Jonathan Dobres

Part 1

Air date: December 11, 1993

“Time Fugitives” is a memorable two-parter, combining some of X-Men’s most biting social commentary alongside its most ridiculous time travel nonsense. It turns out that Bishop’s actions in “Days of Future Past” not only failed to save 2055, but made it worse. Now there’s a plague killing off most of the planet, and the X-Men died so long ago that no one even remembers them. On top of that, the far future of 3999 A.D. is being rewritten due to Bishop’s actions millennia earlier.

Sucks to be Cable. He leads a resistance movement against Apocalypse in 3999, and now has to deal with a “temporal storm” that’s aggressively deleting his fellow resistance fighters, including his son. He’s the protagonist in Part 2, but for now he’s just the frame story that shows us Bishop’s second trip back to the ’90s.

Part 1 focuses on the outbreak of what is probably supposed to be the Legacy Virus, which had debuted in the comics around the time this episode was written.¹ The virus causes nonlethal symptoms in humans but will become much worse when it crosses over to mutants, Forge (and later Beast) explain.

If mutants are a metaphor for the queer community, then the Legacy Virus is HIV. The worst of the HIV/AIDS crisis was behind us by 1993 (at least in the US), but anti-HIV and anti-gay stigmas were still rampant. When I came out to my mother in 2000, she was very supportive. But even then, her number one concern was that I might get AIDS. Artists spent much of the ’90s trying to find ways to talk about HIV, and the Legacy Virus was Marvel’s attempt to do so, without question. So don’t read the fan wikis and come away thinking that Legacy and HIV were just roommates, alright?

Jubilee and Storm go to the mall, where Jubilee is identified as a mutant by one of the Friends of Humanity (one of the respectable ones who wears a business suit). This guy’s got a spray gun and a plan. He slips into the back room of the shop, sprays the clerk with the virus, walks back out, and immediately begins shouting about “one of those plague-carrying mutants!”

“Plague carrier!” he hisses in front of the mall patrons, “GET HER!” Luckily, Storm hears the commotion and theatrically saves the day before anyone can commit a hate crime.

Beast gives Jubilee a checkup and finds nothing wrong with her, but nearly getting assaulted by an angry mob has left her shaken.

Jean: The plague has people frightened. People are looking for someone to blame, and we’re an easy target.

Beast: Only scientific inquiry can overcome the hysteria that’s gripping the country!

Oh Beast, honey. I have some news from 2020 that is going to break your heart.

As plague hysteria ratchets up, the city begins forcibly quarantining the sick (a thing that more than one country tried to do with HIV, for the record). Once again, the FoH suit is there on camera, creating a frenzy about how the mutants should be sent back to where they came from. The FoH advances on the building, and that’s when Bishop shows up to try to stop them. But he’s not exactly skilled in the art of de-escalation. The X-Men intervene to disperse the mob, my favorite moment of which is when Rogue lifts an FoH goon into the air, drops him into a dumpster, slams it shut, and then kicks the whole thing two blocks down the road.

This episode’s portrayal of bigotry, broad and cartoony as it is, is still hard to watch. I’m surprised at how hard it hit me, much more than it ever did as a kid. And it only gets worse. Beast will be testifying at a Senate hearing on the virus, to which Graydon Creed, the leader of the FoH, says, “When they see this McCoy freak infected on television, everyone will be convinced that mutants are responsible for the disease.” At the hearing itself, Creed spouts more anti-mutant hatred: “Mutant rights are a threat to humanity, and to the survival of this great republic…Everyone knows Kelly’s a mutant lover! He even pardoned that hairy freak, their so-called scientific expert!” It’s like the writers’ room saw the future and blended George W. Bush circa 2004 with Tucker Carlson circa 2021.

Creed then backs away from the podium with a god damn handkerchief over his nose as Beast approaches for his turn. Details like that are what set the story apart. Again, cartoony, but stomach turning.

Joke’s on Creed, though. The FoH suit who’s been spreading the virus and framing mutants is actually Apocalypse in disguise. There’s an impressive bit of continuity here. It was Apocalypse who wanted Kelly assassinated, which is what created Bishop’s dystopia in the first place (at least that’s the theory). Here, Apocalypse has switched gears to biological warfare, which will ultimately have the same result. He’s starting to earn that arch-villain cred.

