The X-Men TAS Podcast: Rise of the Apocalypse Part One

In the past, Magneto and Professor X compete to be the guy most responsible for screwing up the future on the latest episode of X-Men 97! Join us as we discuss...

• Jonathan Majors fired, comic book Kang rehired!
• Not enough shine on Rogue, Nightcrawler and Beast!
• Professor X fails yet again in the astral plane!
• Did the beginning of the episode take place at the end of the episode?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the X-Men Task Podcast. My name is Willie Simpson. My name is Sonia Rappaport. Sonia, we have reached episode three of season two of X-Men 97 Rise of the Apocalypse Part 1. Part one of how many? I don't remember the episode title list that they released, so we'll find out. But this is the third episode they released on the debut day, and it's the third episode we are recording in one day, which is crazy for us, tying a record. I think we've done three in a day before. Um very exciting. Uh before we get into that and a whole lot more, just a reminder to check our show notes for our links to our social media. If you want to contact us, uh our donation links, if you want to donate, we appreciate everyone who does just that. Sonia, what a day of X-Men it has been. What a day. Uh this we started off episode one with the X-Men in the future, then we got some X-Teams in the present, or the 90s, and now we are in the distant past uh with this third X-Team. And um so it's a lot of, you know, laying the table stakes as far as where they want to propel the characters for the season going forward. I guess driving everyone back to the essential present day is really what's happening. Yeah. But this one ends in an interesting cliffhanger, which we'll get to. Um I don't know. How first of all, how's your day of X-Men been? And how do you feel about this one?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Excellent. Um I like this one quite a bit too. I think I liked it better than episode two, even though I did like episode two.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Um I like the backstory on Apocalypse. I like Magneto's take on the apocalypse conundrum. Um I think also it's like smart um for them to have broken up the team into three groups to introduce them discreetly.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

For people who may not be like totally locked into all of the X-Men characters and everything going on, you know, you get like little bite-sized pieces before everybody comes together again. I'm assuming everyone's gonna come together again.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Oh, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Um So, and you know, like we get to see what's going on in each of those timelines.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

You know what I kind of forgot from season one of X-Men 97? That Nightcrawler is now a regular member of the team.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, I love that too. He's such a great character. We've talked about constant uh uh many times about how he's just a great cartoon character. So it's nice to see Nightcrawler again. Uh I felt like let's just go over the characters in this episode. We get the X-Men intro, it's kind of like more of a regular one this time. Uh Magneto, Rogue, Beast, Nightcrawler, and Professor X. Uh Bishop shows up later, too. Uh we get a lot of Professor X and Magneto in this episode. Not much Beast, Nightcrawler, and Rogue, really. A little bit of Beast. Rogue and Nightcrawler are like side characters. Very side characters. Um, you know, oh yeah, a lot of Apocalypse or what's his name? En Sabah Noor. And they just end up calling him Noor, which is helpful. Uh another interesting thing, this is a Bo Dameo co-written episode, which I don't know if we talked about in the last one we did earlier today, but his he's still listed as an executive producer this season. And I guess they still have some scripts that they had to give him credit to. They didn't they didn't like throw out everything he had planned for season two, I guess, and uh just said, fuck you, they had to or they chose to keep using stuff from him, so that's interesting. Um yeah, I you know, for me, I I think I really liked the first episode and the next two episodes I liked, but uh just like a half step less. Um but I did enjoy the experience of watching them all in a row. So it's fun from that perspective of like if if they had uh released every episode all at once, which would have stung for us in a way, but if they had done that, it I would have been very happy to binge them all like two days.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Because they are very addictive. Like I by the end of this one, I need to know what happened next. I know each one like really propels you into the next one. Right. Um so where does this one pick up?

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Um so the Xmansion is destroyed, as we know.

SPEAKER_00 4:29

Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

And the X-Men that were in the future are back home again, but they're kind of like wondering what happened to everyone else. Like, why aren't they back yet? Does that mean they failed? Like, what are we gonna do?

