X-Men #204 is billed as the epilogue to "Blinded by the Light."  What that means, in practice, is that it's a bridging issue between "Blinded" and the upcoming "Messiah Complex", but they're sticking it in the same trade paperback as the preceding arc.

As you'd expect, it's mainly an issue of build-up for the crossover.  After several issues of running around fighting, this is the point where the X-Men and the villains each sit down to regroup before the big upcoming event - whatever it might be. 

For the X-Men, that means the first explicit acknowledgement that Rogue's team really doesn't exist any more, as the cast of Astonishing X-Men effectively march in to take over the book.  This is a smart move; Astonishing is so detached from the rest of the line that it's long overdue for the other writers to pick up the characters and start using them. 

Cyclops mourns the death of his son, which might be a little obvious, but really is necessary if you're going to kill off a close relative.  The decision to gloss over his reaction to his father's death in Uncanny X-Men just baffles me, the more I think about it.  Brubaker has effectively killed off Corsair and then bent over backwards to minimise any impression that people care, which seems an odd approach at best.  We all know Cable's not dead, but at least Carey is trying to sell us on the idea that it matters to the other characters.

Cannonball has some sort of vaguely-defined brain injury, which apparently means that he just talks quite slowly and stays in bed.  This doesn't seem entirely consistent with the way Sinister's attack was presented last month, and it comes off as an anticlimax.  On the other hand, Carey has better luck with Mystique and Gambit, giving them both at least some good reason for turning on the X-Men: they're trying to protect Rogue following the Hecatomb storyline, and they think Sinister's better placed to do it.  Traditional X-Men fans will even be stunned to see Rogue having flashbacks to scenes from stories by other writers - once again, Carey stands out as one of the only X-Men writers in recent years who clearly cares about how his stories fit into the wider history, and understands that continuity can be a resource as well as an irritant.

Guest art comes from Mike Choi and his regular partner, colourist Sonia Oback.  The two previously worked on the X-23 miniseries, and their work here is a little more bland.  But then, it's a fill-in, so you can't expect wonders.  They can certainly tell a story, and they're easy on the eye.  The double-page spread of Rogue's incoherent flashbacks comes across very well.

Overall, it's a reasonably efficient issue of build-up.  Carey has written much better than this, and this comes across as an exercise in moving the pieces into place.  But crucially, it does do the job of making "Messiah Complex" seem like a big deal which we've been building to for months.  Carey isn't telling us a story so much as selling us a crossover, but his sales pitch is effective.

The back-up strip features chapters 16 and 17 of "Endangered Species", although there's no clear divide between them.  The reason for this last-minute scheduling change is that chapter 16 was supposed to appear in New X-Men #43, which is running late and won't be out until next week.  I wait with interest to see what happens if it can't get back on schedule in time for the crossover.

"Endangered Species" is an odd story.  The plot, such as it is, saw the Beast wandering around the Marvel Universe looking for various ways of reversing M-Day.  He meets assorted guest stars, he asks for help, he tries collaborating with evil scientists.  Finally, he comes to Transia to speak to Wanda herself in a cryptic final chapter that basically consists of Wanda delivering a "Be careful what you wish for" morality tale and wandering off.

This isn't really a story so much as an extended build for the crossover, and an exercise in remedial plotting.  When Carey started writing the X-Men, the Decimation storyline had been botched so spectacularly that one had to wonder why the story was ever allowed to proceed in the first place.  With the benefit of hindsight, one gets the impression of a pet idea being foisted on editors and writers who had no clue whatsoever of what they were going to do with it, and chose to play for time by ignoring it for as long as possible in the hope that something might spring to mind.  That's pure speculation, mind you, but the important point is that the books read that way.

Of course, a plot as drastic as "Almost all the mutants lose their powers and the race is going to die out" can't sensibly be put on the back burner in that way, and the result was an embarrassing fumble.  Hence "Endangered Species", which has had to do the legwork of showing up in four titles for four months hammering home the point that, whatever previous stories might have suggested, this is a big deal, and an important thing.  It also allows Carey to work through a checklist of obvious solutions that needed to be closed off.

None of this makes it an especially good story, but it does at least give the impression that Carey knows where he's going with this.  And that's important in itself, because a sense of direction is one of the things that's been missing from the X-books ever since Grant Morrison left.  It's been a dreary lurch from arc to arc with no sense of any wider agenda at all - and, if anything, a positive attempt to avoid having a wider agenda, perhaps because of the difficulties of accommodating Astonishing's unpredictable schedule.  But you can't have three X-Men titles set in the same building which don't talk to one another. If you want to have three writers doing three independent books, get them to write three different books.

If nothing else, Carey has brought back a sense of direction and a connection with the book's past.  What he hasn't yet managed is to write a particularly strong story on the back of that - but given the wreck that he inherited, his steady repair works deserve some respect.

Rating: B+

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