One thing that signified the 90s style of cartoon was a relentless pace that probably crammed about an hour’s worth of story into around twenty five minutes of air time that tried to tune into sugar addled young minds by somehow squeezing the drama between endless action sequences. The result may have often felt like a rainbow coloured panic attack that felt like it was a non-stop shot of excitement on a Saturday morning.
The fact that the minds behind X-Men ’97 have recognized that, for better or worse, that nailing that muscular, driven tone was instrumental to replicating the original feel could have been something of a double edged blade as modern audiences are used to more deliberate and subtle forms of storytelling. However, up until now, X-Men ’97 has found an impressive middle ground, but with its third episode, one can’t help but wonder if maybe this new phase of the X-Men could use the occasional pump of the brakes.
In a career that’s seen them tussle with giant robots, masters of magnitism and various alien species, it takes a hell of a lot to make the X-Men agog, but after having their emotional defences brought low by the sudden departure of a de-powered Storm, no one could be prepared to see and exact duplicate of Jean Grey standing at the front door begging for help. Much to the “old” Jean’s horror, her team mates – including her intense beau, Cyclops – don’t immediately dismiss this doppelganger as a pretender and insist that they run tests to figure out what is what and who is who.
If life hasn’t been tough enough for “Jean #1” recently (after all she has only just given birth to little Nathan Summers), this perceived betrayal, especially from Cyclops, is virtually unforgivable, but matters soon get even worse when Beast confirms that this new Jean is actually the real one causing the the other, cloned Jean to spiral dangerously into something of a mental breakdown. Using her telekinesis to fashion a new look and suddenly announcing herself as the “Goblin Queen”, this imposter Jean launches a mental attack on her teammates that causes their reality to dissolve into a nightmarish onslaught of Lovecraftian creatures that wear the faces of their loved ones.
But who could be behind something so sinister as cloning a specific member of the X-Men in the hope that they would get pregnant – Mister Sinister, that’s who; a virtually immortal geneticist who is obsessed with harvesting DNA and playing genetic structures of mutants in order to create his own race of God-like beings. The crux of his entire plan is little Nathan, an infant with the genes of both Cyclops and Jean Grey swirling around inside his genetic make up.
With the Goblin Queen on a rampage and Sinister making moves to perform hideous experiments on an actual baby, can the X-Men get their shit together in the face of another Jean Grey meltdown and fix their fractured family unit?
Jean Grey has seemingly had so many mental fractures and breakdowns during her time with the X-Men, she makes the frequently delusional Scarlet Witch seem like the very picture of mental health. While the unfortunate comic book trope of female character being unable to handle ultimate power and promptly losing their mind is strangely prevalent (Sue Storm also lost her marbles once too), both the Dark Phoenix and Madelyne Pryor sagas both stubbonly suggested that our Jeannie frequently wasn’t playing with a full deck. While such a plot point was admittedly rife for iconic drama – the Dark Phoenix story in particular has been adapted by the film series twice – it can also be seen as almost regressive as “fridging” (the murder of a female character solely to give the hero reason to fight) and thus probably has to be treated with care in order not to feel tired and overused.
This brings us to X-Men ’97 and its adaption of the Madelyne Pryor story which, as usual, is tackled at a hundred and one miles per hour thanks to the show’s admirable dedication to matching the breakneck speed of its originator. However, for once, it seems that the relentless pace the show sets may have not been the best speed to approach Jean’s latest freak out.
You see, thanks to the story having so many moving parts while having to fit seamlessly into the unrelenting flow of drama the X-Men seem to deal with on an hourly basis, stuffing the majority all it into a single episode ends up being detrimental when the story at least deserved to be split into two parts. You see, in the original comics, Madelyne was never actually palmed off as Jean’s double but instead was an entirely different woman who Cyclops met who just happened to have an uncanny resemblance to his lost love and her eventual drift into super-villiany was so seismi, it was granted a Marvel-wide special event named Inferno that affected even titles as different as Spider-Man and Power Pack. Love and pregnancy eventually blossomed much like it does in the show but the real issue here is that in order for the show to squeeze this all in, the Jean clone has to essentially lose her mind, turn on the X-Men and go full super villain practically within five minutes of the real Jean staggering through the door.
While this works in the format of a 90s cartoon show, the fact that X-Men ’97 is trying to add a somewhat more nuanced undertone to things means that for every character moment that hits the right emotional beat, “Madelyne Pryor” still opts to clad herself in revealing, black, goth outfit and renaming herself the Goblin Queen in record time when her switch probably would have been more shocking if it had been more gradual. Meanwhile, while we’re still trying to process the Jean clone’s instant heel turn (Magneto dubbing her a “Brimstone clone” like the utter bitch he is certainly doesn’t help), the episode also feels the need to include evil geneticist and all round bastard, Mister Sinister and give us the beginnings of the origin of Cable as little baby Nathan has to be whisked away to the future in order to treat him for the techno-organic virus he’s been infected with in an attempt by the villain to make him more powerful.
Yes, this means that the episode is action packed and moves like shit off a shovel, and yes, we get a cool sequence where the X-Men have to fight off hideous, shape shifting beasts that look they’ve slithered right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, but for once it seems like the show’s pledge to match that 90s feel has left them unable to make the emotional moments hit as hard as they’ve done in previous episodes.
While speeding through such an important plotline results in X-Men ’97’s weakest episode so far, it still delivers nicely on the action front and unleashes an absolute ton of foreshadowing for future episodes. It’s just a shame the show couldn’t break it’s own rules to draw out such an important story.
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