Jonathan Dobres

I’m not sure there will ever be a story that so clearly showcases the highs and lows of what this show could do with twenty minutes. Part 1 is built around a thought provoking premise and gives characters plenty of time to react to it. It pulls in a ton of the show’s established continuity, which further emphasizes the impact and grandiosity of Magneto’s latest scheme. Part 2, on the other hand, is there to sell toys. It abandons the story’s thorny premise in favor of a twitchy villain, half-baked action, and a rushed conclusion. It feels like “Sanctuary” was supposed to be a much bigger story, but got trimmed down to two episodes during development.

So let’s talk about Magneto’s ambitious plan to form a segregationist utopia in low Earth orbit, and how this concept doesn’t really mesh with the toyetic demands of Saturday morning cartoons.

Part 1

Season 4, Episode 3. Air date: October 21, 1995.

There’s a lot going on this episode, sometimes a little too much! Someone or something is stealing the Earth’s satellites, some of which have nuclear capabilities. The scientists that man these satellites are also disappearing, or at least, all the mutants are.

The delegates of the U.N. get a minute to argue about the situation, pointedly accusing Genosha of abducting the mutant scientists in service of its slave labor economy. “The Republic of Free Genosha objects strenuously to the term ‘slavery’. Mutant powers are a resource to be managed like any other,” says the Genoshan representative.

It’s at this point that Magneto demolishes the roof of the U.N. building, wraps the desperately fleeing Genoshan delegate in what was formerly a metal railing, and delivers what just might be the series’s greatest-ever monologue. It’s worth reading in full:

The mutant race will no longer be “managed”, Mr. Delegate. Ladies, gentlemen! You have been chosen to witness the announcement of a momentous event in the history of our planet: the liberation of mutantkind has begun. Too long have we suffered under the oppression of humankind. I have witnessed firsthand the barbarous treatment of mutants on your wretched little island [directly addressing the delegate from Genosha]. I will not allow this madness to continue! We have seen communities torn apart by the jealous hatred of our mutant gifts. Roving mobs of vigilantes seek out the infirm among us. Some mutants conceal their true power, living a charade of normality while their spirit suffocates. Others have gone into hiding beneath your cities, huddling in the darkness like rats. There are those who have tried nobly to enlighten their human brethren, to strive for freedom and equality for all men. Their efforts have been repaid with brutality and hatred! The missing mutant scientists and I have built a mutants-only asteroid, where any mutant may live apart from humanity, free from its cruelty…My mission is peaceful. Any intervention would make it otherwise. The decision is yours.

It’s an incredible moment for the show. I don’t think any character has ever gotten a monologue this long. In a format where every second counts, it’s a lot of talking for one character, and David Hemblen knocks it out of the park. Magneto backs up his words with a highlight reel of anti-mutant bigotry pulled from previous episodes. The inescapable conclusion is that—say it with me—Magneto was right. Xavier’s dream is beautiful in theory, but just results in a lot of fighting in practice. It’s not working, and in Magneto’s opinion, the only viable solution is for mutants to leave Earth behind entirely. If you disagree, well, he’s recently acquired over 200 nukes, so please don’t. This is Peak Magneto, people. This is the Magneto who ends up on t-shirts and inspires veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company to do cape flicks. It’s so good that, thirty years later, the writers of X-Men ‘97 are going to give Magneto a chance to do it again.

The amount of in-show continuity here is dizzying. Magneto’s clip reel includes everything from the Sentinels to the Morlocks to the Friends of Humanity. His speech is watched by Mister Sinister and Apocalypse (from separate lairs, naturally), as well as mutants across the world. The setup makes the scale of Magneto’s offer feel global in a way that not even the Phoenix Sagas managed to achieve.

And it works. Crowds of mutants are desperate to get to Magneto’s designated pickup points and ascend to the paradise he’s built on Asteroid M.¹ Xavier, in contrast, is horrified by what he believes amounts to segregation. The other X-Men are less sure. Even Beast says, “For all our efforts, we seem to spend more time fighting for our lives than for mutant rights.” Gambit wants to get to Asteroid M to check on an old friend of his, Byron Calley. Rogue worries that Gambit might live on Asteroid M permanently, which doesn’t really seem in-character for him, but it’s nice to see the two of them openly flirting again. Despite Gambit’s interest in Byron early on, nothing really comes of it, which makes me think there was an earlier draft of this story in which Byron had a bigger role.

