Surprise, You're Renewed
X-Men 2.10 “Beauty and the Beast”
If there’s one romance trope in fiction I hate the most it’s the hero who breaks up with their partner because “it’s not safe to be with me.”
Argh. Just no. Stop. Trust the people you love, hero boy…or in this case Beastie Boy.
Logan infiltrating the FoH was amusing, though, and perfect…nobody else could do it, but he didn’t have the patience to make a long game out of it.
Especially when he discovers the local leader is Creed’s kid who only hates mutants because he has Daddy Issues
Wolverine actually shows that he’s smart in this episode. He has a good brain in there, even if he doesn’t always use it to its full potential.
X-Men 2.11 “Mojovision”
TV shows that have episodes about the evils of TV always amuse me. Doctor Who has gone there a couple of times.
Mojo is always an entertaining character to deal with, and Spiral was very well done too. This is a relatively sane Spiral and a very sane Longshot too. That changes.
Machines are vulnerable to psychokinetic energy? Whatever you say, Jean.
An amusing bottle episode, although it does set up for more of Longshot and Spiral in the future…
X-Men 2.12 “Reunion Part 1”
The season ends with a two parter that brings all the threads together…Morph sets a trap for the X-Men while Magneto and Xavier find themselves in Sinister’s hands.
Sinister, of course, has to monologue and tell them exactly how to turn their powers back on. Supervillain 101, don’t monologue. It never ends well for you.
Jean is a bit too much of a damsel in this episode for my tastes, but Sauron thinks he can easily mind control Xavier because he has no powers.
He still has his training, and while Sauron wins, it’s not easy…and it should be trivial to break it.
An amusing moment is Xavier calling Magneto out for colonialism.
X-Men 2.13 “Reunion Part 2”
This quite neatly pulls together all the threads except for the Friends of Humanity, which is presumably left hanging for season 3.
The gang’s back together, including Morph. Turns out Sinister put a mind control chip in him, because of course he did. Wolverine may have started a friendship with the savage Katar…those two do kind of belong together. (If this wasn’t a kids show, Logan would have the hots for him too…)
Sinister’s into merging mutants to evolve them like one of those mobile games.
I think from this ending that the writers thought they had been canceled…they did leave some stuff to continue, but there was a bit of an epilogue.
Surprise, you’re renewed!
For three more seasons, even.
X-Men 3.1 “Out of the Past Part 1”
Wolverine’s ex, Yuriko, is even more angry than he is…because she thinks he killed her father.
But she also needs to borrow his claws to get into an alien ship. This is all a bad idea, of course.
Honestly, she might have got him to help if she’d asked nicely. But it doesn’t matter, because what’s inside the ship is pretty nasty.
It is, of course, a prison.
Yuriko isn’t drawn the way I tend to envision her, but it works. And Gambit and Jubilee…oh, Gambit, such an enabler!
X-Men 3.2 “Out of the Past Part 2”
So, I was right. The alien ship was a prison cell, meant to drift through space forever. Apparently whoever locked it up didn’t have the X-Men.
But this is all a prelude to a version of one of the most classic X-Men stories. The Phoenix is coming, and we all know what that means.
It’s going to be the next five episodes. Well, six, because 3.8 is apparently the epilogue. In the meantime, Yuriko stops fighting Logan…for now.
I think she still loves him somewhere in there. Love, hate, so close together.