"The Life That Late I Led"
I was all prepared for the Shi'ar/Brood space opera to continue. But on the cover we have Rogue, not yet an X-Man, punching Wolverine. And on the first page we have Ms. Marvel/Binary/Carol Danvers fighting the Star Jammers in Magneto's secret island base. We seem to have had another change of scenery and plot, and the main sign that we are still in the middle of intergalactic conflict is that Professor X is still comatose. And Cyclops is just introducing the man he now knows as his father, Corsair, to his brother, Havoc. Cyclops is going to be gone for a few issues: one thing I realized while reading this issue is that in none of the issues I have read so far actually have the X-Men all together in one room, while usually there is also some random house guest that is present. This is actually pretty realistic: my family works the same way, with simmering resentment and interpersonal conflict over ideological arguments from decades ago presenting us from ever being in the same place at once. Of course, no one in my family is a time travelling clone from another dimension...as far as I know.
All of this is interrupted when Senator Robert Kelly appears on television, talking about the X-Men. Robert Kelly would grow to be an important figure, both in the print comics and in the movie franchise, but here he is still a background character. Kitty Pryde suggests using a computer virus to wipe out all information in the Pentagon's databases about the X-Men. Since this was 1982, it shows that both Kitty Pryde, and Chris Claremont were ahead of the curve, technology-wise, and most of the readers would have probably thought "computer virus" was just as fanciful of a concept as adamantium skeletons. So then we get to the core of the story: Wolverine and Binary, in their respective Canadian/United States Air Force uniforms, together with Storm, go to the Pentagon. While there, they encounter Rogue (still a supervillain) and Mystique, and fight them. Binary had previously had her identity and powers absorbed by Rogue, and feels great anger at her. At the end of the story, she has deleted her computer records, which she feels matches her own sense of deleted identity. Which, I guess...makes sense?
So the weird thing here is that right in the middle of a larger plot, we somehow have returned to earth, and are interrupting our space opera to tell a spy thriller that also ties into the developing focus on the politics of the X-Men. And also, the main character of the story is not even an X-Man, but another character entirely, whose emotional closure seems to be unrelated, characterwise, or plotwise, with what we have been dealing with so far. But hold that thought, because I am sure this will all tie together. Maybe in the next issue, featuring Dracula. Unfortunately, I don't have that issue, but I bet something spectacular happened in it.