[6.9/10] As the first installment of a four-episode arc, there’s a lot of setup here. That’s not bad, necessarily. You can see the path ahead for how the various pieces will come together. But it’s a lot of throat-clearing and table-setting in the beginning, which makes for an opening act that fees somewhat incomplete.
The best thing the first outing of the “Beyond Good and Evil” arc has is that it combines a number of arcs that have been with the show for a while. The fight against Apocalypse. Cable’s misadventures across the timestream. Bishop’s misadventures across the timestream. Sinister’s plot against Cyclops and Jean Grey. The importance of Xavier to the future of mutants. For something intended as a season finale, you can tell it’s the culmination of a ot of story threads that have been dangling about on X-Men for a while.
That said, not much of this really entices me to want to see more. Ii thought the Mr. Sinister material was a dead end the last time we dealt with it. The show’s never known quite what to do with Apocalypse, since he’s supposed to be this big unstoppable villain but mostly seems like a campy, manageable goof. They’ve gone to the “Bishop travels through time to save the future” well so many times already, to where it’s lost most of its impact. And even Apocalypse traveling through time to stop the mutant problem where it starts isn’t much to get excited about since we already dealt with that idea in “One Man’s Worth”.
There is some juice to the concept of the “Time Axis”, a temporal waystation where timelines converge and depart. But Bishop being stuck there doesn’t add much, and Bender, the apparent caretaker of the place, is even more annoying than Mojo, which is saying something.
I’m glad that, even if it was destined to end in disaster, Jean and Scott were finally able to get married. It’s nice to have that pleasant moment before things inevitably go awry. Xavier’s recognition that his first X-Men have grown up and become wonderful people is a wholesome moment. And the fact that they have little -logos on their wedding cake is hilarious and adorable.
Otherwise, this one mostly gets by on promising greater things to come. Considering its ingredients are things I’ve been meh on from past episodes, it’s hard to get too excited about that, but there is some juice to combining so many of the elements that have run through X-Men to date into one epic conclusion. We’ll see where things go from here.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-07-02T18:21:57Z
[6.9/10] As the first installment of a four-episode arc, there’s a lot of setup here. That’s not bad, necessarily. You can see the path ahead for how the various pieces will come together. But it’s a lot of throat-clearing and table-setting in the beginning, which makes for an opening act that fees somewhat incomplete.
The best thing the first outing of the “Beyond Good and Evil” arc has is that it combines a number of arcs that have been with the show for a while. The fight against Apocalypse. Cable’s misadventures across the timestream. Bishop’s misadventures across the timestream. Sinister’s plot against Cyclops and Jean Grey. The importance of Xavier to the future of mutants. For something intended as a season finale, you can tell it’s the culmination of a ot of story threads that have been dangling about on X-Men for a while.
That said, not much of this really entices me to want to see more. Ii thought the Mr. Sinister material was a dead end the last time we dealt with it. The show’s never known quite what to do with Apocalypse, since he’s supposed to be this big unstoppable villain but mostly seems like a campy, manageable goof. They’ve gone to the “Bishop travels through time to save the future” well so many times already, to where it’s lost most of its impact. And even Apocalypse traveling through time to stop the mutant problem where it starts isn’t much to get excited about since we already dealt with that idea in “One Man’s Worth”.
There is some juice to the concept of the “Time Axis”, a temporal waystation where timelines converge and depart. But Bishop being stuck there doesn’t add much, and Bender, the apparent caretaker of the place, is even more annoying than Mojo, which is saying something.
I’m glad that, even if it was destined to end in disaster, Jean and Scott were finally able to get married. It’s nice to have that pleasant moment before things inevitably go awry. Xavier’s recognition that his first X-Men have grown up and become wonderful people is a wholesome moment. And the fact that they have little -logos on their wedding cake is hilarious and adorable.
Otherwise, this one mostly gets by on promising greater things to come. Considering its ingredients are things I’ve been meh on from past episodes, it’s hard to get too excited about that, but there is some juice to combining so many of the elements that have run through X-Men to date into one epic conclusion. We’ll see where things go from here.