Jonathan Dobres

Fox dropped the season 3 premiere of X-Men: The Animated Series unusually early in the broadcast season, airing these episodes in July and August of 1994. If you think airing the season premiere of a kids’ show in the middle of summer is weird, just wait. Would you believe that Fox aired these episodes across two consecutive Friday nights, in prime time, before reruns of the network’s other recent mega hit, The X-Files? Well they did. That’s how big X-Men was at the time. That’s where we are in the summer of 1994. That’s what was happening in pop culture.

Season 3 has big ambitions, and “Out of the Past” is a very strong start. It’s the best two-parter since season 1’s “Days of Future Past”, making excellent use of both its half hours. The writers finally remembered that characters other than Wolverine can have personalities, and as a result this story comes alive in a way that few season 2 episodes did. It’s gorgeously animated to boot, simply the best the show has ever looked.

Part 1

Season 3, Episode 1. Air date: July 29, 1994

There’s a very effective sense of escalation across this story. Part 1 mainly follows Wolverine, Gambit, and Jubilee as they get pulled into the New York subways to confront Lady Deathstrike and the Reavers. Deathstrike wants to crack open a mysterious spacecraft that’s been underground for centuries and claim its power,¹ and she needs someone with adamantium claws to do it. Part 2 reverses the dynamics and turns into something of a chase. The great power in the ship is the Spirit Drinker, an invulnerable monster that could destroy the world if it reaches the surface, requiring the expanded X-Men team to figure out a way to stop it, with Deathstrike turned into a begrudging ally.

Adding to the drama, Lady Deathstrike is Yuriko Oyama, Wolverine’s ex. She has a mess of motivations for becoming this long-fingered cyborg, but it boils down to revenge: she believes that Wolverine murdered her father, who happens to be the man who invented the adamantium grafting procedure.² In case this isn’t dramatic enough, she declares, “I decided to change my outer form to match the darkness inside me.” Yeesh. Wolverine claims he never killed her father, though that gets a little lost amid all the action. Wolverine gets plenty of chances to look cool in this story, including this exchange with Deathstrike:

Deathstrike: Your end can be quick and easy, or slow and painful. It’s your choice.

Wolverine: Sorry, Lady, I don’t do easy.

But it’s not just Wolverine! Gambit hasn’t been this cool since season 1. He repeatedly stops the well-meaning but naïve Jubilee from rushing in, instead waiting patiently for the right moment to tip the conflict in their favor. There are clever touches with his powers, like using a charged card as a torch and exploding out of the otherwise inescapable nets the Reavers favor. But I’m most struck by how Gambit acts in his very first scene. He’s immediately wary that we’re hearing about Yuriko from Morlock lackey Leech instead of their leader, Callisto. When Wolverine growls that the message is personal and rushes off, Gambit goes, “Everything’s personal with that one.” When Jubilee tries to pitch helping Wolverine as a family obligation, he just yawns at her, but agrees to tag along for her sake. Gambit shows more personality in this one brief scene than in the entirety of “X-Ternally Yours”.

Part 1 maintains this nice balancing act where Wolverine is facing the brunt of the action and drama, with Gambit and Jubilee hanging back until they can join the fight in the third act. The show makes great use of Gambit (as previously mentioned), and even gives Jubilee a cool moment. She sneaks up behind a Reaver and uses her powers to blind him. On the sidelines, Xavier uses Cerebro to observe all these events at a distance, periodically screaming about the “INCREDIBLE POWER” inside the ship.

Anyway, it’s all high melodrama and snappy action until somebody lets out the glowing green energy monster.

Stray observations:

• This episode brings back the Morlocks, who are mostly there to serve as the collateral victims of Lady Deathstrike’s misguided mission. It’s smart to use characters we’ve already met for this! Callisto briefly fights Deathstrike for ownership of the spacecraft, since she wants its power to reclaim her place as leader of the Morlocks, a nice callback to the events of “Captive Hearts”.

• The animation is excellent throughout, but almost overdone at times. There are some scenes where Deathstrike never stops moving, twisting and turning for no apparent reason.

• The X-Men play basketball in teams: skins vs. skins. I’m not exactly complaining.

