Years of Future Past #5 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

This entire series has been a mess, so it's no surprise that it ends the same way.

Cameron decides to kill Kelly given his (Cameron's) decision that mutants should all die, but Chrissie stops him and saves Kelly.  She eventually kills Cameron, since she realizes that he'd never stop until Kelly is killed and mutants exterminated.  The X-Men flee to Nightcrawler's church where they gather the remaining 100 or so mutants.  They hear sirens coming in their direction.  They assume that it's the authorities, but it could be ambulances, since the reader saw Kelly tells his troops not to kill Kitty when they had the chance.  The End.

Bennett tries to get philosophical here, ending the issue with Kitty contemplating one of the tigers that we've learned have taken over the city after the zoos were destroyed.  Cameron had used them as a metaphor, noting that they returned from the brink of extinction but did so as monsters.  Norton portrays them almost as zombies in terms of their thirst for blood, but their revival as a species has nothing to do with some sort of virus.  It's just part of their nature.  In that way, Cameron misses the most obvious metaphor.  Rather than arguing that mutants will return from extinction as "monsters," he could argue that mutants have always been monsters.  Just like the tigers, they will only engage in battle, so why resurrect them as a species?  In other words, Bennett failed even at using this metaphor in the most obvious way.

In other words, it was all simply a mess.  This issue was marginally better than the previous ones, mostly because it is the only one without a rambling monologue and excessive moralization.  But, the sins of the convoluted plot remain.  I could continue (particularly about everyone's bizarre motivations, like Cameron's sudden genocidal rage) but I won't.  Let's just forget about this one when we talk about "Secret Wars" in the future, shall we?

** (two of five stars)

Years of Future Past #4 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

OMG, this series just goes from bad to worse to terrible.  At one point, all action stops so that Storm can explain the plot, and, at two separate points, all actions stops again so that Cameron can deliver monologues.  Bennett even tries ol' pet peeve #3, with Chrissie commenting on Cameron inheriting Colossus' penchant for monologue (likely responding to criticism from issue #1).  But, as I've always said, it doesn't really help the reader when you use your characters to acknowledge bad writing:  it'd be better to avoid it entirely.

Moreover, the plot is as tired as they come.  Cameron finds a magic iPad (I wish I were kidding) that proves that Magneto intended on him and Chrissie dying in their attempt to save Kelly.  Apparently, he didn't want humans to see mutants as saviors; he wanted mutants to see Cameron and Chrissie as martyrs and rise against the humans.  We're not really told why Magneto went this direction.  I think that we're just supposed to believe that he's e-v-i-l.  Maybe?  Bennett doesn't really seem to concerned about motivations at this point, so I guess I shouldn't be either.

Next issue:  brother vs. sister!  (Yawn.)

* (one of five stars)

Years of Future Past #3 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

One of the challenges that the authors of the "Secret Wars" tie-in issues face is that they don't have a lot of time to convey the necessary details establishing the reality that they're shepherding.  Since most of the tie-in issues focus on previous events, they've got to show us how these events ended differently in fairly short order so that they can get onto telling the story that they want to tell.  It's not an easy job, I admit, but Bennett is really struggling to do that here.
The big revelation of this issue is that Cameron is actually Kitty and Colossus' son.  Kitty conveniently blurts out this information as she saves his life from the attacking Sentinels, and she escapes with the kids as Colossus and Logan try to help the refugees escape Centrum.  Later, we learn that Logan fled with Cameron when he was an infant as the Sentinels captured the rest of the team (Kitty was pregnant with Chrissie at the time).  As Cameron himself admits, it sort of makes sense, since they needed someone out there trained to fight President Kelly if he got fully genocidal.  (Kitty doesn't admit to that, but she doesn't necessarily deny it either.)  However, I still don't understand where Logan took him.  Bennett generally portrays the United Doomstates as a dictatorial regime that Kelly controls with an iron fist.  As such, it doesn't make sense to me that even Logan could escape observation for that long, particularly with a kid in tow.  Moreover, Bennett implied in the last issue that Logan seemed to leave Cameron for long periods of time to meet with Kitty and the team in the camps, making it seem all the more likely that he would've been caught at some point.  To make matters worse, Cameron is full of all sorts of pop-culture trivia (like "Star Wars" and Wikipedia) that make it seem like he was just chillin' at a bro's house all this time and not struggling to survive in a hostile world.  It leaves me really confused about how the Doomstates really work, and it distracts from the story that Bennett is trying to tell.

