Jonathan Dobres

Season 3, Episodes 12–13. Air dates: September 10 & 17, 1994

I would say that Storm has been inexplicably absent since “The Phoenix Saga”, but thanks to season 3’s episode shuffling, this two-parter originally aired immediately after it. If you’d been watching this back in the ’90s she hadn’t been missing at all.

I’ve already made my feelings on the Savage Land very clear. It’s where Marvel goes when it wants to rip off Tarzan or Conan, and it’s a poor fit for X-Men. The place is overstuffed with dinosaurs, cavemen, magicians, and several millennia of lore, none of which feels like it belongs in the same universe as the x-gene. The Savage Land has always felt like it should be a separate comic, and these episodes feel like backdoor pilots for a new show. A bad one.

Supposedly this is a Storm story, but she’s squeezed out of it by all the convoluted Savage Land nonsense. The big bad is Garokk, a sentient rock-god (but not the fun kind) tied to the Savage Land itself. Recently reawakened thanks to the events of “Reunion”, he wants to unleash Storm’s unrestrained energies on the Savage Land to make himself all-powerful, or something. He’s evil and wants power, end of scheme.

Aiding him in this under-defined effort will be Sauron, the psychic pterodactyl from season 2. Sauron, it turns out, is the evil alter ego of Karl Lykos, forcibly mutated by Mister Sinister. In the original comics, Dr. Karl Lykos/Sauron predates Mister Sinister by eighteen years. Bitten by rampaging pterodactyls (welcome to ’60s-era Marvel), Karl gains the ability to drain energy from other living things, and eventually learns that when he feeds off mutants, he turns into a telepathic dinosaur. It’s a Jekyll & Hyde situation. Karl would greatly prefer to suppress his evil split personality and remain a normal human, but fate constantly intervenes. He’s so repulsed by his alter ego that he chooses “the only name in the annals of literature” evil enough to represent it: Sauron. What a dork (says the guy writing reviews of a 30 year-old cartoon).

I tell you all this because Karl/Sauron’s split personality parallels what the story is trying to do with Storm. Early on, Storm reminds us that her powers are linked to her emotions, necessitating a lifestyle of rigorous self control. Once Sauron abducts her to the Savage Land and she falls under Garokk’s mind control, the full fury of her powers is unleashed.

The story wants to be about the darkness that lurks inside even the purest heart (“Savage Land, Strange Heart”, right?). It wants to tell us something about what happens when good people succumb to their worst impulses and destroy everything around them. The problem is that neither Karl nor Storm have any agency in their dark transformations. Once Karl accidentally touches a mutant, he transforms into Sauron and becomes a cackling, unrepentant monster. Likewise, Storm is hypnotized into using her powers for evil and remains under hypnotic suggestion for almost the whole story. Neither character wants or chooses this, they’re both forced into it against their wills, and once in Evil Mode, they’re entirely on autopilot. There’s no inner struggle akin to what we saw in “A Rogue’s Tale”, and not even much remorse once they come to their senses.

The core of the story doesn’t really land, and surrounding it is a bunch of overcomplicated Savage Land lore. Sauron had set himself up as the Savage Land’s new ruler after Mister Sinister’s defeat, but the sudden appearance of Garokk statues inspired the human tribes (led by Ka-Zar, boring as ever) to overthrow him, for some reason. Zaladane, a sorceress and high priestess of Garokk, forces Karl Lykos to travel to New York and find Storm. Zaladane is a great example of how badly written this story is, actually. There’s nothing she does that Garokk couldn’t do directly. She’s just there because the Savage Land always needs more stuff in it. Over the course of two episodes, we get some uninspired fights, dinosaur stampedes, extremely bad jokes, and a brief kaiju battle between the emerging Garokk and a superpowered Sauron, culminating in an explosion that can literally be seen from space. It definitely should have killed everyone except maybe Rogue, but everyone is inexplicably fine.

The best thing I can say about this story is that it’s the last time we’ll visit the Savage Land. If you want a much better Storm story, go back and watch “Captive Hearts”, which tells us more about Ororo Monroe in half the time.

Stray observations:

• Asteroid M is one of the locations preprogrammed into Karl’s jet.

• While we’re briefly in New York, there’s a banner for NY Comic Con featuring the words “‘Nuff Said!”

• The multiple encounters with dinosaurs in this episode are boring, but at least Wolverine finally gets a Fastball Special courtesy of Beast.

• Wolverine has a quick line about some of the team being away at Muir Island, “Studying Jeanie like a lab rat…” Jean just died, so this is a hell of an off camera development!

• This story’s smartest moment is when the team is debating how to take down an out of control Storm. They can’t just have Rogue drain her energy, since Rogue would gain Storm’s powers and that would risk even greater weather chaos. They decide to have Karl do it instead, and then have Rogue drain the energy out of Sauron. The two energy absorbers briefly struggle against each other, with Rogue transforming back and forth between herself and a pterodactyl a few times. “It was real weird,” Rogue later says of the experience.

• On the toilet: technically no one, since Wolverine has that throwaway line about the rest of the team being at Muir Island. That line aside, it’s Professor Xavier, Cyclops, and Gambit.