Part 2

Season 3, Episode 2. Air date: August 5, 1994

The Spirit Drinker looks a little goofy but it isn’t messing around. One touch of its tentacles absorbs your consciousness, instantly putting your body in a coma. It can burn its way through physical matter (mostly) and seems invulnerable to conventional attacks. To top it off, the thing is a ravenous animal that will not be reasoned with.

As with Part 1, Part 2 is well balanced between rising action and cool character beats that enrich the story. The action piece is straightforward: stop the invulnerable Spirit Drinker from reaching the surface without getting yourself absorbed into it. The stakes keep rising, as first the Reavers, then the innocent Morlocks, then Jubilee, and then Deathstrike are felled by the monster’s touch. Ultimately, Wolverine and Gambit manage to electrocute the thing on the subway system’s third rail, releasing everyone’s consciousness. Deathstrike thanks Wolverine for saving her life but vows to return for her revenge,³ exiting with a curt bow. Things are back to normal…mostly.

In the middle of all this, Beast and Professor Xavier explore the broken spaceship. It’s a strange place, full of highly advanced technology and incomprehensible interfaces. Until Xavier gets a psychic zap from one of them, that is. Suddenly he can understand the ship’s language and work its equipment. It’s a weird and slightly unsettling moment. Xavier is so engrossed in the ship that he doesn’t even notice Beast leave. Xavier is thrilled to finally make progress with the ship, but he doesn’t understand how he’s doing it. The episode gives an uncommon amount of breathing room for this scene because “meddling with forces beyond your understanding” is basically this season’s tagline.

The episode is packed with great character moments that elevate the story. A sampling:

• Xavier summons Beast from an art gallery, where he was musing on whether one can really tell the difference between Jackson Pollock’s canvases and his drop cloths. He interrupts Cyclops and Jean at dinner, just as Jean is remarking that they finally have some time to themselves.

• When Wolverine, Gambit, and Deathstrike get some distance from the Spirit Drinker, they have time for a telling exchange. Wolverine is concerned for the Morlocks, who never asked for trouble. Gambit is concerned for the Morlocks and the men that Deathstrike callously left behind. Deathstrike, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of them. Her revenge is all that matters.

• When Xavier sees Deathstrike’s unconscious body:

  Xavier: And this is…?

  Wolverine: An old friend. She wants me dead.

This adventure has left Xavier shaken. His time with the ship gave him visions of a powerful empire, a galactic conflict, and forces far beyond anything he’s ever experienced. “I fear this was only the beginning,” he says to his X-Men. And then something happens that I remember even thirty years later: the camera pans upward into a shot of the Earth, with the words, “COMING SOON! THE PHOENIX SAGA” set against footage of flames.

This season premiere is a real return to form. It’s not a perfect pair of episodes, but it’s easily better than almost all of season 2. It’s a great prelude to the imminent Phoenix Saga and chock full of what makes X-Men great. Season 3 starts strong.

Stray observations:

• Every attempted psychic interaction in this story ends with either Xavier or Jean screaming for a bit and then gasping that they’re fine. I’m sure that doesn’t portend anything!

• I spotted only one plot hole in this otherwise well built story. After Jean unsuccessfully attempts to read the Spirit Drinker’s mind (screaming, gasping, argh), Cyclops wants to laser it to death. Wolverine stops him, explaining that a lot of innocent minds are trapped inside it. But later, they’ll blow the thing up with a high voltage rail anyway, so what did it matter?

• Even in a very well animated episode like this, Jean’s outfit looks ridiculous. I can’t wait for her to put on her Phoenix costume.

• On the toilet: Storm and Rogue. And on the Forever Toilet, Morph. The end of “Reunion” implied that Morph is elsewhere being treated for their various traumas, and we’ll only see them a couple of times for the remainder of the series.

I’m working on a project that involves some LLM prompt engineering. Showing my progress to one of our main stakeholders:

Stakeholder: …and if we provide feedback on the LLM’s output, that will help train the LLM?

Me: Ah, no. It will train me, and I will then write a better prompt.

