Jonathan Dobres

Season 4, Episode 16. Air date: June 11, 1995 (in season 3).

Stories should happen in the present tense, especially for Saturday morning cartoons. I’ve said it before, but X-Men: The Animated Series only gets about twenty minutes per episode, and the show struggles whenever it has to spend precious minutes cramming in new backstory just to get the ball rolling. You would think that this wouldn’t apply to the show’s most frequently featured character, Wolverine, that at this point we know enough about him that we can live in his present. And yet there is always more Wolverine Background to unravel.

So it is with “Weapon X, Lies, and Video Tape”.¹ This episode features a pared down version of Team X and their false memory storyline from Wolverine #48. I don’t know much about those comics, other than that they tried very hard to be an overcomplicated spy spectacular. The first issue is titled, “The Shiva Scenario Part 1: Dreams of Gore, Phase 1”, for God’s sake. The show’s version of events greatly simplifies things, trimming Team X to Wolverine, Sabretooth, and guest characters Maverick and Silver Fox. Maverick is a dude in clunky armor and Silver Fox will be serving as Wolverine’s love interest for this half hour. Guy gets around.

Wolverine has started hallucinating, going berserk and lashing out at everyone around him. The cause, as we’ll learn, is that he has a bunch of fake memories courtesy of the Weapon X program, and they’re breaking down. A mysterious photograph of Wolverine with his arm around Silver Fox (and some coordinates on the back, more on that in the stray observations) sends him back to Canada to get to the bottom of things. Beast follows him, because the episode needs someone in it who isn’t constantly having a mental breakdown.

Wolverine arrives at the strangely familiar facility (“I got my bones here.”) and encounters Sabretooth. They fight each other immediately, and surely would have done so without much pretext. On top of their general hatred for each other, Wolverine’s memories suggest that Sabretooth was abusing Silver Fox and/or trying to destroy her romance with Wolverine, though the details are understandably kept vague for a kids’ show. Don Francks does what he can, imparting Sabretooth with an especially poisonous line reading of, “What’s the matter, runt? Can’t take care of your woman?” Wolverine also remembers a mission in which Team X faced Omega Red, and Sabretooth callously left Maverick and Silver Fox to die.

This is a story about false memories, so naturally, Silver Fox promptly reveals herself as very much alive. She explains that the facility they’re standing in—a cross between a TV studio and a science lab—was designed to turn them into sleeper agents with false memories. Oh and Maverick is there, too. Silver Fox discovered the lab months ago, but there’s one door she can’t open without all four of them present. Beast points out that the door, which is designed to put all four members of Team X in one extremely secure location, is an obvious trap. But they want the truth no matter what.

What’s waiting for them on the other side of the door is a little more exposition and a fight with a robot called Talos. Among its many combat features are what can only be described as nipple cannons. I am including a picture so that you will understand that this is not something I just made up. This is something a team of professional writers made up, had animated, and put on broadcast television. An entire TV network, along with its Standards & Practices Department, had no problem with this. But God forbid that Amelia Voght walk out on Charles Xavier while holding suitcases.

The fight with Talos is reasonably well done, making good use of all its participants. Where it loses me is the resolution, or the lack thereof. The good guys manage to blow Talos up, only for the facility’s defense systems to trigger traumatic memories in Team X (somehow) that conveniently knock them out, while also loudly announcing that a second Talos will shortly be activated to kill everyone. Beast takes the opportunity to collect Team X’s unconscious bodies, load everyone onto a truck, drive off, and lock the door behind him.

Before everyone goes their separate ways, Wolverine and Silver Fox have an intense heart-to-heart. They both have memories of carving their initials into a tree, as cartoon lovebirds do. Yet the facility’s studio has no such initials in its tree, and the team has learned that all of the false memories are based on half-truths. So was their relationship real? Did they really love each other? Is it too late to find out? Silver Fox doesn’t want to risk it, though she does give Wolverine one last, long look before departing. It’s pretty effective for what the episode has to work with, but it makes me wish the script had done a little more with the ideas of half-truths and unreliable narrators.

I’ll never say no to Beast getting some screen time. George Buza, as always, does a lot with what he’s given here, and I think he pairs well with Wolverine. That said, Beast doesn’t do much in this story other than locate videotapes of exposition (which, again, is the story being told from the past). Wouldn’t this story have been more interesting if Jean, who found the photograph of Silver Fox and Wolverine, had followed him to Canada instead? For one, it would have made sense for a telepath to try to help people who are in mental anguish. For another, Wolverine’s relationship with Silver Fox—yet another person he isn’t allowed to love due to forces beyond his control—would have hit that much harder with Jean nearby. Lastly, come on, Jean’s basically been absent since “Xavier Remembers”. Give the gal something to do.

This is a middling episode that would probably be stronger if you viewed it as Part 1 of a two-parter with “Lotus and the Steel”, which directly deals with the loss of control that Wolverine experiences in this story. Unfortunately, Disney Plus lists the show in production order (where these two are back-to-back but in the wrong order), while other services use the airing order (chronologically correct, but eight months apart in two different seasons). As it stands, the only good way to watch this pair of episodes is with an asterisk.

Stray observations:

• There’s a wild animation error during Wolverine and Sabretooth’s initial fight, in which their lines are synced to each others’ mouths.

• Jean snoops around in Wolverine’s bedroom to find that photo with the coordinates on the back. The coordinates are written as “53º / 120º”, which Beast immediately says is in “southern Canada”. Whole degrees cover huge distances, so at latitude 53º, we’re talking about a region slightly larger than Delaware. It should be nearly impossible to pinpoint a single, extremely secret building in such a large area, but then again, Wolverine has his traumatic memories to guide him and Beast is a genius. Given Wolverine’s history, Beast reasonably assumed that the unlabeled coordinates were meant to be 53ºN by 120ºW, which is indeed somewhere in Canada (though “southern” is a stretch). Hank’s other options were eastern Russia, the middle of the South Pacific, or about halfway between Australia and Antarctica/the Savage Land.

• On the toilet: Rogue, Storm, Jubilee, and Gambit. Cyclops appears and even gets to utter exactly one word (he shouts, “Wolverine!”), while Jean gets a small speaking role for the first time since “Courage”.