Jonathan Dobres

Season 5, Episode 8. Air date: September 6, 1997.

Throughout its run, X-Men: The Animated Series was a show on a budget, and it has the animation errors to prove it. Even so, the drop in quality evident during the show’s final few episodes is impossible to ignore. Just look at the redesigned Rogue. On top of the terrible new look and shoddy execution, her gloves will disappear between shots, even in the same scene. She makes enough skin-to-skin contact in this story to kill multiple people, or would have, if the show had remembered one of her defining powers. The audio is on par with the visuals. In several scenes, the imbalanced sound mix renders dialogue unintelligible against the music and sound effects. It’s embarrassing, frankly.

Anyway, this is the Cannonball episode, a stripped down version of his 1982 origin story. Young Sam Guthrie’s main attributes are that he is adorably gawky, extremely Southern, and can turn into a propulsive human explosion at will. It’s a lovable combination, and Sam manages to come through as a likable character despite this story’s many shortcomings. Briefly, Sam is a known quantity in his small hometown of Cumberland, Kentucky. The townies are a bit weirded out by his powers, but they know he’s a nice enough guy, and it helps that he saved a couple of coal miners from a cave-in at the top of the episode. A shady suit named Mr. Girkland has been trying to recruit Sam into his organization. It feels government-coded and even mentions Rogue appearing in “the Wideawake data” (which is a government program), but is actually a private entity, like Henry Gyrich’s defunct Mutant Control Agency.¹

Rogue hears about Sam’s heroics, remarking, “Must be tough bein’ the only mutant in town.” I wonder if mutation is a metaphor for anything, folks. She and Beast decide to pay Sam a visit. The pair don’t actually accomplish much with Sam, since he’s well adjusted and happy, but they do start looking into Girkland, who in turn starts looking into the X-Men.

The good guys dispatch Gambit, master thief, to break into Girkland’s headquarters. The sequence is overwrought in a “made for twelve year-olds” kind of way. Gambit uses his staff to leap between rooftops, and pulls out a miscellaneous piece of tech to open an HVAC vent cover, for some reason. He’s quickly apprehended, and it’s revealed that Girkland’s operation is exploring how to control mutants through experimental surgeries. Beast and Xavier free Gambit just as he’s about to go under the knife, with Xavier demonstrating the “make everyone pass out from a room away” ability that the movies love. How, exactly, an extra large blue man and a guy in a hovering wheelchair got into this facility in the nick of time is a mystery left to the ADA.

Back in Cumberland, Girkland’s agents are spreading anti-mutant rumors faster than you can say “social stigma”. The show usually portrays anti-mutant bigotry as a given. Characters are either already anti-mutant or not. We almost never see how those prejudices develop and spread, especially in small towns. This is the episode’s most compelling angle, and I wish they’d given it more emphasis. A local teen tells Sam, “I ain’t touchin’ no mutie. Might get infected.” Rather than follow through on committing a hate crime, the teens drive off in their pickup, which Sam grabs ahold of, turning it into a rocket dragster for a few terrifying minutes (Magneto would approve). Sam decides he’s had enough of these people, and visits Girkland to accept his offer (Magneto would not approve).

By the time the episode has resolved things with Gambit, a torch-wielding mob has assembled at the Guthrie house. It’s at this point that the entirety of the X-Men appear. The standoff between the mob and the X-Men is played for a moment of drama, but come on, there are seven thousand ways a team of superheroes could handle this, easily. Meanwhile, Sam realizes what a shifty liar Girkland is and explodes his way out of the helicopter they’re on. The best part of this is that Sam ends his dramatic escape flight with a stumbling crash landing in front of the mob. The episode doesn’t dwell on it for laughs, which makes it funnier. What can I say, I’m a sucker for pyrogenesis as a metaphor for your awkward teenage growth spurt.

Girkland sends a bunch of robots after Sam and the X-Men. The fight is generic, to put it kindly, which begs a few questions. Why summon the whole team if only the episode’s featured characters will actually be doing anything? Why not have characters with fabulous powers use them? Why is Charles Xavier just sort of sitting in the middle of a live fire zone? Why have Girkland deploy one of his surgically controlled mutants, only to have it flop over and pass out after doing a rounding error’s worth of property damage?

