All the pieces are in place, and the war is about to begin. With Tim-21 and his friends trapped in the middle, only the littlest robot can save the day and stop humanity from being wiped from the universe. But a far more sinister, far more far-reaching plot is also coming to fruition as The Descenders finally make themselves known.
It's all been leading to this - it's cliché, but it's true. Jeff Lemire's intergalactic epic has been building and building to this final confrontation between organic life and machines, which is a confrontation that most definitely feels like we've gotten to this place together. However, there's something off about this final arc which is evident from the first issue - we spend almost two issues without even seeing our main characters, as Lemire sets up a new storyline in the background that gives us the background of everything that's been going on.
In other stories, this isn't a bad thing. But it all feels like it comes out of nowhere with Descender - we've always known that the Harvesters weren't acting alone, but building up this entire narrative about the Descenders and their goals in an issue and a half feels like an info dump rather than an actual plot development.
What makes it worse is that what happens next was likely going to happen whether Tim and his friends were there or not. They have almost no agency in the final conclusion of the story, which cheapens everything they've done to get here. And then we get a teaser at the end that sets up Lemire and Nguyen's new series, Ascender, set ten years later. It's almost like a bait and switch, and that's almost never a good narrative device to use.
It's as if Descender was gearing up for a big finale, only for the curtain to be drawn back on an even larger story, which would be fine if there was even a slight inclination that this might be what was going to happen. It's disappointing, in all honesty, and I don't like having to say that.
There are good things going on here as well though - some characters arcs come to a nice ending, like Telsa, and Andy & Effie, while Driller's companion finally seems to make sense in context. Nguyen's art remains wonderful as ever, and his use of white space instead of traditional panels always impresses.
Descender's ending is flawed in many ways, and it's a shame about that. Hopefully Ascender can justify derailing said ending - but it'll have a lot of work to do.