Wolverine and the X-Men 1x18
Nov. 20th, 2020 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tori_reviewsWolverine and the X-Men 1x18: Backlash
As with other major action episodes I don't have a ton to say; there wasn't a lot of character development through the fighting, nor was the world substantially shifted by the actions taken here (it's more fighting not to lose ground than gaining any), nor was anything super interesting done with it. But I actually liked it more than the last couple episodes, partly because all it needed to be was an action story, and where it falls down a bit is in things that aren't action.
I mean, the character with the most development here is Pietro, and if he had been in more than half a dozen cameo appearances this season I might have more to say about how things shift here. Pietro isn't exactly a character I know a lot about in other mediums, so what I can project the most to analyze is him and Magneto, and even that is pretty flat. This show's portrayal of Magneto has not been that interesting; he's not really a character, he's more of an idea of a villain; and coming from the movie-verse that's not a great look. Why is he such a dick to Quicksilver anyway? While I can see how Pietro might be a disappointment in some ways, and that father and son would have tempers that clashed, if Pietro has held out this long, I'm not sure how this is what breaks his commitment to Magneto. All of the Maximoff siblings seem pretty brainwashed by Magneto (which, while fitting for a villain concept is a shallow fit for Magneto as a character; though I suspect not exactly comic inaccurate, just done with more balance) but if we're supposed to sympathize with them beyond a base level we should really see more of how he treats them.
I wish this episode had come more quickly after 1x13 so there was more of a feeling of continuity instead all the random episodes in the middle; and I would like to draw attention to how it doesn't work after last episode. Because I'm watching these episodes at a fairly random pace, I can often end up going almost the week between eps that there would have been between broadcasts; so last episode I kind of forgot some of the people who should have been around the mansion to get captured by the ninjas, but this ep reminds me of that fact. I did half wonder last time where my bro Forge had been, but since Forge tends to be so easily dealt with I didn't really consider it a problem; but now I recall that Nightcrawler is around too but we didn't get anything from him. Or mega-power-girl. Nothing last ep activated her energy demon form?
My biggest issues with this story came in the last couple minutes; not enough to ruin what had been a fairly entertaining ep, but enough to make me roll my eyes at the gaps in the writers and/or characters understanding. Yes I spend too much time thinking through time travel, but I again raise the point the Charles wouldn't know if the future had been changed. In this case I will grant a little leeway as Logan may have run through some things before the bit of the conversation we see and Charles confirmed that those things were still the case as they were previously. But because the show has acted like Xavier would be aware of time changing around him before I won't just assume the writers consider how temporal mechanics work.
The both better and worse aspect is the X-men not understanding how Master Mold could have survived. Most of the X-men don't seem super computer literate but Forge is supposedly the team nerd so he should probably know that it wouldn't work that way (and Beast seems to work with him at times). For one, someone could easily rewrite the code, you didn't take out all the programming notes or the programmers, just the central terminal it seemed to run on. Two, obviously they wouldn't have taken out all of the Sentinel programming in the limited time they spent on it. There were plenty out in the field (they never found out about it being a trap set by the computer did they?) including at the mansion. What is the programming in the individual Sentinels run on? I'm sure they could chop them enough to deactivate them, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be restored and the program reactivated. Three, while in 2009 Cloud computing was not as prevalent as is it now, networks and the internet had been around plenty long enough that the idea the MM program transferred out to some server farm is not something they should be surprised by. Yes I get it's a kids show, and not meant to educate kids on how computers work, but I feel like kids at the time could have called that as an oversight.
Which also brings up another cluster of points concerning the MM AI. When various characters call this AI, what do they mean by it? Do they think of it as a video game AI, capable of some learned behavior but mostly a predictive algorithm; or is it meant to be an artificial life? If they mean the former and it's because of future info (and a general immersion in sci-fi) that I'm assuming the latter, I'll...well I'll have different issues than if I'm right to assume the latter. If they're thinking of video game AI, it's still possible for the MM creator to have backed up the program and the most the X-men did was lose the data from the last fight (and maybe not even that if it had real time autosave/was stored in the Cloud). If the creator is trying to create true AI and MM is a thinking computer/life form in its own right, that raises some questions of its own. For one, the main doctor guy hasn't been shown as someone consumed by his desire to create advanced AI and this is just an organization who wanted to use his tech; this looks like someone who's trying to develop ways of combating the mutant problem and that makes this very short sighted. Unleash an AI programmed for destruction to deal with a race of humans who are largely indistinguishable from human baseline and where it seems pretty wide ranging that humans carry the X-gene even if it's not active (basically, it wouldn't take much for that program that can tell mutants through visual processers to get tweaked just slightly and start going after anyone with a latent X-gene and then you're on the road to full genocide). Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
Actually I thought it was dicey enough at the beginning of the episode that there wasn't any backlash to dragging teenage mutants out of their homes on the news. Yeah public consciousness was in a different place in 2009, and there could be seen as some stand in for actions against illegal immigrants or 'suspected terrorists;' but for that to work, I think we need to see more of the public viewing mutants as such an other that this happens without comment; not just one clearly shady politician speaking for all the fear of mutants. Even the movies, which were not aiming for that exact parallel, took time to show that there was wider public sentiment against mutants that Kelly was tapping into/riling up; and the president there knew better than to show mutants kids being attacked; and the anti mutant forces weren't being armed with giant tanks that look like scorpions. Sending a tank against a teenager who isn't shown with scary superpowers and showing that to the public...I don't think public sentiment is going to be on that side for long unless they take control of the narrative, which we don't see.
