STORY: "Digging in the Dirt" (23 pages)   Cyclops takes a leave of absence to visits his grandparents in Alaska.  Revanche arrives at the Mansion, claiming to be the real Psylocke.

What you need to know:
Illyana is ill, although at this stage the X-Men suspect flu.  Of course, it turns out to be the Legacy Virus, and kills her off in Uncanny X-Men #303, making her the first high-profile casualty of the bug.

Colossus is being grimly stoic about the loss of his parents.  The combination of a head injury and Illyana's death will shortly send him over the edge, over in Uncanny X-Men #304.

Psylocke makes yet another attempt to seduce Scott, and this time she's completely blatant about it.  Scott reacts just the way you'd expect, by stammering a lot and running away.  Then he heads up to Alaska to visit his grandparents.

Jean finally twigs to what's going on (or at least shows it for the first time) and confronts Psylocke about it.  There's an interesting page of narration which suggests that Jean and Scott's relationship has become hopelessly stale by this point, more a matter of habit than anything else.  Storm stops by to warn Scott not to lose Jean in the same way that she recently lost Forge over in Uncanny.

Psylocke tells Jean why she was pursuing Scott, but does so by stabbing her in the head with the psychic knife.  Unfortunately, we don't get to find out what Jean learned from that (and Jean won't remember when she wakes up), so we never really get a particularly clear explanation.  It seems to boil down to a combination of attraction to Scott, and increased aggressiveness in a defensive response to her repeated physical violations.

Both Wolverine's senses and the sensors in the X-Men Mansion read Revanche as a duplicate Psylocke.  Revanche is able to shield herself from telepathic detection.  Rather implausibly, Jean simply ignores the computer's repeated warnings that there's a second Betsy in the house.  (By the way, can I just mention that I've never liked the name "Betsy Braddock"?  Aside from the fact that it's cornball alliteration, the only people called "Betsy" in this day and age are grandmothers and donkeys.)

The Beast still seems to have lost interest in the whole superhero profession.

Rogue's blindness has finally worn off.

Comments:
After a couple of issues of build-up in subplots, this issue kicks off the Psylocke/Revanche plot which takes the lead through to issue #23.  It's more than a little unclear what this storyline was trying to achieve, other than to provide a stronger explanation for Psylocke's personality change and sudden development of martial arts skills after she was messed about with by the Mandarin.  When the transformation took place, there appeared to be little more reason than "because it's cool."

This is mainly a character-based issue at the Mansion, and as such it doesn't really play to Andy Kubert's strengths, certainly not at this point in his career.  To be fair, he's becoming a little more subdued by this point, but there's still a lot of awkward posing going on, and people still seem to be trailing clouds of steam around the Mansion with them - a dramatic effect that just looks rather silly indoors.  But it doesn't overpower the better exchanges dialogue, such as Jean's fabulously uptight confrontation with Psylocke.  ("Are you and Scott...  having an... affair?")  And although Scott and Jean would be married off only a few months down the line, it's still nice to see somebody raising the fact that their relationship had been static (and arguably stagnant) for years by this point.

Not bad.

FEATURE CHARACTERS
Professor X, the Beast (both last in the second story in Uncanny X-Men #300), Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, Wolverine (the latter four last in Uncanny X-Men #300), Gambit, Psylocke and Rogue
Colossus (last in the second story in Uncanny X-Men #300; next in Uncanny X-Men Annual #17, then in Uncanny X-Men #301-303, then in flashback in issue #110, then in X-Factor vol 1 #93, then in Uncanny X-Men #304, where he leaves the X-Men)

SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Jubilee
Illyana Rasputin (last in the second story in Uncanny X-Men #300; next in Uncanny X-Men #301)
Revanche (last in issue #18)

Written: 8 September 2004

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