Summary
- Victor Ten-Eagles directs the construction of a new building at the Last Refuge and he and Xi'an marvel at humans and mutants working together. Morphine Somers arrives and tries to convince them to stop building the settlement, warning that it'll become a nightmare. Meanwhile, La Lunatica holds up a girder as Hodge welds it, but suffers some sort of spell that causes her to drop it. Hodge manages to jump just in time and La Lunatica privately worries that "the hunger" has returned. Morphine watches from the bushes, expositing that La Lunatica's "hunger" is tasting the fears of the weak and hoping that he can attract her to his side given that he failed to do so with Xi'an. Hodge approaches Jade, on whom he has a burgeoning crush, to thank her for her words the previous day. Acknowledging to herself how strange that is, she accepts his thanks and then tells him that she needs to resume work on building the technological infrastructure for the settlement. Hodge returns to the structure and Willow replaces La Lunatica.
- Uproar and Wulff float on some debris and Wulff dives into the ocean to kill a sea monster that was stalking them for food. Uproar tells Wulff that he doesn't know him anymore and they decide to part company: Wulff heads for some land that he smells nearby to figure out his life by himself and tells Uproar to grow to giant-size and head for a ship on the horizon. They part with a vague sense of seeing each other again "whenever."
- Miguel, Xina, and some Latverians attempt to find Doom in the rubble of Castle Doom, but only find his mask. Xina is devastated, saying that she never knew anyone so brave. A Latverian takes the mask from her, saying that they're putting into place protocols that Doom instructed in the even to his death. Miguel is told to bring Nostromo to a pre-determined place. Before Miguel can do so, Winn finds Nostro, who refuses his offer of friendship given his role in Doom manipulating Nostro to rebuild Latveria. One of Doom's soldiers finds them and orders Nostro to the gathering, wondering why Spider-Man didn't tell him. After they leave, Winn asks Spidey, who's hiding in the woods, why he didn't approach Nostro himself and Miguel says that it was because of his guilt over almost kiling Nostro. Winn tells him that Doom purged Nostro's memory of his time as part of the world-engine, but Miguel notes that he still remembers. At the gathering, a holographic image of Doom activated by his mask reads his last will and testament. He bids farewell to Xina (making her a permanent ally of Latveria), honors his word to Miguel by giving him the location of his brother (and offers him a place in the cabinet), and makes Nostro the sovereign of Latveria, appointing Winn as his advisor/regent. Miguel departs to find Gabe, leaving behind his Spider-Man gear and saying that he'll consider the cabinet offer and his role as Spider-Man after he finds him.
- At the Last Refuge, Metalhead dreams that he used his power to purge himself of the Phalanx virus, only to be stalked by Phalanxified members of the X-Men. He awakens to discover that he's reverted to his original form, expect his knee, which remains Phalanxified. He is also reunited with his lover, Rosa. He apologizes that he wasn't there for Rosa after they got separated in the flood and asks about her son, Darkson. At the lab, Cerebra and Krystallin run tests on Darkson and Cerebra exposits his story to the girl who's been hanging with the X-Men, that he was Rosa's baby who got aged into adolescence by a villain named Vulcann. She pledges to find a way to revert him to his actual age, noting that it's a time of rebirth on Earth.
- In the waters surrounding what used to be Transverse City, a figure finds an artifact for which it was searching, declaring that the Ghost Rider will once again belond to D/Monix.
The Review
Raab and Kelly make clear in their good-bye letter that they were forced to wrap up their story quickly. As such, we leave Strange stranded beneath the Earth at the mercy of Garrok and December alone on Mars. We never learn the fate of Gabe or the Thing or the outcome of La Lunatica's "hunger" and Morphine's plotting. Cerebra's condition is left completely unexplained as is the potential menace of Franklin. In other words, it's an ignomious end to a line that once provided fresh and gripping stories of a world similar but still far different from our own.
I'm not going to write the eulogy of the 2099 world yet, since I still have two issues remaining: "Spider-Man #1/2," which looks more like a story of the future Spider-Man that we saw in "Spider-Man 2099 Meets Spider-Man," and "2099: Manifest Destinty," the one-shot that presumably ties up some of the dangling threads mentioned in the above paragraph (and presumably some other ones).
In terms of this series, though, I'll say that Marvel and/or Raab and Kelly made two mistakes. The first smacks of editorial interference, so I'll blame it on Marvel: the decision to flood the world due to the invsaion of Phalanx. Marvel had many other possible options to explore to bring together the characters from the line's ten ongoing series and it's hard to believe that they chose this one as the best one. I'm still left feeling as I did at the end of "Spider-Man 2099," that the arrival of the Fantastic Four somehow caused a new timeline and Marvel simply chose to follow the wrong one. If Marvel returns to the 2099 line one day, my guess is that it'll be a pre-flood one or at least one that looks exactly the same as the pre-flood world with lip-service paid to the reconstruction.
The other fault is probably the one to be borne by Raab and Kelly, mainly the decision to focus so much time on the "X-Nation" characters. I long ago gave up hoping for improved dialogue from the two of them, but I did expect them to find some way to get me to care about these characters. Instead, I found it bizarre that a title that ran for only six issues essentially hijacked the 2099 line by playing such a disroportionately large role in its final issues. It makes me wonder why Marvel decided to kill off the Hulk and Punisher 2099, since they were at least long-running characters that clearly could've played a role in this series. Why chose teenage heroes that many of us had never seen? Even if they replaced characters like Hulk and Punisher, it's still unbelievable to me that they displaced characters like Spider-Man 2099. Miguel is essentially just an agent of Doom here and his story, for most people (given how hard "2099: Manifest Destiny" apparently was to find), ends here, with him giving up being Spider-Man as a result of almost killing Nostro. As I said, it's ignomious, to say the least.
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