Creed attempts to surreptitiously infect Beast with the virus, but Bishop stops him. This leads to a brief tussle in which Creed is infected instead. It wasn’t what he wanted, but he still got to shriek about the obvious dangers of mutants on live TV, as he breaks out in the virus’s signature rash.

Finally, the X-Men assault FoH headquarters. Apocalypse reveals himself, at which Creed faints. There’s not much time left in the episode, so the fight is pretty perfunctory. Apocalypse monologues about his superiority, and the fight bears that out—the heroes can’t so much as scratch him. But they do manage to destroy his reservoir of Legacy Virus. As they retreat, an enraged Apocalypse grows to monstrous size and vaporizes the lot of them. Blink and you’ll miss it, but here’s a screenshot of why nobody in 2055 remembers them:

Now That’s What I Call ’90s: Jubilee is at the mall because she’s broken her portable CD player, again. Not surprising. It’s 1993! The thing probably doesn’t even have skip protection!

Stray observations:

• The animation in this episode is excellent, especially Apocalypse’s various transformations. If only the sound design matched.

• Storm summoning a “blinding mist” in the middle of a mall while wearing a smart red blazer. Goals.

• Cyclops blasts his way through several feet of earth and concrete to access Creed’s secret bunker, which is cool! He spends most of the episode berating Bishop for causing problems, all of which is justified. But he sounds like such a jerk doing it!

• Wolverine: “Bishop? What’s that time jockey doin’ back?”

• Gambit appears in both of this episode’s melees but Chris Potter doesn’t utter a line. At least the writers have stopped forgetting about him!

Part 2

Air date: December 18, 1993

“Millions must die in the past, so that future billions can be born,” Cable’s omniscient computer tells him. And so Cable travels back in time 2,000 years to stop Bishop from stopping the Legacy Virus.

A few quick notes on Cable, previously seen last season in “Slave Island” and “The Cure”. Created by Rob Liefeld and Louise Simonson, Cable was heavily inspired by—that is to say, plainly ripped off from—The Terminator. This explains his character design and 3999’s army of red-eyed skeletal robots, right down to an opening low angle shot of a robotic foot crushing into the ground. Cable’s ever-changing backstory is insane even by comic book standards, but suffice to say he’s the time displaced son of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, and Apocalypse is his nemesis.

As to why we saw him twice in Season 1 without explanation, I think there are two reasons. One, he’s a time traveler, so he can just sort of exist wherever the story needs him (his computer also lets him “body slide” anywhere). Two, he’s a Liefeld creation. Volumes have been written about Liefeld’s infamously bad art, which defies the fundamentals of composition and anatomy. But for all his art’s technical shortcomings, it sold a lot of comics. Cable was probably in Season 1 because there was no guarantee of a Season 2, and Marvel wanted to cram in all the most popular characters while they could.

I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t like Cable. 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”. The most interesting thing about him is that he’s Scott and Jean’s son, and that wasn’t even Liefeld’s idea.

His “plan” in this episode is barely worth talking about. Part 2 makes that very easy for me, as it reuses a ton of footage from Part 1 (which also may explain why everything looks so much better in this two-parter). It’s a re-run of Bishop’s second trip into the past, but this time with Cable interfering.

Cable’s first idea is to find Bishop and kill him, but he can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. The fight at the quarantined building is even more chaotic with Cable there, but he realizes he can’t beat the entirety of the X-Men and makes a strategic retreat “to HQ” (how do you have an HQ 2,000 years in your past?). Reviewing files on the X-Men, he gets a new idea when he learns about Wolverine’s healing powers.

The new plan is to abduct Wolverine from the Senate hearing (again, the fight is more chaotic but the end result is the same). You’d think that Cable did this so that he could convince Wolverine to voluntarily infect himself with the Legacy Virus, but they never actually have that conversation. It’s just a couple of scenes of Cable being very mean to Wolverine—Cable even shoots him!—and then they teleport into the fight with Apocalypse.

In this version of the fight, Wolverine gets infected with the virus (accidentally), thus creating antibodies that can cure it. I see how this accomplishes Bishop’s mission (no rampant virus in 2055, though it’s still a dystopia), but I’m kind of at a loss as to how this preserves Cable’s 3999. The final lines of the episode, from both Beast and Cable, outright tell us that Wolverine’s antibodies did the trick. How, though?

Other than Wolverine contracting and curing the virus, the only other change is that Apocalypse decides to make a more subtle escape, and does not murder the X-Men. This may have had something to do with the energy barrier that Cable lobs at Apocalypse, but a bit of reused animation in between makes it hard to interpret.