Xavier, Beast, and Gambit join the crowd of mutants in Africa, where Magneto convinces them to see Asteroid M for themselves. Magneto delivers on his promise of transporting any willing mutant away, but it seems to tax even his vast powers. Rather than head straight to Asteroid M, Magneto takes the whole collection of refugees to Genosha for another pickup. The Genoshan government has a violent response to this. Luckily, a strung-out weirdo named Fabian Cortez and his Acolytes show up to assist “Lord Magneto”. It’s the first big brawl of the season and a little too chaotic, but it snaps into focus when the Genoshan military activates three Sentinels to try to kill Magneto.² Cortez, luckily, can amplify other mutants’ abilities. After a boost from Cortez, Magneto destroys all three Sentinels in a single, dramatic burst of power.

With Genosha liberated, we finally get to Asteroid M. Xavier notes that Magneto, who is exhausted from the day’s events, might become dependent on Cortez’s abilities, “like a drug.” Nothing else comes of this comment, again suggesting a dropped subplot. Instead, Xavier gets a frosty hello from Amelia Voght, his ex-girlfriend. As Beast will explain, Charles and Amelia had a falling out when he was training the X-Men, whereas she felt that mutants would be better off laying low.³

Magneto then leads Asteroid M’s first state dinner while wearing something of a statement piece. If Asteroid M’s first law is “All mutants welcome,” the second must be, “If ya got it, flaunt it.”⁴ This oh-so brief taste of things going according to plan is interrupted by a volley of missiles, which Magneto manages to repel. Byron informs Magneto that this wasn’t an unprovoked attack; a missile was launched from Asteroid M shortly before. Magneto immediately suspects Cortez, who has been ranting about “the flatscan⁵ human tyrants” and begging Magneto to do more than just isolate from them.

Things come to a head when Cortez shows up in Magneto’s quarters. Magneto tries to put him in his place, but Cortez reveals the flip side of his abilities: depowering mutants. Magneto is so weakened that he can barely move, and Cortez explains that he’ll shortly dissolve. But before that, he’ll make a convenient martyr for the cause. Cortez disposes of Magneto in an escape shuttle (already too stupid to just throw him into space, I guess) and immediately frames the X-Men for the murder.

This is a remarkable half hour for the show. Aside from the action piece in the middle, almost all its running time is given over to some very big questions. Is Xavier’s dream of mutant-human coexistence a fool’s errand? Haven’t his attempts to achieve that dream amounted to training a group of vigilantes, and heaped unwanted attention on mutants who just want to live quiet lives? Doesn’t the fact that Genosha is still enslaving mutants prove that the X-Men are ineffective? Is Magneto’s idea of a mutant-only utopia any better than “go back to where you came from”? Is the shortcut to international recognition nuclear armament? Is an uneasy, nuclear-enforced truce between mutants and humans as close as we can get to peace?

If you’re sitting there thinking, wow, this is awfully weighty material for a Saturday morning cartoon, don’t worry. Part 2 is going to throw all these questions away and restore the balance.

Stray observations:

• When Beast is giving us a flashback to Xavier, Amelia, and the early days of the X-Men (1960s costumes and all), one of them is Angel, who was never an X-Man in the show’s continuity. Let’s just assume it’s some other blonde guy with majestic wings.

• Blink and you’ll miss it, but none other than Black Panther watches the whole group depart Africa.

• On the toilet: Cyclops, Jean, and even Wolverine (!) don’t appear at all, other than in the reused footage during Magneto’s speech at the UN. Storm and Jubilee can be spotted ever so briefly in an early scene, but have no lines.

Part 2

Season 4, Episode 4. Air date: October 28, 1995.

As I see it, Part 2 suffers from two problems. One, Fabian Cortez isn’t a plausible leader, especially next to Magneto’s clear-eyed stateliness. I mean, look at the guy. He looks like he’s been crashing on his cousin’s couch for five months and is going to start looking for a job tomorrow, I promise, man, I promise. On top of that, Lawrence Bayne voices him somewhere between Jay Mohr’s Christopher Walken impression and a psychotic break.

Two, did you know that ’90s cartoons were often used as a means to sell toys to kids? It’s especially egregious in this episode. Labels like SHIAR CLOAK and SHIAR SHIELD are hilariously on the nose. I’m also offended on Hank McCoy’s behalf, as he certainly has stronger UX chops than this. Look at that shoddy text layout! And then there are these extremely ’90s costumes! Rogue’s is relatively restrained, while Wolverine gets an all-black number that makes him look too much like Batman, and Beast’s and Xavier’s look positively deranged. I can’t locate definitive proof, but I found at least one post claiming that these were, indeed, part of a light-up toy line.