This being Sam Guthrie’s one and only episode, he gets to be the hero. He blasts through a few robots, then fires himself head-on into Girkland’s train.² It’s an exciting conclusion to the action despite the plot holes that led to it. Although this episode’s animation is distractingly bad overall, somebody loved animating Sam. He’s more expressive than any other character, and all the sequences of him using his powers feel great (see also: the aforementioned crash landing in front of the mob).

Xavier offers Sam a place at his school, but as with all guest mutants, Sam declines. He’s got to help his family rebuild their lives somewhere else. Call me crazy but that’s a pretty dark ending, and it doesn’t make much sense. The Guthries have lived in Cumberland for six generations. Surely being part of the town since roughly the War of 1812 counts for something. Even setting aside their history, Sam saved peoples’ lives here, twice in two days. Shouldn’t the townsfolk come to their senses and be more suspicious of slick strangers like Girkland?

Overall, it’s another middling-to-bad outing for season 5. Sam is likable enough, but the story itself is nothing the show hasn’t done before, and better.

Stray observations:

• This is the series’s 74^th episode, but I think it might be only the second to show Gambit doing something with that bo staff.

• People Rogue should have put in a coma via accidental skin contact: Sam Guthrie, Gambit.

• Rogue introduces herself as “Ms. LeBeau,” which will later cause her some embarrassment when Sam calls her that in front of Gambit. It’s a fun little moment in an episode otherwise light on character beats.

• On the toilet: no one. All of the X-Men appear, even if, like Wolverine and several others, they have no lines.

Season 5, Episode 7. Air date: February 22, 1997.

X-Men: The Animated Series usually downplays the fact that mutants live alongside the rest of the Marvel universe. Other than a light sprinkling of quick cameos (Stephen Strange and Spiderman’s hand in “The Phoenix Saga”, or an alt-universe glimpse of the Avengers in “One Man’s Worth”), the show treats X-Men as a completely separate franchise. “Old Soldiers” is an unusual episode because it prominently guest stars a Marvel hero from a different comic entirely. Captain America, no less.

I don’t think I really need to tell you who Captain America is, but there are two details about him that are worth remembering here. One, the early Captain America comics about a kid signing up to serve in World War II weren’t a period piece. Captain America #1 was published in 1941, during the war. Two, the cover of that issue shows Cap punching Hitler right in his god damn face. There’s no ambiguity about what Steve Rogers means when he talks about fighting for freedom and liberty. He means literally fighting. Yes, he understands the symbolic importance of his big, bright costume, but first and foremost he’s going to punch a lot of Nazis.

And who better to join Captain America in his enthusiastic Nazi punching than Wolverine? I really mean it, this is a fun pairing. Of course, in 1944 he’s not really “Wolverine” yet, since the Weapon X program hasn’t given him a metal skeleton, retractable claws, or false memories. While we’re on the subject, one of my favorite retcons to X-Men lore is that the “X” in “Weapon X” is not a letter, but a Roman numeral, making Wolverine part of the tenth iteration of the Weapon Plus program. The first was Weapon I, which created Captain America. That retcon didn’t happen until 2002, during Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men. In 1997, Wolverine and Cap were just two Marvel characters who had both fought in World War II.

The episode opens with Wolverine dramatically cursing at the grave of one Andre Cocteau. A nearby group of elderly veterans almost recognize Wolverine as one of their old war buddies, before brushing off the idea as a silly mistake (he’s probably the guy’s son, right?). While the show has occasionally hinted that Wolverine is older than he looks, this is our first confirmation that his healing factor makes him extremely long-lived. Wolverine watches the retirees depart, no doubt remembering when he last saw them, in the prime of their lives. Personally I would have liked for the episode to dwell on this a little more, but we’ve got Nazis to punch.

The ensuing flashback takes us to 1944 in Nazi-occupied France. Wolverine—or Logan, rather—is working for the OSS, and is told to rescue Dr. Andre Cocteau from the Nazis, who are forcing him to work on a mysterious project. Cocteau is an original character to the show, as is his daughter Justine, who is only there because the episode needed at least one woman, I guess.