SPEAKER_00 4:43

I kind of wish this episode was like an hour or 45 minutes double length. Because I want to see those future X-Men uh uh enjoy the creature comforts of being back home.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Like get a hamburger, maybe some pool take a shower and just talk about how wow, it's good to be back in like reality instead of like a destroyed future scape. Uh but we don't get much time with them really. Uh Forge says that like bishops in the past with the other X-Men, but their time bands are dead. And that lends itself to an interesting question. Is he saying this before or after the conclusion of this episode?

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

You know what I mean? It's like you're led to believe it's before. Yeah, that's how it seemed to me. But then again, they're in the future when the events of the episode that we're about to witness have happened. So that's a little bit of ambiguity there.

SPEAKER_01 5:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Like, are the X-Ben safe or not?

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Well, that's what they want you to not know.

SPEAKER_00 5:45

Right. So Um, and then the Forge somebody mentions that the longer they're gone, the more the past can be rewritten, which is bad for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Uh meanwhile, Magneto is actively trying to rewrite the past.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

Yeah, he does he give zero fucks. It's funny because in the future, like Scott and Gene were like endlessly well, not endlessly debating, but they were torturing themselves over just like hugging their son and like worrying that that would mess up the future. Whereas Magneto is like in the ear of an apocalyptic tyrant, feeding him a bunch of his like insane modern philosophy about good and bad and like the way the world should be, like infecting him with a code of you know, thought patterns that probably aren't so great.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

I mean there is a moment though where you sympathize with Magneto because he's like what he's saying on the surface actually doesn't seem like it's so bad. Well, uh the stuff he says at the beginning is bad.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Like there's a a point where like uh and Sabah Noor are all called Noor too, or apocalypse. He's like, well, what should I do? How do you see me, Magneto? And Magneto's like, oh, you're a god among insects.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Quoting X-Men 2's Magneto. Yeah. But like uh, you know, it's like he's like laying in some magnetoisms that are like not to not helpful, actually. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

But like his overall philosophy that he or like what he's trying to do is like make Noor not become apocalypse. Like he knows that he's gonna become a powerful godfather.

SPEAKER_00 7:24

Warlord of some kind.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

But like he says to Xavier like a little later on here, like, wouldn't it be great if he just was fighting for your cause the whole time?

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yeah, but it's it's still coded by Magneto's belief that mutants are superior to humans. Yeah, it's not good. And it's not as great. Uh he wants them to be like Magneto and just maybe like discreetly wipe the humans out at one point and just let mutants like all have like a brotherhood together. I mean, I don't know. It's it's shady. Uh what else struck me about this? Oh yeah, Magneto's is just as bad of a therapist as Professor X, it turns out to. Whatever his goal is, is not succeed in the slightest. It totally backfires in his face.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Not from the same cloth. Um okay, so we also get introduced to some other characters in the past. There's the Pharaoh.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Who is it's Kang.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 8:16

A Kang variant, Rama Tut, which is this is a character from the Fantastic Four comics, where in the early 60s comics they were like sent back in time to ancient Egypt, and there's like a pharaoh with futuristic technology. And I forget if it was in that comic or in another comic where they ret conned it where it's like, oh, it was Kang all along, who's time traveling, Kang the Conqueror. So uh interesting that they have Kang and the X-Men. I mean, he existed actually in the original series too. Kang makes an appearance as like a cameo in the Nexus of Time episodes. But uh oh Beyond Good and Evil. I was struggling in the last episode of the first one to remember what those apocalypse episodes were.

