By 2004, I’m not sure who all was clamoring for a return to ‘90s X-storytelling, but whoever it was gets what they wanted in spades with this miniseries touted as the return of the original Cable/X-Force creative team of Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza.  The whole thing would feel totally at home in 1997: Lots of new characters who are never seen again with names like Lady Anime(!) and Skornn.  Massive steroid bodies and huge guns.  Time travel and alternate-reality characters masquerading as other characters (a future Domino comes to the 616 disguised as Stryfe).  More Externals (ugh).  More Askani, too (double-ugh).  And it was immediately followed by a prequel instead of a sequel that focuses on Shatterstar.

Storywise, yet another mysterious visitor comes to kill Cable and tries to convince other X-Men to help him do it. 

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow review here.  At this point, I’m deep into the mid-2000s era of Marvel and reading something as retro as this is painful.  Especially for me, since I am one of those who believe that the ‘90s was emphatically NOT the high water mark for X-Men stories.

At the end, Cable appears to be dead but of course he’s not.