Logan also gets Captain America as a partner for the mission, which is a great pairing. Logan is cynical and used to working in the shadows, whereas Cap wears a bright red, white, and blue costume on purpose, the better to be a symbol of hope, liberty, etc. The episode will somewhat belabor the point as Logan and Cap save a kid from some mean Nazis (one of whom calls Captain America an “Amerikanischer Hund”), but it’s a point worth making.

Logan and Cap infiltrate the Nazi-controlled castle by scaling a nearby cliff. They’re assisted in the effort by some rather implausible strap-on claws, which Logan likes a little too much. He’ll keep them on for the rest of the story. Our heroes punch a lot of Nazis before finding Dr. Cocteau, who is strangely resistant to being rescued. They eventually cross paths with the Red Skull, who chains them up in a dungeon, gleefully informing the good guys that Cocteau has betrayed them (hence Logan’s anger in the opening scene). Red Skull’s delightfully campy performance is provided by Cedric Smith, who ordinarily voices the staid Professor Xavier. It’s a real treat, all exaggerated rolled ‘R’s in a high register that evoke, perhaps intentionally, Skeletor.

Captain America and Logan get trussed up like they’re about to film a Van Darkholme video. It’s up to Logan to swing around the room, knock Cap’s shield into the air, and ricochet it into his restraints to cut himself loose. Cal Dodd has a ton of fun in this scene and seems to know what’s up, especially when he shouts, “Get ready for it, boy!” for no real reason.

With our heroes free, another Nazi-punching melee ensues. This escalates when the Red Skull activates Cocteau’s mystery project, a big robot called the Sleeper. I know I’ve often criticized the show for forgetting that its characters have superpowers, resulting in simplistic action, but the punching works really well here. Both Logan and Captain America are fighters, pure and simple. The episode isn’t leaving creative opportunities on the table—this is what these guys do, and they’re having a lot of fun doing it. Logan clambers all over the Sleeper and opens up its rather conspicuous chest cavity. With a hearty, “Yo, Cap!” he signals Captain America to throw his shield into the thing’s machinery and put it down for good.

Red Skull and Cocteau manage to escape, which Logan considers a failure. Captain America, however, sees the escapade as one battle won in the larger war. The Axis is weakened that much more, and therefore the mission was a success. It’s at this point that the episode returns to the present. An older Justine Cocteau approaches Wolverine in the cemetery to explain that her father was a double agent. The mission was a smokescreen to make her father’s defection to the Axis more convincing. Thanks in part to Logan’s actions fifty years ago, he was able to continue sabotaging the Nazis from behind enemy lines throughout the war (hence why he seemingly didn’t want to be rescued, and maybe why the Sleeper had such an obvious weak point).

It’s a decent story, but I think the reveal of Cocteau’s double agent status would have been more fun if it came from Captain America. It also would have been nice to see Wolverine react to the sight of someone who, like him, has an unnaturally long lifespan.

Stray observations:

• Wolverine somehow makes Cocteau lose consciousness so that he’s easier to carry around. Mutant nerve pinch, maybe?

• On the toilet: it’s a Wolverine solo episode, so he’s the only X-Man who appears. Most of the action takes place in the 1940s, long before the other X-Men have even been born (though Xavier himself would be about ten years old).

Season 5, Episode 6. Air date: November 16, 1996.

I went into season 5 knowing that it was produced hastily, an effort to pad out the show’s run quickly and cheaply, even going so far as to enlist an in-house animation studio with a different (generally worse) visual style. So I wasn’t surprised to find an episode like “Jubilee’s Fairytale Theatre”, in which Jubilee gets stuck in a cave with some little kids. She keeps them calm and out of danger by telling them a fantasy story. The one she tells feels more like an episode of Gummi Bears than X-Men, and while it does make sense for her intended in-universe audience, it doesn’t for the show’s. I wish the episode had leaned harder into the idea that this is a story from Jubilee’s imagination, maybe let her run wild with her most ridiculous power fantasies. Instead, she’s an elf. The animation is rubbery and cheap looking, maybe the worst the show has ever looked. The only notable thing in this episode is the debut of the redesigned Gambit. He looks and sounds terrible, as Chris Potter has been replaced by the inferior Troy Daniels.

