Iceman's here to freeze stuff and chew bubblegum. And he's all out of gum.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, Longshot had a career change. The blonde leading man with vague
luck powers fell out of the sky and into Logan’s jeep while he was giving
Jubilee a driving lesson. After he, Jubilee and Wolverine fought off Mojo’s
goons, Longshot gets taken to the mansion and we learn what happened. Turns out,
since the X-Men were last on Mojoworld, Longshot quit his gig as Mojo’s leading
man and joined a rebel force trying to stop him. The evil interdimensional tv
producer captured him and tried to reprogram him, but Longshot escaped thanks
to the rebels but got hit into a warp point that dropped him off at Earth. Oh,
and Jubilee is obviously smitten with him. Mojo, being a gross monster that
looks like old cheese smells, decided to come to Earth to get his star back. He
kidnaps Jubilee and makes Longshot, Wolverine, Beast and Rogue fight his robots
to get her back. The X-Men battle through the shapeshifting robots, Wolverine is
distrustful of Longshot, but they’re able to get Jubilee back and banish Mojo
back to his home reality. Longshot leaves as well but gives Jubilee a kiss on
the forehead for believing in him. Enough recapping. Let’s get to it.
We open on some security guards arguing
about how hot/humid it is at their place of work. A situation made super ironic
by the arrival of a blue fella seemingly made of Ice. This is, of course, Iceman
aka Bobby Drake. The cryokinetic young man freezes the security cameras and
busts into the instillation. He breaks into the warehouse itself and freezes
both guards, but not before they hit an alert button.
At the X-Mansion, Jubilee is
helping Xavier make some repairs to Cerebro. She attempts to use grabbing a
part for him as an excuse to use one the Mini-X-Jets, but Charles puts a kibosh
on that idea. He tells her she’s not cleared for solo flight and that she really
needs to stop behaving like an impulsive child. She says she might not act like
one if she wasn’t treated as such. Considering this is still how she behaves
and is treated in X-Men 97, a show that comes out 30+ years in the
future, this is not a plot point that is resolved quickly. Their argument is interrupted
by Cerebro alerting them to a Mutant attacking a federal storage depo. Cerebro
tells them that this mutant is using ice powers and then identifies the culprit
as Bobby Drake. … it felt the need to de-ice his face, but like… my guy, Mutant
powers aren’t so common that you’ll run into two twenty-somethings with the
power to encase their whole bodies in Ice armor. Charles puts out a mental call
to his X-Men, gathering Wolverine, Cyclops and Beast. Jubilee tells him the
mansion is locked down and ready to go, but she’s left behind to prep the
infirmary.
On the flight over we learn that Wolverine
has never met Bobby, that he’s an OG X-Man that left the team at some point,
and the Cyclops is a stick in the mud. … I know that’s not new information, but
he rags on Bobby hard, saying that the others coddled him and let him get away with
a lot. Beast remembers him very fondly, though and yells at Cyclops for talking
about and treating Bobby too harshly. Charles tells them to stop fighting. He
orders the X-Men to grab Bobby and run, and try to do it without hurting the
soldiers. Wolverine is just kind of enjoying Cyclops not being mad at him for
once. Cyclops orders the group to split up and find him.
We see Bobby using his ice beams to
make a wall to hold off the soldiers before running off. He briefly returns to
his non-ice form to take a breather when Beast catches up to him. Hank is
obviously happy to see his old friend, but Bobby is less than enthused to think
Charles is meddling in his business. He ice-blasts Hank away and tries to run.
Wolverine cuts him off, but Bobby freezes him in place. He gets blasted by
Cyclops, knocking him out and returning him to normal. Cyclops takes a moment
to yell at inert Iceman about not having a right to wear his uniform anymore,
but then attack copers and soldiers show up. Wolverine notes that he thinks
that story about this being an abandoned depot is probably a lie, and Beast says,
“no duh,” in the classiest way possible. They end up surrounded, Cyclops radios
to Charles they need help, and Charles uses the Blackbird’s Cerebro to make all
the soldiers see monsters, so they’d back off. Beast grabs Bobby and the group
falls back.
