STORY: "Early Frost" (22 pages)  Emma refuses to believe the X-Men when they tell her that the Hellions are dead, and she flees to the New York headquarters of Frost Enterprises, only to learn that the X-Men are telling the truth. She collapses in despair, and is taken in again by the X-Men.

What you need to know:
Emma is stuck in Bobby's body throughout this story, and for some reason she is much better at using his superhuman powers than he has ever been. This flies in the face of the general convention in such stories (in fact, the X-Men comment on it too), and suggests that Bobby has been seriously underperforming all this time.

This story establishes Emma's sense of duty and responsibility towards the Hellions far more clearly than had been shown before. Earlier stories had hovered between this line and the suggestion that she was manipulating the team for her own benefit (although of course they aren't mutually exclusive). The point of this, of course, is to soften the character sufficiently to allow her to serve as one of the mentors of Generation X. The prominent and appearance of the Banshee is obviously another part of the set-up for the new title.

Bishop's sister Shard appears for the first time in this story (although we'd seen her before in a dream scene). Bishop claims that he killed her. This is finally resolved in XSE #4, which shows that Bishop didn't actually kill her at all, but simply feels responsible for her death at the hands of Emplates. He had her mind downloaded onto disc before she died. It can be inferred from subsequent stories that he carried the disc with him at all times (the only logical reason why he would have had it with him when he came back to the present) and that he has now used the Danger Room technology to bring her back to "life" as a hologram. Dialogue in this story, however, very strongly suggests that Shard is a duplicate programmed by Bishop. Evidently there has been a continuity rewrite here.

Shard confirms that Jubilee is known as "the last X-Man" in her time, but also says that nobody knows why.

Comments:
The main purpose of this story is to re-establish Emma Frost as a credible mentor for Generation X (as well as developing Lobdell's ongoing subplot about Iceman not using his powers properly), and it certainly succeeds as far as that's concerned. Emma's grief at finally learning of the Hellions' deaths, months after the fact, is well played, and the fact that her beloved students died when Xavier's New Mutants survived makes her wholesale ditching of many of her beliefs reasonably credible. The generally grim tone of the story is helped no end by the unusual fill-in art of Lee Weeks and Bill Sienkiewicz. It's hard to see this one playing as well with Madureira drawing it.

Flaws... well, some of the set-up for Generation X is rather obvious, with the Banshee playing a prominent role for no apparent reason other than that he's going to be in the new series as well. Bishop's bare statement that he killed his sister, without any further explanation, is melodramatic in the extreme. I also have grave reservations about Xavier's closing speech, in which he swears that no innocent blood will be spilt in the X-Men's battles again - a plainly ridiculous promise, since nobody can possibly believe it's within his powers to achieve that. Overall, though, a pretty good story.

It's also the last conventional X-Men story for several months, as everything goes on hold for the Generation X launch. But first, there's an annual, and a month to kill...

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X and Storm (both next in Uncanny X-Men Annual #18)
Archangel (next in Cable #16, then in issue #318)
Bishop (next in the second story in Uncanny X-Men Annual #18)
Iceman (behind the scenes; next in Cable #16, then in issue #318)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Jubilee (next in the second story in Uncanny X-Men Annual #18)
The Banshee (next in Deadpool vol 2 #1)
Emma Frost (next in issue #316)

GUEST APPEARANCE
Shard (in her holographic form; first appearance; last in flashback in XSE #4; next in Bishop #1)

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