Part 1 is the far better half of this story. As portrayals of fear and hatred go, it has bone chilling relevance thirty years on. I just wish our heroes had more room to react to it. Not much actually happens in Part 2 that we didn’t already see in Part 1, other than a whole lot of Cable. His plan, such as it is, makes no sense under the slightest scrutiny, and the episode makes no attempt to address the “millions must die so that billions can live” ethical quandary that kicks things off.

Stray observations:

• No Savage Land interlude in this two-parter, so far the only episodes to forego the slowest of slow burn stories.

• Jean gets little glimmers from Cable’s mind, including his parentage. “He’s more important for the future—our future—than you could ever imagine.” Look, Jean, this is Scott Summers you’re talking to. You’re going to have to spell it out for him.

• During the melee with Cable and Bishop, Storm just hammers him with rapid fire lightning. No big announcement, just a brutal barrage from above.

• During the hearing brawl redux, the FoH goons manage to get Cyclops’s visor away from him. It neatly explains why he didn’t just clear the room with a blast, and it’s just a background detail in this fight. Nice touch.

• There are other nice touches, like a couple in a car cowering as Cable strides across the road with his massive gun, an unhoused person yelping as Cable teleports next to him, and a passerby pausing briefly outside the motel room as Cable shoots Wolverine. Little things like this make the story feel like part of a real world.

• Beast wears a cute green polo in the epilogue scene.

Air date: December 4, 1993

Twenty-two minutes—or less, if you subtract the opening and end credits—is not a lot of time. If I’ve learned anything watching this show, it’s that X-Men can get a remarkable amount of things done if it lets the established cast play off each other and trusts the audience to keep up. Season two keeps doing the exact opposite, presenting stories that split up the cast and necessitate a lot of lengthy exposition. “X-Ternally Yours” is the worst offender yet. It’s a Gambit spotlight, so I want to like it, but it’s so weighed down with Gambit’s elaborate backstory that there’s not much room for him to actually do anything.

Gambit was a member of New Orleans’s Thieves Guild, you see. The Thieves are locked in a vague, ancient conflict with the Assassins. This cajun-flavored Hatfield/McCoy situation is mediated by an entity known as the X-Ternal, who appears once per decade to collect tithes from both guilds and bestow or revoke power from whichever side she finds deserving of her generosity/wrath. Who is the X-Ternal and what does she want? The episode doesn’t say. She’s probably based on Candra of the Externals,¹ but the show redesigns the character to vaguely evoke a Voodoo priestess a la Marie Laveau (I’m guessing). Form your own head canons.

Anyway, the Thieves have been on the outs ever since they screwed up the last tithe. The Assassins want to put the final nail in their coffin this time around, so they kidnap the Thieves’ leader, Bobby, who also happens to be Gambit’s brother. Gambit has another connection to this weird mess: he nearly married the current leader of the Assassins, Bella Donna. She never got over it and wants him back, so by orchestrating Bobby’s kidnapping, she gets the chance to simultaneously destroy the Thieves and force Gambit into marriage.

If this all sounds like a lot, it is! And it forces a lot of shortcuts. It would have been great to see crafty old Gambit attempt to double cross Bella Donna, but there’s no time. As the X-Ternal’s most recent chosen one, she has powers that allow her to slap a magic ring on Gambit’s finger, which removes his abilities and forces him to play along. It would have been great to see Rogue kick ass on behalf of her sort-of boyfriend (she’s part of the cavalry along with Jean and Wolverine), but the writers conveniently forget how formidable she is and settle for her just being very incensed at the idea of some swamp witch marrying her guy.

In the plus column, the animation is a lot more evocative in places here, especially when Cyclops is battling simulations of every major villain in the Danger Room. He manages to hold his own for a while and even looks kind of cool. Similarly, Jean finally gets some important things to do. She takes away everybody’s guns and, in the end, telepathically reveals Bella Donna’s schemes to the X-Ternal, allowing the Thieves to prevail. Gambit asks that Bella Donna be rendered powerless rather than killed. He declares, “I am not Thief or Assassin. I am an X-Man, and I am never coming back.” In a very nice final touch, he leaves with his arm around Rogue. In spite of it all, Gambit remains a charming presence.

