I do not understand my fondness for Cable, he really does not make sense to me as a character.  What is his hook really?  Both Cyclops or the X-Men have easy elevator pitches, quick summaries helping to understand them and offer a glimpse into the grandeur and pain they endure in just a quick sentence.  Maybe even two.  Cable takes a few paragraphs to a page to just stumble past his origin and in terms or powers I could not tell what he has this week.  Last time I had checked he was on par with the Phoenix in terms of power levels but now he seems limited in scope again and back to big guns.  Point is he is a confusing character to pin down and identify but throughout everything the easiest mark to differentiate him has been the time traveling soldier hook.  So that’s what we have here, a big guy with a MacGuffin strapped to the middle of his chest running around a generic apocalyptic future shooting guns at people in rags with their own guns.  Aside from some tough guy dialog and an antagonist hell bent on firing his own huge guns at our hero this series has been big on the biceps and explosions and less on the character.
    So I guess that’s why we get this issue devoted to emo dad Scott Summers.
    Where the plot leaves me little character drama it feels like Scott was brought in to flesh out the main character more and remind us of this crazy Days of Our Lives with telekinetics origin they have for him.  Plus a seemingly mandated reminder that Scott feels super bad about sending his kid into the future so he wouldn’t die.  He left him with his daughter from another reality but still, it was a childhood he couldn’t experience and when he meets his kid again he’s full grown into a Dirty Harry with shoulder pads and a Herr Starr eye.  That work’s for me.
    What does not work for me are the other details surrounding Scott’s scenes.  Why the focus on his out of character behavior in X-Force in this book?  He has to keep the fact that he’s decided on letting the killers on his team actually kill the bad guys now so they won’t keep coming back from his girlfriend who’s a former villain herself?  If it were Jean I could understand the hesitation but Emma was running around in a white dominatrix outfit imprisoning 13 year old girls in birdcages a few years before they hooked-up.  I think she could understand the reasoning.  Another minor gripe, where the heck are they through this issue?  To my understanding the mansion got totally destroyed and everyone split up and then came back together later in San Francisco, but this is taking place 6 weeks after Messiah Complex by the scripts admission and they look like they’re still in the mansion, hanging out in the kitchen, and whispering about murder like it’s an affair.  Maybe it’s a really really nice hotel, I don’t know.     
    Finally my last problem with the story was Scott’s motivation for crying and being emo to begin with.  He hasn’t heard from his son who he gave the baby too in six weeks and it’s bringing up guilt for him of.. not being there to raise him in the first place?   Weren’t there mini-series where he and Jean went to the future and raised him while in other people’s bodies or something?  I thought that point was kind of moot by now and further more, wouldn’t he be feeling more guilty for putting a hit on his own son during MC when he thought Cable was trying to kill the baby then not raising him?  Even Xavier was calling him out on being cold for that and Scott still told everyone with claws to kill his own son and that’s not addressed in this at all.  Instead he mopes like he was in the 80’s again about subjects I thought closed for these characters and tries to hide his thoughts from his psychic ex-dominatrix girlfriend so he won’t offend her.
    Those are my gripes about this story involving these characters.  That said, if this same story was being told with different characters I would have to say it was not bad.   A story about a person wrestling with their own conscience and trying to hide their true intentions from a psychic they also love is pretty compelling.  The artwork was really grounded in the Scott scenes and gave me almost an Alias feel, that founded in reality approach to the Marvel Characters the look can offer.  Seeing Scott in the empty baby’s room by the empty crib, built for the MacGuffin in theory but a wonderful metaphor to the lost fatherhood he has with Cable, that’s all good stuff.  But just not with these characters as I know them and how they are portrayed in other books reinforces. 
    Cable is a confusing character to be certain and seems to work best when playing off other people, especially in how those people feel regarding him.  But as much as this story offered glimpses into Cable’s past it was Scott Summer’s story, although a Scott Summers I am not seeing in any of the core books and with a girlfriend I don’t recognize.