Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Captain America does the thoughtover for this final issue and so it's he who brings us up to date. Baron Zemo's Thunderbolts planned to use their Project: Liberator to drain all transnormal energy from the world to make it a safer place. (This would include neutralising all atomic weapons and eg draining the gamma energy from Hulk.) The Avengers had to stop them. (The T-Bolts did a test run which stored some of that energy in the Liberator device. Not trusting Zemo completely Moonstone had arranged a failsafe to take the energy for herself. The Avengers' attack triggered the failsafe.) Now Moonstone has all that power (as well as her 2 Moonstone gems). Karla Sofen's sanity is questionable. (Liberator has already been run in reverse to take back its energy but) taking away her Moonstone power as well risks leaving her catatonic (or dead). Her ex-lover Hawkeye has notched an arrow, and Cap hopes he's made the right choice.
[The bits in brackets are me inserting stuff that Steve Rogers leaves out.]
But from Cap's point of view Clint Barton chooses wrong as he blasts the Liberator, stopping it from draining the Moonstones. And they're left with an angry Moonstone.
More stuff happened last issue. Helmut Zemo's face is scarred again after he took a Moonstone blast meant for Cap. Karla tore apart Blackheath's plant body. Now he's reintegrated but claims that the Green is abandoning him because of the damage Moonstone's power did to the world. However he can still generate a substance to ease Helmut's pain.
Vision does his phasing an arm through the chest trick on Moonstone, but Hawkeye hits him with a bioelectric scrambler arrow. He comments that he's got an arrow specifically designed for everyone on both teams. Karla says she's tired of trying to live up to his expectations, and now she just wants to be left alone. She prepares to gravitational shunt away but Scarlet Witch tries to stop her with a Chaos Magic hex. But the result is a hole in space which threatens to suck them all in. Fixer reports that such holes are appearing all over the world.
Songbird tries to plug the hole with solid sound. Atlas, Wasp and Yellowjacket go big to throw debris at it. The hole splits(?) into multiple bubbles and Scarlet Witch can't get Moonstone out of the middle of it all, so Jolt sends her electric self to try to do the job. But Karla no longer trusts anyone, not even her friend, and bats her away. A hole starts to take Blackheath and Zemo away to Moscow but Songbird pulls them back with a sound tentacle. A Chinese building suddenly pops up through another hole. Clint tries to persuade Karla *she* can stop all this.
Fixer and Iron Man come up with a pseudoscientific explanation for what's happening. Wanda Maximoff's hex caught Moonstone mid-shunt and now she's everywhere at once. Fixer says he's stopped her before, but that was before she got the 2nd power gem. But he's devised a multi-phase spectrum scrambler which should give them 3 seconds to deal with her permanently. Norbert Ebersol hands it to Tony Stark and then jumps through a hole - anywhere on Earth is safer than *here*. As the Statue Of Liberty's torch suddenly appears and nearly crushes some of them, Cap tells IM and Hawk to get it done. Tony tosses the scrambler towards Moonstone and Clint shoots his anti-Moonstone arrow which disrupts her gravity field long enough for the scrambler to get through.
There's an explosion of black blobs and light and Karla Sofen falls towards the ground. Vision dives through her and comes away with the Moonstone gems. But their energy is too much for him and he drops them. And Zemo dives for them and uses them teleport away. And Clint Barton cradles catatonic Karla.
We end with some epilogues weeks later.
Ex-Blackheath Sam Smithers surrenders himself to Vantage and Warbird at Seagate maximum security penitentiary, from which he had escaped with Hawkeye (TBolts#56). Warbird offers Dallas Riordan a job with Homeland Security.
In Avengers Mansion Songbird turns down an offer of Avengers membership (at least for now). Atlas gets Yellowjacket to remove the Pym Particles that give him his current growing power. Jolt is going back to Counter-Earth. She, Songbird and Hawkeye say goodbye over Karla's hospital bed. Hawk, Cap and Wasp hear that Abner Jenkins' help in this series has got him a parole from Parsons minimum security prison, and now Mach-3 hopes to set up a new Thunderbolts. Steve says he thinks ex-TBolt leader Clint's legacy is in good hands.
We have a flashback to Zeilniz in 1489 where the heroic 1st Baron Zemo, Harbin, has let power go murderously to his head.
And in modern day Zeilniz Helmut Zemo dons his hood again. He's given up trying to persuade people to let him save the world. From now on he'll go back to forcing them to accept him as saviour.