair one at the time given what he knew then and the scale of the threat.  So there’s an element of him recognising that he got it wrong, even if you couldn’t go quite as far as to say that he was apologetic; as such, he winds up as a more sympathetic character than might have been expected.

There’s something in their interaction.  It ends up, though, boiling down to a very familiar routine where Rachel doesn’t initially want to save his life, but eventually decides to do it because it’s what her family would have wanted from her.  This is serviceable enough, but doesn’t feel like it really gets to grips with the full potential of the characters.

But what does that tension have to do with anything else in the story?  Ultimately, nothing that’s particularly well defined.  There’s an attempt to draw a parallel with Deathbird wanting revenge for the Providian Order experimenting on her unborn child, but it doesn’t really go anywhere, and ends up feeling like a slightly strained parallel between two vaguely similar plot points in unrelated stories.  And the Order themselves have nothing much to do with any of this.  The concept of a bunch of genetic Marxists trying to bring the ultimate equality to the races of the universe has a certain appeal (even if it’s obviously crackers), but they’re the main threat in the story and so far as Rachel’s arc is concerned, they might as well be random invaders.  Conceivably there’s supposed to be some sort of contrast in the idea that Rachel cares about her family line while the Order are utterly uninterested in individual heritage – but again, it goes nowhere.

Alongside this we have a subplot about an Order mole within SWORD, which is largely just busy work to keep Storm, Jubilee and Cecilia occupied.  That becomes painfully obvious when the story racks up the artificial tension by suggesting that Storm has been left on the verge of death, only for her to be absolutely fine for the big climactic battle in the next issue.  Her injuries have served their function (by keeping her out of the way for a couple of issues), so now they can be ignored again.

For all that, I can’t quite shake the feeling that this all fitted together rather better in Guggenheim’s head than it does on the page.  The title, “Exogenous”, simply means something that enters a system from outside, and you can sort of see how it could be applied to most of the plot threads here – Rachel is an outsider come to our world, the Shi’ar intruded into her life, the mole is an intruder into SHIELD, and the Order are all about introducing new genetic material into existing species – but for the life of me I don’t see where that parallel takes us in terms of the story actually being about anything.  The emotional centre of the story, after all, is about Rachel deciding whether she can bring herself to help her family’s killer, which is not really anything much to do with outsider-ness.

So it doesn’t really work.  I do suspect there was a big idea in here that got lost along the way – or perhaps it’s in there and it’s just going over my head, though I doubt it.  It has its moments as a five-issue runaround, but it never gets much higher than that.