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:57

Beyond Good and Evil sagas, part one through four. Yeah, Kang is one of the characters in the Nexus of Time. I think he's like the janitor or something. I don't know. Anyway, here he is. This is um a like a more traditional comic book version of Kang because he's a white guy, I guess. Like they um what was that actor that got canceled that played Kang in the movies or the TV show? Jonathan Majors? Is that a yeah yeah. So um this is you know, he was a black guy, so they were like all the Kang variants were like versions of Jonathan Majors, and like this is the character from the com like I just wonder about if Jonathan Majors didn't get cancelled and fired by Marvel essentially, would this representation of Kang be like a Jonathan Majors version versus like just going back to the original comic book version? I don't know, that crossed my mind just mentioning that. Not that it really matters, but um I wonder if like when they were writing these episodes, if they wanted to throw a bone to Kang, because that was like so much part of like where the story in the MCU was going at the time. Yeah, and then they had to like just decide. Pump the brakes on it, yeah. All right, but Kang is here. Uh-huh. And he's got like some kind of futuristic like Egyptian pharaohhood going on. Where he's got robot slave drivers with laser whips and the machines and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

It's like funny because we've talked about how in the Marvel universe all religions outside of like the major monotheistic religions are just assumed as real.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

Well, those are supposedly real too. Also, but like they're not based on so much in the same thing. They don't have the adventures of Jesus and Muhammad so much and uh yeah, and Buddha. Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

But they but like we've talked about before, how like the Norse gods are real, the Egyptian gods are real, like all of it is real.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Like and as part of that, African gods are real, Native American gods are real. Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

All the gods are real, and also like the aliens uh that supposedly crashed or like landed on Earth and gave the Egyptians their technology are also real.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

Well, the celestials. I know the celestials. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

When you watch the history channel at 2 a.m. Yeah. It's like and the Egyptians were so advanced because it was alien technology.

SPEAKER_00 11:06

Well, in this case, it's like not so much the it's it's Kang the Conqueror who travels through time. Uh there it's just so it's it's both Kang the Conqueror with his technology and aliens have crashed in the desert as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 11:20

So it's like it's a confluence of crazy things, or like the most amazing thing has happened. Uh you know, what was I gonna say about this? Um there was one quick shot where they show like Egyptian, real Egyptian people enslaved, and they're knocking down the statues that I think it's what's the value of the dead or something. It's like the statues, and they're replacing them with like Kang statues, which is kind of s I thought that was kind of sad in a way. That he that Kang himself, too, is also like fucking with the timeline in a way that's evil and he doesn't care about the consequences of that whatsoever. Um, anyway, we see Noor or Apocalypse. He's got this little like freedom force army he rides with, the Sandstorm Riders or something they're called. And uh his like friend or the leader of this tribe is called Ball. Uh and Ball's philosophy is much closer to the Apocalypse philosophy, we'll learn as the episode goes on. Like he doesn't believe in mercy, he like thinks mercy is for the weak and only the strong will survive, survival of the fittest, all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

Right. Like before Magneto showed up, this guy was in Noor's ear, like feeding him philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 12:34

Right. And the the story is that Apocalypse was a slave that this guy, Ball, rescued from the desert and raised him, uh, even though he was left to die. And you know, Nor, his mutant power seems to be, I don't know, like super strength, more or less, like invulnerability.

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Right. Not quite the full powers of Apocalypse, who could like change his shise.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

Doesn't he do that once here?

SPEAKER_00 12:59

Nor? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

Oh, maybe it's no, maybe not.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

No.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

There was a scene, I think the scene here, like they storm the fortress or whatever, like the sandwiders, but there's all like uh robots hidden under the desert sands that like spring up and counter-attack the guys. Yeah. And then at some point there's like a pile of like hundreds of the these shiny robots like on top of Noor himself. Right. Oh, that was a cool scene. But like obviously he gets out of it with his super strength or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, he just punches him like he's the Hulk.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

And he is the lone survivor of the counter massacre, and he marches through the fortress gates.

SPEAKER_00 13:36

Knocks the gates down.

SPEAKER_01 13:38

And then they attack him inside. They have these like crackling laser whips, and he just like grabs them and like destroys all the robots.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Right. And then there's a super-sized elephant, like a freak-sized elephant. I don't know if it's supposed to be a robot or something. And the general of Rama Tut is riding it. This guy named Logos.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:59

And he's super evil and like uncompromising. So he has no fear. Does he end up being a robot in the end?

