Review By: beetleblack

Writer: Bill Mantalo
Artist: Whilce Portacio
Story: "This Mortal Coil"

Alpha Flight have never been the luckiest of teams have they?

In issues preceding this "Special Double Length" 50th edition: Snowbird has been violently killed (by Vindicator no less!) along with her husband and their newborn child (possessed by the evil being Pestilence); the wandering spirit of Walter Langkowski has found a new home - in Snowbird's dead albino-Sasquatch form - only trouble is he is now a SHE (cleverly renamed Wanda!); Roger Bochs (Box) who'd been given new hope (and legs) by Lionel Jefferies (Scramble, the mixed up man!) has succumbed to madness and ended up being 'devoured' (for want of a better word) by the insane Omega (Lionel Jefferies/Scramble); Northstar has been suffering from a mysterious illness which he claims is killing him; and his unbalanced sister Aurora - whose split personalities have long plagued her and the team - has been plunged into an even greater depth of instability.

So why should issue 50 be devoid of such trauma and catastrophe?

Well, the answer is of course that it isn't (although thankfully this time death is not on the cards).


OVERVIEW

In a bid to cure both the twins, Vindicator leads her now rather depleted team to Ungava Bay - site of a previous adventure they had with the X-Men (see appropriate X-Men/Alpha Flight Two Part Special). Here they hope to find some healing magic left over from their dealings with the Gods of Asgard, which will help cure Northstar and somehow make Aurora's split personality into one. (Also, unknown to the others, Puck hopes that the magic fires will help cure his dwarfism and make him a 'whole' man that Heather can love - he's been mooning after her for months and unfortunately she seems to be growing more and more attracted to Madison Jefferies.)

However, as the Alphan's search for the magic they so desperately need they are not alone (of course not - that would make it too simple and uncomplicated, this is a double length edition lest we forget!), the mischievous Loki watches on and works a little magic of his own. Finding the doorway which will hopefully lead them to the magical Firefountain our team of heroes are forced, thanks to Loki, to leave behind the now desperately ill Northstar in the care of his sister to continue their journey.

They soon discover a fountain of black fire - then disaster strikes: an attack by dark Elves! A battle ensues, during which everyone's favourite little person plunges off the bridge and head long into the black firefountain where he's freed from the curse of Raazer and made 'whole' once more!

Meanwhile, having tried to quench Northstar's fever with dark cave water, Aurora is confronted by Loki who - with his evil minions - forces Aurora to also drink the dark water which makes her dream the same dream as her brother - that of their 'true' birth origin! To cut to the chase: man falls in love with elf, then faster than you can say "Lord of the Rings" man and elf marry and begat twins, elf's people are pissed and try to get their hands on the elf-human halflings, as they are opposed to human-elf couplings (surely ideal material for Jerry Springer?), however they only succeed in killing both parents in the chase not noticing that the twins actually survived the crash! (Okay, 0 points to anyone who can guess who the twins grew up to be and MINUS points for anyone who sniggers about the fact that Northstar is truly one of the fairy folk - and anyway, years down the line we discover that all is not what it seems in this origin story…)

Anyway, what this dreams also reveals to Aurora is that her brother can be cured by a massive infusion of pure elf light - light which she realises she can provide herself with her uniquely (albeit tapered with by Langkowski) abilities. But can Aurora do it? If she does she realises that she will be sacrificing her light power forever - how can she hope to stay sane without it? (It has often been her fear of the dark which ultimately drives her to switch personalities due to the abuse she suffered at the hands of nuns - surely another one for Springer here?) Realising that she loves her brother too much to see him dead she thus provides the cure and Northstar recovers within seconds, just in time to see his now powerless sister being dragged off into the depths of the caverns by Loki's nasty darklings! Northstar swears that he will NOT let his sister be lost to him for long and vows to search for her - no matter how long it takes (bare this in mind for later…).

