SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for X-Men: The Exterminated #1 by Zac Thompson, Lonnie Nadler, Neil Edwards, Jay David Ramos and Joe Sabino, on sale now.

Even by superhero comics standards, the Summers clan has one of the most complicated and convoluted family trees in the genre, so when one of them passes away, it’s kind of a big deal. Cable’s recent death in the first issue of Extermination set the stakes of what was to come in the status-quo altering event series, but the mile-a-minute pace of the X-Men’s mission to stop Ahab and his hounds hasn't allowed much space for the characters to reflect on their losses and mourn their dead.

This week’s X-Men: The Exterminated is a much more thoughtful and considered affair that brings together two fan-favorite Summers family members readers have been dying to see interact. Cable’s mother Jean Grey and his daughter Hope Summers team-up to track down and decommission his secret hideouts around the world and attempt to learn more about each other through their connection to the X-Men’s gruff, time-traveling freedom fighter, while Hope has a secret mission that she wants to pull off without the telepathic Jean realizing what they’re doing: They’re going to bring Cable back.

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Family Tree

So, Cable kinda technically isn’t Jean Grey’s son... but he also is. The son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor, Cable was first introduced as baby Nathan Christopher Charles Summers in Uncanny X-Men #201. It was later discovered that Madelyne was a clone of Jean Grey created by Mister Sinister; when The Phoenix Force doppelganger of Jean sacrificed itself on the Blue Area of the Moon, a portion of the Phoenix Force woke Madelyne — until then considered a failed experiment — up. Then came Inferno, which saw Jean Grey gain the memories both of her Phoenix Force doppelganger and Madelyne, so she had the memories of sacrificing herself on the moon along with the memories of and love for the infant Nathan Summers, who is biologically her son, even if she didn’t birth him.

Whew.

Eventually, the baby was infected with the techno-organic virus and Cyclops was forced to send the child into the future to be saved. After Scott and Jean got married, they took a trip through time to the future to raise Nathan and help him control his powers under the aliases Slim and Redd Dayspring. Despite all of the weirdness in their past, Scott and Jean raised Cable into the man he became, and helped impart the teachings of Charles Xavier in a post-apocalyptic world.

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Speaking of post-apocalyptic worlds, Hope was the first mutant baby born after the House of M and Scarlet Witch’s fateful “No More Mutants” spell, which saw the forces of the Marvel Universe descend upon Cooperstown, Alaska in order to be the ones to control the future of the mutant race. Cable was able to take the baby into the future, forcing Cyclops to once again send his son far away for the safety of a child.

Cable and the child, named Hope after a woman Nathan fell in love with and married on these adventures, continued to flee further and further into the future on the run from Lucas Bishop, who believed Hope to represent the end of the mutant race. They eventually made it back to the present and Cable sacrificed himself to stop Bastion and an army of Nimrod Sentinels, so Hope does have some experience with her dad dying and coming back already.

NEXT PAGE: Cable May Have Seen His Own Death Coming

Summers End

While the character has died before (quite a few times, in fact), there’s something a bit more final to this death as he was killed by his own past self. Cable probably remembered things from Kid Cable’s perspective and knew it was coming, meaning the twist sets up his story into a recursive loop of time-traveling, quite fitting for one of the most confusing mutants, even by X-Men standards. Due to the nature of the X-Men, Jean and Hope have never really met before — at least this incarnation of Jean, like we said, the nature of the X-Men — but Jean sees the death of her son as an opportunity to reach out to her granddaughter and help her process Cable’s death by going round all of his safe houses and cleaning them out, together.

At the very first safe, in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, the pair run into the man who can arguably be referred to as Cable’s best friend, Deadpool. Deadpool has also given himself the mission of cleaning out Cable’s safe houses and compares it to a friend deleting another friend’s internet cache. The interesting point that Wade notes is that Cable had already done the same for him six times previously, a reference to the cycle of death and resurrection in superhero comics. It’s interesting that the creative team brought Deadpool into the story, as Cable and Deadpool’s last team-up saw Wade kill a far future version of Nathan Summers in order to fulfill a pact with Stryfe.

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While it should be taken with a grain of salt due to the comedic nature of Deadpool stories, it was very clear that the Cable killed in that story was definitely the one-true Cable and that all other instances of Cable’s death were just one stop on a longer journey for the character. Considering both Deadpool and Extermination were edited by Jordan D. White, it’s likely that story may come into play later down the line when Cable inevitably returns from the dead (it is superhero comics after all).

Last Hope

Hope and Jean’s journey takes them across the world, to X-Force’s original base in the Adirondack Mountains to a bunker below Moira McTaggart’s lab on Muir Island, where Hope discovers there was a thirteen safe house that even she didn’t know about, in her birthplace of Cooperstown, Alaska. It’s there that Hope confronts the possibility that her father really is dead and not coming back, and Jean discovers what Hope has been looking for this entire time; a time machine. Despite the protests of her grandmother, Hope wants to go back in time and stop Cable’s death at the hands of his younger self, leading to a fight between the two generations Summers for the fate of the man that binds them together.

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Ultimately, Hope realizes that she can’t beat Jean and that she shouldn’t either. While her father may be gone, his legacy lives on in everything he taught her; everything he trained her for was to get her ready for this moment where he wasn’t around to look after her anymore. Hope was a major focus of the X-Men line in the early-2010s but hasn’t been around all that much for the past few years. Perhaps with Cable’s death and a new era of the X-Men on the horizon, it’s a new dawn for Hope as she finds her place among the mutant community after serving as its messiah and she can carry on the legacy of her father by making sure their people have a future less dire than the ones they were raised in.