Wednesday, April 19, 2017

X-Men Issue 16 - The Supreme Sacrifice


Separated from Professor X, and trapped by Sentinels, I'm excited to see if the team can overcome their greatest foe yet!



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If you remember from last issue, Professor X's spirit form had been pushed out of the Master Mold's lair by his microelectric blasts.  His weakened spirit form was left right near his human form, struggling to rejoin it.  Thankfully this issue opens up and Professor X is back in his corporeal form, albeit he is weakened as well.  As he starts to figure out a new plan, he watches the fortress disappear back below the earth.



With the X-Men trapped inside, Professor X knows he will need to help himself.  So he drags himself to the side of the highway, and telepathically hitches a ride back to the city from a couple of young drivers.



Back inside the sentinel's fortress, the X-Men have been trapped inside an impenetrable heavy gravity bubble.  Each moment is very strenuous for the mutants, and they can feel their power drain quickly as they attempt to escape.  After several failed attempts, they decide to wait until the sentinels open the bubble then strike.




Master Mold has finished with Beast, and determined that the X-Men are not a threat to them, as they do not possess the power that would be required to stop them.  Master Mold orders Beast to be put back in the heavy gravity bubble with the rest of his teammates and for the sentinels to prepare them for disposal.



Master Mold then turns his attention back to Dr. Trask, telling him to prepare the machine which will create more sentinels, and if he doesn't, he will destroy a large city.  Burdened with the weight of the death of so many humans on his mind, and with a conscience that now regrets his decision greatly, Dr. Trask agrees to help Master Mold build the new sentinels to save the lives of all those other humans.




Professor X has arrived back in the city, specifically back at the TV studio where the very first sentinel they encountered suddenly stopped and collapsed to the ground motionless.  To Xavier's luck, then sentinel is still there, lying motionless, with several people milling around it trying to figure out what to do with it.



Xavier again attempts to form a mental bond with the machine (while a policeman makes snarky comments at him), until he realizes that something is off in the giant machine's brain, it's as if his mental thought process is being interfered with.  When he looks out the window he sees a massive crystal set into a building across the road.  This is the source of the interference with the sentinel.  Then Xavier get's a brilliant idea.  



As the sentinels open the heavy gravity bubble the other X-Men are in to put Beast inside, they strike.  Cyclops unleashes his optic blast at them, and draws the fire of the sentinel's lethal chest rays, hoping he can give the team enough time for them to escape. 



The team, now fully out of the heavy gravity bubble, let's the sentinels chase them around the room they are in, having their missed punches destroy the control panels and weaponry in the room with them.  Just as the team thinks they are going to escape, they are hit with a stun ray from a team of sentinels pursuing them.  With the X-Men down, and the sentinels surrounding them, it appears that there is no hope for the X-Men's escape.



At the last second, the sentinels fall over.   What our team doesn't know is that Xavier has taken the large crystal from the building in the city, gotten the police to strap it to a helicopter, and they have flown it over the sentinel base.  As they circle the base, they deactivate more and more sentinels.  The X-Men charge through the base, but at each corridor they see more and more deactivated sentinels.  So they turn their sights back to the original mission, to stop Master Mold.




Dr. Trask has prepped the sentinel creation machine, and Master Mold is shooting his synthoparticles into the sentinel creation mold and the machines are starting to form eight at a time.  As Trask sees the new sentinel batch come forth from the mold, he cracks.  Wracked with guilt at the fact that he doomed the human race with this invention, he pick up a large wrench and plans to stop his mistake before a single human dies.  Trask smashes the wrench into the machinery controlling the sentinel creation machine, and also takes out the ionic power source, without that, not even the Master Mold can survive.




When the X-Men arrive, the area where the Master Mold was is now engulfed in flames, with Dr. Trask nowhere in sight.  The fortress starts to rumble and the X-Men know it is time for them to make their exit.  As they dodge the falling debris and use their powers to navigate through the raging fires, they manage to escape out of a window and reach safety.



Just moments after they escape, they watch the fortress explode into a ball of fire.  Just before the explosion we see that Dr. Trask has died in the fire, and his body lays on top of a deactivated Master Mold, and we know he successfully stopped the sentinel revolution.




Just as we think that all is well and the X-Men will get a short break and some time to celebrate back at home, we see the shadow of a new menace which will threaten the team as soon as they get back to the mansion!


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