Jonathan Dobres

Season 4, Episode 16. Air date: June 11, 1995 (in season 3).

Stories should happen in the present tense, especially for Saturday morning cartoons. I’ve said it before, but X-Men: The Animated Series only gets about twenty minutes per episode, and the show struggles whenever it has to spend precious minutes cramming in new backstory just to get the ball rolling. You would think that this wouldn’t apply to the show’s most frequently featured character, Wolverine, that at this point we know enough about him that we can live in his present. And yet there is always more Wolverine Background to unravel.

So it is with “Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”.¹ This episode features a pared down version of Team X and their false memory storyline from Wolverine #48. I don’t know much about those comics, other than that they tried very hard to be an overcomplicated spy spectacular. The first issue is titled, “The Shiva Scenario Part 1: Dreams of Gore, Phase 1”, for God’s sake. The show’s version of events greatly simplifies things, trimming Team X to Wolverine, Sabretooth, and guest characters Maverick and Silver Fox. Maverick is a dude in clunky armor and Silver Fox will be serving as Wolverine’s love interest for this half hour. Guy gets around.

Wolverine has started hallucinating, going berserk and lashing out at everyone around him. The cause, as we’ll learn, is that he has a bunch of fake memories courtesy of the Weapon X program, and they’re breaking down. A mysterious photograph of Wolverine with his arm around Silver Fox (and some coordinates on the back, more on that in the stray observations) sends him back to Canada to get to the bottom of things. Beast follows him, because the episode needs someone in it who isn’t constantly having a mental breakdown.

Wolverine arrives at the strangely familiar facility (“I got my bones here.”) and encounters Sabretooth. They fight each other immediately, and surely would have done so without much pretext. On top of their general hatred for each other, Wolverine’s memories suggest that Sabretooth was abusing Silver Fox and/or trying to destroy her romance with Wolverine, though the details are understandably kept vague for a kids’ show. Don Francks does what he can, imparting Sabretooth with an especially poisonous line reading of, “What’s the matter, runt? Can’t take care of your woman?” Wolverine also remembers a mission in which Team X faced Omega Red, and Sabretooth callously left Maverick and Silver Fox to die.

This is a story about false memories, so naturally, Silver Fox promptly reveals herself as very much alive. She explains that the facility they’re standing in—a cross between a TV studio and a science lab—was designed to turn them into sleeper agents with false memories. Oh and Maverick is there, too. Silver Fox discovered the lab months ago, but there’s one door she can’t open without all four of them present. Beast points out that the door, which is designed to put all four members of Team X in one extremely secure location, is an obvious trap. But they want the truth no matter what.

What’s waiting for them on the other side of the door is a little more exposition and a fight with a robot called Talos. Among its many combat features are what can only be described as nipple cannons. I am including a picture so that you will understand that this is not something I just made up. This is something a team of professional writers made up, had animated, and put on broadcast television. An entire TV network, along with its Standards & Practices Department, had no problem with this. But God forbid that Amelia Voght walk out on Charles Xavier while holding suitcases.

The fight with Talos is reasonably well done, making good use of all its participants. Where it loses me is the resolution, or the lack thereof. The good guys manage to blow Talos up, only for the facility’s defense systems to trigger traumatic memories in Team X (somehow) that conveniently knock them out, while also loudly announcing that a second Talos will shortly be activated to kill everyone. Beast takes the opportunity to collect Team X’s unconscious bodies, load everyone onto a truck, drive off, and lock the door behind him.

Before everyone goes their separate ways, Wolverine and Silver Fox have an intense heart-to-heart. They both have memories of carving their initials into a tree, as cartoon lovebirds do. Yet the facility’s studio has no such initials in its tree, and the team has learned that all of the false memories are based on half-truths. So was their relationship real? Did they really love each other? Is it too late to find out? Silver Fox doesn’t want to risk it, though she does give Wolverine one last, long look before departing. It’s pretty effective for what the episode has to work with, but it makes me wish the script had done a little more with the ideas of half-truths and unreliable narrators.

