{"id":4444,"date":"2018-12-27T22:07:22","date_gmt":"2018-12-27T22:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4444"},"modified":"2018-12-27T22:07:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-27T22:07:22","slug":"extermination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=4444","title":{"rendered":"Extermination"},"content":{"rendered":"

The thinking behind\u00a0Extermination<\/em> might be called haphazard. \u00a0This is the story where the time-travelling original X-Men finally get removed from the board – they’re sent back to the Silver Age and the reset button is duly pressed, save that their adult counterparts now remember everything that happened while they were in the present. \u00a0The practical significance of this is surely limited, given that their adult counterparts already know the general thrust of what they’ve been up to – it feels like more of a gesture of goodwill that, honestly, this all amounted to something.<\/p>\n

But the obvious question is: why is this appearing as a separate miniseries written by Ed Brisson, rather than the final arc of Cullen Bunn’s\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>? \u00a0Isn’t that the natural place to do this story?<\/p>\n

Well, there are some answers to that. \u00a0Extermination\u00a0<\/em>has other plot threads, even if they’re not the main event. \u00a0It brings back Ahab and picks up on Rachel’s Hound tattoos, a subplot from\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em>. \u00a0More drastically, it gives Cable a drastic overhaul by having him apparently killed by his own (much) younger self, who seems set to take his place as the new Cable, something of a reset to the days when the X-Men didn’t know much about him and regarded him as suspiciously triggerhappy. \u00a0This sets up X-Force reuniting to take him down, which is the plot of their series.<\/p>\n

So you could have justified running this story as a crossover between\u00a0X-Men Blue\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0X-Men Gold<\/em>, doubling as a launch into\u00a0X-Force<\/em>. \u00a0But. \u00a0Where\u00a0Extermination<\/em> itself is concerned, it’s a Blue story; it’s more about X-Force than it is about the Blue team more generally (let alone the Red, who show up briefly too), and the fact that it’s going to result in a status quo change for Rachel only really becomes apparent in the final issue.<\/p>\n

More fundamentally, the heavy lifting of setting up the teenage X-Men’s return has already been done in\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em>, where they’d reached the stage of being reconciled to returning home, and were simply awaiting the mechanics to get them there. \u00a0That’s what this series provides.<\/p>\n

Again, though, there’s a problem here. \u00a0The plot goes roughly like this. \u00a0Ahab, the Hound-master cyborg from Rachel’s home timeline, shows up in the present. \u00a0He plans to kill one of the original five (any one, it doesn’t matter) before they can return home, thereby derailing X-Men history. \u00a0Precisely why that’s such a big deal isn’t altogether clear, given that his timeline wound up as an anti-mutant dystopia even with a fully-formed X-Men team around, but that’s the plot, so go with it.<\/p>\n

Cable – who has been positioned of late as a guardian of the timeline – has been turning a blind eye to the X-Men Blue team, apparently because he thinks they’ll somehow be improved by their stay in the present. \u00a0Younger Cable sees this as a wrong turn, so he kills his own older self (it’s not clear why, or why older Cable doesn’t see this coming), and sets about abducting the younger X-Men so that he can forcibly reset their powers and send them home. \u00a0In Warren’s case this means giving him a wing transplant from the Mimic, which seems like the sort of thing that might be picked up on back in the Silver Age, but okay. \u00a0(Didn’t\u00a0Guardians of the Galaxy<\/em> claim that Black Vortex power-ups wear off after a while, and that’s why Gamora was back to normal?)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Ahab is using a pair of telepathic twins who are under his control to psychically turn other X-Men into Hounds, because there has to be a lot of running around and fighting. \u00a0That’s the immediate threat which keeps everyone occupied; Jean goes back in time to meet the twins when they’re younger, both to learn how to suppress their memories of their stay in the present, and to avert whatever Ahab’s been doing to them. \u00a0This resets all the Hounds to normal, except for Rachel, apparently because she was originally turned into a Hound by traditional brainwashing, which can’t be reversed quite so easily.<\/p>\n

This is a profoundly dull exercise in moving pieces from point A to point B. \u00a0It’s competently paced and structured, if you’re prepared to accept some time-travel handwaving in lieu of the plot making complete sense. \u00a0Pepe Larraz’s art lacks something in scale but at least handles a large cast well, and his design for the monochrome twins is appropriately creepy, though the colouring often feels muddy when it’s aiming for moody. \u00a0But ultimately, none of it feels like it’s about anything in particular.<\/p>\n

The basic problem is that\u00a0X-Men Blue<\/em> has already done the interesting bit, which is the teen X-Men’s decision to return home. \u00a0The obvious way to play their farewell story would be for them to make the sacrifice of losing their memories of the last few years – in Bobby’s case, the particular sacrifice of returning himself to the closet for a large chunk of his life, something which was always inevitable if the time loop was ever going to be closed without making major changes to history – and generally do a story about putting duty or fate or whatever first. \u00a0That’s the emotional hook. \u00a0But it’s been done, and\u00a0Extermination<\/em>\u00a0doesn’t come up with anything much to replace it with, leaving it to fiddle around with the outstanding plot mechanics. \u00a0Not only that, the solution of how to get home is thrust upon the X-Men without their having much to do with it. \u00a0They have very little agency in this story, considering it’s primarily about them.<\/p>\n

There’s a shortage of personality more generally. \u00a0That’s not to say that there aren’t good moments. \u00a0The scene of the X-Men back in the Silver Age taking their places before wiping their memories, and then proceeding directly into their Silver Age Unus story as if nothing had happened – that’s played well. \u00a0But the twins seem to be nothing more than a plot device, and the character moments elsewhere feel incidental to the story. \u00a0The art plays the melodrama up respectably, though perhaps a little unrelentingly – there’s not much light and shade going on here.<\/p>\n

Generally, this feels like a story hamstrung by its remit of getting some plot out of the way, when the bit of the story with the most dramatic potential has already been covered somewhere else. \u00a0It’s an important series in as much as it finally closes off the time travel storyline, but it’s nothing great when judged as a story.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The thinking behind\u00a0Extermination might be called haphazard. \u00a0This is the story where the time-travelling original X-Men finally get removed from the board – they’re sent back to the Silver Age and the reset button is duly pressed, save that their adult counterparts now remember everything that happened while they were in the present. \u00a0The practical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-x-axis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4444"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4445,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4444\/revisions\/4445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}