#hell charlie and david are from two diffrent families entirely ?????????????

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i heart blocking almost every fnaf blog i see lalalaaalalala i love circulating my expirience lalalalalalalalalaaaaa

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Jake Reviewcaps Stuff: X-Men Evolution: The X-Impulse

Two of the series most popular characters, and one of its’ more popular ships: Jean and Xavier try to lead kitty away from charming asshole Avalanche whose trying to use her for crimes, but have trouble due to having taken stupid pills before this episode. Meanwhile Kurt and Scotty follow Logan as he confronts Sabertooth for the first time and gets cars thrown at him. No really. Abusive Romance, Flying Cars, and probable Gilmore Girls refrences under the cut. 

So yeah i’m doing another one already. This pace MIGHT slow eventually, as I want to get through the show faster.. but this episode gave me a ton of material to work with so I wanted to strike while the iron was hot. So as I mentioned last time the show started with slowly shoveling characters in one at a time, giving each time for focus and to breathe a bit. So with Nightcrawler and Toad out of the way it’s time for Shadowcat and Avalanche.. who happen to be one of the biggest ships for this show.. and also one some don’t like. Me, i’ll form an opinon as I go as I don’t remmeber much of them together other than him trying to join the x-men in one episode, so we’ll see. For now it’s time for some X-Impulse. Wait isn’t impulse dc? Is there a marvel character named that too? 

Yup there is! Two in fact, but somehow one is x-men related. This is impulse a member of the Shiar imperial guard I entirely forgot about because there’s like 40 or 50 diffrent members and he’s not one of hte more promeinet ones. For those who’ve never heard of these guys there the elite superpowered muscle for the Shiar Empire, an intergalactic empire whose former empress Charles Xavier dated for a while after dethroning her brother and who serve either as allies to our heroes or people for them to beat up depending on if someone sane is in charge that day or not, and who often have members killed to show off some new baddy, hence why there’s been three impulses apparently.

 Their based on the less military, more heroic and more fleshed out if still hugely sized,  legion of superheros from dc, which Guard co-creator David Cockrum was one of the  most famous artists for and originally actually CREATED Nightcrawler as a legionnaire, but he was rejected for being too demonic and thankfully recycled into the rougish religious elf we know today. The Guard were as far as I can tell made as a wink and a nod toward that and a gentle jab at the competition and is far from the first or last time either side would make characters based on the other side. I also bring up the Shiar because despite being a sizeable part of the X-Men mythos in the comics.. they’ve BARELY been used outside them. Cartoon wise only the 90′s series used them, though to be fair....

