If the three “Apocalypse Wars” storylines are supposed to share any broader theme, over and above just having something to do with Apocalypse, then it’s far from clear what that might be.  All-New X-Men had Apocalypse in the past, and could at least play off having Evan in the cast.  Uncanny did the present (even though Apocalypse wasn’t actually there), and it had Angel to work with.  Extraordinary gets the future, but it doesn’t have any characters with any particularly close link to Apocalypse.  I suppose one of them gets one here.

Jeff Lemire and Humberto Ramos’s story has fairly clear goals in mind, at least when it comes to changing the status quo of various characters.  Quite why it wants to do those things is less clear.

The plot goes like this.  Out of nowhere, the X-Men detect a whole load of new mutant embryos.  These turn out to have been genetically engineered by the Sugar Man, in his established role of the disposable mad scientist, and he’s trying to create new mutants in isolation from the Terrigen Mists.  They’re all in a little sphere called the Ark which is your macguffin for this storyline.  The routine fight ends with Colossus and four of the trainees – Anole, Glob, Ernst and Martha – being sent a thousand years into the future along with the Ark.  The rest of the X-Men go after them, but botch the time travel and show up a year late.

During that year, the four trainees have been wandering around a future world which now consists of a handful of linked spheres where the survivors of Apocalypse’s great war now live, an arrangement which is being kept going by Apocalypse himself.  The mutants didn’t make it and nobody is especially pleased to see any show up now, if only because they think Apocalypse won’t be thrilled.  Colossus, meanwhile, winds up as a Horseman of Apocalypse.  So the trainees Grow As People and become full-fledged X-Men and so forth. The whole thing ends with the trainees being reunited with the X-Men to fight the Horsemen, Apocalypse casually destroying the Ark, Nightcrawler killing (or at least mortally wounding) Apocalypse, and everyone being brought back to the present, including Apocalypse, who promptly vanishes.

So there are some lasting effects here.  There’s an Apocalypse in the Marvel Universe again, though it’s one brought back from an alternate future.  Four of the kid have been seemingly permanently aged, with Anole losing that lopsided look he’s had for years, and Martha having a more impressive armoured body.  And Colossus is a baddie once more.  You can’t say stuff doesn’t happen here.

It’s just that, aside from Colossus becoming a Horseman (which is fairly generic stuff), none of it has very much to do with Apocalypse.  Even the Ark seems to be mostly a macguffin.  It’s quite strange.  In fact, the best bit of these issues is actually a subplot setting up a future storyline with Illyana and Sapna, though that may be simply because it’s easy to remain optimistic about stories that haven’t happened yet.  Visually, Humberto Ramos gets to have some fun re-designing other characters for the future Horsemen.

But the more interesting ideas in this storyline – and there are a couple – are at the very least underplayed, and more likely just plain underdeveloped.  We’re told that Omega World is a patchwork of bubbles, each occupied by one of the groups which survived the “Great Trials”.  Apocalypse is using his personal power to keep this whole arrangement going, which is why he’s vulnerable to Nightcrawler at the end of the story. The surviving groups, curiously, are identified as the Atlanteans, the Inhumans, the Stark-Self (a collective artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark), the Wakandans, the “mystics” and, of all people, the Moloids.

And for all that the Horsemen bluster about survival of the fittest, these individual worlds don’t seem to be in any particular state of turmoil, nor do they seem to be fighting among themselves.  This, apparently, is Apocalypse at a stage where he’s deemed the battle for survival of the fittest to be over, and is content to keep the winners around.  Precisely why he’s come to this view is never really explored – perhaps he just got to the point where the “survival” bit took precedence over the “of the fittest”, perhaps he simply regards this as the end of the road – but he explicitly tells us that there are millions of people living in Omega World.  At any rate, this seems to be more of a post-Apocalyptic world, despite who’s in charge.  Since this Apocalypse does make it back to the present day at the end, it’s always possible we’ll find out more in due course.

More strangely yet, Nightcrawler attempts to kill Apocalypse (and the X-Men then bring him back to their time) despite being repeatedly told that he’s the only thing keeping Omega World alive.  Apocalypse outright tells them that this is going to kill millions and nobody seems especially bothered.  Granted, for most of the X-Men there’s the excuse that Nightcrawler has already struck the killing blow, so maybe they’re just trying to save what they can from the situation.  But it’s a downright weird way to end a story.  These X-Men seem almost disturbingly preoccupied with a bunch of unborn mutants to the exclusion of all else.  If we’re to take this at face value then this timeline ends with the X-Men killing everyone left on Earth.  That’s not a win.

Is this badly misfiring writing, or is Jeff Lemire doing this on purpose?  It’s certainly a bleak future for the X-Men, in that it shows that the mutants didn’t survive, and a big theme of this series so far (Storm keeps harping on it) is whether there’s any point at all to anything they’re doing.  A very charitable reading of the intent might go something like this: the X-Men are sticking to a conventional superhero ethical line where you never give up and you keep trying bring about a better world in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds.  Even when there seems to be no rational way to succeed, you plough on regardless.  This story hammers them over the head with the fact that they’re doomed to fail, and that mutants were indeed just a short term blip that never ultimately mattered.  The Ark seems to be explicitly there as a symbol of false hope.  But the X-Men can’t accept any of that because it’s contrary to their basic premise, and so they see Omega World as something to avert rather than to save.  So we’re in the territory where heroic persistence blurs into something else.

That’s a potentially interesting idea, but getting there from what’s on the page takes some big leaps of interpretation.  Still, Lemire does seem interested in the idea of the X-Men’s mission as futile, and whether there really does come a point at which you’ve crossed the line from heroism to delusion.  It’s possible that the agenda here really is to subvert the “never give in” schtick of superhero ethics.  Whether you can actually get a workable superhero comic out of contemplating the nature of futility is perhaps another matter, and I’m not convinced thus far.

Or maybe I’m just being very charitable in trying to make sense of a very strange and rather depressing story.  Superficially a relatively normal time travel story, on closer inspection this is really quite weird.  But quite what it’s going for is at best hard to decipher – which tends to suggest that whatever it was trying to do, it didn’t really work.