So, Jay, how did Nick Fury become The Watcher?

He killed the previous one.

Why would Nick Fury kill the Watcher?

Well, to get the Watcher's eyeball.

Which... Fury wanted... why?

So he could use it to find out who'd stolen the other one, of course.

What!

... What?

I'm Jay Edidon.

And I'm Miles Stokes.

And we are here to Explain the X-Men.

Because it's about time someone did.

Welcome to episode 499 of Jay and Miles Explain the X-Men, where we walk you through the ins, the outs, and the retcons of comics' greatest superhero soap opera. 499. God damn. Yeah. It's a lot. I feel like something big is about to happen, or at least something that ends in a couple of zeros. Or, you know, maybe it's going to be like one and a half length, but with a bunch of variant covers. Ha, excellent, excellent. We're actually going to just, like, cover some random, like, Pizza Hut one shot. So if you guessed we were doing something ultra special in this lead-up, then, well, you would be wrong.

We're covering some X-Force.

And, like, it's pretty fun, but it's just, it's just X-Force.

Yeah, this is a pretty, this is, feels like a very one-of-the-mill X-Force story, in fact.

It does.

Well, run-of-the-mill for this era, because, of course, yeah, we're in the counter-X era where X-Force, X-Men, and Generation X all got like heavy tonal shifts with new creative teams.

And in the case of X-Force, that means it went from being all about the explodey to all about the sneaky.

It's become like a black-ops spy book.

I mean, there are still a lot of explosions.

Don't get me wrong. I was going to say this is a fairly explosion-heavy book and possibly an extraordinarily

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