Jonathan Dobres

Season 2, Episode 11. Air date: February 5, 1994

When I first got into X-Men as a kid, I didn’t realize that they were supposed to exist in the same world as Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and the Avengers. It doesn’t even really make sense that they do. Who needs Tony Stark when you have Forge? Who needs Thor when you have Storm? Reed Richards? Beast is just as smart, and much cooler. The X-Men canon has more than enough room for every kind of story. Sometimes you get touching tales of love in the face of bigotry, and sometimes you get “Mojovision”, an episode in which the inter-dimensional love child of Jabba the Hutt and the guy from the Micro Machines commercials abducts the X-Men to perform in his TV shows.

The barely-there plot is that Mojo, an all-powerful TV producer from another dimension, is facing a ratings crisis as his star actor, Longshot, is losing popularity. Mojo decides to abduct the X-Men and force them to perform for his audience, and that is pretty much all that happens here. It’s an insane premise with a shallow execution. Peter Wildman’s absolutely gonzo vocal performance as Mojo is the only highlight, and thank goodness, because the episode spends fully ten minutes introducing him and letting him harass Cyclops, until they’re all teleported to the arena/studio.

The X-Men get paired up into three very brief action scenes, none of which are interesting. I will, however, point out that the title card for the Beast/Rogue vignette is “Space Star: starring Hank McCoy as The Beast and Rogue as Rogue” (a segment that forgets that Rogue has super powers). Jean saves the day this time around, using her telekinesis to disrupt Mojo’s broadcast equipment and free her teammates. Two seconds later, Mojo is crushed beneath a bunch of his malfunctioning equipment. His assistant, Spiral, teleports everyone back home.

There’s supposed to be a B-plot in here about Longshot getting back at Mojo, but it never really materializes. It’s a shame, really. Longshot is a genetically engineered alien whose primary power is supernatural luck (similar to, say, Domino). He could’ve been incredibly fun, if the episode had actually done anything with him!

The episode at least manages to be funny in a few places, a lot of which is Wildman’s stupendous turn as Mojo. Jean disrupts the broadcast, Mojo complains that he’s losing the audience, and then we smash cut to a panoply of aliens in the stands, every single one of whom is reading a book. And later there’s this offhand exchange, delivered like office chat:

Longshot: Did I tell you I used to go out with an actress who had two heads?

Spiral: Was she nice?

Longshot: Yes and no.

In the end, Mojo is fine. He bursts out from beneath the debris and immediately starts badgering Longshot and Spiral into doing a new series. He then turns to one of his TV monitors, where Xavier and Magneto can be seen in the Savage Land. There, they take in the view of Magneto’s citadel (???) and encounter Sauron, a psychic pterodactyl. Up next: the season finale that will end these stupid interludes.

Season 2, Episode 10. Air date: January 15, 1994

Beast is one of the original X-Men, debuting all the way back in issue #1. Back then, Dr. Hank McCoy’s mutations granted him enhanced strength, agility, and intelligence, but left him looking like a mostly normal guy. It wasn’t until 1972’s Amazing Adventures #11 that he underwent the transformation that turned him into the blue (initially, gray) creature we know and love. Wikipedia informs me that this was done to capitalize on the popularity of Werewolf by Night, but of course, it gives Hank McCoy a whole new set of interesting problems. He can no longer pass for human, tends to scare the ignorant on sight, and sometimes contends with atavistic impulses at odds with his genius-level intellect and gentle heart.

The contradictions are, of course, the whole appeal. Here’s a guy who can bend steel bars with his bare hands but chooses to stay in prison for all of season one because he believes in justice. He’ll climb a lamp post and effortlessly wrest an assault rifle from some goon’s hands while sarcastically remarking that perhaps the man does not know what a dangerous weapon this is. He’ll acrobatically tumble through a laser grid while quoting Lord Tennyson. Beast is a great character, and George Buza’s vocal performance—a mix of the gee-whiz optimist and the erudite uncle with more hobbies than sense—has made Beast a reliably delightful presence.

All this is to say, it’s about damn time he got a spotlight, and it’s a good one! It turns out the show has an explanation for all those times they forgot to write him into an episode: when not engaged with superpowered dramatics, he works as a medical researcher at a local hospital. This makes him one of the few (only?) X-Men with a day job.

This episode, like all the good ones, manages to do a lot with twenty minutes. Beast is about to perfect a sight-restoring treatment for a young woman named Carly, and the vibes between them are distinctly romantic.¹ Graydon Creed and the Friends of Humanity show up to shriek about the mutant working at the hospital, threatening everyone’s lives in the process. Unlike the last time we saw Creed, there’s no sci-fi virus, no time travel, no immortal supervillain lurking in the shadows. The bad guys are just bigots, as believable as the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church.

Wolverine is furious that the FoH would endanger people at a hospital, and while he tends to get furious at a lot of things, I’m 100% with him on this one. In fact I think he should be angrier. But the B-plot goes in an interesting direction, having Wolverine pose as a sympathizer to infiltrate the FoH and strike at their heart. Over the course of the episode, Wolverine cozies up to Creed, follows a hunch, and eventually reveals him as Graydon Creed Jr., son of Sabretooth.² The leader of the anti-mutant hate group is the son of a mutant. Wolverine already gets a ton of attention on this show, but this is a genuinely great side story for him. Rather than just charging into FoH headquarters and knocking a few heads, he puts on his tightest black t-shirt, does some espionage, and forever ruins Graydon Creed’s life.

