Scott faces off against the Purple Man, what a weird set up.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, the Phoenix saga came to a close. D’Ken merged with the M’Kraan
crystal, cracking it and causing all nearby matter to be sucked into it. Once
inside the weirdly fleshy world of the Crystal, the X-Men, Starjammers and
Praetorian guard did their best to fight off D’Ken but he’s basically one with
all matter in the crystal and is more or less invincible. The crystal started
sucking in mass from the sun and caused major weather disturbances on Earth.
The Phoenix finally recovered, though and fought D’Ken long enough to get everyone
else out. She said her goodbyes as she learned the only way to stop D’Ken was to
sacrifice herself. Calling on her friends for strength and willpower, Phoenix
sealed the crack and D’Ken inside. She then took the M’Kraan crystal into the
sun. It can’t be destroyed but the interior of a star is basically hell so no
ones getting at it again for at least a couple billion years. The others return
to Earth and Scott begins to mourn his lost love. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
The episode begins with the X-Men
having a funeral service for Jean. Beast reads a poem for her which most of the
X-Men love but makes Scott leave. He’s… not processing this well. Jubilee also
has a bit of a breakdown, crying because she also doesn’t want to face the possibility
Jean is gone forever. We find Scott in the War Room watching a hologram of Jean
and being sad. Charles joins him and tries to comfort him but basically says
all the wrong things. Scott is tired, and angry, and in pain, so he doesn’t want
to hear that the pain will fade, or that he needs to soldier on. He shouts at
Charles that he’s sick of playing den mother to the team and just sick of
caring. He throws his uniform on the ground in front of Xavier and saying he
won’t need this anymore. And storms off.
Scott takes a bus out of town and
thinking about his time with Jean. He remembers proposing to her and how happy
he was when she said yes. He’s pulled out of the memory by a boy shooting a toy
gun at him and telling the Mutant to ‘die.’ His mother scolds him, saying that
the nice young man doesn’t want to be called a Mutant. Huh… weirdly correct ma’am.
He returns to the McNeil orphanage where he grew up. He remembers playing tag
with other kids right before he gets hit with a migraine and fired off his
first eye beam. A woman sees Scott and asks what he’s doing there. They
recognize each other, the woman being Sarah, a woman that Scott lived with at
the orphanage. They go inside to catch up, Sarah saying she started volunteering
at the orphanage after her husband died and has since taken over. They have tea,
and Sarah turns on the news, a story about Zebidiah Kilgrave donating to help
disadvantaged children playing in the background as they chat. Sarah says that he’s
the main reason that the orphanage has stayed afloat, not only has he donated
to them but he’s adopted four ‘special’ kids. And when Scott asks what she
means she clarifies to say they’re Mutants. Scott flashbacks to when he lost
out on an adoption due to his eye beams. A fire alarm starts blaring and Scott
and Sarah rush to save the kids. Scott finds the fire and uses his eye beam to
put it out. He sees a kid in a storage area and chases him. He catches the kid
and demands to know why he set a fire. The kid rushes to Sarah, who says he’s
Rusty and that he’d been adopted by Kilgrave two days ago. He does not want
to go back there for some reason, and is so worked up his hands start burning.
Scott asks to talk to him. He and Rusty go for a walk, Scott showing off his
eyebeam to prove to Rusty that he knows what Rusty is feeling. He tells Rusty
that there’s someone out there willing to look after him, so maybe he should
give Kilgrave another chance. Rusty starts babbling about Kilgrave having a ‘plan’
to run the governor out of office and has a torture chamber in his basement. Sarah
hears him and scolds Rusty and he runs off. Scott asks if there’s any truth to
what he says, but Sarah says that Rusty is a troubled kid with a checkered past,
so she doesn’t believe him. Kilgrave arrives with several police looking for
his wayward Child. Rusty begs them to not let them take him. Sarah tells him
Rusty is having trouble adjusting, and that maybe he should stay with them a
little longer. Kilgrave makes veiled threats about pulling his funding if he doesn’t
get Rusty back. Scott asks if Rusty should have a reason to fear Kilgrave,
Kilgrave saying that the boy just doesn’t understand the loving discipline of a
father. He takes Rusty back to his house, saying “I already love you like a son”
in the most threatening way that sentence can be spoken.
