The story opens up with a discussion between Tony Stark and Maria Hill about the House of M.  She wants to know what it was and he plays coy about the whole subject and then snubs her.

Ok, so an entity falls from space and destroys a city in Alaska.  Ms. Hill sends a Shield team out to investigate and they die before they even get close.  They call in Alpha Flight and this entity kicks their ass and actually kills a good part of the team.  When it turns towards US soil, Maria Hill has no choice but to summon the Avengers, who in turn summon Ms Marvel.

As a team they face the entity and discover his power level is really too much for them to handle.  Sentry makes an appearance and shoves the entity up into space where it can’t hurt anyone while the rest of the team tries to figure out what this entity is and how they can stop him.

With the help of Vision the team discovers that the entity’s power are those of the mutants who lost their powers following the House of M.  Still in the dark about the whole thing, Ms Hill captures Spider-Man and has her team of psychics rip the info from his head, along with his secret identity.  The Avengers come to bust Spider-Man out but by then he’s already been released by Shield.

In the meantime the entity returns to earth and heads straight for Genosha where a de-powered Magneto is writing his auto-biography/suicide note.  The entity reveals itself to him as Xorn and repowers Magneto with everything it’s got so that he can crush the homo-sapiens once and for all.  Wolverine says it best when Vision states that his files on Xorn are incomplete by responding, “Xorn’s files on Xorn are incomplete” and this book does nothing to make it any clearer.

So Cap brings in an ace called Quake to give Magneto something akin to a stroke and then Iron Man contains the energy of Xorn before Sentry throws the entity made up of raw mutant powers into the sun.  Right…

Oh, and the mutant who had no idea he was a mutant and just happened to absorb all the missing mutant energy and get controlled by the Xorn entity regains his senses and that’s the beginning of Weapon Omega.

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.

Ok, this is going to take a while. The New Avengers get split down the middle as far as alliances go.  The X-Men, constantly under watch by Sentinals refuse to get involved, but Bishop can’t but help to join in the fight.

Thor is back!  Well, it’s not so much Thor as a clone of Thor packed with cybernetics thanks to Dr Pym & Mr Fantastic.  As we soon discover this clone is faulty and in its’ first battle it slays Goliath with a lightning attack that blows a hole right through him.  Goliath was giant sized when he died and that’s the size they had to bury.  The Thor clone is killed in the final battle by Hercules.

Mr Fantastic is in deep with Tony Stark’s commitment to the registration act and the 50 in 50 initiative (50 states, each with at least 1 super hero team).  Mrs Fantastic isn’t so sure and after watching the Thor clone kill one of her friends she defects and splits the family right down the middle which will have repurcussions to their relationship that go beyond this book.

After years of painstaking effort to keep his identity a secret, Peter Parker unmasks himself on live television and tells the world that he has been Spider-Man since he was fifteen years old.  J. Jonah Jameson’s reaction to the news is priceless.

The registration side drafts super villains to their side to help capture the rebels.  We’re talking Venom, the Green Goblin, Bullseye, the Taskmaster, the Jester and Jack O’Lantern.  The last two team up against Spider-Man in a tight sewer passage when he defects to the rebel’s side and almost kill the web-slinger before Spidey gets saved by the Punisher of all people – who apparently kills both of the villains.  The Punisher joins with the rebels briefly before he murders two villains who were brought in to help the rebels and Captain America expels him as he calls him a murderer.

In the final battle, Namor and the Atlantians come to Captain America’s aid and the battle only stops when innocent bystanders jump into to restrain Captain America and show all of the super heroes the damage that their battle has brought upon the city.  At this, Captain America surrenders himself and tells his men to stand down which is the beginning of the end for the man in blue and red.  His followers are offered amnesty for their part in the rebellion against the registration act.