This is Claremont's week of the month, when both Mekanix and X-Treme X-Men ship.  Both books play to an extent off events in Grant Morrison's title.  In X-Treme, it's thematic; here in Mekanix, it's more of a plot point.

Even as somebody who loves Morrison's work, I've got to admit that there's a fairly glaring plot hole in the first Cassandra Nova storyline.  The Sentinels wipe out Genosha; the Sentinels bugger off; everyone is quite upset about the massacre.  At no point, however, does anybody actually do anything about the Sentinels.  Okay, Cassandra was stopped from giving them any further orders, but you'd have thought somebody would be a little concerned about a whole load of weapons of mass destruction floating around.  It seems to have slipped between the cracks somewhere.

So Claremont shrugs his shoulders and picks up the dropped ball, as the adaptive Sentinels turn up here in Mekanix.  Presumably one of the aims of this story is to provide some closure to that storyline, and this also explains why Claremont put a previously unseen Genoshan character in the cast.  And, of course, it finally sheds some light on the reason for the series title.  Artist Juan Bobillo doesn't quite have the same style with the Sentinels as Quitely did, but his versions have their own sinewy charm.

The structure of this plot is a little odd, since we're now more than halfway through the series, and until this issue, all we'd seen of the Sentinels was some very brief subplot scenes showing their ship heading towards America.  It doesn't seem to have much to do with the rest of the storyline in the series, and so while everyone else is in Act 2 of their own plots, the Sentinels have turned up from nowhere and initiated a new Act 1 that's starting up simultaneously.  I'm not quite sure what Claremont's going for with this somewhat bizarre plotting, given that he's obviously been simmering this plot in the background for three months.

We're steering back in the direction of conventional hero versus robot monster stories here, but it's all fair enough.  A perfectly sound issue in its own right, albeit that it puts a very odd kink into the shape of the series, brushing the existing villains aside and putting the Sentinels.  I'm not quite sure where Claremont's going with all this, but in many ways that's a good thing.

Rating: B+

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