Synopsis & Review by X-Mark. Thanks!
Synopsis: The X-Men are dead, Weapon X is stronger is ever… so let’s cut back to that hotel room whenever the hell it was (I’ve kind of lost track of the chronology). Zero walks in to see… Mesmero. Well, he was following Mesmero, it shouldn’t be too much of a shock. Also, Jackson, Chamber and Wildchild are hanging around, making fun of Zero, while random people fawn over Mesmero. He holds Zero’s gun to his forehead and dares him to pull the trigger, but he can’t do it. Mesmero explains that Jackson rescued him from the Neverland trucks and gave him the chance to regain his powers, his first new assignment to make Zero more “accommodating.” Jackson explains that Zero’s been working as a sleeper spy for Weapon X for a while, and that he killed the Neverland prisoners (hence the place being deserted, although it does specifically mention that some people were simply taken for reprogramming as Weapon X agents, which will doubtless be used to explain future mysterious survivals). Zero removes his mask and breaks down, so Mesmero puts him under again, thus wiping his memory of the event and negating the entire point of the scene. Fortunately, a Sentinel tears through the roof at this point.

13 Years From Now: Zero wakes up from his ‘nightmare’ (read: flashback) when Logan calls him to hire him for his new X-Men squad. Apparently, Zero got bored of pretending not to be Maverick. We then go through several one page scenes where Wolverine recruits his team; Deadpool while they kill people in Tijuana, Juggernaut at a strip club, Aurora (now a nun at Lourdes) by retriggering her schizophrenia, Sunfire in hospital with all body third degree burns after he went after a Sentinel plant by himself with malfunctioning powers, Mystique killing someone just because, and the only X-Man not present when they were all killed, Angel, who then ‘sheds his feathers’ and becomes the apparently tougher Archangel with metal wings, which doesn’t make much sense. Also, the X-Mansion now resides in Ottawa, and it appears the only supervillain Warren couldn’t defeat was male-pattern baldness.

14 Years From Now: Wolverine’s X-Men slaughter some random people at a Sentinel plant. That’s it.

19 Years From Now: Zero kills all of his new team-mates, to no-one’s real shock, and grapples with Wolverine. Eventually, though, Zero can’t kill Wolverine, instead blowing his own brains out. Malcolm is less than pleased, to say the least, but Bot points out that with every X-Man but one dead, the mission is a success. We also discover the consequences of his allowing Bot to starting producing Sentinels alone; now, “this unit is designated MasterMold.”

Review: As someone who can’t help noticing such things, this issue was something of a plot hole ridden mess. I would have thought, for example, that Mesmero’s death would have been enough to break his hold on Zero, but apparently not enough to stop him killing every X-Man except Logan, when it miraculously did break. Handy, that. Indeed, the stories behind the recruiting of those X-Men don’t make much sense either. Didn’t Archangel grow his feather wings under his metal wings? So now he had metal wings under the feather wings under the metal wings? It didn’t make that much sense to start with. And Chamber seems to happily be hanging around with Weapon X. Still hasn’t been explained what happened there. And now the Sentinels are taking over again. No idea how this one is going to play out, but we’ll see. All I know is that Mesmero was cool as hell in this issue, and why this is done posthumously is beyond me. But I have since started answering challenges with “Honestly, though, I’m Mesmero”. So on with issue 4.

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