Marvel’s mutants are trapped in a world of fighting –fight for survivalfighting Defend yourself against hate. But they also argue among themselves, including this week penultimate episode of X Men ’97 is no exception… except Mutantdom’s two biggest drama queens couldn’t have picked a worst time for their latest feud.
Previously I have described last week “Tolerance is Extinction, Part 1” as a necessary “Fight, Fight, Fight!” part of X Men ’97is the three-episode grand finale that sets the stage for the ideological battlefield to come, in which both Magneto and a returned Professor Threat from Bastion from opposing fronts. But in reality, it’s a similar story this week in Tolerance is Extinction, Part 2. The fights are still there, there are a lot of them and it’s good. The threat of Bastion is still there, even if it is interrupted by Magneto’s all-powerful EMP pulse, even if it is slightly mitigated by the actual ecological threat that his magnetic attack now poses to the world. It’s just that this ideological divide is now firmly entrenched here too, and so far the mutant world is dealing with it by saying, well, “Fight, fight, fight!”
The X-Men love this almost as much as they love working together. The franchise has always been as much a soap opera as it is a superhero story, and there’s no bigger, uglier drama than friends and allies turning on each other and setting each other up for a major bust. For this reason, it makes perfect sense that even if Bastion sets half the world on fire and unleashes the Prime Sentinels, and Magneto shut down the electronics regardless of the worldwide source to bring these Sentinels under control, the real focus of this episode isn’t the case is how our heroes stop Bastion, but how they stop punching each other in the face for five seconds and listen to the arguments everyone is making.
While Jean, Storm, Forge, Morph, Beast and Cable lead a team to infiltrate Bastion’s fortress to dampen his technopathic powers, Cyclops, Wolverine, Jubilee, Nightcrawler and Charles head to a newly forged asteroid M, to try and stop Magneto from destroying Earth as they know it – aided by both Rogue and Roberto, who accepted Magneto’s strong offer of revenge for Genosha in the face of Charles’ recalcitrance – we really get more of what we already have. And again, that’s not a bad thing: X Men ’97 enjoys letting its action flow freely, and the abundance of fight scenes is actually quite perfect for a show that’s always almost too hot to slow down and let its ideas run wild. Since not much else happens in the narrative other than the ticking clock of Magneto’s magnetic field, the essentials come to the surface. And what matters most X Men as much time as his two most prominent idealologists trying to cross the aisle?
But this isn’t a clean room of debate where Magneto and Professor Mutantkind are used to lashing out when their backs are against the wall, but that’s united against outside forces: the threat feels different when they compete against each other. And this also means that the arguments that Magnus and Charles present to each other differ. For all villainous edge ’97 When he describes Magneto’s far-reaching actions here – after all, he is quite ready and aware that what he is doing is not just to stop the Sentinels, but to set the entire Earth on the path to imminent catastrophe – there is always a sense still an understanding of this Both the audience and Rogue and Roberto sense with his injury that Genosha has gone a step too far to be placed on Mutantkind’s chin. For all reasons ’97 depicts Charles’ appeals to Magneto to stop, while his path to tolerance – and yes, that tolerance in the face of attempted genocide – is still littered with the corpses of abused and bloodied mutants, like his students fighting around him or whatnot fast He is the one once Magneto’s helmet is removed to torment him with a horrific psionic blast as he attempts to gain control not only of Magneto’s powers, but of his body itself.
Both Magnus and Charles want the same things, they always have. And while the situation they find themselves in causes despair in both of them, neither man in “Tolerance is Extinction, Part 2” is entirely right. It is Cyclops who blows up Charles mid-attack after he is given a psychic vision of Jean nearly dying in battle to stop Sinister and Bastion; and it’s Wolverine – he stabs Magneto to prevent his pulse from getting any stronger, with the bravest in battle falling first, as he puts it. This is not the time for core ideological alignment X Men. It’s time for them to be heroes, to each other, to their own people, to the world they call home, no matter who doesn’t want them there. The path they subsequently take in this world can wait.
We’ll have to wait for next week’s finale to see if their attempt really worked – Logan certainly pays a heavy price, as the episode ends with Magneto ripping the adamantium from his skeleton in one of the series’ most horrific sequences to date . But even if that happens, this pause is just a pause for now… and the X-Men and the entire world face extinction if they don’t do something about it soon.
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