I'm not really sure what's up with the Dazzler vs. Alien cover on the front of this collection.

After adoring [b:X-Treme X-Men, Vol. 1: Xavier Must Die!|16002137|X-Treme X-Men, Vol. 1 Xavier Must Die!|Greg Pak|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1351213726s/16002137.jpg|21764114] I had high expectations going into this volume. Unfortunately, it didn't live up to them. The first volume was fast paced but stream-lined and had some really interesting character development happening. In comparison, this volume was disjointed and I found myself confused about what exactly was going on in several parts.

This collection starts out where the last volume ended with Issues 6 - 7 which finds Kurt accidentally back in his own universe. These two issues were fantastic. The story is that Kurt is trying to find out what happened to his parents in a post-robot uprising landscape. Like Howlett's (and even Emma's) development in the first volume, Kurt's character development here was extremely well done and I was glad to see such a great conclusion to his story-thread. However, this is where the collection lost me.

Issue 7.1 (which was the worst one, IMO) to mid-10 seemed to be all over the place. The main reason was that things became extremely rushed. Up until 7.1, some time had been taken in each universe to build-up to the final battle with the "evil Xavier". They had also taken time to build-up character conflicts and distrust of the Xavier who has been navigating them to each world. This made the overall story more engaging because it dedicated time to making sure you got invested with the characters and what they were trying to do. After Kurt's plot though, it was like someone pressed the fast-forward button. The pacing was very Grant Morrison-ish, as we jumped from one emergency (or several) right into the next one with very little build-up and at the expense of engaging character arcs. To give some idea of how much the story was sped-up, in the first volume we made it through 3 Xaviers while in this volume we got through 6. I'm guessing that things became rushed because they (whoever they is) wanted to get to the X-men X-termination story?

I will say that in the middle of issue 10, the plot managed to slow it's pacing back down and re-engage me. So by the end, I was back to full investment and am looking forward to reading [b:X-Men: X-Termination|17277838|X-Men X-Termination|Greg Pak|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1375060419s/17277838.jpg|23891209]. ( )