Writing: Mark Waid
Art: Andy Kubert
What Went Down: Continuing from the cliffhanger last issue, Gambit is charging the front car of a runaway train with explosive energy while Bishop yells at him for being crazy. Gambit reveals that his plan is to have Bishop absorb all of the energy until he has enough to release and stop the train. Somehow this actually works, but it leaves both heroes weakened so that Mr. Sinister can easily knock them out.
In South Carolina, Rogue rents an apartment from a single mother; the woman’s son tries to touch her, and she panics. On TV a news report discusses the runaway train with possible mutants witnessed at the scene. The woman comments about how awful mutants are, and Rogue regretfully agrees with her.
At the train station, police are interviewing all of the formerly mutated humans. A shadowy figure in a trenchcoat and hat walks by, and all the cops refer to him as an important government figure named Bastion.
In Sinister’s underground lab, the X-Men are all elaborately restrained. Sinister explains that he was using the train to test the effectiveness of his new mutant virus which creates minions for his disposal. He is also excited because he finally has Bishop in his possession. You see, because Bishop comes from the future, Sinister has no genetic records of him at all. And since Sinister has collected samples of every other genetic mutant ever, that just won’t do.
Sinister has a machine that projects thoughts, so he’s going to use it to learn Bishop’s origins. Dark Beasts panics because he knows that this test will show that he’s not the real Beast, and reveal to Sinister all his secrets from the Age of Apocalypse. Sinister learns about Bishop’s time traveling, the X-traitor, and the Age of Apocalypse while Beast insists that Gambit free them. Beast also notices that Sinister takes an interest in Gambit’s health when Gambit pretends to be coming down with the virus.
As Sinister approaches him, Gambit releases a charged card and blows up the machine, thus freeing his friends and destroying all of Sinister’s samples. The X-Men defeat Sinister in about two pages, and he teleports away. As they walk away, Gambit tells the group that they are just outside of St. Louis. Dark Beast picks up on this and realizes that Gambit must have a connection to Sinister. Rather than tell the X-Men, he decides to keep this information to himself for future use.
How It Was: First off, I’m no physics expert, but I’m ninety percent sure that Gambit’s plan wouldn’t have a chance in hell of working, due to the fact that the locomotive’s engine is continuously running, so any attempt to introduce an equal opposing force would be negated once Bishop’s energy was depleted. Then again, it’s a comic book about people with genetic anomalies that give them super powers, so I guess I don’t have a lot of grounds to judge it on realism.
How much does it suck to be Dark Beast? Getting captured by the one person you’re trying to hide from on your first mission with the X-Men has to be frustrating. Anyways, Bishop gets something of a resolution to his months long beat of hallucinating about the Age of the Apocalypse. After having his experiences confirmed by Sinister, Bishop is finally able to come to terms with them, and they’re rarely ever mentioned again. It’s not the most satisfying conclusion, but hey, at least it’s something.
The dialogue between Rogue and her racist landlord is some of the worst to ever appear in an X-Men comic. Not only is it an unflattering portrayal of people in South Carolina (“Don’t tell me I’ve done rented to a mutant lover?”), showing yet another human that hates mutants a lot doesn’t really add anything to the story.
There’s also some more cryptic hinting at Gambit’s relationship with Sinister, but most of this is for the benefit of the Dark Beast so he can figure it out on his own. He says that he plans on using this information to his advantage someday, but again he’s going to be disappearing in a couple of issues and the plot point will fade away with him. Sinister’s reaction to capturing Bishop is well-handled, and the fact that Bishop would be his missing link is a nice touch. In fact, the conflict is really well-constructed in that all three mutants have secrets that they don’t want Sinister to discover or share, so the plot is a little more engaging than your standard “captured by a mad scientist” plotline.
An event that should feel more significant is the destruction of Sinister’s life’s work, a collection of every mutant’s genetic samples, by Gambit. Of course, it would be easier to get excited about if it hadn’t already happened a year ago in X-Men #34, and afterwards Sinister just said that he had duplicates. And yeah, this time Sinister is around to agonize about the loss and lash out at the X-Men, but this only lasts for a page until he’s blasted by Bishop and teleports away. This is a pretty easy victory for the X-Men as far as Sinister goes; usually he puts up more of a fight.
While a nice aside, in the long run this two issue story just doesn’t feel that significant. Sure it resolves Bishop’s whining about the Age of Apocalypse, and it features the Dark Beast and Gambit coming into contact with Sinister, but the story just rushes to the end and neither of the villains do anything with the new information they’ve gathered. After all, Sinister had gained knowledge of the future while Dark Beast knew of the villain’s relationship with Gambit, so something could’ve come of this.
B-
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