Everyone's got a dark side.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, the X-Men set out to face their greatest foe yet. Charles Xavier
had intense nightmares that warned him of a terrible doom that will soon befall
the earth. His dreams convinced him that the X-Men need to get on a space
shuttle and reach the Eagle-1 Space station or the earth is doomed. The X-Men
break into the launchpad, leaving Jubilee behind to take the fall for the break
in. They replace the crew except the head scientist Dr. Corbeau and Jean uses
her mental powers to make him see the crew. They reach the station and learn
it’s been taken over by Eric the Red, an emissary from the Shi’ar Empire. He’d
come to capture a Shi’ar fugitive named Lilandra in a bid to impress his
Emperor D’Ken. He tries to vent the X-Men into space, but Jean saves them with
her mental powers. They stop Eric’s attack, and the station starts to fall
apart. The X-Men and Corbeau fall back to the shuttle and they and Eric the
Red’s ship chase after Lilandra. The shuttle is damaged in flight, and they’re
stuck falling towards a contrail Lilandra’s ship is giving off. If they hit it,
they’re going to be cooked. The team realizes they can hide in the probe the
ship was carrying, but someone has to stay outside to pilot the ship. Corbeau
volunteers to do it, but Jean decides to do it. She mentally downloads
Corbeau’s training and knocks out Scott when he tries to stay instead. She
throws up a mental barrier around the ship as it falls and screams in agony as
a flaming phoenix envelops the ship. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
We open as the shuttle follows
Lilandra’s ship as it falls to Earth. Jean is clearly in pain as energy
encircles her and flows throughout the ship. The rocking of the ship throws her
from the controls, but she’s able to crawl back in time to correct their
course. As she does, she keeps seeing flashes of a phoenix. Jean begs for help
from Scott, Logan, from anyone before she passes out and the Phoenix enters her
body. Oh that’s not good. Starcore falls towards Earth, but Jean, now
surrounded by an aura of energy corrects their course so they crash into New
York Harbor. The shuttle breaks into pieces when it lands. The capsule starts
to flood, Scott and Logan work together to break the door open and they escape.
Scott instantly dives back down to look for Jean, and Logan calls out to her.
They can’t find her, but that becomes a moot point in a second. Jean erupts
from the water in a new green and yellow costume and announces that she is the
Phoenix! She then drops back into the water as her power runs out, Scott and
logan swim after her and dive down to get her. They’ll pull her up.
We cut to Jean in a hospital bed
getting checked out. Scott explains what happened to her from his perspective
and Jean seems really out of it. She says that she feels like a different
person, like she could reach out with a hand and crush the moon if she wanted.
Scott asks what the Phoenix is, and Jean’s eyes flash with flames. Hank and
Charles enter the room and let her know that they know something weird
happened, even if they don’t know the scope of it, and suggests Jean stays in
the hospital for a while. Scott goes to look out a window and Hank follows,
telling him that Dr. Corbeau told him that NASA can’t explain what happened,
the alien ship, or the bizarre readings, so they’re brushing everything under
the rug to not cause a panic. But they’re detecting more unusual activity from
the wormhole. Scott demands to know what Charles’ knows, and Charles angrily
shouts back that he told them everything he knew. Well, everything that he
could make sense of. Scott and Charles start getting into it, Scott blaming
Charles for not preparing them and Charles angrily snapping back that a good
leader shouldn’t need to be told to be on his guard. Beast gets their attention
by leaping onto a pipe and hanging upside down before telling them they’re both
feeling irrational anger due to what happened to Jean and there was literally
no way to prepare for aliens. He then walks off to examine the implants Eric
the Red put into the astronauts to control them.
He heads out and finds Logan in the
alley across from the hospital, venting his anger by breaking things. Hank
tells him that Jean’s doing fine and that maybe he should see her instead of
vandalizing. Logan admits that he really doesn’t like hospitals after the whole
“human experiment” thing. Beast sighs and tells himself science can wait and
does the good friend thing of offering to take Logan to a Manhattan club or
‘night spot’ to help him cool his head. He hails a taxi but the cabby drives
off in terror when he sees a blue beast looking in on him. Logan thanks Hank
for the offer but says he’ll just spend time alone.
On the Hospital roof, Charles
floats over to one off the X-Men’s smaller jets and tries to take off. He gets
hit by a mental blast of some kind. He sees flashes of space, of a big crystal
and the alien woman in bug armor. He screams in pain about trying to remain in
control. His ship flies up and crashes. When it does, a mental projection of
Charles in a cape floats out of him and smiles evilly. This clearly evil
Charles does a mental sweep of New York and finds all of the X-Men before fading out.
We shift to Logan riding a subway.
He sees Lady Deathstrike in a joining car, but as pre-cyborg Yuriko. He cuts
into the car and tries to talk to her, but she shifts into Sabretooth, who
slaps him aside. He attacks Sabretooth, who vanishes and turns into… well, he’s
credited as a mercenary but that’s Deadpool. Deadpool shoots him out of the car
before transforming into Evil Charles.
Evil Charles calls him an animal, a monster that won’t follow orders.
Logan prepares to attack Evil Charles, but the apparition makes him see Jubilee
tied to the train tracks. He goes to try to save her, but Evil Charles traps
his feet in glue. He cuts himself free and grabs Jubilee, who fades away. He’s
nearly hit by a train, but he leaps away.
Logan comes out near a theater
where Gambit and Jubilee are waiting in line to see a show. Gambit flirts with
a lady in line, but Jubilee hits him and says he promised to take her to this
show. Before they can argue further, Evil Charles arrives and starts blasting.
Logan runs over to help. They all attack the wraith that looks like Charles,
but while he can hit them, they can’t hit him. He smacks them around and
announces they’re all fools. And that he created the X-Men and thus can destroy
them.