I’ll never say no to Beast getting some screen time. George Buza, as always, does a lot with what he’s given here, and I think he pairs well with Wolverine. That said, Beast doesn’t do much in this story other than locate videotapes of exposition (which, again, is the story being told from the past). Wouldn’t this story have been more interesting if Jean, who found the photograph of Silver Fox and Wolverine, had followed him to Canada instead? For one, it would have made sense for a telepath to try to help people who are in mental anguish. For another, Wolverine’s relationship with Silver Fox—yet another person he isn’t allowed to love due to forces beyond his control—would have hit that much harder with Jean nearby. Lastly, come on, Jean’s basically been absent since “Xavier Remembers”. Give the gal something to do.

This is a middling episode that would probably be stronger if you viewed it as Part 1 of a two-parter with “Lotus and the Steel”, which directly deals with the loss of control that Wolverine experiences in this story. Unfortunately, Disney Plus lists the show in production order (where these two are back-to-back but in the wrong order), while other services use the airing order (chronologically correct, but eight months apart in two different seasons). As it stands, the only good way to watch this pair of episodes is with an asterisk.

Stray observations:

• There’s a wild animation error during Wolverine and Sabretooth’s initial fight, in which their lines are synced to each others’ mouths.

• Jean snoops around in Wolverine’s bedroom to find that photo with the coordinates on the back. The coordinates are written as “53º / 120º”, which Beast immediately says is in “southern Canada”. Whole degrees cover huge distances, so at latitude 53º, we’re talking about a region slightly larger than Delaware. It should be nearly impossible to pinpoint a single, extremely secret building in such a large area, but then again, Wolverine has his traumatic memories to guide him and Beast is a genius. Given Wolverine’s history, Beast reasonably assumed that the unlabeled coordinates were meant to be 53ºN by 120ºW, which is indeed somewhere in Canada (though “southern” is a stretch). Hank’s other options were eastern Russia, the middle of the South Pacific, or about halfway between Australia and Antarctica/the Savage Land.

• On the toilet: Rogue, Storm, Jubilee, and Gambit. Cyclops appears and even gets to utter exactly one word (he shouts, “Wolverine!”), while Jean gets a small speaking role for the first time since “Courage”.

Season 4, Episode 15. Air date: February 3, 1996.

I’ve decided to open this review of our latest X-Men episode, “Lotus and the Steel”, with the most interesting in-universe fact I could find about the Silver Samurai. The Silver Samurai’s teleportation powers come from a magic ring that he recovered during a fight against Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi. This is canon thanks to a 1978 Marvel crossover comic featuring the contemporary SNL cast, which also makes it canonically true that Saturday Night Live exists within the Marvel universe, which I (brilliantly) deduced must be the case in my review of season 2’s “Till Death Do Us Part”:

Commencing his campaign of discord, Morph rubs his hands together and giggles, “Makin’ copies,” a jarring reference which implies that both Saturday Night Live and Rob Schneider exist in the X-Men universe.

The teleportation ring’s lore may or may not have been updated to replace Belushi with Chris Farley, thanks to the Marvel Sliding Timescale, but I can only find one reference to that, and it’s got an ominous “citation needed” next to it. Let us never forget that X-Men is ridiculous.

Anyway, Wolverine and Japan. Both of these things got a lot of attention starting in the 1980s, so why not combine them? “Lotus and the Steel” is a very loose take on Chris Claremont’s 1982 Wolverine book. Overall, the episode isn’t great. On the one hand, this half hour is trying to address Wolverine’s many traumas: Weapon X, Sabretooth, religious faith, Yuriko Oyama, Jean, and even his terrifying encounter with Proteus. He decides that the only way to heal and control his rage is to Eat, Pray, Love about it in Japan.

On the other hand, you’ve got a story that thinks it’s an homage to Seven Samurai, in which Wolverine journeys to a remote Japanese village under the thumb of the Silver Samurai, who is about to collect his annual tribute. It doesn’t work very well, because standing in for an interesting group of hired mercenaries with varied personalities is Wolverine, and only Wolverine. He spends most of the episode learning to restrain himself, pointedly not fighting people and not even offering the village any help with its defense strategy. The villagers make up their own Home Alone-inspired defenses to defeat the Samurai’s gang while Wolverine wrestles with his demons. The emotional stakes are heavy but the action is featherweight, and the two don’t even really overlap.