In the climax, it’ll be Beast who’s busting heads at FoH headquarters as Wolverine engineers the shocking reveal. It’s a character reversal that deepens both of them. Wolverine is playing the subtle game for once, while Beast is getting angrier and angrier. He’s angry at the FoH for endangering Carly and others. He’s angry because those hateful morons successfully spooked the hospital, preventing him from seeing Carly on her big day (he’ll be there anyway, just not in the position of honor he should be). Flipping through old photos of himself, he’s angry that his mutation makes him so visibly different, and thus forever an outsider despite his many talents and good nature. When the FoH abducts Carly, Beast is furious, and he singlehandedly takes out at least a dozen henchmen. This man is the definition of the phrase, “do not mistake kindness for weakness.”

With the FoH dealt some serious blows (Beast hospitalized a lot of them, and their soon-to-be former leader has had a public nervous breakdown), the day is won. Even Carly’s father, initially anti-mutant, has come around on Hank McCoy. Carly isn’t the least bit put off by Beast’s appearance, and you get the sense she’d be perfectly happy as his significant other. But Beast pulls a Spider-Man and tells her that they can’t be together, for her own safety. It’s a bittersweet ending, but given everything packed into these twenty-two minutes, an earned one.

Oh, and a Savage Land interlude! A frogman called Amphibious captures Magneto and Xavier! But some kind of river beast attacks and the duo make their escape. God, just reveal that Sinister is running the place already.

Stray observations:

• “I’m sorry, gentlemen. Your anger at the inexorable alienation of late twentieth century life is sadly misdirected,” Beast says as he tosses two goons to the ground in the initial confrontation.

• A black t-shirt, baseball cap, and sunglasses is a great look for Wolverine. He probably “borrowed” those red shades from Cyclops.

• As Beast is agonizing over whether to cut Carly off for her own safety, Jean urges him to maybe ask Carly her opinion on the matter.

Season 2, Episode 9. Air date: January 8, 1994

Happy 1994, everyone! X-Men rings in the new year with a Rogue spotlight. Rogue has been experiencing terrifying hallucinations of a sensibly dressed blonde woman who sometimes becomes a hideous lizard monster. The hallucinations are coming back, we’re told, because Professor Xavier isn’t around to give Rogue regular treatment. That’s one reason, anyway. The other is that Rogue’s adoptive mother, Mystique, has been surreptitiously planting herself in Rogue’s way, masquerading as the blonde woman to trigger her.

Things come to a head when the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants attack a carnival (real Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff here), the goal of which is to put Mystique-as-blonde woman right in front of Rogue and drive her insane. We don’t even see how the pointless carnival fight ends, as the story follows Rogue’s perspective and we wake up with her in the infirmary (an economical bit of plotting). But the damage is done, and Rogue keeps spiraling. Literally! In the episode’s sickest sequence, she flies in an arc around the room, then smashes upwards through four floors of the mansion, the camera moving with her for all of it.

Rogue’s hallucinations eventually lead her to the blonde woman’s hospital room, where Mystique has been waiting for her. We finally get Rogue’s backstory: Mystique taking her in after she ran away from her bigoted father, training her as a terrorist, and ultimately encouraging her—very strongly—to absorb Ms. Marvel’s powers. If you’re reading a blog about a thirty year-old Marvel cartoon, I assume you’ve heard of Ms. Marvel (aka Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers). Along with Ms. Marvel’s powers came a big chunk of Carol Danvers’s psyche, and she is understandably very mad about being imprisoned inside Rogue. Charles Xavier was the only person who could quiet Rogue’s mind and give her peace, which is how she came to be one of the X-Men.

Rogue gained Mystique’s unstable shapeshifting powers during the memory transfer, so there’s a real risk that Ms. Marvel is going to assert herself permanently and erase Rogue. With a clearer idea of who Carol is and an assist from Jean, Rogue is able to retake control of her own psyche by sealing Carol into a cement box in her mindscape. It’s a cruel ending, I’m sorry to say. Carol is as much a victim of Mystique’s scheming as Rogue is, but cartoon logic demands that she be treated like one of the bad guys so that Rogue can have her big self-affirming battle. Rogue at least begins paying the comatose Carol visits in the hospital, which seems to do both of them some good. Never mind the show’s greatest animation error to date, in which Rogue lovingly touches Carol’s forehead barehanded.

This episode is all about Rogue, and Lenore Zann makes a meal out of it, of course. Meanwhile, the two fights with the Brotherhood, such as they are, just fulfill the Saturday Morning Action Quota and distract you from the fact that you’re watching a story about trauma and abuse. Mystique’s scheme—a twisted attempt to coerce Rogue into obedience—only makes sense from the perspective of the abuser.

The story also focuses pretty much exclusively on women. Rogue, Jean, Storm, Mystique, and Ms. Marvel are the stars here. Had the episode followed the comics a little more closely, we probably would’ve also met Mystique’s wife, Destiny.¹ But the Saturday mornings of 1994 weren’t ready for that (the comics were still just hinting at it). It’ll probably have to wait for a future season of X-Men ‘97.

Stray observations:

• Jubilee and Beast are on the toilet for this one.

• Never try to mug Mystique. She’ll transform into a hideous bug monster and mentally scar you for life, if you’re lucky.

• Mister Sinister appears briefly to tell Mystique that Xavier isn’t with the X-Men, and that the time is nigh to reclaim her daughter. How, oh how, could he know that? Incidentally, no Savage Land interlude this week. Hmm!

• Mystique easily subdues Storm while masquerading as Rogue. I love little interactions like this. No one can take on Storm head-to-head, but subterfuge is another matter. That’s Mystique’s whole deal, and she gains the upper hand in seconds.

• Wolverine barely does anything in this episode but Cal Dodd still gets a few lines, maintaining his streak of appearances in every episode this season.

Part 1

Season 2, Episode 7. 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

Season 2, Episode 8. 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.

Season 2, Episode 6. 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.