We cut to Storm meditating on top
of the Brooklyn Bridge. Jubilee calls to her over her communicator that they
need help with a crazed professor. She flies off to help. We see Charles is
still passed out on the Hospital roof. He’s watching the events in his minds
eye and begs Storm to stay back as he can’t control what’s happening.
Evil Charles says that Gambit can’t
be trusted and must be eliminated. He blasts Gambit aside. Cops arrive and tell
the Mutants to get on the ground. Jubilee says to arrest him, pointing at Evil
Charles, but this is when we learn that no one else can see Evil Charles. Logan
says that they can’t see him because he’s not real. How does he know? He can’t
smell him. Evil Charles fades away. More cops arrive and Logan prepares to
fight his way out rather than try to explain this nuttery. But Storm arrives and
gives them cover with fog. The X-Men fall back.
At the hospital, Scott is talking
to Rogue on the phone and updating her on the situation. He urges her to get
over here quick as they may need help. Evil Charles appears, calling Scott an
incompetent fool and ingrate. He blasts Scott and announces he’s here to
destroy him. Scott tries to blast him, but it doesn’t affect him. The evil
Charles blasts Scott and tries to force him out of a window. Jean wakes up and
says this isn’t real, that he’s making Scott think a force beam is pushing him
towards a window. She blasts Evil Charles with her mind, the Phoenix
manifesting around her head as she does. She forces Evil Charles away and
explains that that was a projection from Charles’ mind. Jean tracks Charles
mind to the roof while Scott calls the team in.
They find Charles and wake him up.
He says that he felt a blast of enormous psychic power, the same force that
warned him of the aliens arriving, but it dug deeper into him this time. As
they talk, another mind-controlled minion of Eric the Red is watching them with
a camera to the man himself. Charles says that that beam cut through all his
defenses, the ones he erected to keep his powers in check. These barriers
included a repressed dark side that is a manifestation of all his angry,
violent thoughts that he represses. That caused an evil manifestation of him to
appear and attack those who he loves most, his X-Men. Eric the Red realizes
that Charles is the key to finding Lilandra and goes to prepare. Charles tells
the X-Men that his orders can’t be trusted until he gets his head
together. He puts Cyclops in charge
until he returns.
From where? Muir Island, Scotland,
where his ex, Moira McTaggart, runs a research center. He arrives in another
shuttle and meets Moira and her new fiancé Sean Cassiddy. An Irishman and a
Scotswoman? Me ancestors are turnin’ in their graves. Ha. Charles is clearly
offput by this but asks to be see his room to get some sleep. He floats off,
Moira telling Sean she’d never seen him like this so his condition might be
serious. That night, Charles reaches out to the alien that’s trying to contact
him, saying he fears her but that she might be the cure to his loneliness. Which… like Charles, I know dating apps are a
few years out but surely a girl who’s birth planet is Earth is more your speed.
He stares longingly at Moira and Sean standing outside on the cliffside. Sean
asks if Charles still has feelings for her. She says she doesn’t think so, but
he needs her. He’s given a lot to his X-Men but he doesn’t have many in the way
of friends. While they kiss, Charles gets hit with another massive psychic blast.
He says this is driving him mad but he realizes he has to stop fighting her. He
reaches and mentally touches hands with the bug lady, somehow drawing her to
him. She takes off her helmet and reveals a remarkably human face. She says
she’s Lilandra, sister to Emperor D’Ken of the Shi’ar empire. She touches minds with Charles to show him
her history. She says she served her brother loyally for years until she
learned he was trying to control the greatest power in the universe, the
M’Kraan Crystal. She says he wants to turn it into a weapon, but it’s foretold
that if the M’Kraan crystal is broken it’ll destroy both of our galaxies. She
stole the crystal to keep it from D’Ken and fled to Earth to protect him.
Charles asks why’d she come to him, and she says that the Shi’ar believe two
people can be connected from the moment of their births and destined to seek
each other out. She thinks she and Charles are that. It’s a bond like love, but
deeper. She caresses his face and says she’s seen it a thousand times in her
dreams. His door’s buzzer goes off and Charles tells Moira it’s alright. His
door bursts in, revealing that it’s actually Charles’ dear step-brother, Cain
Marko aka Juggernaut. He’s come calling for Lilandra.
Well, this took a turn. Jean’s been
infused with immense psychic power and it’s clearly messing with her. We’re
only seeing bits of it here as she’s recovering but it seems clear to me that
it’ll get worse as they go. The Charles plotline was a little out of nowhere. I
know it connects him to Lilandra and moves the Shi’ar plot forward, but one
mental blast and Charles is making an evil clone? Weird. I do like how it
attacked Wolverine, drawing him in and then attacking him with a pair of his
frenemies and then putting Jubilee in danger to try to get him pancaked by a
train. I believe I mentioned this before, but Deadpool’s cameo was very much
inline with the production team skirting around bans on using certain Marvel
characters in the show. He’s not credited as Deadpool, so he’s not Deadpool!
Even if he’s in Deadpool’s costume and uses one of the rifles that he likes. I
think I’d have liked to see Evil Charles mess with the X-Men a little more
before being destroyed by Jean, but they can only do so much in twenty minutes.
It was nice to get an info dump about what is going on the with the Shi’ar and
what Lilandra’s whole deal is, but they really didn’t make it feel like
anything besides a psychic info dump. Surely we could have seen some more of
this situation acted out instead of being narrated by Lilandra, right? I know,
kid’s show in the 90s. It’s already doing a whole hell of a lot. Teasing
Charles having to deal with his brother was a nice touch. They didn’t meet at
all the last time Juggernaut was in town, so they’ll be able to catch up while
Cain crushes Charles’ universal soulmate. Just… fun brother stuff. See you next
time.
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Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
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