Tolerance is Extinction – Part 1
We’re in the final stretch now. Episode 8 through episode 10 of X-Men ’97 are called “Tolerance is Extinction” parts one through three, a big and elaborate season finale. Will the X-Men triumph against Bastion and Mister Sinister? Possibly! Are there more surprises waiting for viewers? Yes. Oh my yes. And hey! Professor X is back in the opening credits! I bet he’ll show up at some point!
At the Xavier Institute, Cable is target practices while Cyclops watches and broods. Turns out Bishop and baby Nathan got separated in the time stream after the end of episode 3, so Scott’s hope that his son would be raised well didn’t quite pan out. In a sitrep later, Cable explains that in his timeline Bastion used the fallout of Genosha to fund his Prime Sentinel program, using the techno-organic virus to rewrite normal people’s DNA to become super Sentinels. Beast is horrified because this means that the Prime Sentinels could literally give birth to an army of Sentinels designed to subjugate mutants. And subjugate they did, creating a “utopia” for humans all through mutant slave labor. Wolverine interrupts and demands to know why Cable didn’t stop the Genoshan massacre, and it’s theorized that Genosha is an absolute point in time and cannot be stopped by any means. Something something Doctor Who. Cyclops wants more info on Bastion while Cable is gung-ho to avenge his mother, Madelyne, when Jean interrupts them to point out the news announcing that Professor Xavier is not only alive, but supposedly now leading an alien empire. Oops. The world does not react well. Down in Brazil, Roberto’s mom is planning a fundraiser for victims of Genosha and manages to piss off Bobby and Jubilee with her casual racism. Back at the Institute, Nightcrawler and Jean bond while tending to the unconscious Rogue, with Jean sharing that her connection with her clone, Madelyne, goes far enough that Jean vividly remembers giving birth to Nathan. So yeah, we may never know when they were swapped. Over with Mister Sinister, we find out that not only did Val Cooper survive Genosha–with a broken arm, but still–but she’s part of OZT, wearing one of Bastion’s pink and black costumes. Sinister reveals he’s working with Bastion in order to experiment on mutant slaves, but what gets Val’s attention is the captive Magneto, stripped to tiny briefs and forced to watch the news report on the mutant menace. Val begs Magneto to say something to her, but he just gives an icy glare. Meanwhile, Cyclops, Jean, and Cable are investigating what they thought was a Sentinel factory but turns out to be the residential home of Bastion’s mother. Oh yes, the villain who is a super Sentinel in the comic was born to a human woman and grew up with an affinity for technology because his father was infected by Nimrod, a different kind of super Sentinel from the future. So, uh… I guess that’s why Bastion has a personality in the show as versus his very, well, robotic nature in the comics. It also more or less makes him a mutant? Either way, Sebastion’s mom shows the three around before transforming into a Prime Sentinel, ready to attack them. Doesn’t help that Bastion infected his whole hometown and they’re all Sentinels in disguise! Speaking of Bastion, the various allies of Operation Zero Tolerance teleconference in with notable Marvel cameos of Doctor Doom (Mr. Ross Marquand credited as “Latverian OZT Member” for reasons, I’m sure) and Baron Zemo (Rama Vallury), both not happy Bastion did a little genocide without asking first. Granted Bastion doesn’t see what he did as a genocide but rather saving humanity from the future threat of being replaced by mutants. Still a massacre, dude! All throughout this, Val Cooper is visibly becoming more and more disgruntled. But now that we know about the Prime Sentinels, they strike all over, including Roberto’s family butler attacking the boy and Jubilee. Oh, and Trish Tilby was one, too, and is forced to attack Beast. This gets the attention of Wolverine and Nightcrawler, who put up more of a fight than Morph, but even with Kurt brandishing three swords–he has a prehensile tail, after all–the Xavier Institute gets blown up and the X-Men are outnumbered everywhere. Jubilee tries to use her powers to fly–clearly inspired by Abscissa in episode 4–but sadly fails and has to get rescued by Roberto, who can fly in his Sunspot form. They crash his mom’s fundraiser but are horrified when she tells her own son to surrender. Cyclops and Jean are forced to blow up the X-Men’s jet, the Blackbird, to escape a Prime Sentinel swarm, but that just slows the killing machines down. At least they have some combat bonding with Nathan! But it all comes down to Val feeling bad enough to release Magneto. Caught by Bastion, she says the only logical reaction to the massacre of Genosha was three simple words: “Magneto was right.” She said the thing! Pissed off beyond measure, Magneto sends out an EMP pulse that blankets the globe, deactivating the Prime Sentinels and much more as we’ll find out next episode. But as Wolverine realizes that Magneto has declared war on the world, he wonders where Professor X is. Oh, there he is, crash landing in a Shi’ar spaceship. To be continued!
