Writing: Larry Hama
Art: Lenil Francis Yu
What Went Down: In the middle of the desert, a blind nomad is approached by the tired and ragged X-Men who are on the run from Operation Zero Tolerance. The blind man invites them to his fire and explains that his name is Mustang and he’s a pilot that was gravely injured preventing a plane from crashing into an airshow crowd. He is in the desert taking part in a study that might repair his eyes, kidneys, and legs, all conducted by a Dr. Prospero. The surrounding trailers are full of people with similar injuries that just want a chance to have their handicaps fixed. Mustang is also able to deduce that the group is made up of mutants. After everyone goes to sleep, Wolverine sneaks off to check out the clinic where these treatments are occurring.
In the morning, the X-Men confront Mustang about the true
purpose of the clinic. Using her powers,
Jean lets Mustang “see” what Wolverine saw the previous night: a lab full of
Sentinel parts. Jean explains that the
Prime Sentinels are sleeper agents activated when they come in contact with
mutants and all the people in the camp are being turned into them.
All of a sudden an aircraft appears in the distance. The X-Men know it is from OZT scanning for mutants,
but Mustang is able to hide them in an underground compartment originally
designed for smuggling immigrants.
Mustang then wanders off to tell the rest of the community what he has
just learned. At the same time Bastion tells one of his members to activate the
Sentinels. And randomly, we end on a
scene of Robert Kelly talking to his wife at her grave. He wonders aloud if he
should stand up to Zero Tolerance, then resolves that it’s the right thing to
do. Kelly tells Gyrich to get in touch
with G.W. Bridge of SHIELD.
How It Was:
After two issues of barely surviving the Prime Sentinels, the X-Men get
a little bit of a breather to actually learn something about the storyline. Sure the reveal of Prime Sentinels as
unwilling cyborgs isn’t a huge revelation, but at least it’s an answer; Bastion
has been appearing in X-Men comics since before Onslaught and we never learn
who or what he is in this story.
Probably the best moment occurs during the first-person scenes of
Wolverine uncovering the lab; seeing Wolverine tear up a wall from his
perspective is a neat visual.
The story really centers on Mustang, who isn’t anything to
write home about. He’s a one-dimensional
nice guy whose only purpose is to instill sympathy in the reader by putting a
face to the victims of Operation Zero Tolerance, although you could argue that
particular role should be held by the mutants being persecuted by OZT. He’s background is so cliché, and it’s hard
to believe he can figure out the X-Men’s identities when he didn’t even realize
the government was turning him into a killer robot. You can tell from the first page that you’ll
never see him again in another Marvel comic, but he’s inoffensive in a dull,
one-note sort of way.
The Robert Kelly scene at the end comes a little out of
nowhere; I want to say that this plotline belonged in X-Men, but really it was
only tertiary in that book as well. It
is redundant considering all the other conversations Gyrich and Kelly have had
in other X-books, but readers of just Wolverine would have needed this to make
heads or tails out of the ending.
This book is set up for the end of the story, which is fine
enough. What should’ve happened is that
the Wolverine book would be responsible for stopping the Sentinels and the
X-Men book would stop Bastion, but that doesn’t quite happen. Everything in OZT just lacks focus and
direction; there doesn’t really seem to be an end game for the team in the Wolverine
book. Still, this is definitely more
coherent and less formulaic than the rest of the issues in Operation Zero
Tolerance, so I’m not hating it.
C+
