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Mekanix comes to a close this week.
Last time, I wondered how Claremont was planning to bring his
two separate storylines together, while avoiding the garishly
obvious solution ("Wow, now that I have been exposed to killer
robots in action, I am no longer a bigot and love my fellow
man.")
Well, the good news is that Claremont
doesn't take that route. In fact, he doesn't really
resolve the campus bigotry storyline at all. Most of the
issue is an extended, and fairly well laid out, action
sequence in which the Sentinels are defeated.
The closest we get to resolving the other
storylines is that Tom More completes his turn from bad guy to
friend, and one of the police officers pops round at the end
to say that he likes Kitty after all. But the FBI
surveillance truck is still around by the end, and Purity are
never really tackled.
Obviously this is in large part because
Claremont doesn't want to be seen taking the cheap and easy
way out on the bigger issues that he was raising. The
catch is that aside from a subplot leaving one of the Purity
members with a damaged Sentinel which she's going to repair
for sequel use, Claremont doesn't seem to be aiming for an
open-ended resolution. The final scene seems determined
to sell us the idea that the story has achieved closure.
And it hasn't, really, because half of the plot is left
untouched. The result is a curious miniseries which
starts off with one set of villains, segues halfway into the
unrelated Sentinels, beats the Sentinels, and declares the
story to be finished.
It's the sort of thing that would work fine
if this was an ongoing series, but seems strange in a
miniseries, particularly one which devoted the first couple of
issues to the Purity storyline before pretty much dumping it
out of hand halfway through. All a little odd.
Taken as an individual issue, this is
perfectly okay. It's a reasonable action sequence,
albeit a little formulaic in its "Let's all combine our powers
to beat the baddies" structure. It's when you look at
the miniseries as a whole that things start to look rickety.
Rating: B-
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