Time to wrap up this opening story. We’re in the middle of the mission to destroy all of the files at the Mutant Control Agency; an ill-advised plan, but oh well, it happens. Cyclops, Rogue and Gambit are waiting outside the building. Cyclops is worrying about how the mission’s going, to which Gambit reiterates that he should be the one inside, in case anyone forgot how this mission should have gone down.

Inside, Storm nearly walks her team into a trap, but Wolverine stops her. He claims he can smell gun oil, so he knows that there’re armed guards on the other side of the door. Funny, I would think the scent and pulses of about six people would stand out more than the gun oil would, but what do I know? Maybe Wolverine just really hates that new gun smell.

“There’s guards on the other side of the door, so blow the door off its hinges and send them flying; in fact, always do that. That’s how we’re gonna handle all doors from now on.”

Beast makes a joke about wondering where Storm got her Nom de guerre, and I’m 99% sure this line only exists so kids would ask their parents what ‘Nom de guerre’ means. Then the parents would ask where the kid heard that term, and the kid would say “X-Men!,” and at least temporarily, parents would think X-Men was educational. Oh Fox Kids, you devious charlatans.

A bunch of reinforcements arrive outside to back up the guards, so Cyclops begins taking them down. Cyclops instructs Rogue and Gambit to do the same, but cautions them not to hurt the humans; Gambit snarks that perhaps Cyclops should tell the humans not to harm them. This may shock you, but I think Gambit has a point; Cyclops is assuming that the X-Men outmatch their foes by enough that they can afford not to take the fight seriously, and that assumption is going to cost everyone dearly. I mean, I don’t think Rogue and Gambit should be running around using lethal force on human guards, but still, they’re playing this way too fast and loose.

Back inside, Morph uses a ruse to get some guards out of the way, and the voice he uses is so obviously Cal Dodd (Wolverine’s voice actor) making a froggy voice that it’s pretty funny. The inside team begins destroying the mutant files. Going by the size of the file cabinet, it looks like the MCA has data on thousands of mutants. Err, not good.

We switch scenes to Detroit, of all places, where Jubilee has been kidnapped. Gyrich is trying to get her to spill the beans about the X-Men, but unfortunately for him, Jubilee didn’t stay with the X-Men long enough to even finish the Orientation Breakfast, so she doesn’t know squat. Well, actually she does know the location of the X-Men’s headquarters, and the personnel, and so on and so forth, but she’s not talking. This doesn’t play like Jubilee playing tough to protect her new friends; more like she’s so confused by constantly being kidnapped that she doesn’t even know what’s what anymore. You can’t really blame her.

Bolivar Trask, scientist-guy who makes the Sentinels, discovers that Gyrich kidnapped Jubilee and is clearly upset about it. At first it seems like maybe he’s a decent guy who thinks they shouldn’t be running around kidnapping kids. But no, he’s just pissed that Gyrich went as far as kidnapping a mutant before the Sentinel project had reached the next benchmark.

“Now listen here, if you want to kidnap 13-year-old girls and strap them down to a table, there are certain very specific items of protocol you need to be aware of, Gyrich. First of all, that is not my preferred bondage table.”

Cyclops, Rogue and Gambit are all fighting the guards outside while being careful not to play too rough. Cyclops wants the inside team to come out so they can regroup before things get out of control. Oh Cyke, things are already out of control; you’ve got Rogue dumping tanks into the Potomac. You probably should have told her not to do that.

Fortunately, the inside team is almost finished destroying all the files. Beast tries to wipe out the digital files with a computer virus, but Storm loses patience and fries the computer. I would like to be able to make some joke about how that data is backed up on Dropbox and Storm is screwed, but eh, it’s 1992; Storm’s probably right to just take out the hard drive and call it a day. Informational terrorism was so much easier in the days before the Cloud.

It haunted poor Derrick here that when the hottest woman he had ever seen touched him, he called her a “freak” because of the whole mutant thing. Determined not to ever let that happened again, Derrick adopted a new personal motto: “Booties before Muties.”

The two teams meet up outside, and make a run for the Blackbird. Morph makes another comment about how it’s “Clear sailing all the way!” and oh my God, I’m ready for him to die at this point. You’ll notice a lack of pictures of Morph in this post; that’s not deliberate, I just never felt the urge to take a screenshot when he was on screen. I guess I’m not Morph’s biggest fan, is what I’m saying.

