"The Gift Part 2"
by Chris Claremont and Paul Smith
Talisman chases after Kitty and Rachel and admires the landscape. After a while Kitty pops up and Lockheed has found the still scared and confused Rachel about Madelyne having a baby boy, meaning she'll probably never exist. Kitty then manages to finally comfort her and then the cave starts to collapse. They all use their powers and manage to bring themselves into safety and decide to return to the others, but find it all very suspisicous. At the diner party, Madelyne gets informed about the injured Wolverine and heals him from his wounds and animal personality. Kitty goes over to tell him what she found out, but Logan hesitates now to do something about it. He thinks it's because his animal instincts are no more due to Madelyne's healing. But anyhow, Kitty can convince him to at least go check it out and he takes Aurora and Lockheed with him. They find a cave and Logan tells Aurora to go tell the others, and he enters it and finds a deadly injured Snowbird, who's almost dead.
Then, some of the transformed coworkers of Madelyne show up and challenge Wolverine to come out or else they'll have to take him too, but Logan says he won't go without a fight. Lockheed's ready too. Inside at the party, Rogue shows up dressed up and asks Northstar for a dance but he doesn't want to. After a laugh from Sasquatch he accepts, but not with happiness. While they have their "fun", Heather, Puck and Xavier watch from the sidelines and talk about what to do. Meanwhile, it is also revealed that Loki is behind it all. We skip over to the God of Lies himself who wonders why they just won't accept his gift.
Then Wolverine returns with his defeated foes and killed one of them, Pathfinder, and with Snowbird and Shaman. The group now finally understands what's going on, and argue begins on what to do. The group gets split up from one side who wants to sacrifice all the magicians and another group who don't want to do that. The fight rampages on for a lot of pages, and then Loki shows up real angry and disappointed. He tries to convince the group to accept his gift nontheless, but nobody really wants to now and put up a fight, while Loki still tries to convince them. A fight begins, but then another of Madelyne's coworkers get injured and almost dies. Loki robs them all from their superpowers, but as Madelyne sees her friend dying, Loki can convince her to aid him in convincing the others to accept his gift and he'll give Madelyne her healing powers back, she agrees and rescues her friend. The heroes then don't see no other choice but to accept, but then all the Asgardian Gods appear, very angry.
They explain to Loki he won't get a gift from their side either, as for Loki should have only accepted the fact that the humans wouldn't accept Loki's gift. But since he tried to force them, they won't go on with their deal. Loki gets very angry and wants to put up a fight, but the Gods can calm him down. Loki then robs all of them from their new powers and brings everybody to their normal state again to were they were from all this started, and then disappears. The teams depart in their planes, but not with Northstar. Now that his sister has chosen to become so different then he is, he finds no great reason to stay with Alpha Flight and flies seperately towards his own way.
Review: As far as this story goes, I only REALLY enjoyed the appearance of Loki, and making him the villain instead of the so-maniest "new villain" that's just created for a LS and never used ever again later on. So, Loki was interesting. The way how the Gods treated him and handled the situation and not handing over his gift, is really great and kinda logic, if you think about it. Gifts should come from the heart and accepted with joy and own will, otherwise it just doesn't work. That's my opinion, at least. But then again this LS has an ending that makes this story kinda interesting for the Alpha Flight fans: Northstar leaves the team at the end, so that should be somesort of a legendary issue. Even for the X-Men fans, making the fact that Madelyne is pregnant of baby Cable.
Things are taken care off real nicely by Claremont so that fans are eager to find out by themselves by reading these issues. But I guess those were the only good things about it, for the rest there's nothing more that was interesting enough to talk about. Beside the possiblity of a relationship between Northstar and Rogue that is, almost forgot that. It was realy cool to see those two bonding and almost kissing, I now really want Rogue back on Uncanny to see what they'll do about it. Probably Chuck doesn't know about this, but one may never know. Guess time will only tell.