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.