If the makers of X-Men ’97 have proved that they’ve mastered anything, it’s the art of escalation. Since the season began, the stakes have just been getting higher and higher with the standard battles with Sentinels soon balloning into scrapes with cloned imposters, immortal geneticists and even the attempted mass murder of an entire mutant nation, so a natural question just has to be asked. Just exactly how big can X-Men ’97 really get?
Well, if episode 9 is anything to go by, the answer is “absolutely fucking huge” as the show goes on to prove to us that armies of human/Sentinel hybrids and Magneto shutting down the entire planet with an EMP while dressed only in a pair of black speedos is somehow only the beginning.
The end is truly in sight as the X-Men’s second coming delivers more escalation, shocks, twists and shameless cameos than even an MCU Avengers movie could handle in an episode that could only be described as *pops Wolvie claws* x-tra crispy.
In a classic frying pan/fire scenario, the EMP that Magneto sent corsing across the Earth may have halted the attack of Bastion’s macabre Prime Sentinel army, but in doing so, he’s practically doomed every human on the planet as numerous nuclear power plants across the globe start going into meltdown. However, ever the arch Duke of melodrama, the master of magnetism reforms his old base, Asteroid M, and floats it over to the ruins of the Xavier School For The Gifted in order to lay down the same old ultimatum: join him or perish.
Stunningly, two of the X-Men actually agree as Rogue and Roberto switch sides due to the less-than-stellar way mankind has treated them recently and as they head off to preside over what happens next, the X-Men try to figure out how the Hell they can tackle two world threatening events at once. The solution, unsurprisingly, is to split up and while Cyclops’ Blue Team head up to Asteroid M to take out Magneto, Jean and Storm’s Gold Team seek out Bastion’s hideout in order to neutralise that threat, but the real catch us that Blue Team can’t reverse Magneto’s EMP until Bastion has been brought down, lest his Prime Sentinel come back online.
So the battle is joined on two fronts and as the X-Men battle friend and foe alike, the world waits anxiously to see what the result is – but while Gold Team hopes to get a collar on Bastion to block his technopathy (something Storm disapproves of for obvious reasons), Blue Team struggles to remove Magneto’s helmet in order for Charles to enter his old friend’s mind and reverse the damage he’s caused.
But during the fracas, choices are made, lines are drawn and a certain metal boned bezerker meets his match when his unique insides get rearranged with possibly fatal consequences.
If the previous episode ratcheted up the stakes, then the second part of Tolerance Is Extinction goes all out on desperate, knuckle gnawing tension as all of its plot lines collide with spectacular results. Of course, before we do, the episode makes sure that all the necessary character stokes are tended to before shit goes inevitably sour, so we get a pissed Cyclops confronting his mentor about his recent decisions involving his last will and testament. While a timely “I told you so” is definately on the cards after Xavier handed his life’s dream over to a one-time genocidal maniac (what next, Peter Parker assigning Norman Osborne to be Aunt May’s carer?), Xavier, his response that he was only wanted to try and give Jean and Cyclops a shot at a normal life is ultimately as annoyingly flawed as it is genuinely touching – so typical Xavier then. There’s also a much needed moment between Jean and Storm as the two reforge their sister-like bond before going into battle and as stupendous as the ensuing, multi-level action is, it’s always been these little moments that give them the emotional heft that they wield.
Anyway; once the action starts, it doesn’t stop and it takes the the kind of overlapping, falling dominio effect of the third act of Return Of The Jedi and makes the X-Men’s job all the more impossible when you consider that they can’t just defeat their enemies – they have to defeat them in a certain order. This means that the drama is enhanced even further during moments when it looks like Xavier has Magneto beaten only for Cyclops to thwart him with a shocking optic blast because Jean’s team hasn’t managed to finished the deal yet. Those rickety bonds are tested even further when X-Man is forced to throw hands with X-Man for various other reasons, with the main two culprits being the shifting temperaments of Rogue and Roberto. Finally done with all this humanity shit after Magneto reverses his fucking asteroid into the X-Men’s airspace, the shifting of sides is actually quite painful and matters are stretched even further when Cable’s mind is hijacked by Mister Sinister and Jean is forced to fight with her…. well, I’m not exactly sure what Jean and Nathan are to each other, but whatever you want to call it, it sure is tense.
Once again, the ins and outs of the action is as polished and ludicrously exciting as ever with some standout moments including Morph transforming into the Hulk or Jean Grey battering Sinister with multiple bowling balls before slamming him into the alley with the sound of striking pins thrown in for good measure, but the references and nostalgia goes all the way up to eleven when you realise that the majority of the X-Men are fighting in older costumes such as Jean wearing her Marvel Girl costume (the mini skirt may have been a bad choice for a life and death tussle), or Rogue fittingly reverting to her “villain” garb.
However, it’s the ending that really grabs you as the repeated and desperate attempts to stop Magneto and remove his telepathy blocking helmet feel just as harrowing and watching multiple heroes struggle to remove Thanos’ gauntlet in Infinity War. But if I’ve learned nothing else from the previous eight episodes, it that X-Men ’97 like to keep giving you body blows right down to the final moment. In a split second of Magneto letting his guard down, Wolverine comes out of nowhere and finally does what he’s been threatening to do to Magneto since the show first started and runs him the fuck through with those claws of his. But while everyone stares dumbfounded at this wanton act of attempted murder, Magneto, still clinging onto life like Deadpool to a chimichanga, manages to throw down one Hell of an Uno reverse card when he repays the favour by stripping the adamantium from his would-be assassin’s bones. It’s an infamous moment from X-Men comic lore that is recreated so faithfully, the freeze frame of the actual moment recreates the comic panel almost exactly and as we try to process what we’ve seen, the episode lays you out with the cruellest moment yet – the end credits.
With everything on the line, the expectation for the final episode far surpasses anything I could of expected back when the series was first announced and the hit cartoon show continues its evolution from cool nostalgia boost to can’t-miss television.
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