Oh and I almost forgot, we get another Savage Land interlude. Xavier and Magneto encounter Barbarous, who tells Magneto that he “has a new master now.” Barbarous nearly succeeds in bear hugging Magneto to death, but Xavier drops a hive of angry bees on him and the two make yet another narrow escape. Five near death experiences in as many episodes. The Savage Land lives up to its name, at least.

X-Men is an ensemble franchise, and the more I watch season two, the more firmly I believe that. Splitting up the cast scuttles the show’s best dynamics in favor of thin exposition, rushed stories, and boring fights.

Stray observations:

• When Cyclops complains that the Danger Room simulation is too easy, Gambit smirks and says, “You don’t like Gambit to be gentle?” Again, form your own head canons.

• The “cajun” accents are all over the place. Sometimes Chris Potter says, “thief”, but often it comes out “teef”.

• Wolverine, exploring the decaying gothic plantation where Gambit was raised: “No wonder Gambit’s so messed up.” Gotta love Cal Dodd. The show sure does. Wolverine is the only character to appear in every episode so far this season, excluding the Savage Land interludes.

Air date: November 20, 1993

Wolverine gets another solo episode, this time all about his backstory with the Weapon X program. He’s lured back to Canada by Heather Hudson (Wolverine has a thing for redheads, we assume), and is immediately accosted by his old team, Alpha Flight. They’re led by Vindicator, one of the flashiest jerks in the show yet. He’s also Heather’s husband, so Wolverine has an extra reason to hate him.

Alpha Flight has its own long and complicated history in the X-Men canon. Their roster is a blend of mutants (Northstar,¹ Aurora, and Puck), science experiments (Vindicator and Sasquatch), and outright magical creatures (Shaman and Snowbird). The episode doesn’t have a lot of time for them, which is especially unfortunate, as this will be their only appearance. They botch their first attempt to capture Wolverine but finally get their act together on the second try—one can almost see the Alpha Flight Saturday morning cartoon where they’re learning the value of working together this week.

In between these fights, we’re seeing much cooler flashbacks to the Weapon X program, which gave Wolverine his adamantium skeleton. Notably, the flashbacks imply that Wolverine’s claws are a surprise secondary mutation in response to the grafting procedure. In all other iterations of the character, they’re either a package deal with his healing abilities or an engineered upgrade from Weapon X. Regardless, Wolverine goes berserk and runs off into the woods, where he bumps into Heather and James Hudson. They take him in and nurse him back to health, like a cross between The English Patient and Nell (it’s also implied that Heather helps Wolverine re-learn how to read?). None of this is even remotely like the episode’s namesake, Repo Man, but I digress. The flashbacks end with Wolverine agreeing to join Alpha Flight with Heather and James’s encouragement, adopting his nom de guerre, and putting on the costume for the first time.

Why did Wolverine defect from the team? The flashbacks don’t show us, and Wolverine refuses to talk about it. He’s a little busy being angry at the covert military project that is, at this moment, trying to vivisect him to figure out why he’s the only person to survive the adamantium procedure. Heather was happy to submit Wolverine to a number of excruciating diagnostics, but she draws the line at slicing him open and quits on the spot. Likewise, Alpha Flight (except Vindicator) thought this mission was about getting Wolverine back, not killing him for mad science. A melee ensues and Wolverine comes out on top, threatening vengeance if anyone from the facility comes looking for him again. These events presumably introduce an incredible problem into Heather and James’s marriage, but the series doesn’t follow that thread, for some reason.

Savage Land Interlude: Magneto and Xavier encounter a strange woman with vertigo-inducing powers, who tells them, “All the mutates in the Savage Land are Magneto’s creation.”

All in all, it’s another sluggish entry for season two. If you like Wolverine, and especially if you like shirtless Wolverine, this one’s for you. Most of the episode’s content is in flashbacks, so relatively little is actually happening. It’s been a pretty weak run for season two so far, with no truly strong stories since the premiere (and only Part 1, at that). But next week is a Gambit episode, so here’s hoping!

Stray observations:

• Hoo boy. Shaman.

• Jean uses Cerebro to search the world for Professor Xavier. No luck finding him, but we do get cameos from Nightcrawler, Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, and a few others. I’d much rather be watching an episode about them!

• Jean can sense Wolverine’s physical pain, almost like they share a deep connection or something!

• Puck’s astonished comment that the facility is staffed by androids is obviously a note from Standards and Practices. Rip a person apart? Absolutely not. Do the same to a robot? Okay, but make sure the audience knows it.

