With Chris Claremont ready to get back to work, New Excalibur #15 completes Frank Tieri's extended run of fill-ins. 

This is an awkward situation for any writer to find himself in, since obviously you can't just drag the book in a completely different direction.  For that matter, you're pushing your luck if you even try to advance the ongoing storylines, unless you have a clear idea of the regular writer's plans.  For the most part, Tieri has quite sensibly taken the line of focussing attention on a guest star, in the form of the Black Knight, and avoiding anything that bears too closely on Chris Claremont's interrupted plots.

However, the three-part "Unredeemed" ends up falling into a slightly different category.  This is a Juggernaut story, providing Tieri's spin on how Chuck Austen reformed the character and made him a hero.  Tieri's always been drawn to the villains, and he doesn't seem entirely happy with the Juggernaut's transformation.  After all, this is a character who's gone from being an A-list supervillain to a depowered generic strongman, and whose personality has been re-fitted as "loveable dumb lummox."  He is, in almost every sense, a shadow of his former self.  In confronting that, Tieri has hit on a good point.

Ironically, of course, the Juggernaut arc was one of the few elements of Chuck Austen's run that was fairly well received.  The Juggernaut had essentially been emasculated for years before.  He was a character you wheeled out just so that new characters could prove how powerful they were by beating him.  He'd even been farmed out to the Malibu Ultraverse as a hero in the largely forgotten All-New Exiles, arguably the most obscure X-book ever.  The days of the Juggernaut as a threatening villain who did genuinely nasty things were long in the past.

So the project here is to point out that Juggernaut has rather more to atone for than previous stories have made out, and to flag that up as a problem for his teammates.  On top of that, Tieri wants to play with the idea that on some level, Juggernaut desperately wants to go back to being an A-list character, and is rather easily tempted by any offers.

In theory, this is all very good stuff.  In practice it doesn't quite come off as well as it should, but it's still by no means bad.  There's something a little off about the pacing, and the ending feels a little flat.  The rest of the team have to be occupied with squabbling subplots that lead to very little.  And for some reason Tieri decides to give the Juggernaut a new atrocity in his back story, which seems a bit gratuitous and actually does make the character retroactively worse than he was to start with.  That doesn't quite work for me - the story would have been better working within the existing parameters of the character, rather than redefining them simply in order to hammer the point home.

But for all that, it's still a fundamentally strong idea for a story, and it does make its point perfectly well.  Unexpectedly, it ends in a way that Chris Claremont will pretty much have to deal with upon his return, and I can only assume that this plays into his existing plans somehow or other.  And despite the crashing lack of subtlety with the Juggernaut's additional back story, Tieri wisely holds back from just claiming that he's just an irredeemable villain at heart.  Rather, the point is that he doesn't feel he's redeemed himself, and he's awfully easy to manipulate into doing things that he immediately regrets. 

It's an interesting take on the character, and to be honest, it actually makes him more interesting.  There's a lot wrong with this story, but at its core, it's got something to say about the character, and it turns out to be worth saying.

Rating: B

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