Okay so I felt guilty for not even taking a screenshot of Morph, what with him selflessly sacrificing himself and whatnot, so here you go. Heroic Morph! To be fair, death improves his character a lot; his arc in Season 2 is fun.

Oh no, the Sentinels from Detroit have gotten to Washington in record time! Wolverine is ready to scrap, but Morph gets worried and jumps to push Wolverine out the way of a blast. Jarring scene change to Jean groaning over Cerebro; Morph just died off-camera, sacrificing himself for Wolverine. By the time Xavier puts on the Cerebro helmet to try to sense Morph, it’s already too late.

“I ain’t gonna say I tol’ you so, but I tol’ you so, mon ami.”

As little as the character of Morph himself moves me, I’ve always been impressed with this choice. Killing off a member of the team in the first story shows pretty strongly that there are real stakes here, and makes you question what the X-Men are doing. Was this entire mission worth it? Hundreds, maybe thousands of mutants may be safe from harm now that the data has been destroyed, but the X-Men don’t know that for sure; for all they know, the MCA could collect the same info again quite easily. And even though I didn’t like Morph much, a lot of viewers did; the show killed off a character people actually cared about.

I’m not sure how the show got away with this, because it seems way too hardcore and depressing for a program rated acceptable for 7-year-olds; I have that thought frequently while watching this series. When I first watched it I was already 10, maybe 11, so I had already encountered death in books, but I wonder what it must have been like for really young children who saw this on TV.

We skip ahead a bit to the team arriving back at the mansion; we’ll flash back to the fight against the Sentinels in a moment. This actually reminds me a little bit of the famous second episode of Evangelion, where you see the first half of a fight and don’t get to see the end of until much later; it’s much less dramatic than the Eva version, but to be fair, this came first. Wolverine is about ready to take Cyclop’s head off for leaving his teammates behind, but Jean comes and defuses the situation. She shares that Beast is alive (Thank God!) but Morph is not (okay.)

Instead of shredding Cyclops, Wolverine takes his rage out on Cyclops’ car and takes off. Jean says that what happened wasn’t Cyclops’ fault, or Wolverine’s, and no Jean: it’s Professor Xavier’s fault, for not sending Gambit. I’m not going to remind you again.

Flashback to two minutes ago! After Morph makes his heroic sacrifice, the X-Men are quickly overwhelmed by Sentinels, and poor Beast gets shoved into an electric fence, which is hard to watch. Remember how Cyclops can easily decapitate Sentinels with his optic blast? Well try to forget that, because he doesn’t even attempt it here. None of the X-Men’s attacks seem to do much in this battle, and in order for this to make sense with the end of the episode, we have to assume they were completely taken by surprise and are off-balance. Either that, or everyone gains about ten levels of power progression after this fight.

When the group decides that all they can do now is run, Wolverine wants to go back for Beast and Morph. Rogue uses her energy-sucking power to stop him, which is…weird. She’s not at all subtle about the fact that she’s about to do it, and Wolverine makes no attempt to fight or evade her. You know what I think? I think he wanted Rogue to stop him. I think he wanted to be able to say that he tried to go back from Beast and Morph without actually doing it. Sneaky Canadian.

I said I didn’t care much about Morph, but seeing Beast be sad makes me sad. Anything that makes Beast sad is intolerable.

Beast gets taken into captivity, where he prays for Morph. It may seem odd that a man of science like Beast is praying, but I think I get where he’s coming from. The only thing Beast can possibly do to help Morph at this point is pray for him, so unless he has solid proof that praying won’t help, that’s what he’s going to do. If Beast has ever gone into depth about his religion in the comics I haven’t read it, but that’s how I like to believe he thinks.

I would complain that Beast is sidelined for the rest of the season due to being captured, but to be honest, the scenes with Beast in jail are some of the best scenes in the entire series, so I’ll live with it. You’ll see what I mean when we get to Episode 3.

We see the President of the United States, and she’s a lady! It’s cool. At first it seems like the president is pleased that the X-Men’s attack on the MCA was foiled (it wasn’t actually foiled, they achieved their mission, but whatever), however we soon learn that a) she’s a smart lady who understands the nuances of the situation and b)she’s committed to cardiovascular health. She wisely tells Gyrich to stop with his MCA nonsense, because it’s only going to lead to more bloodshed. Honestly, at this point, if you put this woman on the ballot, I would vote for her in a hot second.

