Peter Milligan goes into horror movie mode with X-Men #169, the penultimate part of "Golgotha."

Shall we get the complaint out of the way first?  I think we shall.  The big idea here is that Golgotha is driving everyone slightly mad for 24 hours.  Milligan rather obviously wants to write a story about a handful of people wandering a deserted compound.  In that regard, he faces the obvious difficulty that there are two other teams of X-Men who he doesn't want to use, plus everyone teaching and working at the school.  The solution is to say "the kids are locked in their rooms", and otherwise just brazenly ignore it.  Obviously, that doesn't really work, because the kids are going to go nuts too, and since they're all mutants, locking the door isn't really going to do it.

So, yes, you've got to swallow a fairly big plot hole in order to let Milligan do his story.  Not to mention a few minor ones, as characters get sent to search curiously ill-advised places.  I mean, if everyone's being tortured by nightmare images, at least keep Gambit away from underground tunnels.  Mind you, it's easier to let that sort of thing slide on the grounds that the X-Men are already slightly out of their heads when they start doling out the assignments.

But if you can live with this sort of contrivance, the actual story works well.  Larroca gets to do dark and moody for a change, helped by Liquid! doing the right sort of low-light colouring (single colours, rather than impenetrable murk).  Milligan shows that he's got a good grasp on his core characters, although once again, he understandably seems more interested in Emma Frost.  Her scene, where she hallucinates that she's got old and is on the verge of embarking on a DIY facelift with a pair of scissors, is beautifully played.

It's an issue of off-kilter paranoia, and it works.  After a shaky start, Peter Milligan is finding his feet on this title.

Rating: B+

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