Man, has it
really been two months since anyone said anything in this thread...?
Well, for 455....
Good side, of course, Alan's art. A combination of movement and rounded, organic shapes have always made his work my favorite. And it's nice to get into the Savage Land again.
Now, this is probably because I haven't been reading the series between 1989 and 2003, but when did we introduce the intelligent sauriens like those "attack/supervillian dinosaurs"? I remember the one-shot with Excalibur, when we had the "alternate versions" of Excalibur as dino-sentients, but they went back to their dimension as soon as they were done cleaning up the mess in ours. When did we get permanent dino-sentients in the Savage Land? Yeah, the antagonistic saurians seem to be "strangers in town", but what about those others in the cell with Bishop and NC, who seem to be natives?
More good things: Storm apparently being affected by the primal nature of the Savage Land. Yeah, she wasn't affected in this way when the Xmen first went there, or with the later adventure there to take out Sauron and the rest of the Savage Land "mutants", but it's a neat idea nonetheless, and it's been so long since those stories that I'm willing to work with a little "retconning" on this.
And speaking of that second foray into the savage land, It was nice to see all those mutants again, even if they were just a "money shot" at the end. Nothing like unorthodox "allies" to make a story interesting.
Bad things: I'm... starting to get irritated with Rachel, now.
Someone
please tell me why people create, introduce, and keep around uber-powerful characters if they don't have believable methods to keep them in check? Yeah, I realize that Rachel could clean just about anyone's clock, and if she wasn't "turned against" the Xmen the villians would've been lizard-on-a-stick, but come ON! She put up a better fight against Emma Frost and Selene than to this dino-whatsis-telepath-whatever-guy. And I can't believe that was only because she hated the former two so much.
When Mastermind originally turned Phoenix against her teammates, it was a slow, subtle change, a seduction. It made sense. If they knew about Rachel beforehand, or if they concentrated everything on her, made it look like it took some EFFORT, damn it, it may have worked! Instead, we got a "wham-bam-you're-ours-now-ma'am", which looks suspiciously like a clumsy attempt at carrying the story from A to C.
I felt like I was watching a superhero role-playing game, and when the game master's villian attacked with his mind control, he suddenly rolled two or three critical hits in a row. Something that would never have touched Rachel suddenly overwhelmed her, just because the dice were friendly that night. Fine for an improvised game, not so fine for a planned story.
The enemy's exclamation of "I don't believe that worked!" looks more like a cop-out than anything else. Have the Xmen grown so powerful that they NEED to have a ball-and-chain to trip them up?