nevanna | Tuesday Top Five: "My X-Men will always be there"

The Cartoon Night squad finished our rewatch of X-Men: Evolution last week, and I’ve wanted to make this list ever since we started (if not before).

The show’s fourth season was significantly shorter than the previous three, and although it’s unclear whether the creative team knew all along that it would be their last, the final minutes of “Ascension, Part 2” suggest some understanding that this was at least a strong possibility. Still, Season 4 set up the potential for some continuing storylines even before Professor Xavier’s closing speech about The Future.

Here – in no particular order – are some things that I would have liked to see if the series had continued. I’m mostly focusing less on characters/storylines from the comics that I wanted to see adapted, and more on pre-existing narrative threads from the show itself. (The Venn Diagram of “what I wanted from canon” and “what I’d enjoy reading about in fanfic” is not a circle, but it does exist.)

1. More screen time for Destiny

Much of Rogue’s (very understandable) angst is a result of the various ways that Mystique manipulated and exploited her. But Irene Adler shared equal (if not greater) responsibility for Rogue’s upbringing and was definitely also keeping secrets from her; she appears in only one episode after Rogue’s introduction and they never interact, nor do we ever hear how much Rogue knew or how she might have felt about Irene’s part in Mystique’s scheming. (I’m not saying that Irene’s return would have to be integrated into the hypothetical XME version of “Days of Future Past,” but I wouldn’t have been unhappy about it, either.)

2. More screen time for Danielle Moonstar

Dani was introduced in the fourth-season episode “Ghost of a Chance,” which made excellent use of the “characters are forced to visualize their worst fears” and “it was all a dream… or was it?” tropes. I would have loved to see her and Kitty have more adventures together, even if Dani didn’t end up staying with the X-Men.

3. Backstory for Xavier and Magneto

Unlike the comics, the movies, and the animated series from the 90s, XME doesn’t show us how those two met or how their ideological differences developed. Flashbacks that are somehow relevant to an ongoing storyline would not have been unwelcome.

Admittedly, said ideologies are a lot less nuanced than in other versions, particularly for Magneto. He has his characteristic disregard for baseline humans, but he consistently treats his fellow mutants pretty shabbily, too. Speaking of which…

4. Follow-up from Wanda’s mind-wipe

In Season 3, as I discussed in an earlier post, Magneto arranges for Wanda’s traumatic memories to be non-consensually overwritten with recollections of a happy childhood with him and her brother. Wanda never finds out the truth – though she comes close at least once – and she and Pietro are embracing their father in one of her last scenes, implying that her happy ending involves being psychically lobotomized. This is horrifying, and I would like to believe that future episodes, had they existed, would have addressed the violation somehow.

(Shameless self-promotion: I wrote a fic about Wanda’s incomplete memories, True or False, in 2015. I’m still pretty happy with that story, although I wish in hindsight that I’d written out some events that the final section only summarized. Maybe, one of these days, I’ll be inspired to write a companion piece.)

5. The Dark Phoenix Saga

XME had been building to this since the beginning of the second season, and even though I’m glad that Jean had plenty to do in the show outside of the story for which she was best known in the comics, I’ve always been a little bit curious about how it might have played out. I doubt that it would have made me angrier than X3.