It’s a downgrade all around, folks. I suppose at the very least, the episode has a tiny character arc. Jubilee goes from complaining about having to play babysitter to doing a very competent job keeping the kids safe and unaware of how much danger they’re actually in. Jean (hi, Jean!) notes that she doesn’t sense any of the fear or trauma from the kids one might expect after spending a day in a slowly flooding cavern. Good for you, Jubilee.

Stray observations:

• This episode has a fair bit in common with Uncanny X-Men #153, in which Kitty Pryde calms down young Illyana Rasputin with a similar story (in the middle of the Dark Phoenix Saga, no less). It’s hard to say whether that issue directly inspired this episode, or if tropes like Professor Xavier as an all-knowing wizard are just kind of obvious.

• One of the peasants that elf-Jubilee rescues looks an awful lot like Longshot, but as there’s no other reference to him, that’s probably coincidence.

• The X-Mansion has vast caverns underneath it, as all cartoon mansions do.

• The kids leave via a school bus belonging to the Squillace School District, a reference to the show’s co-creator, Frank Squillace.

• On the toilet: Storm, Rogue, and Beast.

Season 5, Episode 5. Air date: February 8, 1997.

My review of “Beyond Good and Evil” was already a million words long, so I excised an observation about how Apocalypse’s opinion of himself changes (abruptly) over that story. He starts out by telling Cable, “Evil? I am not malevolent. I simply am.” By the end of the story, however, he seems to have concluded that he perpetually struggles against lesser beings because he is an incarnation of evil, and the universe simply cannot allow good or evil to triumph absolutely. Apocalypse seemed not to realize that unmaking all of reality would certainly qualify as evil’s ultimate victory, which may explain why his intricate scheme, centuries in the making, was somehow foiled by idiots like Cable and Bishop.

All this is to say, Apocalypse has come a long way from his season 1 debut as yet another X-Men villain who wanted to make perfect mutants. He’s the closest thing this show has to a living god. Fabian Cortez says as much in this episode. Apocalypse cannot ever truly win, but nor can he ever be completely destroyed. Thus, instead of blinking out of existence at the end of “Beyond Good and Evil” like he should have, Apocalypse has ended up stuck in the astral plane (say hi to the Shadow King for me) and in need of a new body.

Cortez, last seen regaining consciousness in Apocalypse’s lair at the end of “Sanctuary”, has been acting as Apocalypse’s instrument on Earth, a fitting role for a guy I think we can charitably describe as an absolute tool. Turns out that Apocalypse has a cult of worshippers and a backup Lazarus Chamber in the Andes, and Cortez has been working toward reincarnating his boss. Everything is prepared for the grand ritual, he just needs to find a young, strong mutant capable of hosting Apocalypse’s…soul? Essence? Whatever allows Apocalypse to retain his powers and exist as a translucent ghost in the astral plane.

Conveniently, Beast and Jubilee are in South America on a research trip. Beast gets to do archeological research and Jubilee gets to practice her Spanish. The pair of them work very well as a comedy duo. Imagine Frasier Crane getting an enthusiastic intern with pyrokinetic powers. I’ll also note that this is where a new animation studio took over, so the show looks different, especially Jubilee. There are odd animation errors throughout. In particular, sometimes characters (or just parts of characters, like Jubilee’s lips here) have a glow around them for no apparent reason.

Anyway, Apocalypse needs a new body, and Cortez, borrowing a page from his new boss, has empowered four former Morlocks as his “Hounds” to find one. They don’t do a very good job of it, but eventually clock Jubilee as the perfect candidate. They assault Jubilee and Beast just after Beast realizes that the ancient tablet he’s been studying, which he initially read as dedicated to “the end of the world”, is actually dedicated to Apocalypse. This would have made for a clever reveal if we didn’t already know that Apocalypse is in this story.

