A team goes to Antarctica to investigate a distress call from a mutant colony up there and when they arrive, everyone is either dead, crazy, or turned into a zombie. Rogue absorbs the memories of one of the zombies (didn’t know she could do that with dead people) but all she sees is the name, “Golgatha!”
Through various investigative adventures, they find that Golgotha is actually an alien invasion of tiny critters who use telepathy to make mutants lose their minds.
Meanwhile, a mutant slave that rich slaveowners call “Boy” kills his masters.
He has the power to absorb radiation and then turn it into eye beams.
He recruits a gang of mutants and Wolverine and Polaris capture them.
Turns out, Boy and his gang are suffering from the same Golgatha mind-disease that made the mutants go crazy at the North Pole, and it’s contagious. So, the X-Men team has to go into quarantine to sweat out the illness.
For the big conclusion, the X-Men work with NASA and fly to a space station where they meet Gazer.
Gazer is a mutant who lives in space (because he is immune to radiation) and who has seen that a full-scale Golgotha invasion is on the way.
They are able to kill the aliens before they get to Earth and the President makes a silhouetted appearance.
While the mutants do a “The Right Stuff” pose.
This was a surprisingly good story. The “craziness” caused by Golgatha offers lots of chances to look at current relationships among the team-members. The “Boy” character is a bit of a red herring—it doesn’t go anywhere and he’s never seen again—but the idea of a group of mutant anarchists killing rich people is stiff fun.
Overall: Well done. But…This happens:
Wolverine and Rogue kiss, but this idea never gets picked up again.