At Kilgrave’s manor, Rusty is
strapped into a chair and Kilgrave orders him to get back to work. Rusty tries
to fight, but Kilgrave uses his power to force Rusty to comply. For those who
may recognize the name, yes, this is the same Kilgrave from Jessice Jones,
the Purple man with mind control pheromones. Rusty is lined up along with the
other Mutant children and forced to watch a brain washing video. He repeats
that the future is now, they will overcome their hatred and that they will be
respected on a loop. Kilgrave’s skin turns purple and the video reveals Kilgrave’s
plan. After their minds become nice and malleable, he lays out his plan. First
he’ll send Taki, a kid in a wheelchair with the power to transform said
wheelchair (weirdly specific) to attack the capital building front gate, Skids
(a girl who can slide on an energy she releases and form a forefield around
herself of the same stuff) and Boom-Boom (Fires explosive balls) will hold off
the guards and Kilgrave and Rusty will enter the building. Rusty’s really just
there to serve as a bodyguard. He forms a firewall to keep the guards out. He
makes it to the Governor’s office and uses his power to force the governor to
give him a “Platte River Project.” I feel like he maybe could have done this
with a simple meeting, but whatever.
Back at the orphanage, Scott is
still helping Sarah out. Sarah asks him who Jean is, as she heard him cry that
name out in his sleep. Scott admits Jean was someone he loved, but doesn’t want
to explain. He thanks Sarah for her hospitality but says it’s time to go.
Before he can leave, though, he sees a special report about the Governor resigning,
sighting health problems, and saying that this bodes will for Kilgrave. Turns
out that the governor was blocking his bid to take over the Platte River hydroelectric
damn project. Scott realizes Rusty might have been right about Kilgrave and
tells Sarah they need to save those kids.
They drive out to Kilgrave’s manor.
Sarah isn’t sure she can believe that Kilgrave is involved in something
criminal. Scott says he’s not sure he can either but they can’t risk it. He has
her stay with the car as he wants to talk to Kilgrave himself. Turns out the adult
orphan takes serious issue with someone adopting kids with powers for their
evil schemes, who knew? Kilgrave quickly applies makeup to his face to hide his
purple skin when Scott comes knocking. Scott demands to see the kids, which
Kilgrave allows, showing them all doing activities. Taka is playing the piano
while the girls play chess. They greet Scott together, speaking in an obvious ‘we’re
mind controlled’ monotone. Rusty comes in an offers Scott a Cookie. Kilgrave
snaps his fingers and Taka rams into Scott, striking his head on a wall and
knocking him out. Kilgrave tells his goon to throw Scott in back and that he has
a press conference to get to. Scott is thrown into the pool to drown. He has
visions of Jean as the Phoenix reaching out to him, and he reaches out to her,
only for it to be revealed that Sarah fished him out and was trying to
resuscitate him. She says she saw Kilgrave drive off and knew something was up.
He asks if Kilgrave had the kids, and when she said no they rush into the house
to save them.