The performances in this episode are some of the worst in the entire series, though the writers did at least pepper Wolverine’s lines with some basic Japanese. Cal Dodd does the best he can with these phrases, which isn’t very good. I think the episode is implying that Wolverine is actually speaking fluent Japanese throughout, and we’re just hearing English for convenience. Jubilee’s subplot is that she’s searching for Wolverine but failing to make progress because she can’t communicate with anyone.

The Silver Samurai may oversee a motorcycle gang, but his protection racket and the overall vibe of this version of Japan are positively feudal. The episode’s portrayal of Japan as exotic and a bit backward feels very dated from here in 2026, when anime has become a global phenomenon.¹ It’s thanks to our Crunchyroll subscription that I know that Dodd’s Japanese is pretty bad, and also why I know so much about the standardized layout of Japanese high schools.

Things come to a climax, if you can even call it that, when the Silver Samurai decides to stop playing games and personally crush the village. Wolverine steps in for a stupidly easy fight. The point is that Wolverine has learned to wait, pick the right moment, and strike with precision instead of rage. Although the episode spends a lot of time showing Wolverine not fighting (thrilling TV, right?), we don’t really see him learn anything. The monk he’s been spending time with, Oku, urges Wolverine to see with “different eyes,” a callback to “Nightcrawler”, this time from the practitioner of an Eastern religion instead of a Western one. Oku spouts phrases that vaguely approximate Zen riddles (“True strength is knowing when not to fight”, etc.), but the episode never actually demonstrates how this philosophy helps him. Oku’s life is threatened twice in this episode, and both times he’s saved not because of self-control or the acceptance of things he cannot change, but because Wolverine is nearby.

Overall, this one is a weird mashup that doesn’t really work. Now if you’d gotten Chris Farley in there somehow…

Stray observations:

• Xavier specifically mentions “the recent revelation” of Wolverine’s false memories. The episode contains flashbacks to the events of “Weapon X, Lies, and Videotape”, which, if you’re watching the show in production order, haven’t happened yet (it’s the next episode). This is a rare case where the airing order reflects the correct continuity but the production order doesn’t.

• Jubilee has a minor presence in this story, but it’s nice to see her. She manages to be pretty funny in her brief scenes. I particularly like the way she pilots her jet, demonstrating that she has learned nothing since season 2.

• After Wolverine defeats the Silver Samurai, the villagers just let him walk away. This guy has run a years-long protection racket against them, and they just let him wander off with a frown on his face?

Season 4, Episode 14. Air date: October 26, 1996 (in season 5).

Every time I start to think this show has lost sight of what makes X-Men great, it gives me an episode like “Bloodlines”. The kickoff is that Graydon Creed is desperate to rejoin the Friends of Humanity (now even more klan-coded), and he agrees to eliminate all the mutant members of his family to prove his loyalty. We haven’t seen Creed or the FoH since way back in season 2’s “Beauty and the Beast”, so their reintroduction here is quite a surprise. We learned in that earlier episode that Creed is the son of Sabretooth. This episode reveals that his mother is none other than Mystique, whose other children (Rogue via adoption, and Nightcrawler via Count Wagner, as previously seen in “Nightcrawler”) will also figure prominently here.

How, exactly, Creed manages to coerce the very clever Mystique into his scheme to ensnare his half-siblings isn’t very clear, though she does mention that she wanted to get closer to Rogue (as usual). Regardless, ensnare she does, sending Nightcrawler a letter meant to lure him to an FoH facility. Correctly sensing a trap, he takes the precaution of stopping by the X-Mansion on Halloween night to recruit Rogue (always fated to end up in Mystique’s garbage), Wolverine (continuing his near-perfect attendance record), and Jubilee (finally doing something!) for help.

