Jonathan Dobres

Season 5, Episode 8. Air date: September 6, 1997.

Throughout its run, X-Men: The Animated Series was a show on a budget, and it has the animation errors to prove it. Even so, the drop in quality evident during the show’s final few episodes is impossible to ignore. Just look at the redesigned Rogue. On top of the terrible new look and shoddy execution, her gloves will disappear between shots, even in the same scene. She makes enough skin-to-skin contact in this story to kill multiple people, or would have, if the show had remembered one of her defining powers. The audio is on par with the visuals. In several scenes, the imbalanced sound mix renders dialogue unintelligible against the music and sound effects. It’s embarrassing, frankly.

Anyway, this is the Cannonball episode, a stripped down version of his 1982 origin story. Young Sam Guthrie’s main attributes are that he is adorably gawky, extremely Southern, and can turn into a propulsive human explosion at will. It’s a lovable combination, and Sam manages to come through as a likable character despite this story’s many shortcomings. Briefly, Sam is a known quantity in his small hometown of Cumberland, Kentucky. The townies are a bit weirded out by his powers, but they know he’s a nice enough guy, and it helps that he saved a couple of coal miners from a cave-in at the top of the episode. A shady suit named Mr. Girkland has been trying to recruit Sam into his organization. It feels government-coded and even mentions Rogue appearing in “the Wideawake data” (which is a government program), but is actually a private entity, like Henry Gyrich’s defunct Mutant Control Agency.¹

Rogue hears about Sam’s heroics, remarking, “Must be tough bein’ the only mutant in town.” I wonder if mutation is a metaphor for anything, folks. She and Beast decide to pay Sam a visit. The pair don’t actually accomplish much with Sam, since he’s well adjusted and happy, but they do start looking into Girkland, who in turn starts looking into the X-Men.

The good guys dispatch Gambit, master thief, to break into Girkland’s headquarters. The sequence is overwrought in a “made for twelve year-olds” kind of way. Gambit uses his staff to leap between rooftops, and pulls out a miscellaneous piece of tech to open an HVAC vent cover, for some reason. He’s quickly apprehended, and it’s revealed that Girkland’s operation is exploring how to control mutants through experimental surgeries. Beast and Xavier free Gambit just as he’s about to go under the knife, with Xavier demonstrating the “make everyone pass out from a room away” ability that the movies love. How, exactly, an extra large blue man and a guy in a hovering wheelchair got into this facility in the nick of time is a mystery left to the ADA.

Back in Cumberland, Girkland’s agents are spreading anti-mutant rumors faster than you can say “social stigma”. The show usually portrays anti-mutant bigotry as a given. Characters are either already anti-mutant or not. We almost never see how those prejudices develop and spread, especially in small towns. This is the episode’s most compelling angle, and I wish they’d given it more emphasis. A local teen tells Sam, “I ain’t touchin’ no mutie. Might get infected.” Rather than follow through on committing a hate crime, the teens drive off in their pickup, which Sam grabs ahold of, turning it into a rocket dragster for a few terrifying minutes (Magneto would approve). Sam decides he’s had enough of these people, and visits Girkland to accept his offer (Magneto would not approve).

By the time the episode has resolved things with Gambit, a torch-wielding mob has assembled at the Guthrie house. It’s at this point that the entirety of the X-Men appear. The standoff between the mob and the X-Men is played for a moment of drama, but come on, there are seven thousand ways a team of superheroes could handle this, easily. Meanwhile, Sam realizes what a shifty liar Girkland is and explodes his way out of the helicopter they’re on. The best part of this is that Sam ends his dramatic escape flight with a stumbling crash landing in front of the mob. The episode doesn’t dwell on it for laughs, which makes it funnier. What can I say, I’m a sucker for pyrogenesis as a metaphor for your awkward teenage growth spurt.

Girkland sends a bunch of robots after Sam and the X-Men. The fight is generic, to put it kindly, which begs a few questions. Why summon the whole team if only the episode’s featured characters will actually be doing anything? Why not have characters with fabulous powers use them? Why is Charles Xavier just sort of sitting in the middle of a live fire zone? Why have Girkland deploy one of his surgically controlled mutants, only to have it flop over and pass out after doing a rounding error’s worth of property damage?

This being Sam Guthrie’s one and only episode, he gets to be the hero. He blasts through a few robots, then fires himself head-on into Girkland’s train.² It’s an exciting conclusion to the action despite the plot holes that led to it. Although this episode’s animation is distractingly bad overall, somebody loved animating Sam. He’s more expressive than any other character, and all the sequences of him using his powers feel great (see also: the aforementioned crash landing in front of the mob).

Xavier offers Sam a place at his school, but as with all guest mutants, Sam declines. He’s got to help his family rebuild their lives somewhere else. Call me crazy but that’s a pretty dark ending, and it doesn’t make much sense. The Guthries have lived in Cumberland for six generations. Surely being part of the town since roughly the War of 1812 counts for something. Even setting aside their history, Sam saved peoples’ lives here, twice in two days. Shouldn’t the townsfolk come to their senses and be more suspicious of slick strangers like Girkland?

Overall, it’s another middling-to-bad outing for season 5. Sam is likable enough, but the story itself is nothing the show hasn’t done before, and better.

Stray observations:

• This is the series’s 74^th episode, but I think it might be only the second to show Gambit doing something with that bo staff.

• People Rogue should have put in a coma via accidental skin contact: Sam Guthrie, Gambit.

• Rogue introduces herself as “Ms. LeBeau,” which will later cause her some embarrassment when Sam calls her that in front of Gambit. It’s a fun little moment in an episode otherwise light on character beats.

• On the toilet: no one. All of the X-Men appear, even if, like Wolverine and several others, they have no lines.