"Live Free or Die!"
It seems a lot has happened in the past two issues. We are still in space, still fighting The Brood, and the story has gotten complicated. We also have a new artistic team, with Paul Smith taking over from Dave Cockrum on pencils. And his penciling is certainly up to the task in this Double-Sized Issue! that includes gigantic space panoramas and lots of dialog.
Binary, who isn't an X-Man but is teaming up with them in this story, is flying through space, destroying Brood cities. She also has to commit euthanasia on an Acanti who has been captured by the Brood, the Acanti being gigantic sentient flying space fish that are lobotomized and used as spaceships by the Brood. And like the whales they resemble, they sing to each other, and the lead Acanti is a prophet. But the soul of the last singing prophet giant space whale is trapped, which is why the Acanti can't fight against the Brood. So Storm, who has psychically merged with one of the Acanti, has the X-Men go on a possible suicide mission to free the soul of the Acanti. Meanwhile, the Brood parasites are still gestating inside of the X-Men, and one of them might have already been turned...
There are a few twists, a few captures and escapes, a traitor unmasked, and finally a happy ending when the mystical power of the Acanti is revealed, the X-Men are cleansed of their parasites, and the Brood homeworld explodes. Oh, and Kitty Pryde meets Lockheed the Dragon. This is a Double-Sized Issue!, after all. And then on the last page, it is revealed we still have one last problem: there is still a brood parasite inside of Professor X, back on earth.
So a few things to say about this issue, and the Brood saga in general. One of the most obvious things is that Chris Claremont's run on the X-Men was centered on him incorporating real life problems, either literally or metaphorically, and with a strong message about tolerance and co-existence. And in this story, we have a space opera with lots of mystical overtones, and has an entire race that can never live peacefully with others. The entire planet of the Brood explodes (presumably because the Brood Queen is a load bearing boss), and the entire attitude is that it had to happen, it was just lucky that the X-Men themselves didn't have to make the decision to commit genocide. So basically, the entire Brood saga, one of Chris Claremont's most famous inventions, goes against what was considered to be the central themes and tones of Claremont's X-Men run.
So here is the big question: how does the introduction of a race that is intrinsically cruel, malicious and parasitic make sense in terms of a message of peaceful coexistence? And furthermore, why does a story written by a Jewish creator, using both direct and indirect references to antisemitism, include the idea of a "parasitic" race, that are referred to by slurs (they are called "sleazoids" throughout the story.) Of the alien races in the Marvel Universe, the Brood were really the first to not just be militaristic, but truly evil. It does present a contradiction, before we do return to more street level stories.