This is the third story in a row that focuses on family feuds, produced (but not aired) immediately after “Proteus” and “Family Ties”. Those earlier episodes felt disjointed, either going through the motions of Saturday morning action pieces or doling out the family drama, but not really managing to blend the two into satisfying stories. “Bloodlines”, on the other hand, manages to keep everything in balance. The action is simple (but not boring) so that the characters can shine. Nightcrawler, Rogue, Wolverine, and Jubilee infiltrate a massive FoH compound (Rogue: “How did we miss this place?”) and spend the remainder of the episode fighting Creed and an escalating number of FoH goons. In between the gunfire, we get a lot of strong character moments and a surprisingly strong climax.

The show leans heavily on Nightcrawler’s religious faith once again, and while I wish the writers would show us some other sides of his personality, this continues to be effective, even in some unexpected ways. When Nightcrawler expresses his doubts about dragging the X-Men into his personal quest, Wolverine snickers, “Just have a little faith, pal. I hear it can work wonders.”

As the action comes to a head in the background, Mystique bitterly explains to Nightcrawler that his birth cost her a comfortable life as the wife of a German aristocrat. She’s always been an opportunist, she says, stealing little bits of other peoples’ lives, but never really living her own. She never wanted Nightcrawler, and hates him for existing. In response, Nightcrawler says, “I will beg God to bestow his grace on me, so that I can learn to forgive you. Then I will ask him to bestow his grace on you, so that you might forgive yourself.” Not even the flames of the Phoenix itself could deliver a burn this sick, people. Adrian Hough’s understated, gentle performance makes it hit like a truck. Mystique is taken aback, and shortly thereafter pushes Nightcrawler out of the way of Creed’s pistol. We briefly see her memories of nearly throwing the infant Nightcrawler off of a waterfall, as she goes over the side of the dam.¹

Meanwhile, Rogue, Wolverine, and Jubilee are having a grand old time fighting the FoH. Rogue teases the goons (who are all terrible shots, naturally), and even wrestles a helicopter to the ground! The episode is full of fun touches like this. There’s a very cool shot of Wolverine prying open some reinforced doors with his claws, Nightcrawler climbs along the ceiling to keep up with Rogue, Mystique cycles through some disguises that go all the way back to “Days of Future Past”, and even Jubilee manages to take out a few thugs along the way. Speaking of Jubilee, it sure is nice to see her! This is her first significant outing since “Savage Land, Strange Heart”, and she’s very fun. She’s mostly there as the episode’s Han Solo, occasionally calling out the crazy soap opera that’s unfolding in front of her.

The episode closes with a tearful Mystique quietly slinking away to whatever her next mercenary venture is, and the FoH dumping Creed out of a plane, putting him right in front of the family member who remained conspicuously absent from the reunion: Sabretooth. Leaving the episode’s villain to snivel in front of his hulking, sadistic father is, needless to say, a pretty dark way to close the adventure. Then again, Creed had it coming.

All in all, a very fun, tightly plotted episode that manages some really effective soap opera theatrics in its scant twenty minutes. Alas, Nightcrawler’s second big episode will be his last. At least he exits on a strong story.

Stray observations:

• Wolverine doesn’t like that kids essentially get to pretend to be mutants on Halloween, which seems like a better note for Beast. Ironically, he’s wearing a Beast mask shortly before he says this, which muddles the message even further.

• Mystique, explaining why she chose to marry the bland Count Wagner: “I’ve been many women in my time, some rich, some poor. Rich, I find, is preferable.”

• On the toilet: everyone except Wolverine, Rogue, and Jubilee.

Season 4, Episode 13. Air date: May 4, 1996.

“Your mother was a gentle woman. The world I fought for frightened her. I frightened her.” It’s this episode’s most powerful line, and it comes from Magneto, telling his children (Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, aka Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch) why their mother chose to flee from him and die in hiding. This confession comes shortly after the High Evolutionary reveals to all three of them that they’re a family, and just before Magneto decides it’s time for them to wreck the Evolutionary’s hidden fortress/laboratory. Or as he tells his children, “We shall not perish at the hands of a psychotic biologist!” Needless to say, this episode has some tonal problems.

