5x13 Hidden Agendas

[7.1/10] This episode has a familiar division for me. I love the concepts at play, but am much colder on the execution.

For one thing, I’ve liked season 5’s animation more than most, but this is where it broke me a little bit. Sam Guthrie looks so exaggerated to the point of being a little grotesque. And the character designs were too off model for comfort.

More than that, this is a really familiar setup for X-Men in its final season. How many times have we seen a vignette about an individual mutant adjusting to their blessing and burden, while some mysterious organization with killer robots puts on a nice face for the public, but is doing terrible things behind the curtain? It's compelling, so I get why the writers return to it. But it’s hard for that type of tale to have the same impact when it feels like we’ve done it over and over again.

That said, I like the individual wrinkles to this one. In particular, I appreciate Rogue going out to help someone who’s standing in her shoes. SHe knows what it’s like to be a young person in the South struggling with your gifts and people’s reactions to them. Her coming down to help Sam work through them feels noble and revealing for Rogue’s own recollections about the difficulties she faced at that time in her life.

But what distinguishes this one most is the way the mysterious government actors don’t just come in, kidnap Sam, or otherwise inveigle him to do their bidding. Instead, they seize on a problem for them - despite his mutant powers, Sam is part of a longstanding family in the community, and he’s liked and trusted in their town. So those agents sow discord and mistrust about mutants in general and Sam in particular to turn the town against him.

The operatives spreading lies about mutants giving off radiation that kills livestock is in line with real life longstanding and pernicious, falsehoods that the “scary outsider” du jour, whether it’s immigrants, members of the LGBT community, or people of different religious communities come with diseases or other maladies, risk affecting the “normal people”. Likewise, turning the personal into the prejudiced, by convincing a local adolescent that Sam’s seeing his girlfriend, thereby stirring up anti-mutant sentiment, is a scary tactic.

That’s the thing to recommend this episode, the way it’s not about persuading Sam, but about manipulating the community around him to where he and his family no longer feel welcome there. That is utterly tragic, and resonant with the way real communities turned on their minority populations on a dime. (For example, how quickly some towns in Germany turned on Jewish residents who’d been their friends and neighbors during the Holocaust).

Otherwise, this is the standard X-Men beat-em-up. Cannonball’s powers are somewhat unique. (At first, I mistook him for the Human Torch.) And it’s nice to see (I think?) Abomination show up to cause trouble in a quick cameo. But overall, this one is more interesting for the ideas it presents than for how it realizes them in the world of the show.