Things move quickly from there. The Hounds drag Beast and Jubilee back to the temple, and Cortez uses his powers to buff Beast into a rampaging animal, who runs off. He also repeatedly insults and dismisses one of his Hounds, Caliban, whom Jubilee recognizes from “Have Yourself A Morlock Little X-Mas” (so I guess that’s canon). This is a rare instance where I wish Jubilee had been given a throwaway line to remind us about that connection.

True to form, Cortez is his own worst enemy. Caliban finally works up the courage to betray him just in time for the sacrifice, and around the same time Beast returns to the temple to join the fight. Cortez hastily depowers everyone, but by then it’s too late. The temple is collapsing (for some reason), and Cortez is left alone on the altar. You see where this is going, right? Apocalypse gleefully thanks Cortez for providing such a fine vessel, takes over Cortez’s body, and transforms into his big blue self.

It’s passable Saturday morning stuff, firmly mid-tier. Lawrence Bayne’s nutty line readings as Cortez are a highlight, as he really leans into the Jay-Mohr-doing-Christopher-Walken of it all. Beast and Jubilee’s rapport is delightful. Late in the show’s run, these two are finally popping up more frequently, and the franchise is better for it.

Stray observations:

• The members of Apocalypse’s South American cult all sport a tattoo of his signature blue underbite. There are only a couple of shots of them as a group, but even for a Saturday morning cartoon, it’s pretty unsettling!

• When deciphering the tablet that points the way to Apocalypse’s temple, Beast gives Jubilee a quick lecture on the differences between Incan and Mayan civilization. It’s nice to see the show demonstrate Beast’s intellect with something other than poetry or technobabble.

• On the toilet: Wolverine, along with everyone else who is not Beast or Jubilee. For those of you keeping score at home, this is Wolverine’s fourth absence across the whole series.

Storm’s abilities have always felt like magic, much more so than any other X-Man’s. How, exactly, does she control the weather? The franchise doesn’t even bother with a theory. What are the limits of her powers? Don’t think too hard about it. Little wonder, then, that when X-Men: The Animated Series focuses on Storm, it goes for sword and sorcery settings more often than not. We first got a taste of this in “Savage Land, Strange Heart”, and now we’re going to be introduced to a whole new planet of shirtless, caped doofuses in “Storm Front”.

In this story, Storm tires of Earth’s racist ingrates and falls for an intergalactic hunk who treats her like a goddess. Naturally, he turns out to be a brutal tyrant. We get to see the X-Men react to one of their most stalwart members stepping away, as she falls for what is clearly the wrong guy. The ideas in this story are good, it’s the execution that falters.

Part 1

Season 5, Episode 3. Air date: November 2, 1996.

The X-Men fly to Washington, D.C. to try to stop an unprecedented weather disaster in the making. The episode doesn’t really posit any kind of plan here, but that’s not the point. Mutants are being blamed for the hurricane, and if you think that’s cartoony kid racism, you’re too young to remember the likes of Pat Robertson. Storm is especially hard hit by the freaky weather, which she cries is, “…not of the Earth!” She flies around D.C. doing her best to return the local weather system to normal, before falling dramatically from the top of the Washington Monument. She is saved by a green-eyed stud in a loincloth, cape, and helm. This is a man who put on this ensemble, looked at himself in the mirror, and thought, “You know what this needs? My largest quiver of arrows.”

This guy is Arkon, the source of the unearthly weather and ruler of the planet Polemachus. Yup, ruler of an entire planet. Arkon is another strangely deep cut into the Marvel catalog. He and Polemachus debuted in a 1970 Avengers story. Think Conan the Barbarian with an Asgardian magical-tech vibe. Polemachus exists in a parallel dimension and is sustained by its planetary rings, which are often affected by events on Earth, hence Arkon’s desire to destroy the Earth in his 1970 debut. The show’s version of this story borrows elements from 1979’s X-Men Annual #3, in which Storm and Cyclops ultimately team up to re-energize Polemachus’s rings, and 1981’s X-Men Annual #5, in which Storm and Arkon express feelings for each other. Arkon and Polemachus haven’t really shown up in the comics since, which should give you some idea of how cool they are, and how truly baffling it was for the show to do a Polemachus story in 1996.

