The "Point One" experiment may have worked the big Uncanny, but not so much for its twisted little brother. The 5.1 issue of Uncanny X-Force gave us a self-contained fight with the Reavers, centering around Psylocke angsting over how much pleasure she could get out of killing those cyborg jerks when once she was a high-road kind of gal. Then issue 6 dropped us right into Part Two of some crazy Deathlok story. Not exactly seamless, but considering they're only a handful of issues into the series anyway, it's not that egregious.
That said, hordes of alternate-reality evil cyborg versions of superheroes might be the optimum group of creeps to send a team of blade-wielding murder-for-gooders after – and it does kind of fall in line with the Reavers, too, considering they are a bunch of home-reality evil cyborgs. How else are you going to see Fantomex shoot Spider-Man in the head? This isn't the kind of book that's going to get a chipper guest-shot from the wall-crawler. It's all about the dark.
Maybe a bit too dark. Writer Rick Remender's series has a very ugly feel to it, although that seems to be its point. The last issue had a cyborged-up Captain America shooting himself in the head to end the horrible memories of what he was made to do. The first arc apparently ended with Fantomex murdering a brainwashed child to prevent him from growing up to be Apocalypse, and it seems that Betsy's the only one that has a problem with that. Fantomex and Deadpool are killers for hire, Wolverine's always been comfortable with lethality, and Warren Worthington apparently now has a dark side he has to let out as the Apocalypse-spawned Archangel from time to time, and he's actually running this black-ops hit squad in secret under the nose of his ex-teammate Cyclops. Psylocke, however, used to be a model, an aristocrat and someone who didn't feel like she belonged in a group of ruffians like the X-Men, and despite having her brain transplanted into the body of a death ninja, she still wrestling with morality in this book that is basically murder, murder, murder.
Issue 7 gives us the conclusion of the "Deathlok Nation" arc, and since this series is my first exposure to Fantomex and this arc seems to deal with his history, I'll explain this as best I can. "Weapon Plus" is essentially what happened when they decided to make the X in Weapon X into the Roman numeral ten. They have some mysterious facility called The World that is not only shrunk down to be pocket-sized, but time within the place is all twisted and weird and it looks like an MC Esher drawing. There's a creepy freak calling himself Father living in The World who is trying to make every future reality into a Deathlok Nation – which means enslaving all superheroes to the Deathlok A.I. and making them into a unified police force called Weapon Infinity to usher in some skeevy version of Utopia. So with the help of one rogue Deathlok who's actually just the regular Deathlok (or Deathlok Prime, if you prefer), X-Force journeys into the weird World to go murder Father.
The main thrust of this issue, aside from murderdeathkilling and fighting evil cyborg versions of themselves, is the head-butting between Fantomex and Deadpool. The former has a great summation of what the latter's general tomfoolery is really meant to do. After Wade starts blathering about how much the idea of the Watcher watching him jerk his gherkin, Fantomex just snaps "It must be exhausting to live your life so utterly entrenched in the war of manipulating other people's perception of you, Wade." This leads to a verbal slap fight over which of them is the most hated member of the group – and it's a toss-up. Deadpool's super-annoying and generally considered to be a bumbling idiot, but Fantomex is the one who killed the Apocalypse kid, which is kind of an uncrossable line.
Of course, this is also the issue where the bumbling idiot proves himself by being the only one to find Father, who has some weird mind-influencing mojo over his former projects, of which Wade is one. It's an interesting appeal to Deadpool's insecurities, as he soaks up fatherly praise and validation until the creepy bad guy gets a little too creepy with it and seals his fate – and happens to save Fantomex from certain death to boot.
More intriguing is the fact that Fantomex seems to have some kind of sinister agenda of his own, as it's revealed that he has a 2-year-old version of Apocalypse floating in a secret bacta tank hidden in the World, and he's got a Weapon XV called Ultimaton guarding the Babypoc. What the hell does this mean? I don't know, I still don't quite understand the guy. He's got a second brain and his nervous system is external and also a spaceship? What? Somehow, the evil cyborg version of himself can "misdirect" him with… what, an illusion? Shapeshifting? I'm all for funky weirdo powers, since it would make sense that not every mutant has handy blasty powers, but I really have no idea what this guy's about. But he seems to be a charming kind of snooty, so he's an enjoyable read regardless of his dubious morality.
Overall, Uncanny X-Force has enough going for it as far as concept and character-interaction go to keep me reading (which is saying something for a book featuring nimbo Psylocke, which is something I never really took to), but it's also got this unpleasant tone that hinders any actual enjoyment of it, and that makes me think it'll only take one iffy issue to get me to drop it.