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Logos?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Maybe. I don't think so. Well, at the very end when he's like dead, his uh like eyeballs blinking, there's a tracker in his eyeball.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

But maybe just Tut put that in him.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Yeah, I thought that was like a surveillance device, nothing.

SPEAKER_00 14:19

Probably more that, because there's blood when he gets killed.

SPEAKER_01 14:22

But the scene where um like Logos is basically like defeated here, and umor is about to kill him, right? Yeah. Uh Kang is in his ear being like chop off his head or something like that. And he decides not to because Magneto has been preaching mercy.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Well, I mean Magneto stops him with his power, too. Noor's gonna do it.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Oh, that's Magneto that does that?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Yeah, yeah. Magneto uses his he holds his arm out. That's okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

But in that scene when when um marching up to him, yeah, I thought that like his size was inflated. I thought he had made himself bigger. Maybe it was just a perspective thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Well, they do some tricks, like there's one scene where like m uh Apoc or Noor is marching through the desert and it looks like he's apocalypse, like with the body armor, but then when the sand goes away, it's just Noor. It's like a foreshadowing.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Okay, maybe it's like that, where they just like force the perspective a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah, I mean it's very cinematic. I mean, like this all these episodes is beautiful, awesome.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

Um so you know, Magneto like stops him from going crazy and decapitating this guy, and Noor just sort of kicks him down, and uh Ball is not pleased with this, but he's also like, I don't know, like you've got some interesting friends, I guess. Like you can listen to them if you want, even though I'm in charge. Like, if there's something weird going on about the power dynamic, maybe Ball's seen the power of Magneto and some of the others, and is like, these guys aren't, I'm not gonna fuck with them.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

Uh this whole time, like Magneto's been communicating psychically with Charles, and Charles like appears as like a hologram walking around, and he's complaining to Magneto. He's doing a lot of complaining and whining to Magneto throughout the episode.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Like, I don't like what you're doing, Magnus.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

He's like, Come on, we have to just get the X-Men back to 1997.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

It's like This guy is Apocalypse, the X-Men's most diabolical foe. And you're trying to tell him what to do. Magneto's like, Charles, you'll never get it. Uh and then but the other like sub-plan the X-Men have is like they want this attack to happen because they want to grab all the crushed robots and gather the Beast needs the microchips from them.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Or yeah, whatever is in them. Which they do. At the end of that battle, um Nightcrawler goes around and just like poofs in and out and like grabs robot parts and he assures Professor X that he's not seen and he hands over the parts to Beast and Beast is trying to build the time machine.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Right. Um so you know, the the they gather the robots. Uh where was I here. So they try to like run the power or whatever, but I mean, despite everything, Magneto promises to Charles, I'm getting the X-Men home safely, Charles. Don't worry about it. That's my plan.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Right.

unknown 17:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

So Beast is trying to build a time machine and it blows up in his face.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

He's ashamed. He just says he just needs like a ton more power and he doesn't know how to get it.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

He says the power, the power to create a stable temporal displacement field is quote unquote cosmic. So at first I thought, like, oh, that's a clue. Like they need cosmic like silver surfer energy or galactus energy. Which honestly, that's like the most scientific thing we've seen in the X-Men cartoon.

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Just that building a time machine would take like cosmic level power.

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah, you would need like the power. If you like look up how to build a time machine in reality, they're like to they're like you would need the power of like 12 galaxies to harness to open a wormhole up that could fit a spaceship through. We've talked about that a lot.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

So I think that's a nice nod to reality a little bit. That you can't just grab some like hunky, like, you know, funky robots from the desert and turn them into a time machine. But it also shows you that Forge is smarter than Beast. I think that's important to notice as well. Because Forge invents a time machine and he doesn't have access to cosmic power. Um, all right, where were we here? Um sorry, it's been we've podcasted all day long.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Um so Noor thinks that like he did the right thing listening to Magneto, and he thanks Magneto, and he's like, you know, like this is good. Like the people, they're not like cowering in fear, they're actually like following me and respecting me or something.

