As we suspected at the end of last issue, America does send the Ultimates into a third world country as a pre-emptive strike against what looks to be a nuclear facility.  The Ultimates do the super-hero thing, they take out the weapons and shepherd the innocent civilians out of harms way, which means displacing them.

The real spoiler here at the beginning of the book will give you one example of why the story felt contrived.  The yet to be disclosed antagonists attack Hawkeye in his home.  They slay his family in a sequence that feels all to real and frightening.  The scene was done well but why did it happen?  See the ‘bad guys’ take Hawkeye, pump him full of sodium thiopental to extract all the Shield security codes so they could shut down’s their defenses.  But we soon find out that the Black Widow is the wolf in the fold.  She kills Jarvis — Stark’s effeminate butler — and takes Tony hostage.  But if she’s the bad guy and she’s an Ultimate, wouldn’t she have access to the same security codes as Hawkeye?  So what was the point of taking Hawkeye’s family if not to just make the bad guys seem even more bad?  Was it done just to evoke travesty in the story.

Well apparently the bad guys did it to frame Captain America.  He’s Captain freakin’ America people, who’s going to fall for that?  Well apparently Nick Fury and Shield do and they violently arrest and restrain him.  Ok, so Thor’s locked up, Tony Stark is a hostage, Captain America is in Shield custody, Hawkeye is captured by the bad guys, it’s time to attack Shield.

A coalition of foreign countries have created their own super-heroes and they launch a strike against America for the preemptive strikes mentioned previously.  Now when I say they created their own super-heroes, I mean it.  There are pages with thousands of supers flying in and attacking various things.  The idea of mass-producing supers just takes all the magic away from the genre because as Syndrome said, “when everyone’s super, no one is!”

That’s the biggest gripe I had with this book and you could tell the writers did too because they made these supers have a short lifespan i.e. one month.  Along with these created and short lived heroes we have a cast of villains. The team’s leader is a middle-eastern version of Captain America with Darth Maul’s lightsabre, we’ve got the Hulk’s friend the Abomination, the Crimson Dynamo, a guy with Thor’s hammer and powers, a spin-off of Jamie Madrox the multiple man, the poor man’s version of Quicksilver, a chick that can control bugs – yeah bugs – and the mastermind behind the chaos, Loki.  We all knew it’d come down to Loki didn’t we.

So these so-called Liberators plan on public executions for the Ultimates, but do you really think that’s going to happen?  I’m going to go through this next part kinda fast so hang on.  Everyone who was locked up or held escapes and even the Hulk who survived the nuclear blast intended to kill him stops by for a little chat with the Liberators and to tear off the Abomination’s head.  With much smack-down laid everything goes back to normal, well almost normal as the Utlimates decide to remove themselves from Shield seeing as being tied to a specific government makes the government’s agenda the Ultimates agenda.  Their intention is to become heroes for the planet, not just one country.

I’m fine with the ending, I just didn’t buy all the stuff it took to get there.