The first season rounds off very nicely, building to a good climax and setting things up for future season.
The Cure is a very important episode, as Rogue’s power is one that she’s not comfortable with, it’s only natural that she’d be interested at the prospect of getting rid of it. Much as I hate the third film in the original trilogy, The Last Stand, it got this detail spot on. This episode however had a rather different angle on it, the “cure” being as it was a trick to create Apocalypse’s four horsemen.
Come The Apocalypse followed right on from that, properly introducing the Apocalypse character. I’ve never been a fan of his design in the cartoon, and I think I preferred him in the film. Still, he was a sufficiently powerful villain here - in some ways the biggest villain the show had. However much people like to push Magneto as the arch enemy of the X-Men, that was never how it really worked. Apocalypse is basically this show’s answer to Mumm-Ra. His voice, incidentally, is provided by the late John Colicos, best known as Kor, the very first Klingon to appear in the original Star Trek.
Days Of Future Past is a good two-parter. It’s set up as the beginning of the end of the season really, as the final episode is more a follow-on from it, but I digress. There are two basic types of time travel story, the objective is either to avert history being changed, as in Back To The Future, or to change a bad timeline for something better, as here. Star Trek did both types very well multiple times, and the what-if’s that spring out of these stories are infinite. But again I digress. The interesting thing about this episode is that when Bishop gets back to his own time, the bad future hasn’t changed, which again sets things up nicely for “future future episodes”. When they started incorporating both Bishop and Cable together coming back from their own different future times for different purposes, that’s when the show got really interesting. This episode is a close match in theme for the film (which was awesome, and not just because it erased Last Stand from the timeline!), and the original storyline from the comics. The idea that the X-Men have to wonder if one of their own is a killer is a good one, and very mature writing. Not surprising when a lot of this show was written by the same writers as Exosquad. The revelation at the end was also very well handled, and explains Mystique’s earlier attitude towards Rogue in The Cure, convincing her not to take it.
The Final Decision is a single episode for a reason. Big though it is, it’s evocative of the whole “when the dust settles after one big incident, there’s usually some details that need clearing up still” - and this is one such. Senator Kelly (voiced by the late Len Carlson, who did everything from Bert Raccoon to Herc Stormsailer to Big Boss, Mace and Sundown in COPS) has his moment of realising that it’s not being a mutant that makes someone bad. This episode does go all the way back to the pilot for tying up loose ends. The Sentinels have been a recurring menace in this first season, and Cyclops’ decision not to leave anyone behind as well comes full circle. The end of the episode also sets things up nicely for season 2, in which Mr Sinister plays a big part, along with his gang.
A great show. One of the best the 90s had to offer. We’ve now covered all four of the best shows from the 90s - Prince Valiant, Pirates Of Dark Water, Exosquad and X-Men.