Wolverine is playing pool at a crummy bar to try to distract himself from his grief. I’ve always gotten a kick out of how seedy this show makes Westchester County look, by the way. I haven’t been there a whole lot in real life, but whenever I have, it’s seemed like the entire area is ensconced inside a giant Starbucks; it’s a little precious. We hear from Senator Robert Kelly over the bar’s TV, in a nice piece of foreshadowing. They really planned out this season! Cyclops shows up to recruit Wolverine on a revenge mission against the Sentinels, and Wolverine is so turned on by the sound of the word “revenge” that he temporarily suspends his hatred of Cyclops and goes along with it.

“I know you’re mad at me, but in my defense, I’m about to offer you a mission that involves chopping up dozens of robots.”

“This is why I can never stay mad at you, Scott.”

This next part is cool. Cyclops goes to Jubilee’s foster parents, and her Foster-Dad rats him out to Gyrich. It quickly becomes obvious that this is what Cyclops wanted to happen, because he wanted Gyrich to send a Sentinel that the X-Men could then track back to the Sentinel’s home base. This is some pretty clever social engineering on Cyclops’ part, and goes a long way toward showing why he’s the leader. Cyclops easily damages the Sentinel (which apparently he can do when he feels like it), and the team tracks the damaged Sentinel back to Detroit in the Blackbird.

Detroit, inside the Sentinel Skunkworks. Gyrich tells Trask that they’re going to pack up the Sentinel operation and move overseas, now that the President has withdrawn the government’s support of the MCA. I would go on a rant about how hard-working American Sentinel-building jobs are being destroyed, but it seems like Trask is the only one actually building the darned things, so I guess that’s not a concern. You have to give Gyrich credit though: by pulling manufacturing out of Detroit, he’s about 5 years ahead of the curve there. If only Detroit had kept the critical killer-giant-robot industry, things might be very different today.

In the chaos caused by the broken Sentinel returning (apparently losing an arm also fries their guidance system), Jubilee tries to escape. She does a pretty good job of blasting through a metal wall, which seems like it shows off a lot more juice than her powers usually have. Why? Because Gambit is near, of course! Gambit gives Jubilee the courage to fight like a proper X-Man!

NEVER LET GO

What follows is a virtuous ass-whomping, with the X-Men easily taking out about 30 Sentinels. It’s a bit puzzling that they’re so good at fighting the Sentinels now when they sucked at it the first time, but I guess we just have to assume that the X-Men are all full of piss and vinegar now and were ready to engage. Back at the MCA, they were still in “Let’s pull our punches and not harm the puny humans” mode, and that’s why their attacks at that time were so weaksauce; that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

“I can nevah kill these robots properly until I’ve had my coffee in the mornin’! Let’s get ’em all, while I’m still running on French Roast, Sugah.”

One particularly choice moment in the fight involves Cyclops yelling at Jubilee to “duck!,” then he promptly blasts some Sentinels about forty feet above her head. There was no need to duck, is what I’m saying. Another nice moment (this time being serious) involves Wolverine using his claws on a Sentinel with extreme prejudice. Even though we know the Sentinel is a robot and not really alive, it still looks impressively brutal and shows off what Wolverine is about.

And so ends the Detroit Sentinel program; of course it’s going to be resumed in Bangladesh or something like that, but for now, the X-Men enjoy a well-earned victory. Besides, the quality of the foreign-made Sentinels won’t be nearly as good as these patriotic, American-Made Sentinels, so the X-Men’s hardest fight is likely behind them. Vote for X-Men:TAS President in 2020, she’ll bring manufacturing back to America and Make Sentinels Great Again!

Wrap-up time: Jubilee is saying goodbye to her foster parents, now that she knows she belongs with the X-Men. She confesses that the pair are the best foster parents she’s ever had, and uh…let’s all take a moment to appreciate what a scathing indictment of the American foster care system that is. Nevertheless, Jubilee will now call the X-Mansion her home for the next five seasons; beginning of an era.

There’s a moment at the end of the episode where Cyclops asks Jean if he did the right thing back during the battle where Morph was killed and Beast kidnapped, and she replies that he “did what he had to do.” Cyclops, hon, you shouldn’t have been put in that horrible situation in the first place, because you shouldn’t have even been there. If the Professor had only sent Gambit—-

*gets pulled away from the keyboard kicking and screaming*

Okay, let’s bid goodbye to Night of the Sentinels, and I promise that I’ll never mention that Xavier should have sent Gambit again. Probably. Unless it’s highly relevant. Next time: Magneto! Sabretooth! Due Process! Wolverine not understanding the concept of organizational hierarchy! We’ve got some good episodes coming up.

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