SPEAKER_00 18:40

Right. The Apocalypse or Norse is something like we'll hear the songs of freedom blow through the desert winds when we're all done with this. So he's on board with being a freedom fire, not like and there's another line between him and Ball where Ball's he says, like, you know, Ball, you you want me to conquer the world, but Magneto says I could save the world, and isn't that more interesting? Um Meanwhile, like they've got this logos guy captured, and the X-Men.

SPEAKER_01 19:06

They're like, you should just read his mind to figure out like what's going on with like with Kramatut, and like there's some secret thing he's searching for. We know he has like technology that he hasn't revealed, and like where's he getting it from? Like, we need answers. Professor X says that using his powers could corrupt the timeline. I'm not really sure why.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

I don't know why. Yeah, I didn't quite I mean I think it's just he wants to make as minimal of an impact as possible in the past.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

But why would like using his powers be more impactful than Magneto like philosophizing with the future?

SPEAKER_00 19:40

I mean, that's I think the Magneto thing is way worse.

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Uh I mean the whole goal for them was to keep a low profile and not affect the timeline, but they're doing a terrible job in any way you could slice it.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Um So Magneto, oh, this is where they go on Magneto goes on the diatribe about like making Noor into the very first X-Men and telling Charles like I'm I'm doing this because like mankind has always been the one writing history, and it's time for us to take the reins at the pretty good you might get a better outcome.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

I wrote down the quote. It's a pretty good one from Magneto. Mankind has long offered history wait. Uh Authored history. Oh yeah, I'm sorry, right. Stupid spell check. Mankind has long authored history, the result, countless volumes of trite barbarism, every new chapter scrolled in blood, each generation plagiarizing the prior. True. True facts. I mean, it's like Magneto is often right about this shit. His problem is the execution of a plan is shitty. But it's also annoying for Magneto be like checked by Professor X, whose plans are like whiny and lame, too. Incrementalism versus like radical action.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

That's sort of like a That's a wet blanket. Yeah. Um there's that was a big theme in season one.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

And then Professor X is like, Magneto, you know, everything in Genosha was not your fault. And Magneto's like, Yeah, you're right. It was both our faults, Professor X.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Right. They're they're both not good therapists to each other. They're both trying to out-incite one another.

SPEAKER_01 21:18

And then Charles is kind of like, all right, like, let's see how you're playing.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Yeah, he gets one over, which kind of blows my mind. But he's all they're also in way too deep. And the situation's also fairly hopeless, because they're trapped in the past, beast can't build a time machine. They're kind of fucked. And perf no one I don't think any of them are enjoying living in living in ancient Egypt.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

No.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

So, like, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 21:37

Uh so now we have this guy Logos trapped, and Noor goes in to question him, and he's like, All right, what is Ramatut, which is Kang's, like uh, what's like the real secret about him? And Logos is just like being an asshole to him.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

Yeah, it's surprisingly showing a spine and being questioned and tortured or whatever. Being hung upside down and threatened by these scary people. He has no fear of them.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Right. He's just like making fun of him, and he's like, You were abandoned in the in the desert as a child, ha ha.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Right. You're a slave. Like, I'm not answering to like the the helpers of an abomination. And then but he does like give up the fact that he says, like, the the Pharaoh's on the precipice of discovering uh some like incredible technology that like's gonna make his current shit, which looks mind-blowing, look like toys. And we know that's that's just gotta be the celestial shit that Apocalypse will later find that where he gets his suit from and his immortality. And uh Professor X is like, alright, I've had it, I'm going into your mind, no who cares. And he go he enters in the guy's mind, and it's it's odd because his mind is filled with floating pyramids. Professor X is like seeing nothing of value. He tries he removes a brick from one of the pyramids, and when he looks inside, he's like greeted to like an apocalyptic vision of some great power that like fucks him.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

I feel like as usual, the visuals that we see don't match up with his description of the experience later on. Like there's like floating pyramids, he gets sucked into a sand pit, which turns out to be like a what do you call it? Like a sand dial.

