A couple of points before we get underway this week.

First of all, we're finally starting to see signs of the X-books thinning out.  Okay, so there are five X-books this week.  But one of them is the penultimate issue of District X (albeit that there's the Mutopia X miniseries to follow).  One is the penultimate issue of Excalibur before it goes on hiatus for several month.  And one is the antepenultimate issue of Gambit.  Come to think of it, even Astonishing X-Men is going on hiatus between seasons.  Why, it's almost as if the line is getting back to a sensible size again in the near future.  Although, knowing Marvel, they'll probably just launch another five titles in the aftermath of House of M and things will be as bad as ever.

Secondly, I have spent the day nursing a blinding hangover, so if it looks like I'm skipping over some of this stuff, that'll be why.  On the bright side, I suppose it's the ideal frame of mind to review Desolation Jones. 

Anyhow.  Astonishing X-Men reaches part 4 of "Dangerous", and it's a big fight scene.  Whedon's big idea here is that the Danger Room, now transformed into a robot, has a big advantage over the X-Men because it's fought them so many times before.  So we get the usual routines where the villain counters the heroes' normal attacks, and the heroes try to catch the villain off guard by changing their style.  Fortunately, this time round common sense prevails, and shifting styles gets the X-Men absolutely nowhere.  With the X-Men duly sidelined, the Danger Room flies off to Genosha in order to fight Professor X.

I can kind of see where Whedon is coming from here.  The Danger Room was built to fight the X-Men, it's always been held back by its programming, and so it's very frustrated.  This makes reasonable sense.  But is it really enough to justify a six part storyline?  It also runs into an assortment of practical problems.  For example, we're meant to accept the logical corollary - that Xavier has an advantage over the Danger Room because he never actually trained in it.  But hasn't Xavier always been largely useless against robots?  Besides, won't Magneto just rip the robot apart before the battle even gets going?  (After all, he's just down the corridor.)

The Danger Room robot hasn't been very well established as a threat, unfortunately.  It apparently wants to kill Xavier, but it's less than clear why it didn't just kill the X-Men as well - save for the obvious practical consideration that the characters aren't disposable.  It's also one of those awkward stories where a villain sets out to do something nasty to the X-Men but is satisfied by simply beating up the cast of this particular title and ignoring the other two thirds of the roster.

On the plus side, of course, there's some nice snappy dialogue, particularly in the subplot  scenes with SWORD.  There's a couple of interesting moments with Emma Frost.  And while action scenes aren't really John Cassaday's forte - he's more of a "delicate beauty" kind of artist - it's still a magnificently drawn issue.  It looks great, and the art alone justifies at least a decent rating.  For that matter, as fight scenes go, this one's perfectly sound.  But there are definite problems with this storyline - expectations have understandably been raised high for this book, and the core idea of this arc just seems a little bit weak.

Rating: B

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