As Nightcrawler is making sure to watch the backs of all his allies, Dr. Strange floats off and up to one of the castle towers. Inside, he finds a lavish room with the real Wanda playing with her kids. She greets him warmly and he wonders how she’s survived after her body fell apart outside. Oh, that’s just an extra body that she lets Magneto use to show off to the public. She never leaves her children alone. As he joins them in their playing, he asks if she remembers him. Of course she does, he was there for the birth of her children. She asks what brings him to Genosha. He says that she brought them there; she created Layla Miller to bring them. Wanda has no idea who that is. He figures she wouldn’t as she’s created so much lately. He wonders if she created her father as well. He heard of his death and strange resurrection before this big change happened. Was that her, and how long has she been changing things? She says she can’t understand all that she’s asking and one of her kids says that play time isn’t talk time. Strange apologizes, but says they don’t have much time. Their friends are fighting outside. Wanda looks to the wall in the direction of the fighting and deconstructs it just like her other body did in order to see the fires burning outside. She scoffs at this and says that no one should be fighting. All this was done so there would be no more fighting. Strange tries to ask how Magneto did all this, but she doesn’t appear to be listening as she says that “he” just wanted her and everyone to be happy. Is that what Magneto said, he asks. Wanda says it’s more complicated than that as one of the blocks from the wall float over and we see an image playing on them.

We flash back to the scene is issue 1 where Quicksilver is confronting his father about what the Avengers plan to do. This time, it continues after Quicksilver has collapsed to his knees and Magneto leaves. He is then told by a waking Wanda that he shouldn’t yell at their father like that. He asks if she heard, and she says yes, and she’s not going to fight them. Quicksilver tries to get her to agree to let him take her away or fight them for her, but she just tells him it’s over, it should have been over months ago. She asks if she’s a coward for knowing she should kill herself, but doesn’t want to. She can already hear Xavier in her head, so it’ll be over soon. Pietro begins to reminisce about how they never really had a chance to live the lives they wanted with the way they were raised and because of their father. He says they were supposed to be a family and great heroes. He liked being an Avenger more than he ever said. Wanda agrees, but look what she did to them. She’d do anything to take it back. After a moment, Pietro says she could. She could take it all back and make everyone happy. Wanda tries to tell him that she can’t control it, but he says he’d be there to help her, and she’d have Xavier’s mind inside her, and use her powers with his. There’s nothing she can’t do. They could have everything they deserve and give it to their friends and father as well. They’d be happy and wouldn’t bother them anymore. Again, she tries to tell him that she can’t, but he won’t listen. They became Avengers to change things for the better. Now she can change them and make it permanent. Why be given that power if she’s not going to use it? And if she doesn’t, they’ll kill her and they’ll never be together again.

The blocks fade away leaving Dr. Strange shocked at the realization that it wasn’t Magneto behind everything. It was Pietro. He talks to Emma, who’s been listening telepathically the whole time, to make sure she heard, and she quickly tells him to ask about Xavier. But before he can get the question out, Wanda falls to the floor with an arrow in her back.

In the garden, Emma just sensed this attack, but Layla is trying to warn her of something else. Magneto has just burst from behind Xavier’s memorial stone, demanding to know who they are and why they’re bothering his family. Before Emma can move Layla to safety, the young girl’s power flare and Magneto’s eyes glow green.

Back in the palace, Hawkeye gets ready to load another arrow. Wanda asks why he just shot her, but he’s irate that she even has to ask, as she deconstructs the arrow in her back, and gets back up. Clint says that he loved her and would kill for her. She says she loved him to, but he demands to know why he killed her then. She just tries to brush this off by saying she brought him back, but he says she doesn’t know what she’s done, and readies his arrow. One of her kids screams for him to shut up, and Hawkeye bursts into thousands of pieces. Wanda tries to say that she didn’t mean to do that, but she had to protect her kids. Strange tries to get her to listen to him, but she says she can’t control anything.

