Hogan Reviews

The second season of the animated X-Men series has an over-arching plot across all 12 episodes though really it’s mainly short cut-away sequences that don’t go anywhere until we get to the two-part finale. It was an interesting choice but I don’t feel it worked well. Luckily though a lot of the actual episodes are really fun and feature some pretty deep cuts from Marvel lore mixed with interesting looks at our titular heroes… so let’s take a look!

The season opens up with a two-parter called “Till Death do us Part” focusing on Cyclop and Jean getting married, much to the chagrin of Wolverine, but on their way to their honeymoon the couple are captured by Mr. Sinister thanks to the help of Morph, who was assumed dead during the previous season’s opener. The ex-X-Man then heads into the X Mansion and intentionally gets the various mutants to fall out with each other by pretending to be various other members and saying and doing bad things (though to be fair Gambit being coaxed into kissing Rogue despite knowing how her powers work was entirely his fault, even if Morph was originally disguised as the girl…) Eventually Wolverine’s sense of smell alerts him to Professor X not actually being the Prof and they follow an escaping Morph to Sinister’s lab, where they eventually rescue the happy couple. Wolverine tries to get Morph to re-join them but he is too mentally unstable to agree, caught between the anger at being left behind and the knowledge that he’s being controlled by Sinister. At the end of the second episode Professor X and Magneto meet in the Savage Land (a prehistoric jungle in the middle of Antarctica) each thinking the other sent the message (but it was actually Morph), only to be caught in an avalanche.

Wolverine’s pure dedication to trying to bring Morph back into the fold was a good look at his loyalty to his teammates not always evident in his “bad ass” loner persona.

This is the over-arching plot, Professor X and Magneto, neither having access to their mutant powers (but X somehow able to walk again) running around the Savage Land escaping dinosaurs and being captured by local “mutates” only to escape each and every time until the two-part finale. It gets more than a little repetitive by the end. What isn’t repetitive though is the next bunch of episodes, all focusing on a single X-person’s backstory! Episode 3 “Whatever it Takes” sees Storm heading back to Africa and facing off against the evil Shadow King (that means a lot more now I’ve watched Legion…); Episode 4 “Red Dawn” has Wolverine face off against the reactivated Omega Red alongside Colossus as Red tries to reconquer the former lands of the Soviet Union in a bid to reclaim their past glory (um… yikes, that episode hits a bit harder in 2023…); Episode 5 “Repo Man” sees Wolverine invited back to Canada by an old flame only to be assaulted by the Alpha Flight team of Canadian heroes, though it turns out they were being manipulated by the same people who modified Logan back in the past rather than having suddenly turned evil… Episode 6 “X-Ternally Yours” sees Gambit get brought back to the swamp he grew up in when his brother is placed in danger due to a weird spirit that appears every few years and must be given tributes by the local thieves guild and assassin guild, which is an odd set up, plus the assassins look super 90s with neon colours and crazy helmets, it’s great stuff. Gambit saves his brother and the thieves guild.

Magneto realises that Professor X’s crippled legs are somehow a “mutant power”.

Our next two-parter is another time travel / paradoxy one that actually combines the two from the previous season as Cable sees his post-apocalyptic future begin to change, including his son being erased, and finds out that its happening because Bishop goes back in time from his earlier but still pretty crappy dystopian future to change the present to and help his future. Follow? Good. The thing Bishop changes is the spreading of a deadly virus that mutants get accused of being the spreaders due to an extremely unpleasant on-the-nose racist group called “Friends of Humanity” engineering it specifically to look like that. In an earlier episode the group’s leader was asked by Jubilee what she’d done to him and he responded “you were born!” so, yeah. Not very nice KKK-like people, which given the Mutants were originally an analogy of black people in 60s America I guess that makes sense! Still shocking to see it on display so blatantly in a cartoon, but that’s why the show worked so well, not doing much hand-holding. Anyway, turns out Apocalypse is behind the virus so when Cable arrives in the present day to stop Bishop from succeeding in stopping the spread of the virus he finds out that by doing that he’ll be helping his arch-nemesis. It’s a really fun set up seeing the two time travellers trying to stop each other. In the end Cable and Bishop find a way to please both futures and still stop Apocalypse’s plans.

“This is called a grenade!” “Yeah I know, they had those in my future as well. I mean, your past, my present, their future…. Oh just throw the damn thing!”

We then get three more stand-alone stories before we get to the finale. “A Rogue’s Tale” shows Rogue being haunted by a blonde woman that turns out to be Mystique taking the guise of Ms. Marvel, who Rogue had put into a coma by permanently stealing her powers back when she was working for the changeling. A piece of Carol Danvers’ mind still lingered in Rogues but Jean managed to cage that part of her mind up and Rogue fought back against Mystique, who genuinely seemed to care for her like a daughter, just a daughter she had used in criminal schemes… “Beauty and the Beast” sees Beast fall in love with a blind woman called Carly but is hounded by Friends of Humanity into leaving her. Wolverine breaks into a FoH meeting and finds out that their leader Graydon Creed is the son of his nemesis Victor “Sabretooth” Creed and by revealing that to his followers he loses all credibility. Finally “Mojovision” is an odd side-story where the X-Men are sucked into a TV dimension and are forced to appear in TV show parodies led by the super over-the-top network executive parody Mojo. It has its moments, but it’s not… great. Very easily slips into obnoxious, though the multi-armed camera operator always brings a smile to my face as she was weirdly a playable character in Marvel vs. Capcom 2…

Overall Thoughts:

This was pretty much my only frame of reference when it was announced Captain Marvel would be coming to the MCU several decades later…

X-Men’s second season largely continues the strong focus on storytelling alongside Saturday morning cartoon action, with each X-Man getting a whole episode focused on them and their individual troubled backstory. The stretched story of Prof. X and Magento running around the Savage Land didn’t really work as a linking device in most of the episodes and the opening two-parter and the two-part finale were the weaker episodes of the season, but hey-ho. I still enjoyed my time with the show again!

The two-part finale, “Reunion”, sees Prof. X and Magneto FINALLY get caught permanently and get brought to Mr. Sinister’s lab, where he uses a form of mind-control to bring the X-Men into a trap. Everyone but Wolverine is captured and Sinister begins to show how he’s going to use their powers to enhance his “Nasty Boys” gang and others, plus he shows a particular interest is Cyclops and Jean’s… um, genes.

“Now I will put you in a cell, take you out of the cell and hang you back on the wall in my lab and gloat a bit more until your friends arrive. This is your life under Mr. Sinister!”

Wolverine recruits the savage Tarzan-like locals and stages an attack on Sinister’s lab that doesn’t actually do much apart from just at the last moment knocking out the machine that was blocking everyone’s powers, allowing for a mass X-Men breakout. Everyone attacks Sinister, including Morph as he finally breaks free of the mind control he’s been under, and Sinister is reduced to dust (that then collects together into a silhouette of his face that then laughs, which was just comical rather than threatening…) Professor X is happy to see his X-Men can continue to exist even without him as everyone heads home…