4x10 Beyond Good and Evil (3)

[6.0/10] This episode is basically all fights, and as usual for X-Men, there’s nothing especially novel in the object of combat, or in how its animated, to really capture my attention.

Cable and his resistance fighters battle the time machine protecting robots in the future. Cyclops and the X-Men fight Apocalypse’s horseman outside the pyramid. Xavier and company fight Apocalypse’s horseman inside the pyramid. That’s 80% of the episode right there. If you’ve seen one X-Men fight, you’ve pretty much seen them all, so watching Cable fire his guns at robots, or Cyclops blast his eye-beams at other robots, or Wolverine slash at the same robots, doesn’t hold much novelty anymore, despite what’s theoretically at stake in these missions.

There’s only a few things to recommend this one. One is that Cable ends up in the present through convoluted means, and with Archangel in tow, there’s a sense of “getting the band back together” for these fights. There’s at least some minor juice to the X-Men and their allies going back in time to the completion of Apocalypse's pyramid to destroy his lazarus chamber (Which came first, Apocalypse’s Lazarus Chamber or Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus pit?) And the fake out with Mystique pretending to be Apocalypse only to lay a trap so that her boss could kidnap the key members of the XMen he needs is a decent swerve.

Otherwise, this is a bunch of moving around the heavy plot machinery among a wash of flavorless action. The whole thing feels a little pointless since the mission turned out to be all for naught anyway. The best I can say for it is that it at least paves the way for the finale, with Apocalypse having assembled what looks like all the psychics he needs for his mysterious plan. So hopefully things are finally in place to put all the cards on the table and have the grand climax the show seems to be promising with this arc.