What Went Down:  Gambit enters an exclusive Paris club without paying mind to the dress code.  After making a scene with a woman, the security guards escort him to a parking garage.  When the guards, who are working for Candra, go to kill him, Gambit subdues them all.  After changing into his uniform, Gambit is knocked out by the Tithe Collector.

Back in New Orleans, Rogue and Gambit’s Tante Mattie, a voodoo practitioner and healer, are watching over Bella Donna.  When Mattie leaves, Rogue debates using her powers to absorb Belle’s memories of Gambit.  In Paris, Gambit wakes up in a nicely furnished room.  He fights the Tithe Collector again and blows a hole in the room.  Candra breaks up the fight, announcing that she has need of Gambit and revealing their romantic past together.  Over in the Big Easy, Rogue stops herself from touching Belle, but Belle’s hand reaches out to grab the mutant anyway.  This forces Rogue to relive the entire Gambit/Belle romance.

Candra reveals her elixir and offers to give it to Gambit if he will kill his father.  She explains that she created the guilds centuries ago to keep each other in check and do her bidding.  Now she wants to create a new organization.  The Assassins and Julien burst into the room to steal the elixir for themselves.  Julien is powerful enough now to take Candra, one of the Externals, but Gambit distracts him.  In the middle of the fight, Jean-Luc Lebeau takes one of Julien’s claw swipes to save his son.  Enraged, Gambit subdues everyone while Candra knocks Julien out the window with a psionic bolt.  Gambit kisses Candra good-bye, but uses the opportunity to steal the elixir from her cleavage.  We end on Candra telling the Tithe Collector to order both guilds to hunt down Gambit, Rogue, and Belle.

How It Was:  Now this is more like it.  Gambit with a leather jacket, torn jeans, and a cigarette, tearing into a high society club, flirting with ladies and beating the crap out of jerks.  This is the stuff I want to see, even if it slumps a little once we get to…sigh, Candra. 

So the entire plot still centers on this elixir, the plot device that the guilds exist to compete for.  We learn that Candra created them for some vague purposes—something about reaping benefits.  But it’s hard to see what she needs them for because we don’t really know anything about Candra, other than she sleeps with Gideon and had a fling with Gambit.  I have no idea why a super powerful mutant would need an army of thieves and assassins, and how giving them powers to rival her own or having them kill each other is remotely a good idea.  It’s story logic that makes no sense whatsoever.  And the problem is, all these issues are what drive the primary sources of Gambit’s origin.

The tension and mystique of the Tithe Man have been completely shattered now that he has been beaten twice.  And there is this plot convenience of Julien being able to almost kill these uber-powerful beings, but Gambit can smack him in the head and hold his ground against him.  Gambit might be a little too powerful in this series, which harms the story when we don’t think there’s any chance Gambit could fail. 

Well we’ve got Gambit back in character, but now Rogue is acting out of sorts.  I don’t know why Rogue would want to absorb Belle’s memories since they could only hurt her emotionally.

Still, it’s Lee Weeks’ art that continues to carry this book.  His layouts here are especially memorable.  There’s a nice sequence where Gambit drops a card at the top of the page and it lands by a panel of Belle grabbing Rogue.  Or the composition of Belle’s memory montage which looks great.  Even the explosion panel where Julien and his men enter the hotel is fantastic. 

So we’ve got some great scenes for Gambit mixed with some dreadful Candra gibberish.  While I feel this issue does some harm to Gambit’s back story, the stuff in the present is rather fun.  I just wish Gambit had something better to do than assemble a magic elixir from some fantasy novel that somehow got stuck here.