Sage has gone to the Hellfire Club, so a team goes after her, bickering among themselves the whole way. Rachel and Emma’s catfighting gets extreme and astral because Rachel seems Emma as a homewrecker.
Which, to be fair, she is. After Emma crushes Rachel she makes a postfeminist argument for holding female sexuality on par with all other assets of being, and says she’s more right for Scott than Jean.
Which, to be fair, she is.
After that’s out of the way, they infiltrate a Hellfire Club mutant slave auction (yes, that’s a thing now)
Meanwhile, a second search team in Paris has even more extreme infighting when Bishop shoots all of his teammates.
Yawn. We all know they’re not dead and he has a good reason to shoot them. We find out after the cliffhanger that they were full of nanites. This kind of “fake” conflict just isn’t convincing anymore.
This team is the one that finally catches up with Sage, who is with Sebastian Shaw and Sunspot—who is now Black King of the H.C.
Shaw explains that the Club is now in line with Xavier’s ideals, which is why there’s all these new people in leadership roles.
Okay, whatever. All the talk is pointless anyway because it just winds up in a big fight. Two big fights, actually, as both teams—the anti-slavers and the finding-Tessas—all fight in their various locations. That’s not all that interesting, but this kinda is: Donald Pierce has different ideas about the future of the Hellfire Club, which leads Shaw to behead Pierce.
He’s not really dead.
In the battle, Shaw is badly hurt and steps down as Imperial, which means Sunspot rises in Hellfire rank to “Imperial.” For those keeping score, that makes this the royal family of the Hellfire Club:
- Black Imperial: Sunspot.
- Black King: Vacant due to Sunspot’s promotion.
- Black Queen: Selene.
- Black Princess: I don’t know if there is one…?
- White King: Vacant until they backfill Donald Pierce.
- White Queen: Opal Luna Sat-yr-9 from the old Excalibur series, incognito as “Courtney Ross.”
- White Princess: Viper
Finally, Tessa formally adopts the name Sage, saying she was playing both sides all along.
There’s nothing bad here, it just feels a bit stale overall.