Jonathan Dobres

Season 4, Episode 2. Air date: September 14, 1996 (in season 5).

The worst thing an episode of X-Men: The Animated Series can be is boring, and people, they don’t get much more boring than this. The US military wants to salvage a derelict Soviet nuclear submarine, and to do it they thaw out Omega Red. In exchange, Red demands that Wolverine and Storm—the two people who put him on ice last time, never mind Colossus I guess—accompany him down into the sub. Once there, Red quickly gains control of the sub and its nuclear arsenal, and proceeds to hold the world hostage. It’s up to Rogue and Beast to disable the sub before Red can launch its missiles or the Air Force swoops in to blow up the whole thing.

The episode is littered with low quality animation and plot holes (again, this was slated for season 4 but aired during season 5; all of the season 5 episodes we’ve seen so far have been terrible). Chief among them: why would Storm have agreed to be Omega Red’s bargaining chip? Sure, Wolverine has an axe to grind and would want to keep an eye on the guy, and his healing powers mean that the sub can’t kill him. But this has got to be a nightmare scenario for Storm, plunging herself into an enclosed space that will trigger her claustrophobia and severely limit her powers, to say nothing of the whole place being extraordinarily poisonous to her.

There are no character beats to speak of. There’s a lot of generic growling and trash talk from Wolverine, but he’s completely useless. He gets knocked unconscious halfway through the episode, eliminating him from the story. There are a couple of nods to Storm’s claustrophobia, but nothing that meaingfully affects the events.

The action is no better, just a couple of very low stakes tussles between Wolverine, Storm, and Omega Red that don’t really go anywhere. Meanwhile, you’ve got Beast and Rogue hovering nearby in the Blackbird, alternately trying to disable the sub or knock its missiles out of the sky before they arm. Reading that sentence, you might imagine that this would be a great opportunity for Beast to show off his brilliance and hack the sub, or for Rogue to fly off and wrestle the missiles out of the air at great risk to herself. But nope, nothing like that happens! It’s just Beast and Rogue sitting in the Blackbird’s cockpit, either releasing depth charges at the sub or using lasers to try to shoot down the missiles (they missed two but luckily the Air Force got them, oh wow). Rogue does eventually dive down to the sub to rip it up and force an evacuation. This is played for drama—can she survive the water pressure? The writers forgot that we’ve seen Rogue survive in deep space.

In the end, Storm fireman-carries an unconscious Wolverine to an escape craft, which the Blackbird then airlifts out of the ocean. Omega Red tries to steer the sub to a new location, but thanks to the damage that Rogue did, it malfunctions and the whole thing falls into a deep sea trench. Recapping the events for Xavier, Beast says of Wolverine, “I’m sure he feels that he could have done more.” I’ll say, Hank.

Stray observations:

• The US military brass, giving Omega Red the hard sell about the current state of geopolitics: “[The Cold War] is over. We won.”

• Red pronounces the word “Colonel” as “Co-low-nell”.

• Wolverine, remarking on the sub’s still-functioning reactor: “They oughta use this tub in one of those battery ads with the rabbit.”

• Lenore Zann still gets the episode’s two best lines. As Red loads up another volley of nukes, she simply says, “That does it,” and dives into the ocean to personally rip apart the sub. When Beast asks what the hell is going on, she says, “I bent his boat.”

• On the toilet: Cyclops, Jean, Jubilee, and Gambit.