With the original X-Men’s teenage selves having been sent to the present all kinds of hell has broken loose. The students have seen what they’ve become, failed to become, and in one case that they’ve died. The Cyclops of now has offered Wolverine’s school a choice and the last issue ended with a cliffhanger as one of the original X-Men made the decision to go with him. The question though is which of the X-Men is the one that decided to leave?

Unfortunately the cliffhanger was a bit ruined for the huge “Which of the All-New X-Men will join Cyclops’ mutant revolution?” that was plastered all over the cover if you had read ‘Uncanny X-Men’ #5. In those pages we had already learned last week that Angel is the one whose decided that he wanted a change of scenery. Not too surprisingly really with how much he’s clearly hated what happens to his future self.

What we didn’t see there though is after he choose to leave, Jean Gray told him not to. She in fact forced him to stay by using her powers to make him go inside. This pretty much pissed off everyone on both sides and the Stepford sisters show her what someone whose been trained in their powers can do. Angel leaves (as we already know) and Jean is knocked out. This actually leads us into the best scene in the book.

After Jean recovers she has a heart to heart with Kitty Pryde. The All-New X-Men has had some of the best written dialogues to date and while this one wasn’t being heavy on the comedy it truly gave us a feel of what Beast was trying to do by bringing the past into the future. I somehow doubt that Angel is going to have that kind of an effect on Cyclops though.

On the villain side of things we have Mystique still out and about. This time she decided to steal from Iron Man by masquerading as Pepper Potts. (Hey Tony’s poor once again? I doubt this will cross over into the Iron Man story line so hopefully they transfer this money back at the end of the story arc.) Her team does a fake X-Men attack buying her the distraction we need and still no idea how this is going to play off for her team fighting the X-Men.

Last issue we had a cliffhanger and this one is no different. Wolverine is taking the All-New X-Men (minus Angel) out in a Blackbird when Captain America has the Uncanny Avengers knock it out of the sky. It should be interesting to see how Havoc responds to his now much younger brother in this situation. I wonder if this is going to lead into an Uncanny Avengers mini-crossover similar to the one we had just seen with Uncanny X-Men? While *I* love how they are currently tying the universe together I feel this could be slightly annoying to anyone not currently buying the majority of the Avengers and X-Titles that are being sold.

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Stuart Immonen