Season two is a disappointing downgrade from season one. The baffling decision to include the Savage Land in almost every episode is most of the problem. Those interludes steal precious minutes from every story, all so that Xavier and Magneto can inch through repetitive encounters with dinosaurs and Mutates. To make matters worse, the interludes culminate in a season finale that continues to showcase the Savage Land at the expense of character, plot, and anything fun.

Isolating Xavier and Magneto in a jungle for the whole season is consistent with season two’s habit of splitting up characters rather than letting them play off each other. We get several overcomplicated solo adventures that are bogged down in exposition, leaving little time for an actual story or fun character moments.

The season isn’t without its bright spots, of course, but there are a lot of missed opportunities here. I’m hopeful that the tone will change in season three, which tackles both Phoenix Sagas. If they’re doing it right, those stories should be heavy on the interpersonal drama and high stakes that were missing so often in season two. I guess we’ll see!

Worst Episode

“Whatever It Takes”. Why tell one good story when you can tell three bad ones? The Wolverine/Morph story is the best of them, but then the writers drop that ball until the season finale.

Dishonorable Mentions: “Mojovision”, though you’ve got to applaud Peter Wildman as Mojo. And of course “Reunion” has got to be on the Worst list, as it fails to pay off the season as a whole and instead just heaps on more Savage Land garbage.

Best Episode

“Beauty and the Beast”. Finally, Beast gets some attention, and it’s a season highlight. It’s also one of the best Wolverine stories in the entire series.

Honorable Mentions: “Till Death Do Us Part: Part 1”, “Time Fugitives: Part 1” (the show loads all the good stuff into the first half of its two-parters), and “A Rogue’s Tale”.

Worst Hero

Ka-Zar. You’d think that eight episodes of Savage Land interludes would have at least teased his existence. Imagine a version of the interludes where Magneto and Xavier keep surviving because of some shadowy guardian angel. But no, there’s not a hint of Ka-Zar until the season finale, where he finally shows up and starts sucking all the air out of the story. This Kirkland brand Tarzan contributes nothing.

Dishonorable Mention: Cable. His feature episode is a literal repeat of “Time Fugitives: Part 1”. He’s callous, mean, and feels like he’s from a different show. Let me just quote from my review of the episode:

He’s the kind of basic, brutish power fantasy that only young boys can or should find cool. Liefeld wanted to insert Arnold Schwarzenegger into X-Men and it shows. He’s just a big dude with an even bigger gun and a lot of far future tech that conveniently gets him out of every problem. He’s supposed to be a tactical genius but we never see much evidence of it. He has the emotional range of the sounds one makes on the toilet. And he’s got way too much in common with Bishop, making it easy to confuse the two. The X-Men universe has an infinite variety of mutants, and it just doesn’t need “big man with rifle”.

Best Hero

Wolverine. Marvel loves him so much that he’s the only character to appear in all 26 episodes so far. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s in every episode of the series, but I’ll let you know if he misses even one. The outsized attention the show gives him would be grating were it not for Cal Dodd’s reliably great performances. Despite the overexposure, Wolverine is fun, cool, and even charming. His undercover operation in “Beauty and the Beast” puts him over the edge this season, finally pushing him beyond “angry little guy with claws” and into “frequent berserker who is also plausibly a former government agent.”

Worst Villain

The Shadow King. There’s not much to say. In the comics he’s the most malevolent force on the Astral Plane, but in “Whatever It Takes” he’s just a cackling ghost with the vaguest sketch of a plan.

Best Villain

The Friends of Humanity. The militant anti-mutant hate group picks up the torch from Henry Gyrich. They’re one of two recurring antagonists this season, appearing in at least six episodes by my count. The FoH’s bigotry is broad and cartoony, and yet it is chilling to sit through, a real gut punch even thirty years later. Why? It is indistinguishable from actual bigotry, because bigotry is its own parody. The ridiculousness is also the bigot’s first defense. It’s always oh, we’re just kidding, why can’t you take a joke, until things are suddenly very serious. The writers tried to portray bigotry for a kids’ show, but landed on a shockingly plausible version of it, because there just is no Kidz Bop version of racism.

Honorable Mention: Mister Sinister. He’s the season’s other recurring baddie, appearing in just barely five episodes. Of all the scheming masterminds the show has introduced, Sinister is the only one who sounds like he’s enjoying himself. Chris Britton revels in Sinister’s evil machinations and delivers every line like he’s on the verge of a little laugh. Just delicious. The FoH make me angry; Sinister makes me smile.

