You know, I want to like Peter Milligan's X-Men.  But he makes it so hard for me. 

Over the last four issues, the X-Men were driven slightly mad while trying to stop Golgotha (a fungus thing that, well, drives people mad).  But wait!  Tons of them have turned up in space.  So this issue, the X-Men... uh, fly around and blast them.  And then go home.  Frankly, it's a bit rubbish.

On the plus side, of course, it looks great - although Larroca understandably struggles to keep the characters distinct when they all spend the issue in identical spacesuits.  There are some lovely moments, such as Gambit and Rogue trying to kiss through their helmets before they head out to battle.  And... yeah, that's about it.

The thing about Peter Milligan is that fundamentally, he's an ideas man.  He isn't really a "run around and blow things up" type of writer.  That's what he's attempting to write here, but it really doesn't work.  Fundamentally, there's no tension.  After the X-Men spent four issues getting rid of one of these things, hundreds of them ought to be a huge threat.  In fact, they just hang there obligingly, waiting to be blasted, while the X-Men seem less affected than they were last issue.  Not only is there no sense of an escalating threat, there's no sense of threat, period.

Worse, it's another issue where Milligan's choppy storytelling undermines the flow.  Alex and Lorna drift off somewhere along the line, and something happens to them, and it might be a subplot, but it might not.  Ho hum. 

And it was all going so well, too.  Last issue was rather good.  This... is just plain bad.  Milligan still gets the benefit of the doubt from me because he's written so much good stuff in the past.  On the other hand, he's also put his name to a lot of more mainstream material which was just painful.  (Elektra volume 1, anyone?)  This does nothing to alleviate my fears that he may have been horribly miscast on this book.

Rating: C-

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