- Title: Legion – Chapter 20
- wiki: link
“Why don’t we have a time traveler?”
Legion opens its Third Season not with David (Dan Stevens) but with the introduction of a time traveler who we will come to know as Switch (Lauren Tsai). Going even more psychedelic and strange in the first 20 minutes, “Chapter 20” oddly becomes more linear once its storyline becomes less so as Switch travels back in time to save David’s life and the singular point-of-view splits from her to several other characters. Most of the first-half of the episode involves Switch following clues which lead to a hippie commune and an eventual meeting with David, a man she never completely trusts. The sudden attack by Division 3 on David’s compound not only leads to Switch traveling back in time in an attempt to save his life but also forces her to chose a side in a war that, until now, she didn’t even know existed.
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- Title: X-Men: Dark Phoenix
- IMDb: link
Abandoning any further attempts to reconnect with the original timeline in Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Dark Phoenix offers Sony a second chance at the “Dark Phoenix Saga,” so thoroughly botched in X-Men: The Last Stand. Set in the early 1990s where the X-Men have gone from outcasts to national heroes, the film centers around Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner as X-Man Jean Grey struggling to deal with new powers after exposure to a cosmic entity that overwhelms her personality and breaks down walls in her mind meant to hide traumatic events.
Dark Phoenix clears the lowest bar fairly easily, it’s better than X-Men: The Last Stand. Then again, so is a lukewarm Diet Coke. While Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, and James McAvoy are all holdovers from X-Men: First Class, the film primarily focuses on Jean Grey who was only introduced in (the mostly forgettable) X-Men: Apocalypse forcing fans to think back to Famke Janssen‘s performance to have any real connection to the character. It doesn’t help that Jean’s main relationships in the film are with the bland Tye Sheridan as the boyfriend with which she shares no on-screen chemistry or Professor X (McAvoy) in full-on asshole mode for most of the film.
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by Alan Rapp on May 3, 2019
in Comics
Uncanny X-Men #17 is an awkward issue whose moral seems to be nobody ever gets what they want (and mutants, no matter how small the number, are still expendable to serve a larger plot). The comic jumps from the funeral of Wolfsbane to Wolverine and Kwannon who go in search of bloody revenge for another fallen friend. Because of the set-up, Wolfsbane’s funeral is truncated, and because of the funeral Wolverine’s vengeance takes place mostly off-panel.
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by Alan Rapp on April 10, 2019
in Comics
Uncanny X-Men #15 is most notable for a single change to one of the brand’s oldest characters, but we’ll get to that in a second. The comic also features an impromptu pow-wow between Cyclops and Captain America when the Avenger offers his off-the-books help in dealing with the prisoners Scott Summers’ rag-tag band of X-Men has been accumulating. The comic also shows us just what the Dark Beast has been up to while the X-Men have had their focus elsewhere. And… yes, there’s Hope shooting her grandfather in the head (and Logan shish-kabobing the young woman).
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by Alan Rapp on February 27, 2019
in Comics
The X-Men are gone. Long live the X-Men. It doesn’t take Cyclops and Wolverine long to put together the core of a new team as Scott follows Logan’s plan to break into a O.N.E. government facility and extract the mutants being held prisoner and experimented on (including being used to power a new form of Sentinel).
Uncanny X-Men #12 provides some solid action and some humor between the comic’s two lead characters as any grudges between Cyclops and Wolverine appear to have been forgotten (or at least forgiven) given the current state of things. While O.N.E. isn’t presented as much of a threat here, they do provide an enemy to fight and hold friends to be rescued.
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