Most Improved

Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is still uptight, but at least he’s yelling at people who deserve it (mostly Bishop, who thought he was going to fix his timeline with a rifle). He also finally gets some cool moments, learns how to banter with the bad guys, and starts showing us why he’s in charge. Likewise, Jean finally graduates from holding her hands to her temples and then passing out (though she still does that a little). She saves the day in several episodes (“X-Ternally Yours” and “Mojovision”, for example) and offers Beast some astute advice on his love life. These character upgrades are important. Cyclops and Jean will feature heavily in the upcoming Phoenix Sagas.

Welcome to the Savage Land, finally. The Savage Land’s publication history goes as far back as 1941, but it wouldn’t become a regular location in Marvel comics until X-Men #10 in 1965. Like all longstanding franchise settings, it’s accumulated an impossibly long fictional history and an expansive subculture—its Wikipedia article lists nearly 50 native clans, factions, and races. It’s where Marvel goes when they want to do a jungle comic. I’m pretty sure that the Savage Land was introduced in early issues of X-Men because Jack Kirby really wanted to draw dinosaurs.¹ I am baffled as to why Marvel decided to waste a huge chunk of season two on it. X-Men #10 and this season finale also introduce Ka-Zar, Lord of the Jungle. He’s Tarzan, but blonde. He’s a non-mutant with peak physical abilities and a pet sabertooth tiger. We will be spending far too much time with him.

Part 1

Season 2, Episode 12. Air date: February 12, 1994

We pick up with Xavier and Magneto free climbing a sheer cliff to get back to Xavier’s jet. Because you can’t go ten feet in the Savage Land without something trying to kill you, they’re accosted by “sky riders” on the way up. Xavier throws a rock at one of them, to which Magneto says, “Nicely played, Charles!” God, this story is lame.

Atop the cliff, the various Mutates we’ve met in the season’s interludes finally catch up to the duo, and apprehend them to take them back to “the master.” As we’ve seen, something in the Savage Land neutralizes mutant abilities, but the Mutates all have belts that protect against this. That previously unnamed woman with vertigo-inducing powers is named Vertigo, by the way.

Enter Ka-Zar, who communes with a nearby herd of Triceratopses and arranges a stampede to set Xavier and Magneto free. Ka-Zar despises Magneto for creating the Mutates,² and also blames him for every bad thing that ever happened in the Savage Land (he’s only helping them because the Mutates captured his wife, and the new master is worse than Magneto). Ka-Zar can’t let Magneto so much as sigh without remarking on his evil nature. At one point, Xavier comments on the cold wind and Ka-Zar says it’s Magneto’s fault. Give it a rest, dude.

The three of them sneak into Magneto’s citadel via a secret passage, only to be greeted by the Mutates they had escaped from earlier. In other words, they walked to exactly where the bad guys wanted them anyway. We’re also introduced to the last of the comics-accurate Mutates, Brainchild. He is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. An incredibly 1960s character design, giant head topped with a weird crown and a catastrophically receding hairline. He speaks in a shrill, lilting cadence filled with lisps and rolled ‘R’s. His voice is what you’d get if you asked Paul Bearer to do a Paul Lynde impression. Brainchild is also pointless. All he does is tell Xavier and Magneto that there’s a new master in the Savage Land, a fact we’ve heard from every other Mutate this season, even in this episode. Two seconds later, the new master finally shows up. It’s Mister Sinister, with several captured X-Men in tow.

Backing up a few scenes, the B-plot is that the X-Men have found a desperate message from Morph, leading them to a traveling fair where Morph is performing in Jekyll and Hyde (live transformation effects for a stage play is a pretty clever use of Morph’s powers). This is a trap, of course. I guess the writers didn’t watch “Whatever It Takes,” because it’s like it never happened. Morph is colluding with Sinister, albeit still grappling with their split personality. The ensuing fight at first seems like it’s going to be a reprise of the lazy stuff from the season premiere. The good guys are too easily subdued and the Nasty Boys (Nasty Boys) get their hands on Cyclops and Jean. But then Jean uses her telekinesis to pluck Cyclops’s glasses off his face, and we’re all reminded why Cyclops is in charge. Overall it’s a good fight, with characters showing off their powers amid some decent trash talk. It looks like the good guys are going to eke out a win, but Morph knocks Wolverine unconscious in the nick of time, helping Sinister. I also have to note that Chris Britton is doing God’s work as Sinister. His voice slides around every syllable with a delicious irony, like he just loves being evil. This pair of scenes, straightforward as it is, is far more entertaining than everything happening in the Savage Land.

