Synopsis & Review by X-Mark. Thanks!
Synopsis: Wolverine stands in a graveyard full of dead friends, such as Cyclops and Warbird. Then Sentinels burst out of the ground and start killing him. Wolverine runs away… and gets woken up by Juggernaut. Apparently Magneto was killed at some point between this issue and the last one. They run away as Sentinels round people up to be sent to the ‘Human Processing Centre’, despite Malcolm’s protests to Master Mold. As usual, the Sentinels have broadened their definition of ‘mutant’ to include everyone, and as usual, even cold calculating robot minds can be hypocritical with Madison Jeffries being kept alive. These pleasantries are interrupted by the remaining X-Men attacking Weapon X’s HQ, with many of them getting killed. Warren was best man at Logan’s wedding, apparently. Who knew?

Anyway, apparently Brent Jackson’s plan requires them all to die to work, with Fantomex being one of the survivors. Husk’s corpse is shown, and she looks very… different. And it seems even Exodus has managed to get himself drawn into this conflict. But these deaths are all necessary to rescue Rachel Summers, who was the prisoner in Room X, and apparently unable to escape even with the building being blown up around her. Weapon X has some mean security. The plan is for Rachel to send someone’s consciousness back in time to stop Wolverine slashing up Malcolm and so prevent Weapon X from ever getting off the ground in the first place.

Malcolm shows up with a pair of Sentinels and wastes Sasquatch, but then destroys the Sentinels and says he wants to help. Chamber, Malcolm and Jackson hold off the Sentinels while Rachel sends Logan into the past. Jackson and Colcord are killed off-panel while Fantomex shoots Cecilia Reyes (lot of unnecessary death here). Why do all the Weapon X alarms go ‘AAROOGA’? Seems like a strange noise for an alarm.

So Logan becomes his past self and tries to escape without killing anyone. But Fantomex reveals that he is Sublime, having possessed Fantomex after he was shot back in #1. He then possesses Wolverine, forcing him to slash up Colcord, only to get kicked out by Logan’s healing factor. This apparently leaves him trapped in the past, until a Dr. Sublime runs after Wolverine and trips over Malcolm, falling face first into the pool of black stuff that is Sublime. Thus Sublime possesses Sublime and starts off the entire Weapon X saga again.

Review: Well, that wraps it up. Oddly, for a limited series that existed only to clear away the dangling plot threads left by Weapon X’s cancellation, it seems like Tieri gave up around #2 and just decided to see how much time he could cover in what was left. Again this issue has an annoyingly large number of deaths that either happened off-panel or happened for no reason. After last issue I expected Magneto to be a focus here, but instead he was mentioned in one line in the entire issue, which was a pain (especially since the recap page features a picture of him).

Despite the logical inconsistencies in the ending (did Sublime take his name from the doctor, or was he always called Sublime (as Morrison implied) and just happened to run into someone also called Sublime?), I admit that I liked it, and that was surprising as I usually detest predestination paradoxes. It finally brought things to a conclusion with Sublime’s re-emergence, and gave the series the proper ending it never really got. And so it seems that Weapon X draws to an end. This limited series hasn’t been exactly what I expected, but going off on a long and epic storyline in a setting where there was no real need to worry about continuity was a rather refreshing change of pace. Since no effects have been left on the standard timeline, it works as an alternative, and could have been really great had the series been twice as long as it was. The result was a rather rushed but original and mostly entertaining limited series that showed how Weapon X could be a really important influence on the X-Universe, rather than being relegated to the background as it sometimes has been.

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