All this is to say, Part 2 is a severe downgrade from Part 1. There’s just too much going on. Gambit volunteers to hold off Cortez’s minions so that the rest of the team can reach an escape shuttle. Charles Xavier, doing the most Xavier thing ever, waits about one second before deciding to jettison from Asteroid M, leaving Gambit behind. The team crash lands on Earth, much to Rogue’s chagrin, who nearly rips the shuttle in half searching for him. Once back on Earth, Xavier takes his sweet time talking the President into giving the X-Men another chance and leading a memorial service for Magneto.

The memorial service is strange in a lot of ways. Wolverine quietly pops into the story here without any explanation for his absence.⁶ Xavier’s flashbacks to Magneto’s tragic backstory are a lot more German-coded than the last time the show referenced them, though of course this kids’ show stops short of making Magneto’s status as a Holocaust survivor explicit. Xavier refers to Magneto as, “our most intractable opponent,” which is weird because despite the man’s frequent appearances on the show, he’s only been an outright antagonist twice (“Enter Magneto” and “Deadly Reunions”). And then there is Rogue’s outfit. What in the Antebellum nonsense is this? What is this jacket and vest combo from Hobbiton’s Finest? What is this frilly jabot around her neck? And what on Earth is going on with her hair in this scene? Of course, this is all secondary to the fact that Xavier absolutely does not have time for this. Gambit is still stuck on Asteroid M and Cortez could kill him at any moment! Get your ass in gear, man!

Meanwhile, back on Asteroid M, Cortez is in the process of making an example of Gambit for murdering “Lord Magneto”. Amelia Voght smells a rat, takes a tip from the imprisoned Gambit, and starts snooping around for evidence that will reveal Cortez’s guilt. Amelia’s mutant power is that she can sublimate into gas, so it’s trivial for her to slip into restricted areas and locate the missing surveillance footage. It’s all very easy and doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why would Amelia help one of Xavier’s people? From her perspective, isn’t Gambit just demonstrating the whole problem with Xavier’s worldview? For that matter, why is she even here? Wouldn’t it make more sense for Gambit’s old friend, Byron, to help him out? It would certainly be more dramatic, because Byron can’t just turn into a mist to get wherever he needs to be.

In the episode’s third and least developed subplot, Magneto’s shuttle crashes on Earth. He keeps fading in and out of existence and screaming, “I LIVE!!!” This scares the hell out of some people who are probably Bedouins, but doesn’t do much else.

Anyway, the X-Men return to Asteroid M in their crazy outfits (SHIAR SHIELD, SHIAR CLOAK, SHIAR ETCETERA) and engage in some perfunctory brawls with Cortez’s minions. Amelia finds the evidence she needs and exposes Cortez, at which point his former followers turn on him. He panics, instructing Byron to launch all of the station’s nukes. The X-Men do what they can to shoot them down, but it’s not enough. Just then, Magneto returns and deflects all the missiles, having been “nourished by the Earth’s magnetic field as a mother nourishes her child.” Sure, whatever. For good measure, Magneto clamps down on Cortez the same way he did the Genoshan U.N. delegate. Despite all the half-baked craziness, it’s pretty satisfying!

The only remnant of the big idea that kicked off this story is Magneto’s final decision to sink Asteroid M. His dream of a separatist mutant utopia is now too poisoned to ever be viable. Magneto, never one to tolerate half measures, destroys the project with the same decisiveness he had in building it. He even tells Xavier not to worry. He has no doubt that he’ll survive Asteroid M’s reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and subsequent plunge into the ocean.

Probably the funniest scene in the entire story occurs near the end, as Xavier and Amelia are having one last back and forth about mutant-human relations. Xavier offers to rekindle things with Amelia, but I mean, come on. Imagine that your ex-boyfriend is trying to convince you to get back together while he’s wearing this outfit.

It’s very disappointing to see such a promising setup rapidly fall off a cliff. There’s a lot in Part 2 that doesn’t matter at all: Cortez’s broadcasted threats against Earth, Magneto’s pseudo-death and memorial, Beast disarming a few of the nukes, all the fights, and most characters’ mutant powers. All to sell some toys. Man, what could have been.

But as a little sweetener, the next time we see Cortez is at the end of the episode, as he’s regaining consciousness in Apocalypse’s lair!

Now That’s What I Call ’90s: the sheer toyetic absurdity of the X-Men’s costumes.

Stray observations:

• Gambit has a power-suppressing collar from Genosha around his neck for most of the episode, which is shamefully poor writing. There is simply no way that either Magneto or Cortez would tolerate these. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if Cortez had continuously drained Gambit’s powers, simultaneously keeping Gambit under control and demonstrating that Cortez will be the ultimate arbiter of mutant gifts on Asteroid M?

• Blink and you’ll miss it, but none other than Black Panther watches the whole group return to Africa.

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