Given Evolution had both hinted at exterterstials apparently, and was planning on doing the Phoenix Saga in season 5, so they MIGHT have used them eventually, but I somehow doubt it and WOlverine and the X-Men didn’t live long enoguh to even consider it. As for the movies they were considered too ungrounded for them and thus were basically exiled from appearing on film for 20 years. Now the Shi’ar aren’t perfect characters, the fact before he took the throne himself Gladiator would just obey whatever assshole took the reigns due to some misguided loyalty didn’t help, but they could be used intrestingly and the guard are at least intresting in a fight, so it is a shame they couldn’t be used till recently and hopefully with the fox merger the mcu will put them to use at some point. Also for those curious if they showed up in any other cartoons.. nope. According to wikipedia, their mentioned in Avengers; Earth’s Mighteist Heroes (Which will also be covered here some day) and Legion (probably too though also probably not episode by episode if I do), and show up in two of the video games, with Ultimate Alliance being the biggest role outside of the 90′s cartoon from the looks of it, having the well, alliance, head to shiar space to get the mkrann crystal and battle with the guard and deathbird. Anyway, i’ve spent enough time on this weird sidebar, let’s get on with the actual episode!  We open with a pretty good scene. We meet Kitty Pryde, your average teen whose having a weird flying nightmare.. emphasis on weird as it is a bit wonky, but the idea is fine enough.. as is the result where she finds herself having fallen to the basement and FELT it, her panicked parents coming down and Kitty only being able to sob about having fell, her mom putting it off to sleepwalking.. until her dad notices her pillow and blanket fused into the celing above, which only makes the poor girl more upset. It’s a good, tense scene and a reminder that wether your mutant powers are benign or not.. having them awaken can still be traumatic as hell, and uses this world NOT having them be a public concern well: Kitty has NO IDEA what’s happening to her, no one to turn to and is understandabily terrified. For all she knows her body is breaking down and she might not be tangible again, not an unresonable fear given her comics counterpart once ended up in that very situation due to taking some heavy damage in battle from an energy charged harpoon.. from a guy named harpoon because even Claremont had an off day with names sometimes. My point is it’s a very good scene. Naturally Charles notices from cerebro.. and with a weird computer thing that somehow fully researchs who she is because tha’ts not creepy, but It is somewhat understandable. Cue the credits.  We then get a REALLY pointless throwaway scene with Kurt, now having’ been at school for long enough to be late several times apparently, late again and running into Mystique, in her guise as principal before Scott thankfully rescues him. Why Mystique is confronting her son like this I dunno, but what I really don’t is why this scene is here at all. It could’ve easily been replaced with a throaway line about Charles only wanting to have one student miss midterms or not wanting to arouse too much suspcion with the facultiy by taking too many of the kids out of school. Instead we just get this scene to establish their home. And yes they could’ve just needed to fill out the episode.. but there’s plenty of ways, that i’ll mention later, this minute of screentime could’ve been used better and we really didn’t need a whole scene of them to set up that they’d be home for their subplot this episode.  Back in scene’s that actually matter, Kitty is trying to sneak off to school but her mom stops her, with her family apparently having agreed to keep her home but Kitty just wants some normalcy and her family won’t even talk about it, so her mom relucntantly agrees. I can’t blame Kitty: even if it’s a terrible idea to go to school while she has no idea what’s happening to her and can’t control it as far as she knows.. she’s also a scared kid whose body is changing in ways she can’t fully grasp, and unlike puberty, which mutation is a mild metaphor for, there’s no deep years of study on it or how it changes a body: she has no idea what’s going on and just wants to grasp onto SOMETHING normal while she’s clearly not. It’s some well done character stuff.  Meanwhile  Jean and Chuck are on their way to what i’m assuming is that same old place, sweet home Chicago since that’s where Kitty is from in the comics and they had to fly there anyway. Jean questions why her.. out of the three junior x-men so far she’s the least intresting. Charles explains he thinks she can reach Kitty which.. makes some sense. Jean is uber popular at school, easy to get along with and endlessly nice, so she’s a good choice. Another likely part of it, and why not scott, is scott’s powers: it’s a lot easier to sell her parents on powers doing good with someone who can lift objects versus someone whose constantly cursed to never open his eyes, and this way kurt has his buddy back home so he dosen’t feel lonely his first time without his new dad. Now granted I question why STORM didn’t come with them, as she seems like a good choice and it’d be a nice nod to her bond with kitty in the comics, but I suspect it was simply easier to just have two x-men to focus on. Maybe she was busy getting Evan for two episodes down the line...

