"Walk on the Wild Side" - X-Men: Evolution

As I said in my introductory post, I’m primarily a DC fan, and it was only in the past couple of years that I became curious enough about Marvel to start checking out some of their cartoons.  One of the first shows I tried was X-Men: Evolution, which lasted four seasons and played fast and loose with the X-Men mythos (e.g. de-aging half the cast).  If you look at the reviews for this program on IMDB, the changes apparently raised some hackles among comic book nerds.  Let’s face it—when it comes to hackle-raising, we geeks are the undisputed champions. (Finally, a sport that nerds excel in!)  But in all honesty, X-Men: Evolution isn’t one of the things I nitpick.  For better or worse, this show was my introduction to the X-Men, and I for one get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Well… except for this one episode…

Thanks to the blockbuster X-Men films, I think most people are familiar with the group’s concept, but we’ll review it real quick—a powerful telepath named Charles Xavier/Professor X founds a special school to educate younger mutants about how to control and use their powers for JUSTICE.  The students featured in this episode are Jean Grey, a telepath/telekinetic; Scott Summers/Cyclops, who shoots energy beams from his eyes; Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat, who can move herself and others through solid objects; and Amara Aquilla/Magma, who has, well, magma-based powers.  There are not usually more girls than boys on this program; like with most superhero shows, the majority of the characters are guys.  This episode, however, attempts to rectify the situation by focusing on feminism and girl power!  Oh, joy!

The teaser begins innocently enough in an underground makeshift training room with Jean Grey (she only goes by her real name in this show as opposed to Phoenix or Marvel Girl as she does in the comics—don’t ask me why, though my guess would be copyright issues).  Jean is teaching newbie member Amara how to control her powers.  All is going well until Amara misaims a bit and sends a giant boulder toppling in their direction.  Jean manages to catch the boulder with her telekinesis and everything seems to be fine until Scott, who was there to remind them not to be late for school, decides to use his eye beams to explode the boulder into pieces.  Jean and Amara are upset by the unnecessary interference, but Scott is completely oblivious.  And I mean completely.

“It’s a good thing for you girls I was here.  No need for thanks.  That’s what we heroes do—rescue damsels in distress.”



Okay, who thought it’d be funny to spike Scott’s coffee with stupid pills?!  And in case you were wondering, no, this is not stated in a sarcastic tone or anything; Scott appears to be 100% a moron serious.  So if he was just kidding around, he did a very poor job.

Jean is justifiably annoyed and yells at him for it, though her language seems to indicate a good deal of sexism on her part, too.  He asks what he did wrong, and she says that he was “being a guy”—yes, Jean, because ALL men are misogynistic jerks who think that women can’t be heroes.  Congratulations, we’re only two minutes in and already any sympathy I felt for Jean and Amara has vanished in a puff of brimstone.

Next, we head over to the ramshackle boarding house where the Brotherhood of Mutants live.  In the comics, the Brotherhood is a group of (duh) mutants working to subjugate/eradicate humankind under the orders of either Magneto or Mystique, depending which incarnation we’re talking about.  The cartoon sort of mish-mashes the various versions together to get a group of mutants—Blob, Avalanche, Toad, and Boom-Boom—who work for Mystique, who in turn works for Magneto.

In any event, the Brotherhood’s only girl, Tabitha Smith/Boom-Boom, is being a serious creep to the guys.  Granted, most of the people on this team are serious creeps, but there’s no justification or explanation for her behavior here.  The guys weren’t bothering her first, this is just… Boom-Boom being a bully.  Which is kind of a weird move, considering that this episode is trying to make us side with the girls.  In this scene, I’m feeling a lot sorrier for Toad, whose shower was interrupted by one of Boom-Boom’s explosives, than for Boom-Boom herself, who just barged into the boys’ bathroom without permission.  And if they were trying to show that Boom-Boom can hold her own against a bunch of admittedly less-than-nice boys, they should have shown them picking on her first.  Then, maybe, I would have laughed.

We then cut to Bayville High, where both the X-Men and the Brotherhood go to school. (That’s one thing I’ve never understood about this program—if Xavier Institute is supposed to be a boarding school, why are they going elsewhere to get an education?)  Amara and Tabitha bump into each other before class, and Tabitha convinces Amara to go on a “mall crawl” (am I just an idiot?  What does that even mean?) with her later.  So after school, the two take off in the jeep Tabitha stole from Avalanche.  Jean sees them leaving and asks Scott to lend her his keys so she can go after them before they cause any trouble.  Scott yet again grabs the idiot ball with both hands and declares that he will go after the pair.  I do have to give him a weensy bit of credit for attempting to apologize (though he still doesn’t seem to get what Jean’s problem is), and then Jean says this:



“It bugs me to always be treated like the weaker sex.”