SPEAKER_00 23:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Um like a bunch of just like kind of nonsense, but like it looks cool.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

It there's also a vo like a black hole with a voice that says, I am the rocks of the eternal shore, crash against me, broken. So at first I'm thinking like this is just Apocalypse from the future or something, like messing with Professor X or in the astral plane. But I don't think it is. Like Professor X ends up outside this Egyptian palace, and it really sounds like Apocalypse is talking to him.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

But maybe it's the disembodied voice of some evil celestial god that influences Apocalypse.

SPEAKER_01 23:47

I don't know, maybe. I mean, he comes out of it and he kind of like faints, and Magneto catches him and he's like, It's me, Charles, you know, and he's two. And then Charles is like, oh, uh, he doesn't actually know the whole thing. He only knows like bits and pieces about the temple's location, and you're like, oh, that's what you got from that experience.

SPEAKER_00 24:05

And then he says, Right. And then he says it's like, oh, it's like super dangerous. And the the last thing the voice says to Charles is he is where the end begins, which also just sounds like something Apocalypse would say. So again, I'm just like curious if like whatever the celestial technology shit is, it's just like it imbues its own spirit inside Apocalypse. It's just some malevolent kind of celestial force. But that's not like I don't know if that was the case in the comics exactly. If that's how they set up like the origin of Apocalypse. I think he just in the comics I could be way wrong. He just finds like a crashed celestial ship and just sort of takes the technology for his own. And the celestials aren't necessarily supposed to be the celestials aren't necessarily necessarily supposed to be good or evil. They're just like galactic neutral, right? Right. They're galactus level super beings. Uh-huh. But I don't know. There could be more to it than I'm aware of. People can let us know, that'd be interesting to read about. Um Alright, where were we?

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Anyway, Ball comes in to wherever the X-Men are hiding out here, their round table discussion, and he and like Noor is in there and he sees that the X-Men have been like collecting all these robot parts. Yeah. And he's like, uh, look, Noor, like these are your supposed friends. They're like doing something with all this tech, and they're gonna like build a weapon for themselves, and they're only looking out for them. They don't care about you.

SPEAKER_00 25:27

This is a good twist.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Noor feels totally betrayed. And at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yeah, he can't be reasoned with like there's even you think like that there's not a moment for them to even say anything, but still I don't think there's anything they could say that could be something.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

Well, Naido tries, he's like, let me explain. Like, just give me a second to the happening. But like, it's too late. Nor is it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

But even if he could I'm just saying, even if he could say something, it wouldn't work, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

If he was like, listen, we're from the future.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Yeah, I don't think any of that would fly.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Probably not. No. But he doesn't get a chance to say anything else. Yeah. Uh, nor beheads logos. So that's like symbolic of I'm not listening to Magneto anymore.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Uh and then he's like, turns his attention on the X-Wen, he's gonna kill everybody. And he's an unstoppable killing machine. Uh we also see this is where we see that logos beheaded, his eyeball has like a beacon in it that alerts Ramatut, who Ramatut's interesting because every time you see him, there's all these like dancing Egyptian people around him who seem intoxicated and they're doing some kind of, you know, I don't know, ritualistic dance. And then he like turns on what is essentially like his Death Star. His palace turns into like an enormous Death Star laser and aims it at the location where the X-Men are. Before that happened, Bishop drops in and he like shoots everybody with his gun and he blasts Noor. Like, there's an there's a fight that breaks out as pretty good. Uh he unloads on Noor. I like the way when Bishop shoots Noor with his his uh laser arms, how far Noor goes flying. That was pretty satisfying. But then, like in another little satisfying scene, Bishop's got the time bands, they're not dead.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

He's like, come on, guys, we gotta get out of here, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Throws him in every character, they all catch it.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Unfortunately, they stand around talking for another couple minutes after that, and you see like the beam coming from Kang's Palace, wherever it is, and just like targeting the hill where the X-Men are standing inside of.