Fast forwarding to where I left off at the citadel, Sinister has the psychic pterodactyl Sauron put the whammy on Xavier (Morph briefly tries to intervene but Sinister neutralizes them). Xavier tries to resist, thinking specifically of the people who depend on him, which is a nice character note. But in the end Sauron wins out, and Xavier contacts the remaining X-Men to lure them to the Savage Land. They know it’s trap, but they’re heading to Antarctica anyway.

Part 2

Season 2, Episode 13. Air date: February 19, 1994

Part 2, like Part 1, is (almost) all action. The X-Men who aren’t already at the citadel arrive in the Savage Land and fight the Nasty Boys, even without the benefit of their powers. It’s brave, but it doesn’t go super great, and everyone gets captured except for Wolverine, of course. He goes on a speedrun of the Savage Land interludes, eventually encountering Ka-Zar, who ditched Xavier and Magneto the second he realized the citadel was the new Mutate base. I can’t really fault him, since everyone else just got chained up immediately.

Back at the citadel, Sinister reminds the audience about his goal of creating a race of genetically superior mutants. To demonstrate, he uses the citadel’s machinery to combine Vertigo’s and Magneto’s DNA, which makes Vertigo much stronger (cue the powerless X-Men acting very nauseous and passing out).

The only notable scene in the entire episode comes when Rogue confesses to Gambit that she’s scared to live without her powers. From everything we know about her, this is poor treatment of the character. We know she’s strong-willed even without her abilities, and we especially know that she’d love to live a day without hurting everyone she touches. But this does prompt Gambit to confess his love for her. I just wish the season had given this more of a buildup. Season one was peppered with little Gambit/Rogue flirtations, but season two had none. Gambit’s been absent (or at least silent) for a lot of the season, even in stories like “A Rogue’s Tale” where he could have had a bigger role. So we’re mainly going off of season one’s vibes.

Wolverine and Ka-Zar break into the citadel and join the fight. Ka-Zar frees his wife, along with a bunch of other imprisoned humans, who amp up the chaos and give the good guys a fighting chance. This leads to what is probably the lamest moment in any fight to date, in which Professor Charles Xavier destroys a bank of highly advanced computer mainframes by lightly bashing them with an office chair. Everyone gets their powers back and things get fun again. Everyone shows off, and Gambit even has time to say, “The name is Gambit, remember it!”

The final showdown has Cyclops and Sinister holding each other at an impasse with their respective laser blasts. The other X-Men join in, but it’s not until Xavier uses his powers to remind Morph that they’re an X-Man, damnit, that they contribute a few blasts of their own. This finally overwhelms Sinister and he explodes into little pieces. Jean scatters what’s left of him to the wind, hoping it’ll take him a long time to melt back together (don’t worry, his remnants form a Sinister-shaped outline in the beach sand and he closes out the season with a cackle).

It’s a pretty bad finale, especially in comparison to season one. I suppose if you’re twelve and you just want to see superheroes doing cool moves, there’s a lot of that. But there are no emotional stakes here, no attempt to make an even slightly bigger point; just a lot of action sequences set in the wild of the jungle. Every minute spent with Ka-Zar—and we spent a lot of them—is a minute the writers could have spent with characters we actually like. Instead, the finale is stuffed to the gills with characters who aren’t interesting and don’t do much (Brainchild is incredibly off-putting and redundant; and Sauron’s mind control only lasts long enough for Xavier to send the message to the X-Men). This finale doesn’t really pay off the season in any meaningful way. It’s just an extra-large adventure to close things out.

Stray observations:

• “If we do not return, avenge us,” Ka-Zar says to a big cat.