5x08 Storm Front (2)

[6.4/10] This was an improvement on the first episode, which isn’t saying much. But it has the decency to split this one into two parts: Cyclops, Wolverine, and Beast uncovering the slave trade out and about in Polemicus, and Storm gradually realizing the truth with Jubilee at Arkon’s palace. The former is replacement-level X-Men adventuring, and the latter is still pretty weak, but mere competence mixed with acknowledging that Akron is a jerk gives this episode a leg-up on part one.

There’s not much to the Scott/Logan/Hank section of the episode. They see the slaves being threatened by the giant robots, uncover the slave shipments from a neighboring planet, discover the resistance, and burst into Akron’s castle to cause trouble. The business is pretty perfunctory stuff that the audience can catch onto quickly, but I guess it serves a purpose to confirm the obvious regarding what’s going on, and explore the plight of the enslaved peoples a little bit through the lens of the resistance leaders.

Storm’s part is more of the same. Exploring the way we try to placate ourselves and compartmentalize bad things in the name of preserving a relationship with someone we love is a good concept. Charitably, there’s some good intentions here with sStorm witnessing how the servants are treated, and trying to reassure herself that it’s not a big deal and not representative because she's attracted to Akron. Jubilee calls it out, and Storm is clearly grappling with the balance.

But again, my problem is that she seems like a dope for falling for Akron’s crap in the first place. There was some hint that she might be under a spell of some kind, which would have been a little cheap, but at least a more plausible explanation than her buying into Akron’s faux-benevolent routine when there’s bad signs all around her. The show tries to put a fig leaf on it in her conversations with the rest of the X-Men, who understandably have a lot of misgivings about this. And Wolverine suggests there’s a psychological angle to it, with this reflecting the way she was treated as a goddess in her childhood home in a way that messed with her head. If you squint, you can kind of excuse it, but the plainness of everything wrong with Akron and Polemicus still makes her seem like a sap for falling for it and for him.

Frankly, this episode gestures toward more interesting things than it genuinely explores. I honestly wish we got more of Akron’s perspective to give him some nuance rather than just making him an obvious bad guy who can occasionally put on a nice smile. Give me more of the Star Trek: The Next Generation style struggles with cultural tolerance, where he spends more time defending this as part of a culture the X-Men know nothing about and a response to brutality from their neighbors. That would give it more power when Storm correctly draws the line at slavery when it comes to moral relativism. Instead he’s just a generic evil dude doing generically evil things, without any depth.

That said, I have to give “Storm Front pt. 2” credit for boldness. It’s striking to see a show from 1996 whose story centers on leadership refusing to reduce energy dependence because it would hinder their ability to maintain the regime wherein the upper classes are comfortable and the lower classes are kept enslaved. I don’t know if that’s what they were going for, but it gets your attention.

Still, I have little patience for Storm’s woman scorned fury, even if it’s nice to see Jubilee get the win in taking her down. And while it seems a bit tacked on, her using her powers to destroy the power grid that allows Akron and his cronies to charge up the slavemaster bots and slave collars that keep the populace in line at least gives her a bit of redemption.

Overall, there’s a lot more interesting ideas at play in this one than in part one, but the characterization and execution involved is so weak that the episode still can’t claw its way into “good” territory.