Marvel Reveals How the Original X-Men Return

There was a lot to process from this week’s Extermination #5, including just how the original X-Men managed to get back to their time.

Warning, spoilers incoming for Extermination #5, so if you haven’t read the issue yet you’ve been warned.

Cable (the new younger version) is trying to get the original X-Men to go back to their original timeline to keep things from becoming an Ahab murder world in the future. While they’ve resisted that initially, the battle against Ahab and his hounds isn’t going very well at the moment, and is convincing them otherwise.

After Iceman suffers a near miss invitation to that white light in the sky the Cable timeslides them to the past, and Ahab and his ship give chase while the other X-Men battle his hounds, which now include some of their own teammates.

In the past, the X-Men are taken back to a period 5 years before Ahab gets a hold of the twins, who are able to turn the other X-Men into hounds in service of Ahab. Jean finds them and talks to them about how their powers work, while Cable and the other original X-Men battle Ahab, who has now crashed the party. Jean gets the information she needed and then Cable sends them back to the moment that they were originally pulled from by Hank McCoy (our version…ahh time travel), while he sends himself and Ahab back to the present where even more X-Men have fallen since he’s been gone.

Back in the past, the original X-Men try and make everything exactly like it was and then Jean locks away their memories only to open up when they are older in the present, which she learned how to do thanks to her talk to the twins. Once their memories are locked away the time loop closes, and they pick up right where they left off, with their Hank heading out of the school in a rage. The good news is he’ll be back soon enough, and then things port over to the present, where Jean now knows how to defeat the twins and release their control over the other X-Men.

So now the original X-Men are back in their own timeline, though that also had some unexpected consequences, at least for everyone but Cable.

What did you think of the issue, and are you happy that the original X-Men have returned to their time? Let us know in the comments!