At the battle, Pietro is finishing off everyone by running around as fast as he can and seemingly knocking everyone out. Suddenly, a loud voice booms that this ends. Magneto floats in, incases everyone there in some metal, and demands to know what Pietro has done in his name. He tries to reason that they were going to kill her, but Magneto is too furious at this. He used both of them, he never would have allowed this. He says his son has destroyed everything and everyone, and uses his powers to large metal piece after piece flying at the body of his prone child, much to the horror of everyone present, saying he had no right to do that in his name. A large scream of “No” pierces the air as a crying Wanda floats down headed straight for her brother. She freezes Magneto, which cancels out his powers and releases everyone from their bonds. She then places a hand over her very bloody brother and restores him back to health. The X-Men wonder what they should do, but Emma doesn’t want them to do anything until Strange says so, because her mind is so messed up she can erase them in a blink and not even know she did it. She tells her father that Pietro only wanted to make him happy. He was right, he ruined them before they had a chance. Why would he treat his children like this? You think mutants deserve to rule, and that’s what they gave him, but look what he did with it. They gave him everything he ever wanted and he’s still a horrible man. They’re not gods. They’re freaks! Mutants! He chose violence over them and ruined it all. She begins to address he father again, and Emma picks up on something terrible. Then Wanda utters three simple words;

The mutants try to get their powers ready while Strange looks to be trying a spell, but the Scarlet Witch’s powers flare and the world goes white.

Review: Ho. Ly. Crap. I think that aptly describes that ending. But I’ll get to my major thoughts on that and upcoming stuff a little later. Still, amazingly good issue. The story really picked itself up and made the wait worthwhile. The big twist was nothing groundbreaking or amazingly surprising, I’m sure a lot of people guessed it from the beginning, but how it was done is the real story. The reveal of Quicksilver to be the mastermind behind this whole thing was, again, nothing that special, but it fit in perfectly with his character. Wanda is some of the only family he has left that he hasn’t burned bridges with, and he’d do anything for her. He’d made that clear from the moment he was introduced in this universe. Why wouldn’t he convince her to change the entire world to make them happy? Same thing goes for the characterization with Wanda. She thought she was doing something that was for the best, even in her fractured state of mind. I’ll have to say that this was probably the best that those two have been written in a long time. The best thing I liked about this is how, even though this lead up has been to make them the “bad guys”, you don’t really think of them as such. Their motives may have been a little selfish, but they set out to make everyone else just as happy as they were. It obviously didn’t work for everyone, but you can’t make everyone happy, and that’s where the big tragedy came in.

Now that I’ve talked about the kids, lets talk about the daddy. How great of a scene was it to see him just unleash himself? It may have been against one of my favorite characters, but I was none the less awed by it. From the choice of weapons, to the horrified looks on everyone else, it worked just perfectly. Everyone else, with what little time they had, worked as well. But Brian really could have toned it down with Rogue’s accent a notch. This goes for past issues as well.

With the art, I don’t think Coipel has been better. Probably the only drawback in this issue would be the having to use all the speech bubbles, but that’s kinda what you have to deal with when working with Bendis. The whole “deconstructing into blocks” was also well done, and kinda creepy, especially with what happened to Hawkeye. Speaking of creepy, here’s hoping Wanda’s kids stay gone. I also liked a lot of the cameos we saw in this issue. From Sauron, to Sasquatch, to possibly Lady Deathstrike looking like she was going after Wolverine. And was that supposed to be Revanche with that Psylocke like psi-dagger?

Now, onto the big news. No more mutants. Yeah, this has definitely caused quite a stir with many people talking on the subject. Well, here’s my take. (WARNING: talk of Decimation spoilers and this gets very rant-y and opinionated from here on.) Am I excited for this event? Hell no. I can kinda see both sides to the argument, so I’m gonna try and address both of them, but I’m warning you know that I know I won’t be unbiased throughout.

