STORY: "The Last Morlock Story" (22 pages)
Mikhail and Callisto go to the Morlocks tunnels. Mikhail instals himself as the Morlocks' leader, and seemingly kills himself and all the Morlocks in a mass suicide, despite the X-Men's efforts to stop him.

What you need to know:
Mikhail kills everyone. Well, actually, he doesn't - Cable #15 reveals that he actually teleported them somewhere else, and the Storm miniseries (of which the less said the better) establishes that it's a bizarre dimension in which they all fight to reach the top of a hill in a bad allegory. A few renegade Morlocks also continue to crop up in the tunnels. So much for Scott Lobdell's attempt to write the Morlocks out, then.

Jean Grey delivers a moving, and entirely wrong, speech in which she tells Archangel that his wings don't have a seperate personality after all (even though previous stories showed pretty clearly that they did). A quite dreadful attempt to sweep a perfectly good and rather interesting plot under the carpet, but unfortunately it's been allowed to stand.

In a particularly staggering scene, Callisto loses a fist-fight to Professor X, a paralysed man in a daze. Not her finest hour.

The young Marrow is one of the Morlocks who leave Earth in this issue. She's not actually in any of the panels, but that's nobody's going to think her up for another couple of years. But through the wonders of retroactive continuity, she's in there somewhere.

Comments:
Oh dear. Never liked this one. Aside from being part of the not very good Morlock story, it drives a coach and horses through the long running subplot about Archangel's wings. Early Lobdell issues do read like something of a deck clearing exercise - there goes Hiro, there goes Forge, Mikhail gets chucked out the window, the Morlocks all die, and here an axe gets taken to a dangling subplot with scant regard for what had come before. This storyline is really best left to the completists. Lobdell seems to have had some interesting ideas about Mikhail and Callisto's motivations, but that's about the best that can be said.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (next in Marvel Comics Presents #117-118, then in X-Men vol 2 #12-13), Archangel, Bishop, Colossus, Jean Grey, Iceman and Storm

VILLAINS
Callisto, Mikhail Rasputin and the Morlocks (all next in flashback in issue #374)
Thornn II (behind the scenes; last in X-Force vol 1 #11; next in Cable #15)
Sarah --- (the young Marrow; behind the scenes in her chronologically earliest appearance, as one of the Morlocks in this story; next in flashback in issue #347)

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