• The Canadian government was trying to repossess a man, I guess? That’s where the title comes from? I’m working really hard here, people.

Air date: November 13, 1993

This show has always had a casual relationship with geography. Whether the trouble is downtown or on the other side of the planet, the X-Men’s various jets can get there in no time at all. Travel logistics aren’t exactly Saturday morning material, so characters just sort of arrive places as the script requires. This is especially apparent in “Red Dawn”, in which characters get to and from Moscow more easily than your morning commute.

Some hardline ex-Soviet generals want to restore the glory days of the USSR, and they’re going to thaw out their long-dormant secret weapon, Omega Red, to do it. If this sounds a little like the Winter Soldier, well, this came first. Omega Red debuted in early 1992, while Bucky Barnes wouldn’t get the Winter Soldier retcon until 2005. As for Omega Red himself, he’s a Soviet super soldier with “carbonadium” tentacles, invulnerability, energy draining powers, and (canonical to the comics but not mentioned in this episode) pheromones that can kill most people on contact.

What’s going on in the show’s version of Russia is pretty confusing. It’s either a military coup or a lopsided civil war. Either way, it should be global news, and yet no one outside of the Eastern bloc seems to know about it, to the point that Colossus travels to America to seek the X-Men’s help. Unfortunately, all the cool X-Men are busy, so Colossus gets Jubilee, and Jubilee only (having rescued her from another Friends of Humanity hate crime).

She and Colossus depart for Moscow immediately, leaving only this note on the fridge:

Hi.

Gone to Black Sea with Colossus to stop some guy named Omega Red. Dinner’s in the freezer. Have a nice day.

–Jubilee

And then they jet off to Russia (literally), with Jubilee in the pilot’s seat. This whole sequence is pretty cute, blending Jubilee’s “student driver but it’s a supersonic jet” with Colossus’s unfailing politeness (Colossus is still delightful).

On the ride over, we get a little of Colossus’s origin story and his strong connection to his family, which is his primary reason for seeking the X-Men’s help (never mind that his entire country seems to be in the midst of a full scale military invasion). At the same time, Omega Red is increasingly keen on restoring the Soviet empire and becoming its ruler, though again, why he’s the lynchpin and how all this is supposed to work with the trio of Russian generals is unclear. It’s a Saturday morning cartoon, so all that really matters is that bad guys are doing bad things.

Wolverine returns to the mansion, sees Jubilee’s note, growls “Omega Red!” and hops in a jet. But not before angrily crushing the note and throwing it on the kitchen floor, which is why it’ll take the other X-Men so long to show up. Wolverine arrives in Russia almost instantly. He and the others manage to fight Omega Red to a draw, but only after Colossus drops a tank on him and gives the team room to retreat (Colossus is still rad).

Colossus fireman-carries a badly injured Wolverine away from the fight.

Wolverine: I don’t…need…your help.

Colossus: Of course not! But you are guest in my country. Is good manners!

Regrouping after the fight, we learn a little about Wolverine’s history with Omega Red. There’s not much to it. This is just teeing up the deeper dive into the Weapon X program that’s coming next episode.

Finally, the cavalry arrives in the form of Storm, Rogue, and a completely silent Gambit (Cyclops and Jean are doing mutant relations work in D.C.). Despite participating prominently in the upcoming fight, Chris Potter doesn’t utter a single line. I might not have noticed, but it’s very out of character for Gambit to be so quiet. At least we get to hear Rogue say, “We’d have been here sooner but someone trashed your note.”

Anyway, the X-Men get to work causing an international incident. Thanks to a tip from special guest mutant Dark Star about Omega Red’s cryogenic weakness, Storm is able to freeze him solid. The only other notable thing here is that Colossus seems extremely willing to die with him, until Dark Star conveniently yanks him out of harm’s way at the last second. Colossus once again declines to join the X-Men, vowing to rebuild his country. Take a good look at him, because despite how fun he is, this will be his last featured episode.

This episode has a lot of problems. Aside from the thin writing and disorienting relationship to time and space, it’s weird to see the X-Men getting involved in a contemporary geopolitical event. It’s the difference between a show that reflects the civil rights movement versus one that inserts these fanciful characters into the March on Washington, specifically. I also think the episode could have been much more creative. Omega Red and Rogue both have energy draining powers, and if they’d used those powers on each other simultaneously, anything could have happened. But Rogue never gets the chance.

