X-Men ’97 is winding up for one of the best stories about weathermancer Storm ever told
27.03.2024 - 12:11
/ polygon.com
/ Storm
Maybe the most impressive thing about X-Men: The Animated Series is how it committed to directly adapting X-Men comics stories — or at least getting as close as the Saturday morning cartoon format would allow. And X-Men ’97, Disney Plus’ new continuation of the classic series, is not shirking that mandate.
With the last-minute appearance of a certain mutant, and a certain tragedy befalling one of the X-Men’s greatest heroes, ’97’s first three episodes show that the season is approaching one beloved X-Men arc in particular.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for “Mutant Liberation Begins.”]
In just the first few episodes of its season, X-Men ’97 includes three events that will be very familiar to fans of 1980s X-Men comics: Storm taking a laser blast that strips her of her powers, leaving the X-Men, and subsequently running into the mutant known as Forge.
Forge (voiced by Yellowstone’s Gilbert Birmingham) sidles up to Storm at a bar, and she testily asks what his deal is. He suggests they should partner up for reasons that are left mysterious. But based on X-Men history and what’s already been released about upcoming episodes, we can make a strong supposition.
Even if you have fond memories of X-Men: The Animated Series, you might need a refresher on Forge’s deal. He was in the original show, but not in a particularly central way; he appeared as the leader of X-Force, but mostly showed up in alternate timelines.
Forge has been a part of the X-Men setting since 1984, when Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr. included him in their Uncanny X-Men. Forge (he just goes by “Forge”) is a mutant, a veteran, an amputee, and a member of the Cheyenne nation — and at least in Claremont’s early stories about him, he was a guy whose unresolved trauma (watching the rest of his platoon die, making a Big Magical Mistake because of that) had made him selfish and self-isolating.
His mutant power is an entirely mental one: superhuman technological intuition. Forge can instantly perceive what machines will do and how to use them, and he can build a technological solution to any problem he puts his mind to — though since he does all this intuitively, he may not actually understand how the device works, much less how to explain how someone else could build it again. He used his abilities to make a living as a defense contractor, and to build his own specialized prosthetic right leg and right hand.
Forge’s presence, combined with Storm losing her powers from a depowering gun, all points toward the classic X-Men storyline “Lifedeath” — considered one of the best Storm stories of all time.
[Ed. note: If you’d like to see how “Lifedeath” plays out in the cartoon, without any spoilers, you should stop reading here!]