Half the X

Last night's new X-Men'97 wasn't exactly bad but felt like fragments and was altogether unsatisfying after what felt like a full meal last week.

"Motendo/Lifedeath - Part 1" is two stories, a short one about Jubilee and Roberto getting sucked into a video game followed by the first part of an adaptation of Storm's relationship with Forge from the late '80s comics.

The video game story just seemed like a mess. I'm not sure if it contains many references to actual video games. I could sort of see Marvel vs. Capcom in there, minus, of course, the Capcom and other Marvel characters. If Disney had actually made a deal with Capcom to have their characters appear--as they did for Wreck-It Ralph!--the episode might have been really interesting. Maybe that was the original intention but for whatever reason the deal didn't happen and they decided to cobble together what they had for half an episode. It's never clear what the stakes are or the mechanics of how things function in the game world, if Jubilee has to do anything different to what she usually does in order to survive, so it all kind of turns into noise.

Storm remains one of my favourite Marvel characters though mainly for the comics from the late '70s and early '80s. I tend to hate stories about superheroes losing their powers and Storm getting to rock and roll is a rare enough event without this. The episode cuts off at an awkward point and really feels like the story should've been given a whole episode to breathe. It always seems like Storm's getting table scraps to me.

X-Men'97 is available on Disney+.

X Sonnet #1831

Not ev'ry dame behind a flame's Brunhild.
The cards so hard to stack aren't worth a bean.
For grass to pass for rain's a roof to build.
The souls we sold were waxing pale and lean.
Accounts of rain recall diluted suns.
Exploding trees were hid behind her eyes.
But who, you ask, would have sufficient funds?
The girl, I say, who baked the silver pies.
Container paint was worse than prison bars.
Revulsion told on luckless babes abroad.
A lot of coffee changed the bikes to cars.
The garden's czar returned the seeds to sod.
The final book would look a fright on shelves.
In darkling woods the hoods concealed the elves.