So then we get.. Charles being really, REALLY dumb.. like out of character dumb. See in the comics when the X-Men came to recurit kitty, they all came in civlian clothes, though ironically Jean wasn’t with them for the initial meeting because even more ironically she, Scott and Kurt were split off into their own group to try and recruit Dazzler, and Charles was nice and polite about it and promoted the school as well. a school. Granted Kitty’s parents didn’t know about her phasing here and Emma Frost was also trying to recurit kitty for HER school for gifted youngsters.. but still, there’s NO reason for Charles not to use that sort of pitch to get into the door, especially since as we learn in the scene after this Kitty’s a straight A student, retaining her deep intelgence from the comics, so there’s an easy foot in the door before he drops the mutant part in. Instead he just casually mentions he tracked her that he’s diffrent and comes off really fucking creepy and naturally they say fuck no to that. LIke.. how do they know he’s not with the goverment or forming a teen militia or just a pedophile who happens to be a mutant.. they do not and their already scared. So chuck gets a well earned door to the face. And thus I get to introduce a new running gag: The Chuck, you Blockhead, Count,. Now granted the obvious name may be the xavier is a jerk count, which i’ll probably also do but that’s more for being an asshole, like he often is due to poor writing or currently pragmatisim in the comic. No no this is for when Chuck is just out an out an idiot. Plus I love a good Charlie Brown refence so Chuck,  You Blockhead Count: 2 It’s at 2 since we also have last episode where Toad showed up with his own uniform, and attacked kurt.. and Charles did nothing and questioned nothing about that. And now I mentioned that other count Xavier is Jerk Count: 1 The Scott thing is more in character but for having his test be.. have a grown woman chase a teenager with Lightning. Storm was involved too but I doubt she’ll be an asshole as much so she’s safe for now. So having throughly botched it Xavier decides to have them split up, gang: Xavier will go to social services to find out more about lance since he’s an orphan, while Jean will infiltrate the school. Now while watching this I questioned why no one in school at all questioned a random teenager they never met roaming the halls.. but odds are jean just used her telepathy to either make anyone who saw her think she belonged there or masked her self from them seeing her, the latter being a signiture move of both jean and her teen self brought to the present because complicated bollocks, so fair enough. I also thought charles was just fucking off but accoridng to the wiki he was at social services, so he avoids another count and was doing something useful, checking on lance before he tries to offer him a spot: both to make sure he’s a good fit after last week’s debacle and figure out the best course to legaly take the boy in if so, and if not knowing charles still find the kid a home anyway because even if he’s not x-man yet, he’s still a child in need asshole or not and Charles is a good man. Such a good man he had to be told 9 timelines ended in utter disaster and ruin for mutantkind for him to even humor breaking from his dream according to recent comics, and according to Moira’s notes STILL took a good 15 years in universe of attempted genoicdes , 1 actual genocide and his people being reduced to a nub to finally cave and even THEN he admits he still loves humanity and wants them to be better. While I did put up an xavier is a jerk count just now at his best Charles Xavier is a good if flawed man who, while prone to ocasionally making utterly terrible decisions, loves both humans and mutants and just wants peace in our time and only created the x-men to foster it.  Meanwhile back at the ranch her mansion, Logan.. senses sabertooth.. I mean even with Logan’s adept sense of smell, I question how he could smell him over the exaust of Sabertooth’s goofy metalic penis, aka his own motorcycle, but it IS part of his mutant powers. Either that or they just have a magic force bond like Rey and Kylo Ren in the sequel trilogy.. minus the sexual tension and forced face turn for the latter.. maybe just minus the forced face turn. So Logan prepares to go fight his rival, and suits up for the first time. and while it’s in a black void for.. some reason it looks REALLY badass and really gives gravatas to seeing wolverine in costume for the first time. And since he’s one of ONLY two looks to look at this episode, since Kitty and Lance don’t get their uniforms this episode, let’s talk about it. 

I fucking love it. Like Kurt’s it’s basically his comic’s costume but slightly modified.. but unlike Kurt it’s a diffrent costume than last time, going with his cool brown look that he wore for quite some time in the comics, though made a bit more orange. However it honestly STILL looks fantastic and I get wanting to go with a color that’s a bit more eyepopping in the more muted tones of Evolution. It just looks fantastic and i’ts nice to see a cartoon use an alternate costume for a character as their main look.   Logan passes a returning from school Scott and Kurt, who decide to follow him and after debating which car, Scott gestures them to his.. which is scott’s sports car from bot the previous series and the comics. Why a 17 year old has this, I can only assume because Chuck is a really good dad, really rich.. and likely knows having a bunch of teenagers around means if one of them DOSEN’T have hteir own car they’ll be borrowing his rolls royce all the time and this way he can have his nights after training free to smoke a blunt with logan while they watch the next generation and eat a pile of cheeseburgers the children dropped off while crusing around out of his lack of hair, you know why you give your teenager a car in the first place. 