Anyway, Arkon turns off his weather machine and tells Storm that his planet is endangered by weather even worse than what he caused in D.C. She is appalled that Arkon would risk the lives of millions of people just to scout her, and absolutely does not consent to joining him, but in her weakened state he’s able to carry her into a portal anyway. Storm manages to leave behind both her comm badge and one of Arkon’s magical technologically advanced portal-creating beads.

There are some fun character beats as the team is forced to hitch a ride home in some normie’s truck (the Blackbird had to pull an emergency landing) and eventually they accidentally activate the teleportation bead. Upon arriving on Polemachus, they’re beset by both the terrified populus (all in capes and weird helmets, naturally) and a cadre of hovering murderbots. The fight against the bots is not the show’s best work, but it has its moments. Jubilee, of all people, intimidates the angry crowd with her powers, which is a nice change of pace for her. Beast says, “This is not how I would have wished to learn about this new culture!” as he smashes a bot to pieces in self-defense.

They eventually prevail, and Beast sets about trying to triangulate Storm’s location. Jubilee suggests that anyone powerful enough to snatch Storm from a world away probably lives in the giant palace just over yonder, which again, is a fun moment for her (and Beast). Not that it matters, as the team is quickly hit by a teleport ray and sent directly to the palace’s dungeon. Not that it matters, as they quickly fake some infighting to get the guards inside their cell, and escape (presumably; this fight isn’t actually shown). They burst into Arkon’s throne room just as he and Storm are wrapping up the global realignment of the Polemachian climate.

The episode has been breaking up the fights with scenes in Arkon’s throne room. Storm doesn’t love that he abducted her, but faced with a planet imperiled, especially one imperiled by weather, she feels obligated to do the right thing and save lives. Getting in tune with an entire planet takes a lot of time and effort (which rankles Arkon), made more difficult by some kind of interference from a very suspicious glowing pylon at the city center. Arkon insists that this device is essential to planetary security (interesting wording there, my king), and Storm drops it. She’s eventually able to work her magic use her genetically-derived mutant powers to calm the weather across the entire planet, which raises a lot of questions about just how powerful Storm is.

It’s at this point that Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast, and Jubilee bust in to “save” Storm, which entails a brief tussle with Arkon. This enrages Storm, reverting the planet’s weather to its apocalyptic state. Storm calms everyone down and, with Arkon’s support, uses the last of her strength to correct the weather. There’s a notable reaction shot of Wolverine wincing as Arkon escorts her back to the throne so she can save the planet. The message is clear: Storm is trying to do the right thing, and the X-Men are just running around causing harm. “Whoa, guess they don’t need us at all,” says Jubilee.

Arkon is elated with Storm’s miraculous feat. The people adore her. Arkon proposes to her with the words, “Storm, I don’t know how Earth celebrates your incredible deeds, but I’ll tell you, Polemachus will love and worship you, now and forever. And so will I”. And she accepts! Without a doubt the biggest cliffhanger in the show’s entire run.

Now That’s What I Call ’90s: ozone layer mentioned! Polemachus’s aberrant weather is due to the weakening of its planetary ring, which Arkon says, “protects our planet as the ozone layer protects your Earth”. Every ’90s kid remembers being educated about the dangers of the hole in the ozone layer. It’s a real triumph of science education and international cooperation, actually. Ozone depletion was discovered in 1985, along with the attendant risks of increased UV radiation exposure and other effects. By 1996, the world had agreed to ban the production of chlorofluorocarbons, and the ozone layer has been recovering ever since. That I can type “chlorofluorocarbon” from memory is a testament to how effective (and ubiquitous) the educational efforts were. In the ’90s, we worried that the ozone layer might have been damaged beyond repair. Thirty years on, thanks to science and good public policy, we’re instead projecting the complete recovery of the ozone layer by the time I retire.

Stray observations:

• We get to see the Blackbird use that SHIAR CLOAK. Neat!

• It’s fun to see Jubilee taking a more central role for a change, but the way she bosses around Cyclops in the opening scene feels off to me. She calls him “Cyke” a lot.

• On the toilet: Rogue, Gambit, and (of course) Jean.

Part 2

Season 5, Episode 4. Air date: November 9, 1996.

