The X-Men make their last stand against the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle!
Originally Published June 1980
When we last left off in Uncanny X-Cerpts...
Wow! Unbelievable! What could happen next?? Let's get to it...
Well, fair enough, Kurt isn't a doctor. How's he supposed to know?
Even so, the X-Men are in rough shape. They've been overwhelmed by the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle - dangerous superhumans themselves - with Jean Grey, the team's heaviest hitter, being brainwashed into joining the megalomaniacal Hellfire Club in their bid for world domination, as Jason Wyngarde's (aka Mastermind's) saucy, lingerie-clad mistress. It seems like as near-total of a defeat the X-Men have ever faced.
Just when things look their absolute bleakest, there's a commotion out in the hall, and...
Yes! It turns out Wolverine was not totally beaten into submission by club-wielding cosplay-fops in last month's issue, he managed to fight his way through to the Inner Circle's private chamber for Round Two. But what difference could one little beclawed Canadian runt make against the elite villains of the Hellfire Club?
As it turns out, seeing Wyngarde "kill" Scott was the wake-up call Jean needed to break free of his psychic hold. In the commotion, she secretly unlatches Cyclops' power-blocking mask and enables him and the other X-Men to escape their bondage. Now that they know what they're up against the X-Men are able to adjust their fighting style aptly:
While Nightcrawler and Storm corner Shaw, Colossus and Pierce the racist robot slug it out and Wolverine settles the score with the curvaceous Leland in an iconic moment:
As the storm rages on outside, we finally get that blackout Wolverine set up a few issues ago when he slashed the power cables in the storm sewer. It doesn't come to much, but in the cover of darkness, Jean finds Mastermind, who had been Using his Illusion to make pretend he was part of the wall. As you can imagine, Jean finds it hard to hold a candle for him in the cold November Rain, and demands he Get in the Ring.
Under interrogation, Jason explains that his illusion powers were augmented by a technological mind-tap designed by Emma Frost that he wears conveniently around his neck.
By way of ironic retribution for this mindfuckery, Jean offers Jason his heart's fondest desire... magnified tenfold: she uses her Godlike psychic abilities to cause Jason to become one with the infinite oceanic psyche of the cosmos, giving him a maddening glimpse into eternity no mortal was ever meant to have.
He takes it well.
Shaw and Pierce manage to get away, swearing revenge. With the Hellfire Club soundly trounced, the X-Men make their getaway, seeing as the police are en route and they'll probably interpret the scene as a harmless club of innocent job-creators being attacked by dangerous mutant terrorists. Before the X-Men's ship can get very far, Jean has a little something to say to the group:
Oh, and one more thing:
Further Thoughts:
Notice the title of this one - it is indeed too late, not because the Hellfire Club has won, but because Jean's dark side has been unleashed, with all the wicked impulses she never let herself feel before - and there's no un-ringing that bell.
Did Jean go bad because of Mastermind's manipulations? Or was Jean's fragile stste, overwhelmed by her newfound abilities, merely create an opening to where she was headed anyway, as had been hinted in recent stories? I love that it's ambiguous, but I definitely have a side here. To me, the heart of the Dark Phoenix story is that Jean has been toyed with by a man whose reach exceeded his grasp - she makes him pay the price, and now she has overcorrected by asserting herself in a way she has resisted until now, partly because of what Jason has awakened in her.
As an issue about the X-Men overcoming the Hellfire Club, this story is immensely enjoyable, but what's even better is how it escalates. What seems like the culmination of a story about the X-Men fighting battling some villains turns out only to be the middle part of a very long story that's been playing out before our very eyes for months - years, really - about the battle for one woman's soul, between control and madness, goodness and temptation.
Amidst everything, we also see the superhero fight has registered on the Avengers' scanner - and the only Avenger on duty tonight is former X-Man Beast, who had previously offered to join his friends on their excursion to Muir Isle. What he will do with this information remains to be seen.
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