Back at the mansion, Charles demands
Bobby tell them what he was doing last night, and Bobby refuses to tell him. Jubilee
notes that this is the angriest she’s ever seen the professor. Hank helpfully
says this is due to a pseudo-father/son bond that has some dominance issues in
it. And when Jubilee doesn’t get that, Logan adds that Bobby likes to question
authority. Scott also demands Bobby talk, but Bobby refuses, saying that he ‘flunked
out’ of being an X-Man and doesn’t owe them anything. Charles points out that
he chose to leave, but that’s beside the point. Bobby tries to leave, saying
that they can’t put him in detention anymore and that he is going back to that
base, but Charles decides to prove him wrong. He activates an anti-gravity detention
cell that Hank put in recently. It’s Shi’ar tech. Charles tries to get him to
talk but Bobby refuses.
Jubilee uses Cerebro to research
Iceman. From some old footage we see that he was an OG X-Man, and actually the second
ever member of the group. He worked with a pre-blue form Beast, Scott, and
Jean. Cerebro determines that Bobby has high potential but low discipline. Which
is very accurate, he’s actually an “Omega” level Mutant. That’s a designation
given to a Mutant that could seriously threaten life as we know it on Earth.
Logan joins her and warns her not to trust pretty packages. She asks him if he’d
met Bobby, to which he says no, it was before his time. He goes on to say he
got the impression Bobby is dangerous, to which Jubilee points out that he’s a
lot like Logan then.
We cut to Hank bringing Bobby
lunch, and him earnestly asking his old friend what he was doing. Bobby refuses
to answer, but apologizes for being… difficult, as he still considers Hank his
friend. Hank asks where Lorna is. Bobby angrily says this has nothing to do
with her, but when Hank presses him for more info, we get a flashback. We’re
shown the first-class X-Men battling the Super Adaptoid. It’s a robot that
copies powers, from the look of him it’s got Ironman and Captain America powers
at the moment. We see that there’s another team member at the time, a green
haired young woman named Lorna Dane aka Polaris. She took a bad hit in that
fight and Bobby says that they almost lost her then. He goes on to explain that’s
what led him to quitting the team and he and Lorna tries to have a normal life
after that. He got a job as a CPA, and they enjoyed being just normal people
for a while. But then the stuff with Mutant rights and Sentinels came up and
they started fighting. Lorna was very much on the side of ‘lets help Mutants’
while Bobby wanted to keep up the normal life thing. He came to her apartment
one night, saw it wrecked and his only clue to where Lorna could be was a scrap
of paper with the words Kirby Glenn on it. Bobby thinks the government grabbed
Lorna and he wants to save her. He asks Hank to let him out, but Hank tells him
that he needs to let go of the past and trust the team and Charles. He says he
can’t. Hank leaves, but as he goes, Jubilee (who’d been listening from the
hallway) frees him.
Iceman and Jubilee attack the base.
They’re immediately ambushed by a group of Mutants, one of whom blasts them
with an energy wave and knocks them out. The leader of this group, a man with a
cybernetic leg and a weirdly familiar voice tells his team to bring them
inside.
We cut to Cyclops saying he’s going
to make Bobby sorry that he took Jubilee. Charles says that’s his fault, that
he should have tried harder to reach him. Beast points out that it’s just as
likely Jubilee freed him of her own free will. Cyclops tells Charles that it
isn’t his fault, Bobby is reckless and refuses to do as he’s told. Charles says
that Bobby’s return reminds him that sometimes good leadership is to learn when
NOT to give orders. Wolverine swears he won’t say he told him so.
They touch down and enter through
Bobby’s hole in the gate. They’re spotted on security cameras, and the team
leader orders the soldiers to let them pass and leave them for his team. It’s
revealed that the leader of this mysterious team is in fact Forge, one of Bishop’s
allies in the future.
Jubilee wakes up ties to a chair next
to Bobby, her hands in metal caps to keep her from firing her pyrotechnics.
There’s a crate labeled Mutant Project, which grosses her out. Bobby wakes up,
and uses his powers to free them. He’s attacked by Wolverine and Cyclops yells
at her for helping out this miscreant. She says that they had to help him, but
Cyclops and the others were too busy condemning him to notice. He says that’s
not true, but Charles, listening on the com channel, says she’s right. He fell
back into the role of disapproving headmaster and that just pushed Bobby away. They’re
attacked by the new team of Mutants.
Jubilee blinds a speedster and she
and Iceman try to fallback. But They’re chased by a tank of a man that hurls
barrels and crates at them. Beast faces off against a woman with a beast form.
