So here's why I usually wait until I finish a show before blogging about it here. In the past I've written about shows I was watching, while I was currently watching them. I've never had a Battlestar Galactica style crack-up between post and end-of-show, but the danger's always there.
With X-Men 97, the danger is the exact opposite. When I wrote my original post, I'd only seen two episodes and the show hadn't really taken off, as it were. I was cautiously optimistic, but not prepared to rave about it.
That's now changed. Largely on the strength of the fifth episode, Remember It, I'm prepared to call this season the best thing Marvel's put out since Iron Man, back in 2008. The comparison isn't entirely fair, because there have been individual MCU movies I've liked since then (Avengers, Civil War) but it does reflect the drift the MCU's been suffering from - compared to that, X97 is admirably cohesive and well-structured.
So let's get some quibbles out of the way first. When I say X97 is cohesive, that kind of ignores the fourth episode, the double-header of Lifedeath and Motendo. Lifedeath (and its sequel, Lifedeath II, which was the sixth episode) is a classic story, a quiet moment amid the chaos where Storm reckons with the loss of her powers and her complicated feelings toward Forge, whose technology cost her those powers.
I wasn't sure that giving Lifedeath barely 10 minutes of runtime was the right decision, nor that having Storm reclaim her powers so quickly worked either. It isn't to say that either episode is done badly, but more that the power-loss story doesn't really get to breathe. Storm leaves the mansion in Episode 2, doesn't appear in Episode 3, we see Lifedeath for half of Episode 4, and then she comes back again in Episode 6, where she regains her powers.
I don't want to be churlish, because for one thing, it's amazing to see these classic stories from the comics get the TV treatment. For another, the beats of the stories, while different from the comics, are broadly pretty satisfying. Lifedeath II is basically not at all an adaptation of the story from the comics (where Ororo is finding herself in Africa and comes to terms with her loss of powers, rather than regaining them), but it still does right by her, showing how strong she is as a character.
However, if I had to point to something wrong with this show, it's that: the classic stories are referenced but not always explored in depth. The original show had the advantage of more episodes per season, so it could do 4 or 5-parters like the Phoenix saga, and that would be unfair to expect of this show, with its 10-episode order. But the original comics were better able to set up storylines across a long time, so we got to go into a lot of the characters' motivations and relationships. That said, there are some amazing character moments here, like where Morph confesses their love for Wolverine, or where Jean and Storm have a good sisterly moment before they kick all the ass.
Overall, Motendo is really the one dispensable story here. It was nice to see Mojo (to the extent that I like Mojo stories, which isn't much), but I don't feel like it gave a sense of either Roberto or Jubilee's characters. As I read more of the original Mojo stories, I might have to revisit it, but for the moment, I'm glad it only got 10 minutes or so of runtime.
But back to the positives! In my previous post, I wondered if we were going to see any Grant Morrison or Jonathan Hickman stories, and I now have my answer. Remember It is basically a street-level view of E is for Extinction, the storyline that Morrison opened their run with, and it really fucking works. There's a lot of emotional and relationship business in the first half, as we see Rogue and Gambit dealing with the Magneto love triangle, but then Cable shows up trying to avert some catastrophe and then basically everyone gets killed.
Part of the reason it's so audacious is that the previous four episodes didn't really prepare us for the sight of the Wild Sentinel vaporizing everyone. We see Banshee and Archangel get killed, Madelyne Pryor and Callisto are confirmed dead, and even poor Leech (one of my favorite minor characters) dies horribly, despite Magneto's best efforts. This is a big difference from the Quiet Council scenes at the start of the episode (and there's our Krakoa reference: Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Moira MacTaggert and everyone sitting together and governing an island nation for mutants).
The rest of the show maintains the momentum of Remember It, and works in commentaries on alt right intolerance and the cynicism of the news cycle. Bastion - who's revealed to be the season's big bad - explains at one point that the attack on Genosha was necessary to deaden the sympathy the mutants had built up since Xavier's disappearance: by killing so many at once, Genosha just became a news item that could be superseded. There's a bit of a chilling resonance with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza there.
The fact that Bastion is the big bad is another of this show's strengths. The original show could only play with the storylines and characters from 1963 to 1997, but this can hop forward, giving us references to Krakoa, E is for Extinction and Operation Zero Tolerance, not to mention Fatal Attractions. There are possibilities of Age of Apocalypse and other storylines in coming episodes, given that the final episode ends with half the team in Apocalypse's past, Scott and Jean in his future, and the man himself unearthing one of Gambit's playing cards in the rubble of Genosha, hinting at the storyline where Gambit became the Horseman of Death.
The thirty years since I stopped reading (I consider it that, though I was there for most of Morrison's run) are a worrying tangle for me, so I'm hoping the show can make sense of it all. The 90s, in particular, seems to be held up as the X-Men's worst time, just because they had so many bad storylines and writers who didn't know what to do with certain characters (usually the women).
It's also significant because of all the Marvel cameos in the second half of the season. I never watched the 90s Spiderman show, or the other programs referenced here, but apparently they're all canon to this show, and we get to see a bunch of other characters, like Daredevil. This is important because of the way that Marvel was essentially erasing the X-Men during the heyday of the MCU, just because they didn't want to boost the Fox X-Men franchise. So while I'm glad that X97's show runners have cooled rumors that this is part of the MCU, it's also good to see the X-Men being embraced once again as part of the wider Marvel Universe.
On that note, the question is now how the House of X will integrate into the existing MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine is expected to hint at it this summer, but that's also going to turn on the multiverse concept that's been driving the MCU since Endgame. There's an X-Men movie in the works, but I'm hoping that its creative team takes its cues from X97 - they shouldn't follow the cartoon slavishly, but they should keep its obvious love for the characters and storylines, and take into account that X-Men is about the characters as a family, rather than just a vehicle for Wolverine.
It's been 4 years since we last had an X-Men movie (New Mutants), and there's been very little mention in the MCU's 16 year run, apart from the odd Easter egg or post-credits scene. But now that all of Marvel's characters are back under its control, I'm looking forward to seeing the X-Men take their rightful place as Marvel's premier characters.
And it'd be nice to see Beau DeMayo involved in some way, given his deep love and knowledge of the characters.
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