Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Extermination #5, by Ed Brisson, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia and Joe Sabino, on sale now.
For the last five years, time-traveling versions of the original team of X-Men have been bouncing around the modern Marvel Universe. And while these teenage heroes have been a huge part of the X-Men's recent adventures, they've finally returned to their place in history.
In the wake of 2012's Avengers vs. X-Men storyline, the adult Beast brought teenage versions of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Angel and himself to the present day to, well, illustrate a point. It wan not his smartest moment, as after seeing the current state of mutant affairs, the young X-Men decided to stick around, kicking off an extended stay in the modern age. Over the course of series like All-New X-Men and X-Men Blue, these teenage X-Men went through numerous changes that one would assume would dramatically alter their personal histories.
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While the teenage X-Men already made a few failed attempts to return to the past, their presence in the present became increasingly problematic as time went on. At the beginning of Extermination, the mutant-hunting Ahab, a cyborg from a dark alternate future, traveled to the modern Marvel Universe to ensure his timeline's creation by killing Iceman or another one of the original X-teens.
In Extermination #5, the teenage X-Men finally travel back to their home timeline after an intense showdown with Ahab -- but what does that mean for their present day incarnations?
NEXT PAGE: How the Original X-Men's Return Home Will Impact Their Older Selves
Although Ahab successfully killed the vampiric Bloodstorm (an X-man from another reality, not another time), the teenage X-Men survived with some help from a young, time-traveling version of Cable. But while Kid Cable was operating in the X-Men's best interests, he made an extremely poor first impression by killing his adult self, a character that had served alongside the X-Men for decades. As he explained, this Nathan Summers killed his older counterpart because the old Cable had grown too sentimental to continue protecting the timeline.
Despite his brutal methods, Kid Cable was trying to preserve X-Men history by capturing the teen X-Men before Ahab could kill them. As Ahab turned more and more X-Men into his mind-controlled Hounds, both the teen and adult versions of Jean Grey began trusting Kid Cable, but only after he let them read his mind.
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When Ahab's forces begin to overwhelm the X-Men in this issue, Cable and the original X-Men jump several years into one of the X-Men's alternate futures after a few quick goodbyes. In the future, teen Jean had a quick conversation with two young telepathic mutants who were helping Ahab turn people into Hounds.
After destroying Ahab's time-traveling ship, Kid Cable takes Ahab back to the present day and sends the teen X-Men back to the past. The X-Men arrive back in the past mere seconds after Beast took them into their future in 2012's All-New X-Men #2, by Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen.
While they were in the present-day, every member of the original teenage X-Men went through some fairly drastic changes. Cyclops came to terms with the controversial actions of his adult counterpart, Jean developed into a formidable leader and unleashed untapped potential of her powers, Iceman came out of the closet, Beast dabbled in the mystic arts, and Angel replaced his feathered wings with a pair made out of cosmic fire.
After Kid Cable abducted Angel earlier in Extermination, he cut off Angel's fire wings and replaced them with a set of feather wings that belonged to the longtime X-Men ally Mimic. But while that erased the tangible evidence of the X-Men's time in the future, the team still retained their memories of their modern day adventures.
The memory issue was solved in an interesting way, one that was set up in the miniseries' first issue (which we'll explain in another article, for the sake of clarity). Suffice it to say here, after assuring her friends that their time in the future absolutely made a positive difference, Jean places a mental block on the team that erased their memories of the future... until the present-day events of this issue, at which point the repressed memories would be freed.
Back in the present day, the adult Jean Grey remembers how her younger self learned how to defeat Ahab's telepathic assistants. While Kid Cable defeats Ahab one-on-one, Jean frees the rest of her teammates from Ahab's control. A few days later, the adult versions of Jean, Angel, Iceman and Beast get together to discuss their newly unlocked memories, commiserating over their strange shared experience and lamenting Cyclops' absence.
The history of the X-Men is filled with mind-twisting stories involving time travel, alternate timelines and paradoxes, but very few of those tales went on for as long as the original teenage X-Men stayed in the present.
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Earlier this year, one of the teasers for Extermination teased the idea that this crossover was going to "set it right," and this storyline certainly lived up to that hefty promise. By the time their journey reached its inevitable conclusion, the teenage X-Men managed to save the future and fix their timeline, and this story managed to keep the last several years of their adventures from being erased from continuity and turned Ahab into an A-list villain.
While the fallout from Extermination will unfold through the continuing adventures of Kid Cable in X-Force and elsewhere around the X-Men's world, the long, strange saga of these teenage X-Men is over. Given the intricate narrative acrobatics it took to get them home, the original teenage X-Men probably won't return any time soon, so this may truly be the end of the new adventures for these X-Men.