And Cyclops battles a man with energy blasting powers. Weirdly, when they fire
on each other, he absorbs the energy blasters power and the blaster absorbs his
eyebeam. Wolverine finally gets up and faces off against a man that can clone
himself who dogpiles on him. Charles hovers in to help the team. He realizes that
each X-Man seems to be fighting someone who knows the extent of their powers
and how to counter act them, so advises his team to swap opponents. Beast throws
the animal lady at the speedster, knocking them both out, Bobby freezes the
cloner, Cyclops throws the blaster into a wall of crates, and Wolverine takes
on the bruiser and takes him out by dropping a water tower on him.
Bobby demands to know where Lorna
Dane is, and Forge arrives with her and says she’s right here. Bobby seems to
not notice the uniform she’s wearing and runs up to kiss her. She is confused why
he’s here but forgets about him almost entirely when she sees the blonde
blaster knocked out and goes to help Havok. Bobby looks heartbroken at seeing
her tenderly lifting Havok up. Forge introduces himself to Charles and his team
of X-Factor. He only uses codenames, but I’ll use the full names of his team.
It’s comprised of Pietro Maximoff aka Quicksilver, Rahne Sinclair aka Wolfsbane,
Guido Carosella aka Strong Guy, James Madrox aka Multiple Man, Lorna Dane aka
Polaris, and Alexander Summers aka Havok. No, Cyclops does not recognize his brother
or his brother him, probably due to head trauma and not seeing each other for
like 15 years. Charles and Logan think that the government is recruiting Mutants
to fight Mutants, but Forge says that they’re on the same side, his team is
just on the Government’s payroll. He tells Charles that the need for secrecy
for security is important, but he also didn’t inform Charles of his team in the
hopes scrapping with the X-Men could help them out. Bobby asks Lorna what’s
going on. She says that Forge recruited her due to her history with the X-Men.
She thought he’d disapprove, so they faked her kidnapping to… there’s not
continuing that sentence without sounding like a psychopath. They faked her kidnapping
to make the episode happen. She also reveals she’s dating Havok. She says that since
joining X-Factor they’re using their powers to help Mutant kind, and since
Bobby lost touch with that side of himself she fell out of love with him. The
teams part with a friendly rivalry, and no one telling Scott about his little brother.
Which is… so damn weird.
Back at the Mansion Jubilee and Charles
ask Bobby to stay. He refuses, saying that he’d be driving Charles and the others
crazy by the end of the day. He asks Jubilee to make help Cyclops not be such a
stick in the mud before ice riding away. Jubilee asks if they’ll see him again
and Charles says they can only hope.
Speaking from 30 years in the
future, the answer is ‘yes, one more time, in a flashback.’ I sincerely hope
the X-Men 97 team remember him and Warren in season 2.
One of my few complaints about X-Men:
The Animated Series is how they treated the two not-current X-Men members,
Bobby most of all. Warren at least gets some episodes about his struggles as
Archangel and finding his humanity again, but this is the only time Robert Drake
graces the TV screen and that’s a real shame. He’s the funny man of the OG
team, good friends with everyone, and is often times characterized as one of
Cyclops’ best friends. He’s certainly one of Cyc’s oldest friends, so seeing
him be pissed at Bobby this whole episode is kind of rough. It makes sense and
fits with this version of Bobby, he left, Scott feels abandoned, so he’s
fixating on and lashing out at every mistake Bobby makes because being mad at
him is easier than admitting he misses Iceman. And while I like seeing X-Factor
and the fight between the two teams… Lorna seems incredibly cruel and heartless
for faking a kidnapping because that was easier than just breaking up with Bobby.
Like, girl, you let a retired superhero think you were abducted, how did you
NOT think he was going to go after you! At least give him a Dear John letter, for
god’s sake. It’s funny that Charles and Scott rode Bobby so hard this whole
episode but neither of them tell Lorna she’s acting like a psychopath. And,
again, weird they didn’t address the Scott/Alex connection, beyond their powers
don’t work on each other which seems like it should be a tip. It’s a shame that
this is the only time we’ll see Bobby, really, as again, founding X-Man. The
SECOND X-Man. I hold out hope that we can see him and Warren on a mission with
Scott, Jean and Hank at some point in X-Men 97, as the fact that the
last time we saw those five together on a mission that wasn’t a flashback was
in X-Men: Evolution, 20 years ago. Next time, the return of Sauron. No,
not the floating eye, the Pterosaur man.
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Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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