Designation: Earth-811 The yardstick by which all dark timelines are measured, Chris Claremont and John Byrne's classic two-parter followed the persecution faced by the X-Men and all mutants to its logical, horrifying conclusion. Giant robotic Sentinels hunt down any and all mutants - and eventually just anyone with superpowers - and sticks them in internment camps. Anyone who resists is immediately killed. Just as the Earth seems on the edge of a nuclear apocalypse, Kitty Pryde manages to travel back in time and stop the event that sparked this dystopia - the attempted murder of anti-mutant Senator Robert Kelly - from happening. Which stops the Days of Future Past coming to be the actual future for the main timeline's X-Men, instead spinning it off into its own alternate reality which still exists and still sucks for everyone who isn't a huge purple death robot. The TV and film adaptations keep the downbeat tone, with most of the world's mutant and superhero population either dead or in captivity, where they die slowly. Besides being a hopelessly bleak story for the characters involved, the original Days of Future Past also explored some of the parallels between mutants and the way groups are oppressed in the real world. So there's a double dose of grimness in the story for you, reminding the reader stuff like this actually happens all too frequently.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