SPEAKER_00 27:20

There's people outside that see the beam and are freaked out. I like this line from Charles saying, uh Magneto, I think we gotta go. The chance to redeem Nor has passed. That was like a big fucking fuck up from Magneto and Professor X in the past. They really screwed up the past.

SPEAKER_01 27:34

Yeah, they did a bad job.

SPEAKER_00 27:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Uh it looks like the place where they're standing gets totally just blasted like to a crater.

SPEAKER_00 27:43

It's like a double problem because right before they get blown up by the laser, Noor wakes up and he's about to kill everyone.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

So they're like about to be attacked by him, and you don't know if they press the time travel button in time.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

I'm assuming yes, but we'll see. Maybe there's another bump in the road first. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

Yeah. So critics who have had access to this show had the first four episodes.

SPEAKER_01 28:03

First four.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Yes. Us peons and the general viewing audience only have these first three. Uh I'm gonna throw a prediction for episode four, which might be uh silly given that some people actually know the truth out there. Maybe when they tr I I say the X-Men get away at their time travel devices, uh but somehow Apocalypse grabs onto one of them and travels to the present. And we get like young apocalypse in the nineties, and that's the vessel that old apocalypse can use to reduce himself. Or maybe if you has him have him as a character in the present, he learns more about himself, and maybe when he meets his future self, he realizes like he's bad or something, you know.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 28:48

Like that could be interesting.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

It would be very interesting. I hadn't thought of that.

SPEAKER_00 28:51

I doubt I I know. I doubt that's gonna happen though.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

I don't think he's gonna become a character that I just think it's been so clean so far where it's like we're in the past, we're in the present, we're in the future or vice versa. We're in the future, we're in the past.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

Future, present, past. Future, present, past, then presumably next one present.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

Right, exactly. I think it must be that they're all gonna come together in the present again in short order, and then we can get going with the whatever the real story is.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

And then I'm assuming that's gonna be set up by the end of episode four, because that's a logical break-off point for to have given a preview to people, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:26

And also, I mean, this one's called the Origin of Apocalypse Part One. So then presumably if the next one's Origin of Apocalypse Part Two, maybe they are they are in the past for another episode and we get more origin.

SPEAKER_01 29:36

Hmm. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Because like Apocalypse hasn't found the celestial body armor yet that makes him the guy. That's true. Maybe the X-Men are gonna be witnesses to it or something. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

I wish we did have the fourth episode.

SPEAKER_00 29:48

Yeah, well, not today. I've done podcasting.

SPEAKER_01 29:51

I know, just to watch for right.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Yeah, that'd be fun. Well, the fourth episode will come out next week, obviously. Uh, we won't be around, unfortunately, to cover it with y'all in uh real time, essentially.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

No, but we will a couple weeks later. We'll get there.

SPEAKER_00 30:05

We'll be back, so just hang in there with us. We shall return. Um, it might be good to wait a few weeks to let some ideas stew. Uh, I had some plans. You know, well, Sonia's gonna be away. I'll be home. I'll be watching the fourth episode. Maybe I'll fire up Twitch and uh I'll set a time, you know, before the episode is released, saying this is when I'm going to watch the episode. If you want to join my little Twitch stream, we could all watch it together at home and we could react to it all together in real time. That could be fun, right? I mean, I'm not gonna, you know, people have to wanna watch me. That's I don't know how interesting that is, but that could maybe hold some people over if you feel like you want to get some private instant reactions in the X Men community, and you know, we could all talk to each other and share them. So maybe we'll do that. I have no idea. Uh maybe it's a boring idea. We'll see. Um, but either way, the podcast is not. We're not uh it's not over. We are not dead, hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

Short hiatus, and we'll be back.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

Yeah, short hiatus, we will be back. Sonia, until next time.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

Good night, Dad. Good night.