Excalibur is having one of its better months. 

What this means, in practice, is that there are actual signs of direction, and characters finally seem to be reacting to the world around them in a somewhat sensible manner.  Odd and plainly implausible aspects of the environment finally seem to merit some comment.  This helps matters tremendously, since it makes these oddities seem like deliberate parts of the story rather than contrived set-ups which everyone's supposed to take at face value.  (Even if they are just contrived set-ups, at least it helps to disguise them.)

Magneto has returned from Avengers Disassembled with the comatose Scarlet Witch in tow, triggering a helpful six page flashback to fill in readers on relevant material.  Normally I'd tend to say that six pages of flashback in one issue is a bit much, but to be fair, a lot of this stuff comes from the backwaters of X-Men continuity - out-of-print Classic X-Men back-up strips from twenty years ago and so forth - so there's a better than usual justification for restating it at length.  Anyhow, Magneto has suddenly decided that he's going to have a go at being the good father, all of which seems a touch out of character for him.  But then, he's acting out of character generally in this series.  There's something nicely inappropriate about him reading Tolkein to his comatose daughter; the scene actually works better than you might think.

Meanwhile, rather than being slung in jail, the Dark Beast has been put to work on hunting down supplies with the captive Magistrates.  We're basically being invited to accept that all these villains have decided to pragmatically do as Xavier tells them, which is perhaps a bit of a stretch.  I can buy it from the Dark Beast, who's more of a pragmatist.  I find it a bit harder to swallow when it comes to the Magistrates - irrational hatred is their schtick, after all, so you'd have thought appeals to common sense might not work so well.  In fact, this bunch seem to be a surprisingly mellow bunch of Magistrates - one of them is actively trying to pull the Beast.  That stretches credibility a little too far, especially as this is the first we've really seen of her.  If she's that open-minded about inhuman-looking mutants, what the heck is she doing in the Magistrates to begin with?

This reads suspiciously like a story which isn't meant to be a three-parter at all, and has been lumbered with a "part 2 of 3" label on the basis of an automatic policy.  It certainly works better if you just take it as part of an open-ended series. 

It also helps that this issue focusses mainly on the more interesting cast members, and Claremont seems to have some reasonably decent ideas on what to do with the Dark Beast as an unreliable ally.  Still some credibility gaps, but it's moving in the right direction.  Overall, not bad.

Rating: B

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