Wanda Maximoff has a long history with the franchise, debuting way back in 1963’s X-Men #4 as a reluctant member of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. She eventually leaves that group, joins the Avengers, leaves them, hooks up with Vision, and on and on. This episode borrows elements from a 1974 Avengers story, which revealed that Pietro and Wanda’s parents were the Golden Age heroes Miss America and—ahem—The Whizzer, a guy who manifested superhuman speedster powers after being injected with mongoose blood. It’s not until a 1982 story that Magneto is retconned as Pietro and Wanda’s father, no doubt part of other early-80s efforts to transform him from a one-note villain into a more nuanced antihero. Wanda goes on to do many great things, not the least of which is that time she de-powered 90% of all mutants on Earth. She’s also the star of one of the best MCU TV series, but if you’re reading this, you probably already knew that. Or maybe all of this!

Wanda’s powers are an iffy blend of science (“probability manipulation”, parallel universes, etcetera) and sorcery (hexes, demonic influence, abracadabra). She can make basically anything happen, but she can’t control the exact effect. This makes her chaotic and interesting, at least in the comics. “Family Ties” barely uses her powers at all. She restrains Magneto with a rope that magically ties itself, and later makes a bunch of goons trip and fall over. As for Quicksilver, he’s very fast. Not so fast that he’s functionally God, but fast enough to spin like a top and save himself from deadly falls, as he does a couple of times in this story. The action scenes in this one are pretty bad, folks.

The episode makes the mistake of giving the audience too much information. The High Evolutionary feeds Magneto and Pietro/Wanda different stories to get everyone to his lab at Mt. Wundagore, which makes their initial meeting and fight kind of tedious to sit through. We know that the High Evolutionary is going to reveal himself as the villain, and surprise surprise, he wants their DNA (the keys to probability manipulation, super speed, and raw power) to accelerate his own research into creating a genetically perfect race.

If I had it my way, I would have made Wanda a conspirator in the High Evolutionary’s scheme. This is the first time we’ve ever seen her, making her an unknown quantity. Her character often walks a fine line between good and evil (most notably in WandaVision but unfortunately not in Multiverse of Madness), and I think it would have been satisfying to have her start as an antagonist, then experience a change of heart and betray the High Evolutionary in the nick of time. But alas, no. The Evolutionary’s human-animal hybrids apprehend Wanda and Pietro seconds after they deal with Magneto, the Evolutionary reveals his plan, there’s another clunky fight with the goons, and then the Evolutionary cuts his losses and departs. Oh, and Wolverine gets transformed into an actual werewolf (guy’s really been getting it bad lately). In a great example of lazy writing, he just reverts to his normal self when the Evolutionary departs.

The talkier parts of the story work better, if not especially well. David Hemblen does a commendable job selling Magneto’s sincere guilt over what happened to his wife and his unwitting abandonment of his biological children. He asks Wanda and Pietro if they can forgive him, and doesn’t fault them when they don’t. Wolverine acts like Magneto is still his early-era archvillain self, but he’s spent most of his time on the show solidly in antihero territory, and this episode is downright sympathetic to him. Magneto also has a cool exchange with Xavier near the episode’s start, which almost feels like a preview of how their relationship will be portrayed in the movies. Lastly, dude looks fabulous in a simple black coat. Between act breaks, he’ll inexplicably be put back in his classic red and purple costume, billowing cloak and all. At least we got a few scenes of him dressed to impress.

Stray observations:

• Wanda and Pietro’s adoptive parents receive the infants from Bova, a half-cow midwife. They have no follow-up questions.

• Magneto has no difficulty getting into the X-Mansion for his late night chat with Xavier. “Wolverine was supposed to be on guard duty,” Xavier muses. Checking his security cameras, he finds Wolverine struggling in agony against some kind of electromagnetic web that Magneto devised. Then Xavier just mutes the TV and turns back to his chat with Magneto. Charles Xavier continues to be just a bit more of a sociopath than I’d like.

• This episode acts like everyone already knows who the Scarlet Witch is, despite the fact that we’ve only previously gotten the briefest glimpse of her in season 2’s “Repo Man”.

• On the toilet: everyone except Xavier, Wolverine, and Beast. I’m pretty sure Beast is here just so he can say, “The creatures are neither man nor beast, much as I have been described! Though I doubt we will have time to discuss it.”