With Raazer now released from Puck the other Alphans are being kept pretty busy themselves and are almost done for until Northstar swoops in to save the day - using pure light to banish Raazor once more - just as MORE dark elves show up for a fight. Seeing they are severely outnumbered and knowing that if they stay and fight they shall surely die (and there's been enough of that in recent times) they make a hasty retreat and seal the gate trapping the evil behind it (along with Aurora and Puck!)… A distraught Northstar asks Vindicator if she knows what she's done - she does (and thankfully she's only just made yet another dreary observation about the hardship of being leader and having to make life and death decisions so she can't make another for at least a few more pages).

Back on the surface, Northstar informs his fellow team-mates that they have lost THREE Alphans today. "Three? How so?" his comrades ask. Northstar informs them that he is leaving them also, intending to return to his own people… (erm, this would be the same people who wanted him and his half-bred sister dead when they were only days old and succeeded in killing his parents in the process????) And with that we see Northstar fly off into the sky (seemingly already forgotten his vow to find his sister come what may) where he is greeted by members of his own race and seemingly admitted entry into their kingdom.

So what of Aurora and Puck? Well, we learn through Loki (who has to somehow defend his actions to his superiors) that he transported both to a better life: Puck he sent to Tibet - a country the ex-dwarf remembered with some fondness - and Aurora he transported to an unknown location where she was found by religious types with no powers and no memory of who she was and how she got there (as well as no split-personality disorder)… as Aurora came to such everlasting harm as a child in the care of religious types (nuns) this was probably not the most comfortable conclusion for the character but there you go…

So all that's left is for Heather to lament the loss of three more members of her team - she actually states that there now remains NO original members, but seems to forget Sasquatch is still around, albeit in a more curvaceous and feminine form - with the now obligatory mention of being Mac's widow (comic-book writers take note - we don't need to be reminded of this EVERY ISSUE!!!) as the remaining members of Alpha Flight fly off into the sunset and onto another traumatic adventure…


SUMMING UP

As a whole the plot DOES work and despite my criticisms it is a rather enjoyable romp. There are certainly worse ways to get rid of three characters in one fell swoop as is done here.

However a lot of it just doesn't ring true. I don't believe for one second that Alpha Flight would just LEAVE two of their number behind like that, and even less do I believe that Northstar would leave his beloved sister, especially without even trying to find some other sort of entrance into the caverns beneath the ground. Equally the idea of him going off to be with his own people at the end doesn't quite come over as convincing - a more satisfactory conclusion would have been if Northstar had left Alpha Flight to go and search for the missing Aurora, surely that would have been more in character? At the end of the day though, the fact that Northstar gets out of it alive after his 'mysterious illness' can only be a good thing. I seem to remember at the time the rumours were that he was actually suffering from AIDS. Thankfully these rumours were unfounded, having the only gay character - albeit not an 'out' gay character - contract AIDS and die would have done nothing to educate readers and would possibly have just confirmed the myth at the time that AIDS was something you ONLY got if you were gay and that ALL gay people were destined to die from it.

Aurora was possibly always going to have a tragic end - or at the very least bitter sweet - due to her nature as someone who was mentally unstable. At least in this, her 'final' issue, she was able to show that she could be more than just a flirty-French-schizophrenic-nympho by sacrificing her sanity to save Northstar's life.

Puck's departure is pretty much underplayed - whether purposely or not - and seems pretty rushed, in fact if you where to flick through the issue you could miss it completely! Saying that, it is with some relief that the character was written out as his unrequited love for Heather was getting not only repetitive (issue after issue) but also painful, you do begin to wonder why she wouldn't just try and clear the air with him instead of knowing how he feels towards her but just choosing to do nothing about it.

The inclusion of Loki brings an interesting slant to the story as well as his revelations on the twin's origins (even if, as I've mentioned before, they may not be strictly 100% true), the character himself is wicked and indeed mischievous but also gets his just deserts in the end.


RATING: