A monster comes out from the dark.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, Cortez went full dictator. Magneto’s assassin took full control of
Asteroid M, had his people capture Gambit, and drove the X-Men from the
station. He then announced to the world that they would release all Mutant
prisoners on Earth and pay reparations for their pain and suffering. And if his
demands aren’t met, he’ll start nuking countries, starting with Genosha. The X-Men,
(Beast, Wolverine, Rogue and Xavier) outfit the Blackbird with its new low
orbit engines and fly up to stop him. Meanwhile, Gambit is tortured to get a
false confession out of him, but he doesn’t break. He convinces Amelia to investigate
what actually happened to Magneto and why Cortez was so close to his room when Cortez’s
own chambers were half a space station away. Rogue and Wolverine enter Asteroid
M to rescue Gambit while Beast disarmed nukes by hand. They face off against Cortez
but are overwhelmed by his people. Cortez puts them on trial, intent on
executing them via space, but Amelia arrives with the surveillance tape Cortez
hid revealing he killed Magneto. Cornered, he escapes and attempts to activate
his ‘burn it all down’ plan. He tries to get Byron to launch the nukes, but
Gambit and Amelia slow him down. He does get the missiles launched,
unfortunately. Beast got 40 of them, but there’s still 210 to go. Beast makes
it back to the Blackbird and he and Charles shoot down a dozen or so missiles.
The day is ultimately saved by Magneto’s return. He’d crashed on Earth and the
planet’s magnetic field restored him. He breaks into Asteroid M and captures
Cortez to punish him. Everyone evacuates and Magneto plunges his dreamed Utopia
into the sea, since there would be no way to salvage relations with the rest of
the world. Cortez is assumed killed in the drop, it revealed to have been saved
by Apocalypse and Deathbird of the Shi’ar. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
We begin in the X-Mansion at night.
Charles is dreaming and having an extremely vivid nightmare, the mansion is being
shaken by some kind of electrical storm. The team wakes up and wonders what’s
happened. Cyclops comes in, and give the faintest impression that he sleeps in
his uniform because he’s fully dressed, and tells everyone there’s been a
disturbance outside. He tells Beast to check on the others and for everyone
else to check outside. Outside everyone is disturbed by the intense electrical
storm and fog coating the grounds. Wolverine has the additional problem of
running into Sabretooth, who is there for some reason. They start fighting and
Wolverine kicks him into a tree. Jubilee, meanwhile, is attacked by a Sentinel.
She blasts its face with her powers, revealing a cackling Evil Charles head
underneath. Storm meanwhile is suddenly trapped in a box, something that should
be very difficult to do considering she’s flying. She tries to blast it away,
but it doesn’t work. Cyclops runs into Mr. Sinister who’s kidnapped Jean. Everyone
starts sinking into the ground. We cut back to Xavier, still asleep and muttering
that he needs to save them and that they’re all gone.
It's revealed that Xavier is unconscious
in the infirmary, Beast and Jean looking him over. Jean asks why they can’t
wake the professor up, revealing that he’d gotten a concussion earlier. Beast
has no idea why, according to all his instruments Charles has no physical damage
but he’s slowly losing strength. Beast theorizes that this is a sort of self-hypnosis,
something is making Charles ‘think’ he’s gravely injured and his super brain is
making it so. Cyclops comes in and asks how that could be possible when Charles
is the strongest psychic on the planet. He asks Jean if she can’t reach
him telepathically, and she says something is blocking her.
Xavier’s nightmare seems to be getting
worse and his vitals are dropping. We enter Charles’ dream and we see it’s
shifted to a more pleasant dream that his mother is alive again and offering for
him to stay with her forever. Charles seems to sense something is wrong here
and asks about his X-Men. She says that they’re here too and Scott arrives.
Storm, Logan, Rogue, and Jubilee are all chilling by the pool and saying life
is great. Charles is clearly confused by all this, as he knows this isn’t
right. Logan tells him that all he has to do is believe and it’ll be real. The
view widens and we’re shown Charles being surrounded by all the Mutants he’s
ever worked with, along with Lilandra, and everyone telling him how great it
is. He starts to believe the dream, saying this would be so easy. He transcends
into space, a sinister voice telling him that the universe is his. Outside his
dream, Charles’ vitals start dropping. Cyclops tells Jean to use her powers on
him one more time. She does and is able to weakly connect to Charles. The voice,
Shadow King, tells him to ignore it and come to him, but Jean’s insistent voice
is enough for him to question this reality and realize he’s met Shadow King
before.
We flashback to Cairo, where a young
Charles is visiting, and a small white-haired girl steals his wallet from him.
He chases after this girl; he dubs her a little imp. He catches her at the door
to a house and then uses his telepathy to convince young Ororo Munroe to drop
the wallet and run. She got his cash though, so it’s not like she wanted it. Charles
then hears a mental voice beckoning him into the restaurant behind him, the one
Ororo almost went into. The owner is surprised to learn of another with a power
like his. This is Amahl Farouk, the man that would become the bodiless entity
dubbed Shadow King. Charles almost immediately chastises Farouk for using
children to steal. Farouk says that she thought that he was human and
apologizes, he doesn’t believe in stealing from Mutants. Charles thinks
stealing is wrong regardless of circumstance, but Farouk disagrees. Charles
within the memory realizes that reliving this memory is real and then has the
lightbulb moment that this is the human face of Shadow King. His astral form
arrives in the vision and pulls Shadow King from his human body. Their astral
forms wrestle for control as they hurtle upwards. He remembers that 20 years
ago, he pulled Farouk to the Astral plane where they dueled with their minds.
He beast Farouk and cast him into the abyss of the Astral Plane. He’s kept Shadow
King there since with his psychic powers, saying that Shadow King was the first
(but not the last) terribly powerful evil Mutant he’d face and that it was this
encounter that convinced him to create the X-Men. Charles has a happy image of
his X-Men, including Archangel and Iceman for once which is nice. But Shadow
King interrupts, saying that the X-Men are dead and gone, and he should come to
Shadow King to finally be put to rest.
Outside the Astral Plane, Charles’
mind starts slipping again. They try to wake him, their voices reaching out to
him in the Astral Plane. Shadow King keeps drawing him in, but He tries to swim
against Shadow King’s pull. Shadow King claims that it took Charles too long to
realize what was happening and that now he’ll be pulled into the prison of the
Astral plane this time. And Shadow King will finally be free. He claims the concussion
weakened Charles enough to free him. Charles reaches out to Jean telepathically
and begs for help. But she can’t’ reach him. Suddenly, Charles wakes up and
everyone is happy to see him awake. Missing the fact that he’s got glowing red
eyes now. On the upper floors, the mental energy storm sparks again and Logan,
Jubilee, and Storm are all pulled into their nightmares again. Storm in
particular has a vivid vision of Shadow King capturing her again. Scott tries
to radio his team but no one is answering. Weirdly, Beast notes that a foreign lifeform
reading is going off… for this room. Shadow King reveals himself by floating
out of the bed and claiming Charles’ body as his own. The others join them in
the infirmary and Shadow King greets her again. Jean reaches out to Charles,
Shadow King says it’s a waste of time, but she makes the connection. She astral
projects to his prison and they combine their psychic powers to try to break her
free. Logan suggests carving Shadow King from Charles’ body, and Cyclops tells
him to give it a rest.
Jean and Charles break the prison
and pull Shadow King back into the Astral plane. He blasts them into the
endless void, but they rally and counterattack. They combine their powers and
pull him back to the void with them. He tries to fight them, but it’s two on
one. They have a mental duel with Lightsabers… cool. They finally cast him back
into the void. He grabs Jeans leg, and Charles grabs her arm, to pull them all
in. Charles gets a grip on Jean and sends a shock through her body to Shadow King,
breaking his connection and casting him into the void. They return to the physical
space, and the mental storm in the sky finally ends. Charles gives a speech about
how Shadow King reminded him of why he created the X-Men, and that great evil
can only be held at bay by constant vigilance. He does have to thank him for
that.
I do have to ask why we didn’t
start with Charles getting hit on the head. Like, I suppose the fake out of the
initial nightmare was okay, but it seemed pretty obvious from the get-go that Charles
was dreaming. Like, I know Sentinels can be surprisingly quite when walking but
they’re not so quiet that Wolverine or Storm wouldn’t have noticed them. I like
that they included all of Storm’s background with Shadow King and how he played
a role in getting Charles to start the X-Men. Sure, his slice of the evil pie
was relatively small, using children to rob people and enrich themselves, but
that small evil had a sort of knock-on-wood effect that spread outwards. Not to
mention that it puts the children at risk. Pickpockets aren’t treated kindly
when caught anywhere on the planet. Defeating Shadow King, a crime boss and a
bully, was good. But I do kind of agree that locking him in a space outside of
time and feeling, where one does not taste, touch, see, hear or smell, where you’re
trapped in a fog between dream and waking is a little overkill for what
he did. He was mean to Ororo, so that warrants serious punishment, but that’s a
LOT. That’s one weakness of the episode. I think they could have done a better
job showing how dangerous Shadow King’s empire was before his defeat. Like, no
joke, in the comics he was one the biggest, if not the biggest, gangsters in
Cairo. Storm’s pickpocketing was just a tiny part of what he was doing, and it
was kind of implied that he was just biding his time waiting for her to grow
into her powers before using her in more nefarious means. I don’t think that the
episode stressed that enough. As the episode presented it, dude had one child
pickpocket and Charles banished him to the Shadow Realm. Again, overkill. Jean coming
in to save the day was nice, as this situation let her fight the whole time without
passing out… though she needed to pass out to help… whatever a win is a win. So,
ya, a fun one-off episode. Have a good night!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/125644428/
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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