…Um, what X-Men: Evolution have you been watching?  Since when have you ever been treated like the weaker sex, never mind “always”?  But we’ll touch on that at the end.

Back to Amara and Tabitha.  They witness a carjacking and give chase, and a few moments later, Jean spots them and also gives chase.  The three-way chase scene ends fairly quickly (the show’s only twenty-one minutes, so I guess they had no choice on that front), with the only slow point being the mind-bogglingly stupid woman who stops to pick up her bratty daughter in the middle of the road and nearly gets hit by the carjackers.  It’s resolved in five seconds by Jean’s telekinesis and utterly fails at its supposed task of creating suspense, so just add this to the mounting pile of evidence against the show’s moral that women are just as smart as men and deserve to be treated as such.

Tabitha and Amara end up using their powers to stop the carjackers, completely trashing the stolen car in the process.  Nice job there, ladies.  To be fair, Jean does bring that up when she catches up to the runaway mutants, and together the trio escapes the scene before the police can arrive and catch them in the act.

Later that day, Jean and Amara watch a news clip concerning the carjackers in which they and Tabitha are described as “mysterious good Samaritans.”  They agree to keep their involvement a secret, since they “won’t be doing anything like that again” anyway.  Then there’s this one really bizarre moment when Jean and Amara leave the kitchen in silence.  Scott, watching them leave, leans so far sideways in his chair that he falls out of it.  I… am really lost as to the significance of this bit.  Was he trying to listen in on their conversation?  If that was the case, then he should have leaned over while they were still talking.  Was he trying to get a look at Jean’s behind?  He has had a crush on her the entire series, but if this is the case, they should have conveyed that a little better.  Was it just supposed to be funny?  Well, um… it wasn’t.

And then—you’re not gonna believe this—it gets even more confusing with a music video.  Yes!  A music video!  Right smack dab in the middle of the episode for no reason at all!  It’s not even a good song.  It’s not even a good video—it just shows the girls dancing around, buying skimpy clothes, and shaking their booties for the camera.

Two hundred years of feminism, suffrage, and fighting for equal rights and it all comes down to a group of teenage girls sticking their butts out to bad pop music. You people do realize Boom-Boom and Magma are like sixteen in this show, right?  Stop being creepy.  It’s also during the music video sequence that Shadowcat and another female student, Rogue, join the group because… because they’re girls?  Seriously, why are they here?  They don’t have a beef with anybody, as far as we know.  Rogue wasn’t even in this episode until now.  She only gets three lines, and none of them are important! (I refuse to count “whoa” as a line.)

After the girls get done dancing around the record store, they begin their careers as that courageous crew of curvaceous crime-busters known only as the Bayville Sirens.  (The least they could have done was gone for the alliterative angle with 'Bayville Bombshells'.)  Um, beg pardon, but didn’t Amara just say they wouldn’t “be doing anything like that”—that meaning sneaking out to fight crime—ever again?  What happened to change her mind?!

The team is wildly successful at putting the smackdown on crooks, cutting the city’s crime-rate in half in what appears to be a few days.  Jeez, how bad can the crime rate be for a place called Bayville, anyway?  The next day (?) at school, Jean, Kitty and Amara really turn heads.  Probably because they’re walking in slo-mo unison like idiots and, in Kitty’s case, randomly blowing kisses for no apparent reason.  But Scott has apparently figured out that his female teammates are the “mysterious” Sirens and enlists the help of fellow male mutant Kurt Wagner, a.k.a. Nightcrawler, to help him spy on the girls. 

Y’know, Scott, interfering in the girls’ business without permission or good reason is exactly what started this mess in the first place.  Maybe you should… I dunno… TALK TO THEM FIRST???  Not that they really deserve it, seeing how Boom-Boom just put a bomb in the bathroom while Toad was doing his business, shaved Blob’s head while he was sleeping, and stole Avalanche’s jeep for the second time this episode, but there’s no reason why you have to stoop to her level.

So the girls sneak out and the guys sneak after them.  The Sirens (I can’t believe I just called a group of underage and near-underage girls sirens—seriously, ew) notice their stalkers pretty quick and ditch them before changing into their costumes.  In a toll booth, apparently.  While the toll booth guy was still there.  What, there wasn’t a telephone booth available?  Or is that strictly a DC thing?