Season 4, Episodes 11 and 12. Air dates: September 30 and October 7, 1995.

Mutants are metaphors for the other, the outcast, the strange. Of course, X-Men’s stories tend to follow the adventures of mutants who are conventionally attractive and have an array of cool, useful powers, somewhat diminishing the point. Occasionally, the franchise tries to tell stories about mutants who just want to live normal lives, or of mutants who simply can’t live in “normal” society at all, like the Morlocks. Even more rarely, we’re told a story of a mutant who is too dangerous to live, period. Ultimate X-Men #41, for example, is an all-time great issue on the topic (CW: very tragic).

A similar idea plays out in Uncanny X-Men #125-128, in which the character of Mutant X / Proteus / Kevin MacTaggert debuts and dies. The secret child of Moira (Xavier’s once-fiancé and longtime ally) and Joe (evil politician) MacTaggert, Kevin has lived his entire life in a containment cell. His powers are both terrible and overwhelming: he lacks a physical body but can possess almost anyone, rapidly burning out their physical forms in the process. On top of that, he has practically unlimited reality-warping powers that make him an extreme threat to anyone who crosses his path. In his debut story, he escapes containment, tracks down his absentee father, murders him (along with a trail of innocent people), and is finally killed when he tries to possess Colossus (Proteus’s one vulnerability is metal). It’s a sad and violent story about the terrible sacrifices that are necessary to eliminate a truly uncontrollable power. Perhaps not coincidentally, these issues immediately precede the Dark Phoenix Saga.

Color me surprised that X-Men: The Animated Series tried to adapt this one. To make it work, they had to soften all of the violence and radically change the ending. Kevin can still possess anyone but doesn’t kill his victims in the process. His vulnerability to metal never comes up, thus eliding the need for anyone to try to shoot him with bullets, as his own mother does in the comics. He still tracks down his father and confronts him, but instead of ending in murder, it ends with a hasty reconciliation and a decidedly unearned happy ending. After acting like an utter villain for the entire two-parter, Joe MacTaggert has a literal last-minute change of heart and carries Kevin away in his arms,¹ an ending that even Eric Lewald (the show’s head writer) called “a bit much”.

The main story is pretty straightforward and just kind of blends together across both episodes, hence why I’m not bothering to review each part separately. Kevin escapes containment on Muir Island and gradually makes his way to Edinburgh to confront his father, a prominent politician running on a family-first platform. Kevin is limitlessly powerful, but also so sheltered that he finds everything about the outside world overwhelming. This could have been interesting, but Kevin is so singularly focused on finding his father that everything becomes, “Where’s my dad?” Proteus’s extremely goofy character design, somewhere between the Kool-Aid Man and a living Dorito, doesn’t help matters. I will, however, give credit where it’s due: the animation of Proteus’s reality-warping abilities is really well done, especially with what happens to Wolverine.

Oh yeah, consistent with the original story, Proteus uses his powers to melt Wolverine, at least temporarily (his powers only stick while he’s in the immediate vicinity). The animation of Wolverine’s claws turning into little serpents, then the man himself splitting in half and melting into a puddle is, needless to say, pretty wild. Wolverine emerges from this experience rocking back and forth and crying, and he remains pretty traumatized throughout the story. Wolverine has appeared in almost every episode of this show, and we’ve never seen him like this. He’s so scared of Proteus that he runs away from two subsequent fights, but steels himself long enough to help the good guys at least a little. The show doesn’t really do the work to make this an “overcoming your fears” story, but still, one cannot simply remove Wolverine from the fight completely (except for “A Deal with the Devil”).

This story spends a lot of time on Professor Xavier, as many stories have this season. We get an extensive montage/flashback of his early days with Moira, her breaking off their engagement while Xavier was deployed in the army (probably the Korean War, also presumably where he lost the use of his legs), her going on to marry and then divorce Joe MacTaggert, and finally hooking up with Banshee (you know, Saturday morning stuff). The flashback even repeats Xavier’s meeting Amelia Voght in rehab, founding the X-Men, Amelia leaving him, etc. Throughout these episodes, Xavier tells us (and shows us) how deeply he still cares for Moira, and for her wayward son, no matter how dangerous he may be. He’s got more chemistry with Moira here than he ever had with Lilandra the Space Empress.

