During a rewatch of this and the 2nd half of the story, I was reminded how, when watching it when it was being broadcast, how timely it was, as relating to the events of the comics. How the mutant plague was an ongoing threat to the X-Family, and was taking its toll on various members.
For comic book bases cartoons, this was a new thing, compared to the the cartoons of the past.
The first scene was quite a terminator ripoff. I love the voice actor for Apocalypse. He really sold those corny lines. And the show ends with him killing all the X-Men at once. Why didn't he just kill them all in the first place?
Man. Bishop sounds like Ice-T. But the way he was portrayed as an actual ice T in Rick & Morty. He's by far my least favourite character in this show.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-04-24T00:46:00Z
[6.0/10] This one has problems. The easiest one is that its time travel pot is convoluted as hello. So Bishop goes back to the future, but things are still wrong. (We knew that, thankfully!) But they’re wrong in a different way -- a product of some plague that's now affecting mutantkind. So now he has to go back to the 1990s to stop that plague from happening.
Fair enough! If that were it, I could live with this one. It’s basically the same as the “Days of Future Past” duology. Only this time, they’ve added another layer. For some reason, Cable is in the distant distant future, and his time, and his fight against Apocalypse, is being affected by Bishop’s exploits in the past. And that throws a whole separate confusing monkey wrench into things. Because Bishop’s changes don’t affect Cable’s timeline all at once, but rather come in the form of a “time storm” to where now Cable is experiencing these changes in real time and wants to go back to stop Bishop?
Oh that this hoodie were a time hoodie. I can appreciate the ambition of doing a time travel story on top of a time travel story. I particularly enjoy it as an examination of the law of unintended consequences.s Bishop’s efforts to make his future better inadvertently make Cable’s future worse. There’s something to that. But the approach makes the architecture of the story seem byzantine, and garbles up cause and effect, which are the lifeblood of good storytelling.
Sticking in the present though, it’s a little jarring, from the vantage point of someone who’s witnessed the Covid-19 pandemic, to see a story about a plague affecting the world. In some ways, X-Men feels prescient, seizing on the way outsiders and “undesirables’ are blamed for the spread of the airborne virus. In some ways, it feels uncomfortable for reasons that aren’t the 1993 episode’s fault, with the whole thing turning out to be an engineered biological weapon in a fashion that aligns with nutball conspiracy theory.
All that said, I like the idea here that for the “Friends of Humanity”, they’re willing to do anything to frame mutants as disease-carrying threats who need to be isolated and excommunicated from society. The fact that Apocalypse is behind it all is a little silly, but also has a message about who hate groups will unwittingly get into bed with to further their bigoted agenda.
On the whole though, this is a scattered episode of the show that jumps from one thing to another and struggles to keep it all coherent. I can appreciate the ambition here, and I’m a little startled at the salience thirty years later, but the problems with this one hold it back.