As with other major action episodes I don't have a ton to say; there wasn't a lot of character development through the fighting, nor was the world substantially shifted by the actions taken here (it's more fighting not to lose ground than gaining any), nor was anything super interesting done with it. But I actually liked it more than the last couple episodes, partly because all it needed to be was an action story, and where it falls down a bit is in things that aren't action.
I mean, the character with the most development here is Pietro, and if he had been in more than half a dozen cameo appearances this season I might have more to say about how things shift here. Pietro isn't exactly a character I know a lot about in other mediums, so what I can project the most to analyze is him and Magneto, and even that is pretty flat. This show's portrayal of Magneto has not been that interesting; he's not really a character, he's more of an idea of a villain; and coming from the movie-verse that's not a great look. Why is he such a dick to Quicksilver anyway? While I can see how Pietro might be a disappointment in some ways, and that father and son would have tempers that clashed, if Pietro has held out this long, I'm not sure how this is what breaks his commitment to Magneto. All of the Maximoff siblings seem pretty brainwashed by Magneto (which, while fitting for a villain concept is a shallow fit for Magneto as a character; though I suspect not exactly comic inaccurate, just done with more balance) but if we're supposed to sympathize with them beyond a base level we should really see more of how he treats them.
I wish this episode had come more quickly after 1x13 so there was more of a feeling of continuity instead all the random episodes in the middle; and I would like to draw attention to how it doesn't work after last episode. Because I'm watching these episodes at a fairly random pace, I can often end up going almost the week between eps that there would have been between broadcasts; so last episode I kind of forgot some of the people who should have been around the mansion to get captured by the ninjas, but this ep reminds me of that fact. I did half wonder last time where my bro Forge had been, but since Forge tends to be so easily dealt with I didn't really consider it a problem; but now I recall that Nightcrawler is around too but we didn't get anything from him. Or mega-power-girl. Nothing last ep activated her energy demon form?
My biggest issues with this story came in the last couple minutes; not enough to ruin what had been a fairly entertaining ep, but enough to make me roll my eyes at the gaps in the writers and/or characters understanding. Yes I spend too much time thinking through time travel, but I again raise the point the Charles wouldn't know if the future had been changed. In this case I will grant a little leeway as Logan may have run through some things before the bit of the conversation we see and Charles confirmed that those things were still the case as they were previously. But because the show has acted like Xavier would be aware of time changing around him before I won't just assume the writers consider how temporal mechanics work.
The both better and worse aspect is the X-men not understanding how Master Mold could have survived. Most of the X-men don't seem super computer literate but Forge is supposedly the team nerd so he should probably know that it wouldn't work that way (and Beast seems to work with him at times). For one, someone could easily rewrite the code, you didn't take out all the programming notes or the programmers, just the central terminal it seemed to run on. Two, obviously they wouldn't have taken out all of the Sentinel programming in the limited time they spent on it. There were plenty out in the field (they never found out about it being a trap set by the computer did they?) including at the mansion. What is the programming in the individual Sentinels run on? I'm sure they could chop them enough to deactivate them, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be restored and the program reactivated. Three, while in 2009 Cloud computing was not as prevalent as is it now, networks and the internet had been around plenty long enough that the idea the MM program transferred out to some server farm is not something they should be surprised by. Yes I get it's a kids show, and not meant to educate kids on how computers work, but I feel like kids at the time could have called that as an oversight.
Which also brings up another cluster of points concerning the MM AI. When various characters call this AI, what do they mean by it? Do they think of it as a video game AI, capable of some learned behavior but mostly a predictive algorithm; or is it meant to be an artificial life? If they mean the former and it's because of future info (and a general immersion in sci-fi) that I'm assuming the latter, I'll...well I'll have different issues than if I'm right to assume the latter. If they're thinking of video game AI, it's still possible for the MM creator to have backed up the program and the most the X-men did was lose the data from the last fight (and maybe not even that if it had real time autosave/was stored in the Cloud). If the creator is trying to create true AI and MM is a thinking computer/life form in its own right, that raises some questions of its own. For one, the main doctor guy hasn't been shown as someone consumed by his desire to create advanced AI and this is just an organization who wanted to use his tech; this looks like someone who's trying to develop ways of combating the mutant problem and that makes this very short sighted. Unleash an AI programmed for destruction to deal with a race of humans who are largely indistinguishable from human baseline and where it seems pretty wide ranging that humans carry the X-gene even if it's not active (basically, it wouldn't take much for that program that can tell mutants through visual processers to get tweaked just slightly and start going after anyone with a latent X-gene and then you're on the road to full genocide). Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
Actually I thought it was dicey enough at the beginning of the episode that there wasn't any backlash to dragging teenage mutants out of their homes on the news. Yeah public consciousness was in a different place in 2009, and there could be seen as some stand in for actions against illegal immigrants or 'suspected terrorists;' but for that to work, I think we need to see more of the public viewing mutants as such an other that this happens without comment; not just one clearly shady politician speaking for all the fear of mutants. Even the movies, which were not aiming for that exact parallel, took time to show that there was wider public sentiment against mutants that Kelly was tapping into/riling up; and the president there knew better than to show mutants kids being attacked; and the anti mutant forces weren't being armed with giant tanks that look like scorpions. Sending a tank against a teenager who isn't shown with scary superpowers and showing that to the public...I don't think public sentiment is going to be on that side for long unless they take control of the narrative, which we don't see.