They stumble across another carjacking and track the thief to a chop shop, where they are promptly discovered by the owner.  A fight breaks out and the shop is set on fire.  The resulting smoke plume enables Cyclops and Nightcrawler (who have decided to change into their costumes for some reason) to find them.  But this time, Scott appears to have learned his lesson (ignoring the whole stalking bit) and lets the girls handle the thugs on their own.  At least until the Sirens accidentally start a fire too close to the car that they’ve locked the shop owner in, at which point Scott nudges the car out of the way with the same laser vision he used to annoy Jean earlier.  ARRRRGH.

The ENTIRE POINT of the episode is to show that girls can handle themselves just as well as boys!  Why should I even bother to watch the rest of the episode now?!  Their moral has been shot to Swiss cheese!  And honestly, that explosion that Scott “saved” the car from didn’t even look big enough to hit the car in the first place, so personally, I don’t think his actions were even necessary.  Way to completely miss the point that YOU brought up for no reason, Sherlock!  Unless, of course, your point was to prove that Scott’s view of “damsels in distress” is the more accurate portrayal of women, in which case you can go &#*!@ your @&!*&* in the $#^*&% with a &%@#*!.

*sigh* So a policewoman barges in on the Sirens, catching the girls (but not Scott and Kurt) in the act.  At first she wants to turn them in, but she agrees to let them go if they pinky-promise to give up vigilantism forever.  The girls agree (some more reluctantly than others) and leave, with Scott and Kurt following close behind.  The policewoman, meanwhile, turns out to be Mystique in disguise, but that’s another story arc.

Safely back at the mansion, Jean thanks Scott for not interfering in their Sirens business.  Scott wisely decides to keep his mouth shut, and they both hope for a day when they’ll be able to use their powers freely.  So apparently Scott did learn something from this little escapade—he learned to be more subtle with his damsel de-distressing so that the silly females he rescues will feel proud of themselves for solving a case all by their little ol’ selves.  How educational!

This is the kind of idea that sounds brilliant when you’re half-awake at two a.m., and then you get up six hours later and have your coffee and realize that it was trash, is trash, and always will be trash.  But I guess the producers’ coffee maker was on the fritz that day, because this somehow got turned into an actual episode.  I’ve already listed all of its flaws, but what it boils down to is contrivance, contrivance, contrivance.  This episode is entirely unnecessary because none of the characters shown here act like this on a regular basis.  Or ever.  Plus, the goal that they set out to achieve—to prove that girls can kick just as much butt as boys—is completely demolished by Scott’s secretly helping them out in the end.  Clearly, he hasn’t learned anything (and neither has Jean, really), clearly the girls can’t take care of themselves after all, and if the producers expected the audience to learn from this episode, the only thing they’ll learn is that girls really do need a guy to come save their heinies every twenty minutes and are just too proud/ignorant/stupid/feminine to admit it.

Besides which—and this is to the show’s credit—X-Men: Evolution is pretty low down on my list of superhero cartoons that need to be whacked over the head with the feminism stick.  That’s not to say it’s perfect (see: music video), but it has a respectable number of female characters, both heroes and villains, who each have their own strengths, weaknesses, talents, and problems.  Storm serves as Professor X’s right-hand woman but suffers from claustrophobia.  Mystique is endlessly manipulative but still mourns the night she gave up her infant son years ago.  These are interesting, three-dimensional characters who are powerful, independent, and respected (though in Mystique’s case, the respect mostly comes from fear, but still).  And while the women are still outnumbered by the men, the fact that this is a team series ensures they aren’t quite as outnumbered as on a show like Batman: The Brave and the Bold, where we were lucky if we saw someone wearing lipstick every fourth episode.

One last note: for those of you who have never seen this show and are now planning on avoiding it like the Legacy Virus based on this review, please don’t.  Like I said, nobody comes off looking very good in this episode, and that is absolutely not the norm.  Just look at the rest of Season Two for proof—the episode before this one, “Retreat”, features two female X-Men (X-Women?) taking charge of a search-and-rescue party with nary a complaint, gender-based or otherwise, from the boys (and they do a darn good job, too).  “The HeX Factor”, which aired two episodes after “Walk on the Wild Side”, introduces the obscenely powerful Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch to the Brotherhood.  In conclusion, X-Men: Evolution does not suck after all, and someday I will probably review a good episode to prove it to you.

Next Time: Gonzo contemplates the most baffling movie mystery of all time—why was the shark repellent in the helicopter instead of the boat?

Images from X-Men: Evolution