It is both a shame and completely logical that this is Grant Morrison’s last arc on this series. Morrison’s run gets a lot of hate from people who hated what he did with Xorn/Magneto, or how he gave Emma Frost her own group of “mini me” mean girls…But I’m not a detractor. I love how different and bizarre his take was on X-Men.
This final arc is typical “I’m done here” Morrison. It’s deconstructive. It stretches the reader farther than before. It asks a lot of us.
It’s Morrison’s take on “Days of Future Past,” but without the time-travel. It’s just an alternate future story.
In this dystopian future, Beast goes by the name Sublime and he’s a villain.
Nearly everyone is dead, except Wolverine because, you know, he’s Wolverine.
The future story is chaotic, disjointed, and yet has a lot of fun and interesting aspects to it. Still, it doesn’t measure up to the rest of this run.
There is an Earth 616 sequence as well…
At the end of it, in the present day, Emma Frost convinces Scott to re-open the school and take the X-Men back to their core values…
..And they kiss deeply. At Jean’s gravesite.
Thus, Morrison ends his run by “returning to the status quo,” which everyone is supposed to do when they hand a Marvel book off to another creator, but also having left perhaps his deepest impact on it on that last page, with that kiss. That kiss says “Scott and Jean” are over and there’s new flavor to the “reset” of the status quo.