I love the smell of melodrama in the morning.
Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 Episode 5.
The Big Picture
-
X-Men ’97
Episode 5 embraces the franchise’s existing soap opera tendencies. - Episode 5 pushes characters to their limits and uses its love triangles to explore the cast’s flaws, fears, and emotional development.
- “Remember It” balances its high-stakes character work with immense tragedy, making the episode’s devastating consequences thematically resonant and faithful to the
X-Men
comics.
Love triangles, evil clones, resurrections, and apocalypses: X-Men is a soap opera in the classical sense. Although the “soap opera” description matches most superhero comics (hello, Ben Reilly), X-Men is where such terminology thrives. As a melodrama defender, that’s no critique. All melodrama, whether it’s space operas, historical fantasy, Gothic fiction, or William Shakespeare, prioritizes character development and echoes those heightened stakes with plots extreme enough to match. Its success hinges on developing relationships and tearing them down with intense, goofy flair. Like a good romance novel, fans know the drill and live for it. X-Men is more suited to operatics than other superheroes: the ensemble cast, the found family, and the themes of oppression, prejudice, and radicalized violence against society’s outcasts. X-Men: The Animated Series translates that earnestly over-the-top spirit and X-Men ’97 faithfully enhances those threads through the artistic raiment of prestige television.
In X-Men ’97 Episode 5, “Remember It,” the team’s in worse turmoil than usual. Interpersonal tensions rise, and there’s emotional and situational devastation extreme enough to necessitate fans lying face down on the floor in a fugue state. The episode lays a tangled emotional groundwork that hooks us, then stabs that hook through our chests with the swiftness of a harpoon. Not coincidentally, that’s why melodrama is effective. Episode 5 is the best onscreen depiction of the X-Men because it embraces its soapy elements rather than shying away from them. Crucially, ‘97 also understands an inseparable X-Men necessity: it’s a soap opera and an allegory that demands consequences. No other adaptation has balanced that complementary dichotomy with such gravitas.
X-Men ’97
A band of mutants use their uncanny gifts to protect a world that hates and fears them; they’re challenged like never before, forced to face a dangerous and unexpected new future.
- Release Date
- March 20, 2024
- Cast
- Jennifer Hale , Cal Dodd , Chris Potter , Catherine Disher , Adrian Hough , Ray Chase , Lenore Zann
- Main Genre
- Animation
- Seasons
- 2
- Number of Episodes
- 10
- Streaming Service(s)
- Disney+
- Franchise(s)
- X-Men
‘X-Men ‘97’ Episode 5 Prioritizes Its Love Triangles
Few tropes are more soapy or enduring than the love triangle. X-Men ’97 decides to exploit both of the franchise’s defining triangles, because why not? Although it’s entertaining for the involved parties to bicker and brood, the friction is purposeful. Each character’s emotional unrest manifests through the triangle, and their arcs progress by working through their romantic complications. Specifically, Episode 5 intensifies the thorny tension between Rogue (Lenore Zann), Gambit (A. J. LoCascio), and Magneto (Matthew Waterson) to its breaking point. For Gambit, the team’s resident scoundrel who flirts with anything that moves, watching Rogue fall for another man proves that his feelings for her are profound. Rogue and Gambit established themselves as X-Men‘s secondary power couple in the comics. X-Men: The Animated Series has them skirt around a relationship’s edges.
X-Men ’97 provides clarity, confirming they never made things official. Rogue believes she can’t fully commit to anyone she can’t safely touch. That rules out all candidates save Magneto, someone Rogue loved years before she met Gambit. And Gambit knows something’s brewing between his not-quite girl and their new leader. Cracking jokes and crashing the pair’s trip to Genosha is a bandaid for his heartache. He could just talk to the lady, but the healthy response isn’t as dramatically satisfying as his emotional constipation. Their feelings for one another are as obvious as a trainwreck, and yet. Seeing said trainwreck, Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough) actually drapes his arm over Gambit’s shoulder and declares, “I blame soap operas.” I see you, ’97.
Rogue Gains Clarity Through Her Love Triangle
Once Magneto offers Rogue joint rule over Genosha, the situation gets messier. Rogue remembers what kindled their romance in the first place: their shared dream of a better world. Helping mutantkind is why she joined the X-Men. Magneto’s offer becomes tempting for its altruism. Plus, there’s the undeniable fact that Erik offers Rogue what no one else can. Touching a man she cares for is intoxicating. She’s conflicted enough to actually talk to Gambit like a mature adult. He knows the way her heart’s leaning, so Rogue’s would-be beau puts aside his despair. They’ll be friends; nothing more. Setting Rogue “free” from any implied obligation proves his love’s selfless depth.
Except, of course, neither is free. It still hurts Gambit to watch Rogue dance with Magneto. For Magneto’s part, reuniting with Rogue coincides with his attempts to change. He’s lost and lonely, he carries his wounds on his sleeve, and the woman he adores isn’t just pushing him to be better; regaining a lover, a family, puts his symbolic redemption within reach. Their ridiculously steamy dance — and Gambit’s inability to endure it — is drama at its most delicious. Everything stems from the characters’ relationships, their internal strife, and their journeys. Without that transformative build, the hook that soap operas have mastered, these moments would land hollow. When Rogue realizes Gambit is right and love transcends physicality, it’s because her complex triangle clarifies her desires and empowers her.
