Well, it was only a matter of time before somebody did a butterfly effect story in Exiles.  It's an alternate reality series, so you can get away with doing the sort of world-changing events that are needed to sell the premise.

The joke here is pretty straightforward.  The Exiles arrive on a completely normal Earth, and their remit is to buy a danish pastry.  They have no idea why.  They buy it, shrug their shoulders, and move on.  Cue several pages of unlikely chain reaction built on a string of coincidences explaining why that mattered.  You'd never get away with this kind of plotting in a normal story, but because the whole point is a freak series of events being played for comedy, it slides through.

I could live without the Exiles spending a couple of pages standing around discussing the butterfly effect, though.  It's not that difficult a concept, at least to the extent that you need to grasp it for purposes of this story.  Obviously the Exiles need to say something about the possibility of a chain reaction if they're going to discuss whether to fulfil a seemingly pointless mission from an authority they no longer trust.  But actually having them stand around discussing the butterfly effect, in those terms, is beating the reader over the head.  It's a butterfly effect story, we get it.

There's also a slightly awkward bit of pacing where the story has to jump back in order to set up the chain reaction after the Exiles have left.  It would have worked better by just intercutting the Exiles with the other scenes; the time jump breaks up the flow a bit.

Still, it's a nice enough little story, and Mizuki Sakakibara has a suitably light touch on the art.  Good fun.

Rating: B+

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