Review: X-Men ’97 “Fire Made Flesh” 

Overview

When a Visitor arrives at the X-Mansion with a dangerous secret that threatens Cyclops and Jean’s relationship, the team is propelled into a tragic confrontation with an immortal mad scientist…

Our Take

After the string of twists from the first two episodes, we now have one of the craziest retellings of a classic X-Men storyline known as “Inferno” A storyline that famously and originally revealed the classic X-Men villain “Mr. Sinister” (Chris Britton). While this particular story during the late 80s was also Infamous for a plethora of reasons, I can at least give the show points for the storytelling methods it used to condense the proceedings in such a way, that it manages to maintain the emotional weight of what happens later on without the unintentional character assassination of specific characters that Inferno affected across the fandom of X-Men’s past, while still emphasizing how much of a scoundrel Sinister is for the chain of events that take place through his twisted machinations.

The animation remains consistently colorful and at times very fluid, especially in the scenes that give a true sense of suspense and escalation during the proceedings and I remain impressed with many of the character moments, even if one of them leads to a potential love triangle that could leave people who didn’t read the comics scratching their heads in disbelief, yet the ending leaves things on both an uncertain yet bittersweet aftermath while giving glimmers of hope to a small few…

Overall, this was one hell of an episode that did the impossible and as I previously stated, despite sort of knowing what direction the story would take due to the toys unintentionally spoiling the twist-tied with “Inferno”, part of me knew it was going to happen at some point, but I wasn’t expecting them to fully commit to it 1-2 episodes in. You’d think a twist like this would unravel and spread across later episodes, to ease the audiences in, but they legitimately went there, and I can’t wait to see where this goes next!