Oh also, Magneto and Xavier are still in the Savage Land. In this brief installment, Magneto outsmarts a T-Rex, demonstrating that he’s a formidable opponent even without his vast powers. He questions why Xavier wouldn’t just let him die, which would certainly make his life easier. Xavier responds, “I do not yearn for an easy life, Magneto. Only a just one.”

Now That’s What I Call ’90s: vague fears that the recently dissolved Soviet Union might reconstitute itself were around, if not very plausible. More germane to this story, there was an actual attempted coup by a small group of Soviet hardliners in August 1991, though that was shortly before the USSR dissolved, not after. The coup lasted two days.

Stray observations:

• Beast is on the toilet for this one.

• Of the last episode’s three stories, the “Previously On…” recaps only the Morph/Wolverine plot, which tells you where the season’s interests are, or how lame the Shadow King story was.

• To the show’s credit, the Russians actually speak Russian for a few lines before switching to accented English.

• Colossus’s sister calls Colossus “Piotr,” so far the only person on the show, including Colossus himself, to use his given name.

Air date: November 6, 1993

There are three non-intersecting stories in this episode and only one of them is any good. “Whatever It Takes” is very whatever.

The A-plot concerns the return of the Shadow King. This is strange from the jump, because we’ve never heard of the Shadow King before. Rogue and Storm simply explain that Xavier fought him previously, and defeated him. It sounds like that would make for an epic multi-part story, but we’re never going to see it. In fact we’ll only see the Shadow King in one other episode, three years from this one. Anyway he’s back now, having emerged from a tear in the astral plane to possess Storm’s godson, MjNari. Storm agrees to become the Shadow King’s host, which frees MjNari and gives her the opportunity to attempt to kill the Shadow King (and herself) by flying up to where the air is too thin. MjNari, who in addition to his speedster powers can perceive the astral tear, then lures the King back to the astral plane and gives him the runaround until Storm physically pulls him out of the closing portal.

All of the action takes place near Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m going to go ahead and guess that the depiction of Storm’s home village as a simple agrarian people living in thatched roof huts is not exactly culturally sensitive. At least we get a little more background on Storm and what connects her to humanity (Rogue is there, too). The Shadow King is another Chris Claremont original, a deeply malevolent psychic entity that regularly tangles with Earth’s most powerful telepath, Charles Xavier. Here he’s a deep-voiced cackling ghost with vague plans for rebuilding his unseen empire. For a much more interesting portrayal, go watch the first season of Legion.

The B-plot is Wolverine’s quest to find and rescue Morph. Wolverine tracks them to Brazil (somehow), finding them in a random bar. Morph doesn’t want to be rescued and puts up a pretty good fight, first getting Wolverine off balance by mocking him as Jean, and then transforming into several other mutants and wild animals to overwhelm his would-be rescuer. Should Morph really be able to take down Wolverine this easily? Maybe, maybe not. But neither character actually wants to kill the other. Morph makes clear that they have to get through things by themselves, saying, “I have to get through this by myself!” (the writing in this episode is not subtle). It’s a shame this story wasn’t given a little more time. The brief fight is creative, and Wolverine’s simple motive of “This person is my friend, we did wrong by them, and I’m going to fix that,” deserved more.

And finally, we briefly check in on Xavier and Magneto in the C-plot. They climb out of the avalanche and note that they’re near a rainforest, which is pretty unusual for Antarctica. Magneto explains that this is the Savage Land, a place he’s a little familiar with for as yet unexplained reasons. Neither of them has their powers, but somehow Xavier can walk. Before they can process this, they are attacked by men riding pterodactyls, summoned by a mysterious figure at a surveillance console (sure seems familiar). Both men go over a waterfall, to be continued, etc.

Stray observations:

• Storm is so given to Dramatic Pronouncements that it’s starting to feel like she can’t invoke her powers without them. She is especially dramatic here, bringing the rains, wind, and lightning when called for.

• There’s no reason for Rogue to accompany Storm to her village, and there’s not much for her to do there. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to take a telepath like Jean along to investigate a psychic phenomenon? The best explanation I can think of is that Storm and Rogue are friends.

• Catherine Disher has a lot of fun voicing Morph-as-Jean, and it’s nice to hear her branch out just a little from what has been a pretty flat role so far. “Whenever I’m with you, all I can think about is how much I’m in love with Cyclops!”