Jesus, can Marvel not fuck up an event?
I was mostly happy with this event until issue #7. Until that point, Aaron was doing a great job of solving one mystery only to reveal another one. It seemed like we were building to some amazing revelation that would shake the foundations of the Marvel Universe. Over the course of the series, the story had slowly started to focus increasingly on Nick Fury, but this focus seemed reasonable given the likelihood that Master o' Secrets Fury would be instrumental in bringing about said revelation.
However, last issue, it suddenly became clear that this series was really all about Nick. It was a weird realization, since Marvel had already pushed aside Nick and brought his son to the fore in order to bring the comics more in line with the movies. Maybe they wanted to give Nick a proper good-bye? It seemed plausible, but it didn't leave me feeling happy. If I had known that this mini-series would just boil down to a love letter to a character that I didn't really like in the first place, I would've passed.
Moreover, the tie-in issues were still focusing on the secrets related to the Marvel Universe's other characters, making it all the odder that the main series increasingly became focused on Nick. For example, Thor is still in Heven in the "Thor & Loki: The Tenth Realm" mini-series running concurrent with the regular series, though we see him in this issue struggling to pick up Mjolnir. Give that this development will directly lead to the introduction of the new Thor, it seems reasonable to think that we would've actually spent time on exploring it in the main series (particularly given all the time dedicated to Midas and the Orb).
In the end, though we're left with the anti-climatic revelation that Nick did kill the Watcher, though we're not told why he did so. Did he do it because he realized that he could use the secrets contained on his eye for good? No one actually says that. After all, we still don't know what secrets Nick wanted on the eye, so it's hard to speculate what good that he could've done with them. Aaron hints that Nick had to kill Uatu because he knew something about Nick, but it couldn't have just been the Unseen, since Nick himself revealed that information to the handful of possible replacements that he picked. As such, despite eight issues dedicated to the subject, we really have no idea why Uatu had to die.
Instead, we're left with an insane Orb running around the place with Uatu's eye embedded in his chest and a seemingly alive Nick Fury staying on the Moon with Uatu's other eye embedded in his empty eye-socket. The main problem that I have with this ending is that these developments seem unlikely to have any impact on anything. Is the Marvel Universe going to devolve into following the escapades of a crazed and deformed Orb? We don't even have a logical series to pick up his "adventures."
In the end, this event fells like it would've been better done as "Acts of Vengeance," allowing each series to handle the topic on its own rather than forcing an eight-issue mini-series on top of it. We probably could've just had a one-shot that ended with the Orb detonating the eye bomb and be done with the framing story. Instead, we spent eight issues telling a story that really only affects a C-List and D-List character. I can't exactly call that time and money well spent.
* (one of five stars)
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