Jonathan Dobres

Season 4, Episode 13. Air date: May 4, 1996.

“Your mother was a gentle woman. The world I fought for frightened her. I frightened her.” It’s this episode’s most powerful line, and it comes from Magneto, telling his children (Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, aka Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch) why their mother chose to flee from him and die in hiding. This confession comes shortly after the High Evolutionary reveals to all three of them that they’re a family, and just before Magneto decides it’s time for them to wreck the Evolutionary’s hidden fortress/laboratory. Or as he tells his children, “We shall not perish at the hands of a psychotic biologist!” Needless to say, this episode has some tonal problems.

Wanda Maximoff has a long history with the franchise, debuting way back in 1963’s X-Men #4 as a reluctant member of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. She eventually leaves that group, joins the Avengers, leaves them, hooks up with Vision, and on and on. This episode borrows elements from a 1974 Avengers story, which revealed that Pietro and Wanda’s parents were the Golden Age heroes Miss America and—ahem—The Whizzer, a guy who manifested superhuman speedster powers after being injected with mongoose blood. It’s not until a 1982 story that Magneto is retconned as Pietro and Wanda’s father, no doubt part of other early-80s efforts to transform him from a one-note villain into a more nuanced antihero. Wanda goes on to do many great things, not the least of which is that time she de-powered 90% of all mutants on Earth. She’s also the star of one of the best MCU TV series, but if you’re reading this, you probably already knew that. Or maybe all of this!

Wanda’s powers are an iffy blend of science (“probability manipulation”, parallel universes, etcetera) and sorcery (hexes, demonic influence, abracadabra). She can make basically anything happen, but she can’t control the exact effect. This makes her chaotic and interesting, at least in the comics. “Family Ties” barely uses her powers at all. She restrains Magneto with a rope that magically ties itself, and later makes a bunch of goons trip and fall over. As for Quicksilver, he’s very fast. Not so fast that he’s functionally God, but fast enough to spin like a top and save himself from deadly falls, as he does a couple of times in this story. The action scenes in this one are pretty bad, folks.

The episode makes the mistake of giving the audience too much information. The High Evolutionary feeds Magneto and Pietro/Wanda different stories to get everyone to his lab at Mt. Wundagore, which makes their initial meeting and fight kind of tedious to sit through. We know that the High Evolutionary is going to reveal himself as the villain, and surprise surprise, he wants their DNA (the keys to probability manipulation, super speed, and raw power) to accelerate his own research into creating a genetically perfect race.

If I had it my way, I would have made Wanda a conspirator in the High Evolutionary’s scheme. This is the first time we’ve ever seen her, making her an unknown quantity. Her character often walks a fine line between good and evil (most notably in WandaVision but unfortunately not in Multiverse of Madness), and I think it would have been satisfying to have her start as an antagonist, then experience a change of heart and betray the High Evolutionary in the nick of time. But alas, no. The Evolutionary’s human-animal hybrids apprehend Wanda and Pietro seconds after they deal with Magneto, the Evolutionary reveals his plan, there’s another clunky fight with the goons, and then the Evolutionary cuts his losses and departs. Oh, and Wolverine gets transformed into an actual werewolf (guy’s really been getting it bad lately). In a great example of lazy writing, he just reverts to his normal self when the Evolutionary departs.

The talkier parts of the story work better, if not especially well. David Hemblen does a commendable job selling Magneto’s sincere guilt over what happened to his wife and his unwitting abandonment of his biological children. He asks Wanda and Pietro if they can forgive him, and doesn’t fault them when they don’t. Wolverine acts like Magneto is still his early-era archvillain self, but he’s spent most of his time on the show solidly in antihero territory, and this episode is downright sympathetic to him. Magneto also has a cool exchange with Xavier near the episode’s start, which almost feels like a preview of how their relationship will be portrayed in the movies. Lastly, dude looks fabulous in a simple black coat. Between act breaks, he’ll inexplicably be put back in his classic red and purple costume, billowing cloak and all. At least we got a few scenes of him dressed to impress.

Stray observations:

• Wanda and Pietro’s adoptive parents receive the infants from Bova, a half-cow midwife. They have no follow-up questions.

• Magneto has no difficulty getting into the X-Mansion for his late night chat with Xavier. “Wolverine was supposed to be on guard duty,” Xavier muses. Checking his security cameras, he finds Wolverine struggling in agony against some kind of electromagnetic web that Magneto devised. Then Xavier just mutes the TV and turns back to his chat with Magneto. Charles Xavier continues to be just a bit more of a sociopath than I’d like.

• This episode acts like everyone already knows who the Scarlet Witch is, despite the fact that we’ve only previously gotten the briefest glimpse of her in season 2’s “Repo Man”.

• On the toilet: everyone except Xavier, Wolverine, and Beast. I’m pretty sure Beast is here just so he can say, “The creatures are neither man nor beast, much as I have been described! Though I doubt we will have time to discuss it.”