Inside, the kids are watching their
final ‘training’ video. Before he can elaborate Scott blasts the monitor and
says that everything Kilgrave told them is a lie. Acceptance has to be earned,
not forced. He and Sarah bring the kids back to the orphanage, Sarah beating
herself up for falling for Kilgrave’s lies. Scott tells her not to blame
herself and asks why she didn’t seemed shocked that he has powers. She admits
to having known he was a Mutant since childhood when she saw him melt a bike on
the playground. He says that she never made him feel like an outcast, and she
says that she was always his friend. They’re interrupted by Kilgrave attacking
them with an assault helicopter. Bro, overkill. A news truck arrived,
convenient. Kilgrave says humans hate Mutants and that he’ll punish her and
Scott for turning his back on Mutant kind. Scott says that the only hate he feels
is Kilgrave’s. Scott tries to shoot down Kilgrave’s helicopter, but Kilgrave uses
his power to stop him. He summons the kids and has Rusty start a fire to kill
them all. Sarah notices that Taka is still inside and rushes to save him. Scott,
driven by grief and fury, fights through Kilgrave’s control, shoots down his chopper
and then rushes in past Sarah to save Taka. He puts out the fire with an optic
blast and asks Sarah what she’ll do now. She says she’ll rebuild and offers
Scott a place at the orphanage. Scott thanks her but he realized in helping her
that he’s needed somewhere else.
Scott returns to the Mansion.
Xavier and the others welcome him back. It’s just then that Cerebro goes off.
It detected Jeans mind. Scott and the others shout her name before the credits
roll.
First off, let’s talk about the
Elephant in the room. If you’re following along with me that first thing you’ll
notice about this episode is that the production quality and animation feels
way off. Turns out, after The Phoenix saga, episodes were released more or less
at random. While this episode is included in season 3, season 3, 4 and a bit of
5 were all just sort of mixed together in a big mush. As a matter of fact,
despite being an episode that was meant to air immediately after the phoenix
saga to show off Scott’s grief, this episode didn’t air until 1996. For
context, the final part of the Phoenix saga aired September 9th
1994, and this episode didn’t come out until September 21st 1996.
That’s a long time to go without showing this episode is all I’m saying. They
do the same thing for the Dark Phoenix saga, by the way, with an epilogue
episode of Scott grieving (again) not airing until over two years later. I don’t
pretend to understand production schedules, but this is baffling to me. Aside
from the trivial this episode is… okay? I like seeing the bit of history Scott
has pre-X-Men, how he grew up in the orphanage, how his powers made his life
harder, and how he did have at least one friend who didn’t care even if he didn’t
know it. But the Kilgrave stuff feels so tacked on to give the episode action.
Especially when, again, Kilgrave could have done his plan by scheduling a
meeting with the Governor and bringing his makeup with him to reapply after mind
controlling him. And the news truck just showing up to out Kilgrave because he
was screaming his evil plan while shooting at an orphanage was just weird. The
messaging with Sarah is a bit weird, not going to lie. I chock this up to older
eras of storytelling though. They clearly wanted Sarah to be Scott’s friend from
childhood, but it was 1994, and the idea that a boy and a girl can be friends without
any sexual tension was not something we in the US had figured out how to convey by in large.
Heck, we even added romantic subtext to shows imported here because the idea of
boy/girl friendships was weird to us. (I still standby that Tai/Sora makes more
sense in classic Digimon than Matt/Sora, just saying.) I think I like
these two as friends with no tension whatsoever so I’m choosing to ignore the
intimate waist hug and the moment where it looked like they were a beat away
from kissing. Cool? Cool. Oh, and I liked how this episode touched on Scott’s
frustration with the X-Men’s lack of real world progress. Scott Summers is the
original X-Man, he’s Charles’ student, son, and acolyte. The man worships Charles
Xavier and his dream, and even he hits a breaking point when it comes to the Human/Mutant
coexistence that just never seems to come. There’s a reason why I think of his
time when he broke with Charles and ran his own team of Mutant extremists (and
killing Charles when infused with Phoenix Power) as his “Broken Oath Paladin”
arc. His devotion to the man runs deep, so him breaking with Charles even for a
little bit is earthshakingly significant. I will say I give Charles props for letting
Scott go to process things. Sometimes ya just need to let people grieve, ya
know? Oh and Jean will just be back next time. They don’t, like, need to find
her or anything. She’s just… there. Guess the Phoenix just dropped her off
after placing the Crystal or something. Whatever. Next time, we’ll see how Arcangel
has been doing. Here’s a hint. Not well. See you then.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/121088231/
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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