There was nothing about v.3 so messed up that it inherently required a complete deck-clearing exercise of the original team, though. Killing off the team did nothing to correct the continuity headache of Marvel Has Two Alpha Flights -- Bendis intended it to be the real Flight that was killed and no one cared about the spares. All it accomplished was to give Wolverine three panels of angst (and that's counting the Dark Avengers/X-Men crossover), tick off a lot of Alpha Flight fans (and all seven fans of Puck II and Major Maple Leaf II), and still necessitated someone else cleaning up Lobdell's loose ends. And even after all of that, it's not like Chaos War or v.4 took pains to address the issue. All that was needed to solve the problem was pretty much the handwave that was given: the real team came back from space, the xeroxes are no more, let us never speak of this again. Not nuking the team would have meant we wouldn't have needed the Chaos War one-shot to undo Bendis' (and Fraction's, to be fair) killing spree among the Flight, and that Pak and Van Lente wouldn't have to fish Puck out of Hell, while not killing off the team would have presented very few roadblocks as to their portrayal in v.4 -- even without Heather and Mac dying, given their history up to this point, making a case for them as unfit parents/an unstable home environment wouldn't have been difficult, Marinna would still have 1001 reasons to be messed up after being cracked out of a test tube, etc.Originally Posted by Phil
TL;DR: Killing off the team solved none of the existing complications associated with Alpha Flight, it just presented a really big new one.
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