This Issue! Things Get Worse! #127

The Uncanny X-Men #127
“The Quality of Hatred!”
Chris Claremont and John Byrne

Synopsis
Proteus escapes into Scotland, but not before traumatizing half the team. Can the X-Men pull themselves together enough to track him down?

Post Mortem
Page 3. Damnit, Cyclops, there’s a time and place for moral codes and this isn’t it!

Page 4. I approve of Moira taking Scott down like that. Some one should have done that to Scott, like, 30 issues ago.

Page 5. I don’t know why, but I love that after a fight that nearly killed Wolverine, Nightcrawler, and Storm, Banshee is making cocoa to make them feel better.

Page 9. As much as it’s good to see Cyclops and Wolverine acting like adults with each other, I can’t help but feel that everyone calmed down incredibly quickly.

Page 12. Joseph MacTaggert is all kinds of a bastard, isn’t he?

Page 16. Seriously, they need to stop just dropping Colossus wherever they feel like. Eventually he’s going to land on someone and that would be bad.

Post Mortem
I love how at the beginning of the issue Cyclops stops Moira from killing Proteus, and by the end of it he doesn’t care who has to die to stop him. Alas. Anyway, Proteus is properly scary, and you don’t feel sorry at all for Joe MacTaggert. This is probably a good thing for him, as he’s a minor character, but possibly a bad thing for Proteus. As I’ve said before, one of the problems with these books is that there’s very little motivation with the villains. They briefly explain that Proteus saw how Joe had hurt his mother, so he’s off to kill him. But why does he only refer to her as “Moira”? Alas.

Problems aside, it’s still a rather dark and horrible story, which is good. I’m highly excited about the final issue of this story, so instead of wasting more time, I’ll get on with it.