It's robots.
Originally Published August 1976
Stephen Lang is exceptionally pleased with himself, crowing that his X-Robots will soon destroy the new X-Men and pave the way for the total extermination of mutantkind -- you know, unless the new X-Men are in fact a superior fighting force to the previous X-Men, with stronger battle-ready powers and more of a killer instinct, or if Stephen Lang sucks at making robots, which he himself already admitted. But I'm sure this will prove to be a master-stroke.
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| Hard to tell who he's rooting for here. It's a real CFL Rough Riders situation. |
The New X-Men, for their part, seem confused as to why they're fighting their former comrades (For the second time in a few weeks, for Havok and Polaris) apparently missing the fact that creating robots is Lang's "thing" and the fake X-Men were given jagged "electronic" speech balloon tails on the splash page. It's like they're not even reading along.
The battle is pretty chaotic with both sides getting good shots in...
Including the very first Fastball Special:
But gradually we the readers are tipped off that these aren't really the for-real actual former X-Men, like how Beast isn't furry, and Cyclops' visor is wrong (and we, like, just saw him.) "Jean" claims not to know Storm despite the "hours" they've spent training together (between issues 97 & 98 I suppose?) Also Angel calls Banshee a crook even though Xavier had him flipped at the end of his first appearance, so like, that's a goof for Stephen Lang.
Anyway, Wolverine gets a psychic double-team from "Xavier" and "Jean", which is when his animal senses kick in and tell him these two smell like robots:
Lang, watching from the control room where he has placed Cyclops, Jean, Xavier and Cobeau back in glass tubes of captivity (good to know some things never change), is extremely put-out that his master-ish stroke has turned out to be a dud. He reflects on how he was originally hired to research why mutants exist, but really struck a deal with a Secret Board of Shadowy Figures to help them weaponize mutations, but he really just wanted to kill all the mutants - and it's like, dude, now is not the time for a monologue because you are losing hard.
See?
Lang's big move is to pull a Count Nefaria and fly his one-man gunship around the base, but he can't even crash properly since he doesn't manage to take any X-Men with him.
The Flesh and Blood X-Men regroup and retreat to Corbeau's ship, but the system's damaged so they can't plot a flight pattern and also they have a giant hole in the ship. There's also the massive solar flare that they would have needed the computer to navigate, so that's pretty bad. To sum up:
But...
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| Get you a girl who can... |
Jean absorbs Corbeau's pilot knowledge and says she can use her telekinesis to protect the ship. She knocks Cyclops out to stop him from arguing, cusses out Wolverine, and says a tearful goodbye to Storm (her best friend for many hours now.) Everyone who is not a powerful telekinetic mutant is locked in the protective life-cell...
So Jean begins her wild radiation-soaked psychedelic space journey, taking her powers beyond their limit and...
Further Thoughts:
Up until the last few pages, this issue was not so great. I'm not sure if we weren't supposed to know the X-Sentinels were robot fakes, but the fact that they waited so long to explain it makes me think we weren't. The X-Men kind of seem silly for not figuring it out, but I do like that they are later shown handily dismantling the robots on the screen in the background of Lang's freakout, once they realize they can go rough.
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| This wasn't the tipoff? |
Stephen Lang also sucked as the villain, and the entire premise was just to get the shocker cover page for the "big 100th issue" showdown like it was a 1950s DC comic where the cover was created first as a challenge to the writer.
The best thing you can say about Lang is that his Sentinels never turned on him. Yes, they were shoddy knockoffs and absolutely nothing about his plan worked, but at least he avoided that particular cliche.
That said, the last few pages are terrific, ultimately a classic iconic moment in X-History. Several elements that had been teed up in previous issues (the damage to the spaceship, the solar flare, Jean's increased powers) converge, and pave the way for a big, big payoff. So, as a means to an end, it all works out. I love the position the characters are put in, where there is truly only one way out, but it doesn't feel like the writer is artificially forcing them to come to that conclusion - the creators have done their job exceedingly well to get here.
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