Part 2’s best scene is its very first. The X-Men are in disbelief that one of their own would abandon them, or three out of four them are, anyway. Cyclops isn’t thrilled about it, but maintains that Storm is allowed to make her own choices. This opinion seems like a better fit for Wolverine or even the absent Gambit, but as always, the show puts the worst opinion in Cyclops’s mouth. Jubilee is also basically on board with Storm getting hitched to a space hunk, though as we’ll see, she’s more clear-eyed about the situation than Storm is.

Storm herself cuts into the debate to explain that she is, in fact, thinking clearly. She’s tired of putting her life at risk for a world that continues to hate mutants and, more to the point, she’s been an X-Man since she was a teenager. Hers has been a life of self-control, and of being controlled. This is the first real choice she’s ever had, and from where she’s sitting, it’s an easy one. The people treat her like a goddess (they are literally erecting a giant statue of her outside), a superhunk is in love with her, and surely she’ll revolutionize Polemachian fashion sense (this last part is my own extrapolation).

It’s a pretty compelling argument! Unfortunately, Part 1 already dropped plenty of hints that Arkon is bad news, and the very next scene will make that explicit. We get an inside view of a planning session with his scheming advisors, who helpfully say out loud that the mysterious pylon at the center of town is what caused the weather disruption and what powers the murderbots and agony bracelets. Arkon has been running a totalitarian state with an enslaved underclass, and now that the planet’s weather is back under control, he can invade Polemachus’s sister planet, Belgania, for more forced labor.

I can’t find a single reference to Belgania outside the show, so I don’t think it exists in the comics. In any event, it’s unnecessary. Belgania might as well be another country instead of another planet, and might have worked better that way. Subjugating an entire world is fantasy. Invading another country for slaves is something that actually happened here on Earth, more than once. The vast void of space be damned, Arkon sends out his fleet and brings back Belganian slaves faster than I can round trip to my grocery store.

This story’s biggest misstep is in revealing Arkon as a tyrant to the audience way, way before Storm comes around. There’s something to be said for her being blinded by her high status on Polemachus, overwhelmed by the (mandatory) public adoration and Arkon’s lavish attention (Wolverine mentions that as a child, she was worshipped as a god). But Arkon is such a bad dude. A slave fails to bow to Storm and Arkon activates her agony bracelet. Jubilee is understandably freaked out by the whole thing, and yet Storm continues to make excuses for her fiancé. The Storm of “Slave Island” would have electrocuted Arkon on the spot for such brutality.

While Storm and Jubilee are getting ready for the royal wedding, Cyclops, Wolverine, and Beast are getting very suspicious about all these battleships and caravans of miserable looking people. They eventually find a Belganian interment camp and raise some hell. They confront Arkon at a pre-wedding banquet, where he finally snaps, revealing his true tyrannical nature so overtly that not even Storm can remain in denial. The ensuing fight is decent, and actually lets Cyclops rack up some cool points.

Storm, for her part, flies into a rage, taking Polemachus’s weather with her. Entire buildings collapse under her unrestrained fury. Ultimately, Jubilee pleads with her to calm down for the sake of the planet. It’s a bit of an easy ending, but then again, Jubilee has been by Storm’s side throughout this story, so it’s earned, at least. In the epilogue, Arkon makes one last attempt to persuade Storm to stay, but part of his sales pitch includes the humdinger: “The slaves! What are they to our happiness,” which is a hell of a thing to say to a black woman. Storm responds by blasting apart Arkon’s security pylon, presumably leaving him to be torn apart by a planet’s worth of furious Belganians.

Overall, a mixed bag of an episode. I think it’s a decent spotlight for Storm (finally), and very effectively elevates her relationship with Jubilee. Polemachus is just such a goofy setting, a land of crazy helmets and perpetually shirtless guys in capes. Making Arkon such an obvious villain was a mistake. This story might have worked better if Arkon was better at playing dumb, keeping the nastiest parts of his society out of Storm’s sight and saving the reveal of his true colors for the final act.

Stray observations:

• On the toilet: Rogue, Gambit, and Jean (as before), plus Professor Xavier, who only briefly appeared in Part 1.