“Magneto was right” is a political statement, really. It started some time after Magneto was believed to be killed in the attack on Genosha, specifically appearing in New X-Men #135 (2003) when Quentin Quire–an omega-level telepath going through a permanent rebellious phase–wore a shirt with the slogan in an attempt to rabble-rouse and piss off Professor X. From there it became the idea that Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence between mutants and humans could only be a dream, and that Magneto’s vision of mutant supremacy and/or mutant isolationism was the way to go. And, well… Magneto was right. At least that was the unspoken element of Krakoa, the recently ending X-Men status quo where mutantkind founded an island nation all to themselves and told humanity to either get with the program or get out of the way. Humanity didn’t respond well to that, naturally, but that’s comics for you. As for X-Men ’97, how right Magneto is really comes down to the final two episodes, which… we’ll get there soon enough.
I know I say a lot of comic characters have weird origins, but Bastion is one of the weirder ones. Okay… so… By now you know that Master Mold is a super Sentinel that makes other Sentinels. There was also Nimrod, a different kind of super Sentinel from the future who came to the present–at the time, the late 80’s–in a mission to eliminate mutants. It took on a human identity of Nicholas Hunter and had feelings, until Uncanny X-Men #246 (1989) where it merged with Master Mold. In the following issue the X-Men managed to defeat it by shoving it through the Siege Perilous, which is… a thing. It’s basically a magic portal that gives anyone going through it a new start, and there’s a part of me that resents having to explain this to non-comic readers. In a perfect world normies would never have to know about it, but here we are. Nimrod/Master Mold vanished from comics for years, but in X-Men #52 (1996) a shadowy figure named Bastion appeared, and we got to see what he looked like in Uncanny X-Men #333 (1996). He was a pink-skinned man in charge of a government program called Operation: Zero Tolerance. In time we found out Bastion was a humanoid machine that was the combination of Nimrod and Master Mold who–despite having been given a new start with a loving parental figure–still chose to hunt down mutants. Deep programming, or something. The whole Operation: Zero Tolerance (1997) event was the X-Men (and allies) going up against this new threat and basically stalling until the government decided OZT was bad, actually, and shut it down. Bastion continued to be an asshole, but became a relatively minor threat. That is until he killed Nightcrawler in X-Force #26 (2010), but I don’t see a need to talk about Second Coming (2010) here. If Hope Summers appears, then maybe; we don’t need every deep cut to be explored all at once.
How about cameos? Because we have cameos. In Cable’s retelling of Bastion’s dominance against mutants, we see an aged version of Polaris as well as Rachel Summers, the yet-to-be-born daughter of Scott and Jean. While the world was reacting to the revelation that Charles Xavier was alive, one news program had a man who the lower third on screen partially identifies as “–iam Stryker.” That’s William Stryker, a racist pastor who is the villain of the iconic story God Love, Man Kills (1982) and also the militaristic villain of X2. At Bastion’s house, we see a toy of Machine Man, a character whose history is too weird–and not X-Men orientated–to cover here, but it is worth noting that we learned Bastion’s comic full history in Machine Man/Bastion ’98 (1998), or Marvel Comics 1998 Annual Starring Machine Man & Bastion as the cover reads. It didn’t really fit into the summary section, but Jubilee tries on a new outfit while shopping with Roberto and it’s her more modern costume of a black body suit paired with her signature yellow coat. And Morph is full of cameos, this time transforming into Juggernaut to fight the Prime Sentinel Trish Tilby. Oh, and the bald girl hanging around Bastion? That’s Daria (Anjali Bhimani), who first appeared in Generation X #20 (1996). Her story in Operation: Zero Tolerance was feeling sympathy towards the captured Jubilee and freeing her, disappearing into the night afterwards. Dunno if she and Jubes are going to interact, but I’d love to see it! And as Magneto sends his worldwide EMP pulse out, we see reactions from Spider-Man, Silver Samurai, and Omega Red. A lot happened this episode! And we’ve only just begun…
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