Beyond just the problems with the premise, Bennett doesn't really make anyone's motivations clear.  Kitty and the kids escape to a church that Nightcrawler runs, since even Kelly won't shut down a sanctuary dedicated to Doom.  However, rather than taking a minute to regroup, Kitty and Kurt decide almost immediately that Cameron and Chrissie should liberate a mutant detention-camp on the doorstep of the church.  Cameron then proceeds to point out all the various problems with this plan.  He reminds the group that Kitty just regained her powers and Chrissie has never used them, so maybe it's better to wait for Angel, Colossus, Logan, Ororo, and Rachel to return.  Moreover, he observes that this plan really makes little sense when you consider the fact that the prisoners are unlikely to be strong enough to lead some sort of revolt against Kelly.  Finally, he reminds them that Doom chose Kelly as baron, so it's not really clear if Doom would let the revolt succeed even if they could swing it.  I get Chrissie dismissing Cameron as pessimistic, but Bennett makes no attempt to explain what Kitty and Kurt were thinking or not thinking, as the case may be.  (I mean, we're talking about serious pet peeve #3 here:  using a character to lay out the problem with your plot doesn't excuse you for having the problems in the first place.)  However, Chrissie impulsively attacks the camp, everyone follows, and, surprise, surprise, Freedom Force is there, because it's a trap.  (I don't know how they knew that this group would attack.  Did Destiny foresee it?  Anyway, at this point, it's the least of my worries.)

Honestly, I just have no idea where we're going here.  To make matters worse, Bennett continues to fill up panel after panel with script, making it all the more upsetting that we have no clear idea of the plot, since we have to plow through so much exposition along the way.  Unfortunately, I really feel like this story is skippable.

* (one of five stars)

Years of Future Past #2 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

OK, I'm just going to say that this issue is not good.

Bennett just spends way too much time moralizing, with several characters giving long monologues that felt like reading Facebook posts from your annoying and earnest cousin.  I mean, Colossus literally delivers a page-long version of the "First they came for..." speech that the original managed to convey more powerfully in fewer words.  I just can't believe an editor let it get published.  Beyond their tediousness, these moments all time that could've been better spent developing the actual plot.

We learn here that Angel has been running an underground city called Centrum for years, though we're not given any reason why the above-ground team couldn't be in contact with them.  (I'm assuming that it's because they had to stay well placed enough on the surface world to steal the chemicals that they needed to disable their restraint collars, but Bennett doesn't actually make that clear.)  Moreover, I have no idea where Wolverine and his son, Cameron, have been.  Christina makes it clear that she knows Wolverine, and we saw him in play with the surface-world team last issue.  But, she meets Cameron for the first time as a teenager, so Wolverine must've also been spending time outside the bunker?  (Maybe he inherited his prime counterpart's ability to be in multiple places at once?)  Why couldn't Cameron have the childhood that Christina had?  Bennett doesn't put much effort into addressing their different upbringings, despite the fact that they're the two most important characters to the story that she's telling.

Given how important these questions are, it's possible (if not likely) that Bennett will answer them all next issue.  But, given the slog that it was to get through all the speeches in this issue, it was annoying to get to the end and find that I still had no real idea what I had just read.

* (one of five stars)

Years of Future Past #1 (HERE BE SPOILERS!)

So far, the tie-in issues for "Secret Wars" have fallen along a pretty wide continuum when it comes to their connections to the main story.  For example, the characters in "Spider-Verse" #1 seem to be aware of the fact that Battleworld may be some sort of construct, and She-Hulk plays a Lando Calrissian role where she has to find a way to maneuver under the terms of an unfavorable agreement with Doom in "A-Force" #1.  However, Bennett falls on the other side of the spectrum, only alluding to the large issues at play in "Secret Wars" and instead focusing on the matter at hand.

In the "Days of Future Past" timeline, the heroes of the future seem not to have decided to try to change the past.  Instead, they're trying to take advantage of a movement where some humans are lobbying to relax the Mutant Control Act and plan to do so by exposing their suffering under the Act.  It has taken 15 years for Colossus, Magneto, Rachel Summers, Shadowcat, and Wolverine to find chemicals to destroy their restraint collars.  But, they're now free and set about their mission.  However, Rachel has discovered, in the work that she's forced to do for the United Doomstates, that someone has managed to insert a virus into the new Sentinels.  This unknown person now has full control over one and plans to assassinate President Kelly.  Magneto figures that the best play is for the X-Men to send their youngest members -- Kitty and Peter's daughter Cristina and Wolverine's son Cameron -- to save him, winning the sympathy of the people.  However, Kelly has freed the Blob and Mystique and sent them after Kitty, hoping that the footage of mutants fighting each other will show how dangerous they are.

Bennett tells a good story, though I'll admit that she may have gone a little too far in adopting a 1980s tone.  Everyone is either incredibly virtuous (like Cristina) or dastardly evil (like Kelly).  Even the plot seems overly optimistic, since a jaded reader in 2015 (like me) will likely find it hard to believe that Cristina and Cameron saving Kelly will accomplish anything.  But, I'm intrigued to see where it goes.

** (two of five stars)