Jonathan Dobres

Season 4, Episode 15. Air date: February 3, 1996.

I’ve decided to open this review of our latest X-Men episode, “Lotus and the Steel”, with the most interesting in-universe fact I could find about the Silver Samurai. The Silver Samurai’s teleportation powers come from a magic ring that he recovered during a fight against Saturday Night Live’s John Belushi. This is canon thanks to a 1978 Marvel crossover comic featuring the contemporary SNL cast, which also makes it canonically true that Saturday Night Live exists within the Marvel universe, which I (brilliantly) deduced must be the case in my review of season 2’s “Till Death Do Us Part”:

Commencing his campaign of discord, Morph rubs his hands together and giggles, “Makin’ copies,” a jarring reference which implies that both Saturday Night Live and Rob Schneider exist in the X-Men universe.

The teleportation ring’s lore may or may not have been updated to replace Belushi with Chris Farley, thanks to the Marvel Sliding Timescale, but I can only find one reference to that, and it’s got an ominous “citation needed” next to it. Let us never forget that X-Men is ridiculous.

Anyway, Wolverine and Japan. Both of these things got a lot of attention starting in the 1980s, so why not combine them? “Lotus and the Steel” is a very loose take on Chris Claremont’s 1982 Wolverine book. Overall, the episode isn’t great. On the one hand, this half hour is trying to address Wolverine’s many traumas: Weapon X, Sabretooth, religious faith, Yuriko Oyama, Jean, and even his terrifying encounter with Proteus. He decides that the only way to heal and control his rage is to Eat, Pray, Love about it in Japan.

On the other hand, you’ve got a story that thinks it’s an homage to Seven Samurai, in which Wolverine journeys to a remote Japanese village under the thumb of the Silver Samurai, who is about to collect his annual tribute. It doesn’t work very well, because standing in for an interesting group of hired mercenaries with varied personalities is Wolverine, and only Wolverine. He spends most of the episode learning to restrain himself, pointedly not fighting people and not even offering the village any help with its defense strategy. The villagers make up their own Home Alone-inspired defenses to defeat the Samurai’s gang while Wolverine wrestles with his demons. The emotional stakes are heavy but the action is featherweight, and the two don’t even really overlap.

The performances in this episode are some of the worst in the entire series, though the writers did at least pepper Wolverine’s lines with some basic Japanese. Cal Dodd does the best he can with these phrases, which isn’t very good. I think the episode is implying that Wolverine is actually speaking fluent Japanese throughout, and we’re just hearing English for convenience. Jubilee’s subplot is that she’s searching for Wolverine but failing to make progress because she can’t communicate with anyone.

The Silver Samurai may oversee a motorcycle gang, but his protection racket and the overall vibe of this version of Japan are positively feudal. The episode’s portrayal of Japan as exotic and a bit backward feels very dated from here in 2026, when anime has become a global phenomenon.¹ It’s thanks to our Crunchyroll subscription that I know that Dodd’s Japanese is pretty bad, and also why I know so much about the standardized layout of Japanese high schools.

Things come to a climax, if you can even call it that, when the Silver Samurai decides to stop playing games and personally crush the village. Wolverine steps in for a stupidly easy fight. The point is that Wolverine has learned to wait, pick the right moment, and strike with precision instead of rage. Although the episode spends a lot of time showing Wolverine not fighting (thrilling TV, right?), we don’t really see him learn anything. The monk he’s been spending time with, Oku, urges Wolverine to see with “different eyes,” a callback to “Nightcrawler”, this time from the practitioner of an Eastern religion instead of a Western one. Oku spouts phrases that vaguely approximate Zen riddles (“True strength is knowing when not to fight”, etc.), but the episode never actually demonstrates how this philosophy helps him. Oku’s life is threatened twice in this episode, and both times he’s saved not because of self-control or the acceptance of things he cannot change, but because Wolverine is nearby.

Overall, this one is a weird mashup that doesn’t really work. Now if you’d gotten Chris Farley in there somehow…

Stray observations:

• Xavier specifically mentions “the recent revelation” of Wolverine’s false memories. The episode contains flashbacks to the events of “Weapon X, Lies, and Videotape”, which, if you’re watching the show in production order, haven’t happened yet (it’s the next episode). This is a rare case where the airing order reflects the correct continuity but the production order doesn’t.

• Jubilee has a minor presence in this story, but it’s nice to see her. She manages to be pretty funny in her brief scenes. I particularly like the way she pilots her jet, demonstrating that she has learned nothing since season 2.

• After Wolverine defeats the Silver Samurai, the villagers just let him walk away. This guy has run a years-long protection racket against them, and they just let him wander off with a frown on his face?