For one, I don’t buy into the whole argument that the mutant population has gotten too big. Frankly, there’s hardly been When Cassandra Nova killed 16 million mutants, they said it was about half they got rid of. So that means there was about that amount left. 16 million out of 6 billion is not that much. Do the math, and it doesn’t even come out to one percent. Plus, it’s not as if all of these mutants are popping up all the time, so I don’t see the need to get rid of all of them. I can see them wanting to get rid of some, and to a point, I agree, but leaving the population at only about 4% is just too much. I could understand leaving it at maybe 25%, but 4% or less is ridiculous. And it will be even less than that with Joe Q saying that only about a few hundred will be left. Sorry, but that isn’t a minority, that’s a small grouping. For them to be a minority, they need to be small, but they still need to have enough numbers to make some sort of an impact. If this was such a big deal, why did they let Morrison do this in the first place?

Now, I’m no major Morrison supporter, as some things did disappoint me, but he was able to evolve the characters and the theme much more than it had been in a long time. To do this, just completely spits in the face of it all. And this may even make future writers not even care about trying to do something to make a big change in the X-Men, if a few years down the line, they’re just gonna push the big reset button and undo all you tried to accomplish. Morrison left them with a plethora of possible directions to take the X books when he left, but they didn’t take any of them. They could have dealt with many things with mutants becoming slightly more prominent, like having a major mutant non-hero role model for kids, such as an actor or something, or maybe even put the first mutant in a major public office. So many storylines quashed with three little words. This can easily scream of laziness, lack of talent, ignorance, or all of the above. One of the other major themes of these books besides the whole minority feeling is evolution. And a big part of evolution is that the thing that is evolving will grow in number. The mutants were definitely growing in number, it just seems that they don’t know what to do with them.

With characters losing their powers and just plain disappearing, again, not totally for that either. Now I may come off as hypocritical here, as I definitely do not want some of my favorite characters to be depowered, but I don’t care. I am a fan, like everyone else reading this, and I have a right to voice my disapproval over certain characters just getting written off. Like before, I can understand certain characters being taken away. Be done with people like Beak and his wife and kids. He’s saved the day with the Exiles; make them human and let them live normal lives. Don’t get rid of characters like Jubilee and Chamber, who have vast amounts of untapped potential that can be used for so much in the future stories. That’s just serving to cut off some titles at the knees. Taking away all the second and third tier characters and just leaving all the main ones is too predictable and will pretty much lead to the same problems they have now.

Just looking at some of the previews for the post HOM issues, you can tell that there’s gonna be very few shakeups. The rosters are keeping the same team members, and all the writers are going to be staying the same. When you want to “restart” something, you’re gonna want to have fresh talent to take them into these new territories. Otherwise, you’re at major risk of falling back into the same patterns. Whedon was a great step towards the positive, and I’m still willing to give Milligan time to grow into the characters, but one thing just about everyone can agree on is Claremont is past his prime. Just about all of his stories since the reload have been nothing but rehashes of older plotlines with a couple new, but terribly bland, characters thrown into the mix. Another problem is there apparently won’t be any roster changes either. If they were really serious about this, they could knock off several main characters. But they won’t, they’ll keep all the ones that bring in the cash now, and knock off all others, even though they could have immense potential, just because they don’t rake in the dollar signs.

And speaking of characters losing their powers? Supposedly those who lose their powers, and those who just disappear completely are never ever coming back. Yeah, not gonna last. Yeah I said it. Remember, “We’re going to trim down the number of X-books”? Yeah. How about, “Dead means dead?” Well, Colossus and Psylocke sure look pretty animated and well maintained for a couple of corpses. And you can’t just make people disappear, they have to go somewhere. And readers are going to want to know where they went. Somewhere down the line, they will be back, or there will be some storyline that addresses it. Same thing goes for the depowering. If the fans want them back, they’ll be back with their powers intact. They can say that fans don’t really have a say in this stuff, but fans are the ones that buy the books, and if their decisions are based on those sales, then they’re gonna want to listen to them.

Yes, we have one issue left, and a lot can still happen, but things are looking pretty iffy for me. The initial hype over this will keeps figures similar to what they are now, and give some good initial stories, but unless they pull a serious rabbit out of their hat and make some amazing stories in the future, they’re just going to have the same problem they did before with bland stories, but with fewer characters to work with. Marvel’s gonna have to work hard to sell me on the fact that this could be good for the X books, because this looks to have some major impact on the X universe, because it doesn’t look like much of any other title will be caring about this, and it can easily fall to pot.