‘X-Men ‘97’ Episode 5 Made Us Care, Then Broke Us
That emotional resolution immediately implodes via external forces. An unknown villain launches a near-genocidal attack on Genosha, leaving countless mutants dead — including Gambit and Magneto. Someone call George R. R. Martin, because Episode 5 delivers a culture-shifting event no different in tone or quality than Game of Thrones‘ Red Wedding or Avengers: Infinity War. Before his death, Genosha’s ruins remind Magneto of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps. He sobs with rage, shields Rogue from danger, and comforts Leech (David Errigo Jr.), a terrified mutant child. Never has Erik Lehnsherr been more “human” than his final moments, when he’s reduced to the tender empathy that defines his motivations, no matter how misguided his approach.
Magneto’s hopeless sacrifice is the most devastatingly rhapsodic moment delivered by an X-Men adaptation. Until Gambit dies in a weeping Rogue’s arms, but not before taking a Sentinel with him. “Remember It” achieves a hitherto untapped level of desolate poignancy by following the Greek tragedy model: impossible stakes overwrought with meaning but devoid of schmaltz. The love triangles prove X-Men ’97 isn’t trying to make the franchise bleak and uber-serious. Instead, they soar the story high enough for the series to treat the Genosha attack with the severity it requires. Beau DeMayo, ’97‘s former showrunner, confirmed how deep the series’ parallels run. Episode 5 shatters the mutants’ celebratory safety and commits to the weaponized hatred forever beating against the X-Men’s wounded hearts — and which still runs rampant through modern culture. “Remember It” doesn’t flinch. This isn’t drama for drama’s sake. Events matter because ’97 made sure we care through storytelling tactics as old as time.
‘X-Men ‘97’s Love Triangles Explore Deep Themes
Then there’s that other love triangle. To say Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) and Scott Summers/Cyclops (Ray Chase) aren’t having a great time is the year’s understatement. Mr. Sinister (Christopher Britton) kidnapping Jean and swapping her out with a clone has left the reunited couple at an impasse. That clone, Madelyne Pryor, thought she was Jean, married Scott, and had their son, Nathan Summers/Cable (Chris Potter). Jean, a woman who already had her identity stolen by the Phoenix, no longer trusts her mind — the source of her mutant powers, from which she feels disconnected. Simultaneously, Scott grieves the loss of his son and lacks an effective outlet for that distress. The Summers aren’t having the difficult conversations required of a married couple.
This X-Men Villain Is a Parody of TV Executives
Imagine if they all looked like this.
Instead, a vulnerable Jean kisses Logan/Wolverine (Cal Dodd). She needs a tangible emotional tether, but her search kickstarts X-Men‘s most notorious love triangle. Scott, meanwhile, trips and falls into telepathically cheating on Jean with Madelyne. She was his wife and is the mother of his child, and his only tie to Nathan. Scott forever carries the scars of his father’s abandonment. What’s more soap opera than an evil twin, or loving your soulmate’s lookalike? Scott Summers torn between two women with the same DNA. “Go be with my clone,” Jean spits, and it’s a solar-powered The Young and the Restless.
Silly from the outside, the horny as hell Jean-Scott-Logan-Madelyne quartet is organic, engaging, and never reductive. Every person is sympathetically in the wrong, which makes for melodramatic perfection that also incorporates generational trauma and the violation of women’s bodily autonomy. Historically, soap operas broke social taboos by approaching topics like breast cancer and mental health. When the X-Men are a bunch of flawed people doing their best and their pain is rooted in thematic realities, the result’s engrossing.
‘X-Men ‘97’ Understands What Makes the X-Men Great
Melodrama is a tool. If the plot doesn’t elevate the emotion, then the experiment fails. Genosha’s destruction would be harrowing but ultimately meaningless without the established relationships and character arcs predating it. Mutants transformed Genosha into a safe haven. It’s a prospering city, a hopeful promise, and a beautiful home. Since humanity couldn’t abide them, they made a separate island. That still wasn’t “good enough,” because nothing except extinction is “good enough.” Bigotry, the human supremacy movement, and cyclical violence leave that dream — for which the X-Men daily strive — in ruins.
Even though resurrection is never off the table for comics or soaps, for now, Gambit lies dead. Magneto’s status is hazier but doesn’t equal optimism. With half the season left, how do the survivors of a massacre continue emotionally, let alone narratively? Such questions are why X-Men positively informed countless lives and continues to resonate. Episode 5’s intimate humanity — a universally applicable term — is a love letter to X-Men‘s absurdity-relevancy balancing act and is Marvel Studios’s current towering triumph. Soap operas and comic books have retained audiences for decades. X-Men ’97 understands why.
New episodes of X-Men ’97 premiere every Wednesday on Disney+.
This article was originally published on collider.com