Jonathan Dobres

Season 5, Episode 9. Air date: September 13, 1997.

X-Men, as a comic, loves an origin story as much as any other franchise, but the TV show never really made time for them. Apocalypse, Alpha Flight, Magneto, the Starjammers, the Friends of Humanity, etc. are all already established forces by the time they appear on screen. The one big exception is the Phoenix, and cases could be made for Archangel and X-Factor as minor exceptions, but that’s about it. If you wanted a villain origin, you were better off changing the channel to Batman: The Animated Series, where they couldn’t get enough of that stuff.¹

Naturally, X-Men: The Animated Series waits until its penultimate episode to finally do a straightforward villain origin, focusing on Mister Sinister. Why him and why now? Because his origin story had just appeared in 1996’s Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, making it easy pickings for the show. As of 1997, the canon was that Mister Sinister was once Nathaniel Essex, a Victorian gentleman who, obsessed with the idea of human evolution, readily sacrifices his humanity in the name of science.² The comics’s version of this story is, frankly, way too dark for Saturday mornings. Essex performs experiments on his son’s corpse, and by the end of the story his entire family is dead, more or less by his own hands.

The TV show necessarily scrubs the gruesome details and uses some nested flashbacks to pad out the thin narrative. There’s a frame story set in 1888, as James Xavier (ancestor of Charles) explains to a police inspector that he believes Jack the Ripper to be Nathaniel Essex. The two chase Jack down to a second location as James recounts Essex’s break with society thirty years earlier. The worst Essex does in 1859 is chain up a few Londoners who have early, unimpressive mutant powers. Essex mostly experiments on himself, giving him his Dracula palette and healing ability. His treatments also help his ailing wife, Rebecca, whom the episode couldn’t care less about. The 1859 story concludes with the mob wrecking Essex’s lab and chasing him out of London. James also gets to make an impassioned speech in defense of London’s proto-mutants. He adds that “Rebecca never uttered another word” despite being perfectly healthy by this point, which is a pretty good summary of how the show treats its female characters.

This episode illustrates the cardinal sins of the overexplained villain. By giving evil a backstory, you make it less mysterious, and therefore less frightening. Worse, this version of Sinister’s origins isn’t interesting. Like so many prequels, the episode just pulls Essex along until he becomes exactly the person we already know Sinister to be, with no new depth revealed:

Xavier: Dr. Essex, I–

Essex: I am no longer a doctor, James.

Okay, thanks for the update. But why doesn’t he consider himself a doctor? It would have been so easy to add something like, “…for I can no longer abide the oath of ‘Do no harm’!” Instead, James calls Essex’s experiments “sinister” and we get on the nose stuff like, “Sinister, eh? I’ll have to remember that when Queen Victoria knights me.” What? Were you hoping she would dub you Sir Sinister?

Nothing that happens in 1859 is particularly clever or exciting (see dialogue above), and Jack the Ripper’s 1888 killing spree barely registers. The underwhelming reveal is that Jack isn’t Sinister, but merely an agent he’s empowered, as will become his M.O. for the next century. Sinister manages to escape before James can get to him, leading him to lament that someone else will have to take up the charge. Smash cut to Charles Xavier’s eyes snapping open in the dead of night a century later, Essex’s signed copy of Origin of Species on his nightstand.

Have I mentioned that Rebecca is Rebecca Grey, ancestor of Jean? As if having an Xavier great-great-grandfather in the story wasn’t enough. Retcons like this do nothing but shrink the world, reducing all of human history to a soap opera about two or three families (I’m looking at you, Star Wars). As an episode of X-Men that doesn’t actually show any X-Men until the final shot, it’s pretty unusual. As an origin story for the one of the franchise’s best villains, it’s pretty bad.

Stray observations:

• The episode features a cameo from Charles Darwin, who is portrayed with a cough. Although Darwin lived to the age of 73 (not bad for the nineteenth century), throughout his life he was plagued by a mysterious complex of ailments, which seemed to affect every organ system except his lungs. But I suppose it would not have been appropriate to show him crapping his brains out in the middle of a Royal Society lecture.

• On the toilet: technically no one, since this story takes place in the nineteenth century and none of the X-Men are alive yet. Color me surprised that we didn’t get an awkward Logan/Wolverine cameo, making this the fifth episode in which he does not appear.