It looks like Proteus is going to kill his father just as he did in the comics, until Xavier finally manages a psychic breakthrough with the rampaging teen. It really feels like the story is setting up Xavier to become Proteus’s surrogate father, but things take a sharp turn at the very end. Joe, who’s been alternately completely callous toward his abandoned son or straight-up terrified of him, suddenly feels his heart grow two sizes and carries the kid away. It’s a completely unearned heel-face turn that instantly abandons everything this story has been trying to say about what it means to be a parent.

Now That’s What I Call ’90s: Moira shows Xavier some campaign footage of Joe MacTaggert that she’s recorded on VHS.

Stray observations:

• In his campaign speech, Joe MacTaggert says, “What Scotland has lost is family values. As Secretary of State, I will bring Scotland back to the family values that made it great.” The more things change, right?

• Wolverine goes through several wardrobe changes in this story: his usual costume, his typical flannel casual wear, and inexplicably, a cowboy getup out of Westworld.

• Rogue has a minor role in this story but Lenore Zann makes it count. “Guess he [Joe] likes children, if they ain’t his. I’ve seen that happen before.” The way Zann delivers this line is simply a cut above everyone else, and it leads into a not-strictly-needed brief flashback about her own abusive father. The episode is trying, at least.

• As I said, a lot of the animation of Proteus’s reality-warping powers is pretty cool, but the fight scenes bite off more than they can chew. The fights are confusingly staged, and in several places the animation just doesn’t deliver.

• At one point in Part 2, Beast is quoting a book, the cover of which has been blurred out for broadcast. Reddit confirms that this was originally The Making of the President, a book about JFK. It’s unclear why Disney censored it. Either they didn’t want to risk having to clear the rights, or the loosely drawn cover—a vague sketch of an eagle rendered in shades of brown—accidentally came out a little too Third Reich.

• On the toilet: everyone except Xavier, Rogue, Wolverine, and Beast.

Having been raised Jewish, I’m not very big on Christmas music. I don’t mind it, which is fortunate, because for fully two months out of the year it’s completely inescapable. But I, like most of my people, don’t actively seek it out.

That said, I do have a couple of favorite tracks. Both can be found on Hail Smiling Morn!, a 1995 album from my college mentor, Professor Tony Barrand. His group, Nowell Sing We Clear, specialized in Anglo-American songs and carols, which means their albums are full of holiday tunes somewhat off the beaten path, ranging from classic versions of familiar favorites, to obscure wintertime paeans you’re unlikely to hear on the radio.

The first of my favorites is the album’s title track, “Hail Smiling Morn!” Professor Barrand was the group’s lead singer, and can be heard leading the call and response section. This one is about glorifying the light of the sun. I suppose it resonates with me because I live in New England, and our winters are brutal. It’s not the cold or the snow, it’s the darkness. Throughout December, southern New England gets just over nine hours of sunlight, and the sun sets around 4:15 in the afternoon. “Hail Smiling Morn!” concludes with four men heartily singing, “Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail!” as if they’re shouting back the night itself. This time of year, that’s medicine for the soul.

My second favorite track is “The Bitter Withy”, which is a folktale about Jesus’s childhood. I always thought the New Testament had a weird structure. Jesus is born, and then the story skips forward thirty-three years to his death and resurrection. What about all the years in between? What did he get up to? What about that time Kid Jesus accidentally murdered three children? As related in the song, Jesus goes out to play and encounters three rich kids, who want nothing to do with some kid born in a barn. So Jesus runs off across the water, the kids try to follow, and as the song puts it, “Drown-ed they were, all three.” Mary makes a switch from the branches of the withy tree and disciplines Jesus, which is, apparently, why the branches of the withy tree are used as kindling in modern times. The more you know!

I’ll also give an honorable (or perhaps honourable) mention to the album’s rousing rendition of “Here We Come A-Wassailing / We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, which harkens back to the original purpose of caroling: haranguing the wealthy until they finally cave.