STORY: "The Cure" (22 pages)  Colossus commits suicide in order to activate a cure for the Legacy Virus discovered by the Beast.

What you need to know:
Colossus dies.  This was doubtless intended to stick, and Marvel bent over backwards to stress just how dead he was (by devoting X-Men vol 2 #110 to Shadowcat scattering his ashes).  However, perhaps inevitably, it got reversed in the end, when Joss Whedon brought the character back in 2004's Astonishing X-Men vol 3 #4. 

The explanation given in Astonishing X-Men vol 3 #5 is that Colossus does in fact die in this issue, but the alien Ord swaps the body and revives Colossus by using advanced technology from his homeworld, the Breakworld.  Nothing about this story actually changes, it's just that the effects are reversed shortly after.

Through the magic of awkward plotting, Colossus' sacrifice releases a vaguely-described cure for the Legacy Virus.  All characters suffering from the Legacy Virus go into remission more or less instantly (which is just plain silly, but there you go).  This finally puts an end to the Legacy Virus storyline.

This also marks the final appearances of Beast and Gambit as members of the roster - after this issue, Beast drifts off to join the cast of X-Treme X-Men, and Gambit just... well, drifts off, really.  He turns up in X-Treme X-Men in due course as well.

Comments:
With Chris Claremont gone, we now enter a rather curious four-issue interregnum by Scott Lobdell, who also took over X-Men at for the same period. It's an odd mixture of time-killing and deck-clearing.  Lobdell was apparently hampered by the fact that Marvel weren't really sure what was going to be happening in the upcoming X-Men titles until very late in the day.

This, however, is a fairly obvious attempt to get rid of the darned Legacy Virus, a plot which began back in 1993 and never really went anywhere.  It started out as a fairly blatant AIDS metaphor, but that fell by the wayside fairly quickly, no doubt because somebody twigged to the unfortunate implications of an AIDS-analogue which only mutants could catch.  Then they decided that humans could get it as well.  And then they kind of floundered around for a few years.

Charged with getting rid of a global disease in 22 pages, Lobdell has an impossible task here.  His solution is to turn the story into a heroic death for Colossus, a character who had become equally directionless in recent years.  At least Colossus actually had a motivation to sacrifice his life, given that he'd been miserable ever since the Legacy Virus killed his younger sister eighty-seven issues previously.

So far as it goes, that's a perfectly good idea.  Marvel even managed to avoid advance promotion of the death for once, meaning that a major plot point came as a complete surprise for the first time in years.  The problem lies in the ridiculous plot mechanics that Lobdell introduces in order to make the story work - truly ridiculous stuff where Colossus has to inject himself with a lethal "cure" in order to instantly cure the virus globally.  This sort of nonsense doesn't even work on a pseudoscience basis - it's so far divorced from the real world that it's equivalent to writing a story where gravity pulls diagonally.

Unfortunately, the silliness of the plot is just too much to overcome.  If you can look past that, it's really not a bad send-off for Colossus - but it's a hell of a lot to look past.

Read the original review.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X (last in flashback in X-Force #117; next in X-Men vol 2 #110, then in Cable #92, then behind the scenes in Generation X #75, then in X-Men vol 2 #111)
The Beast (last in X-Men vol 2 #109; next in Cable #89, then in Cable #92, then in flashback in X-Men vol 2 #111, then in Wolverine vol 2 #162-166, then behind the scenes in flashback in Wolverine vol 2 #167, then in flashback in X-Treme X-Men #3, then in flashback in X-Treme X-Men #2, then leaves the X-Men)
Colossus (last in X-Men vol 2 #109; does not die, but appears next in flashback in Astonishing X-Men vol 3 #5)
Gambit (last in X-Men: Declassified; next in the second story in X-Men Unlimited #30, then in Gambit & Bishop Alpha, then in Gambit & Bishop #1-6, then leaves the X-Men)
Wolverine (last in X-Men: Declassified; next in Amazing Spider-Man vol 2 #36, then in the fourth story in X-Men Unlimited #30, then in Wolverine vol 2 #162-168, then in issue #392)

SUPPORTING CHARACTER
Cecilia Reyes (next in Weapon X #5)

Last updated: 12 November 2004

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