Anyways while Kurt and Scott buddy up and go on an excellent adventure, with Kurt even bamfing inside and god I love this dynamic. So fucking adorable. But anyways while that’s going on, Kitty is at school being mocked by two alpha bitches for being sad despite her grades then is shoved in a locker. When then meet Lance, soon to be known as avalanche and the other mutant at school who decides to graffito tag the place.. in the laziest but somehow still coolest way possible by just taking his spray can and spraing one long streak along the lockers. Not as neat as doing an actual tag but it does more petty dumbfuckery faster so fair play to him.  Kitty begs him to let her out.. before her powers trigger again. She tries denying it when he comments on them being cool.. before he shows off his own, making the earth move under his feet, though not the sky tumbling down a tumbling down.. that’s Storm’s job. It shakes the lockers and Kitty rather than be impressed, runs like hell. But yeah, I get the feeling, even with him having evil plans for her right after.. that he does feel some attraction to her here. And as I made clear i’ts not shipping goggles.. the way he acts.. he’s elated to meet someone else with powers, to after likely being pinballed around foster care and treated like shit by his piers over it and then finding out he has a special power but is still seen as a weirdo even by his minons.. he’s elated. It’s what draws him to her: that for once he’s NOT alone, and there’s someone else to revel in the sheer power and joy he feels using his powers and even though she runs he vows he’s gonan rock her world.  Since we’re where a commerical break would be, I figure now’s a good time to talk about Lance. In the comics he had a diffrent name entirely, and avalanche was more of a one note villian who later became a retired bar owner. Here he takes bits, the long metal hair and love of his powers, from Rictor, a more heroic mutant in the comics who only started out doing crimes because he was forced to and quickly joined the original x-men’s class of mutants the x-terminators before joining the new mutants and later x-force. He’s also , as you probably know, one fo the x-men’s most prominent gay mutants, but while hinted at in comics made before this series was fully canonized years after, and like iceman who came out even later, there was no way of knowing that at the time, so it made since to use him as partial template here. It also makes sense not to use the rictor name as while it makes more sense given the earthquake motif, Avalanche is an actual villian.. and you know the obvious fact that Lance is white and Julio Richter.. is not.  Granted they COULD’VE made him latino, and used sunspot for spike to ballnce it out representation wise, but this was the early 2000′s and they cared about as much for repesentation as Jeph Loeb does. Hopefully Rictor gets an adpatation at some point outside of Logan, but I get why not here. 

On with the show. Kitty shows up late for track due to thing one and thing two, and has to run first and trips, while on the nearbye rooftops Lance and his two goons try to break into the administration building to get test answers. They don’t as Lance notices an alarm, and while one of his goons asks why he dosen’t just quake a hole in, Lance points out the obvious: If there’s obvious tampering they’ll just change the test answers.. and since he knows about kitty now, he has a better way and when questioned rather than explain her powers, he just shakes rattles and rolls. He also makes one of Kitty’s bullies trip but it only scares her further. I”m getting. serious heathers vibes here jesus.. I mean Lance isn’t nearly as bad as Jason Dean but still jesus. I need to listen to more of that musical good stuff. 

Kitty retreats from her admierer/stalker to teh autitorim, where Jean finds her.. given Jean again slipped in here without no o ne noticing and no one came after kitty , i’m thinking she use her telepathy to mask anyone from seeing Kitty come in and seeing Jean at all so she could talk in private. Granted Lance shows up right after, but odds are Jean didn’t notice him and thus didn’t think to shield him and probably isn’t up to Charles level where he can create a psychic blindspot in an entire crowd. Anyways Jean tries to comfort kitty who’s still angsting about her powers and again hard to blame her when the only other mutant she’s met is a budding psychopath whose idea of a romantic gesture is injuring one of her enmiies for her. Jean does try to calm her down, first showing she’s a mutant and admitting she was freaked out too when she got her powers.. and given most depcitions of jean getting her powers are far from plesant that tracks. She does however make the mistake of telling Kitty, already figuring this is some sort of trick and jean will throw a puppy across the room to also try and get in her pants or something, that she’s a telepath and Kitty screams at her to get out of her head. Jean truly is taking after her mentor in thef ucking up department. Lance then shows up as I mentioned earlier, and tells Jean to backoff and that’ she’s mine and you get it. Oh and as a side note Jean DOES admit to having read Kitty’s mind so she CAN read minds, and likely has gotten a surface level look of duncan’s thoughts which I feel go a little something like this mnus the actual context of when the song’s going on. 

Lance then finds kitty, whose changed into her regular outift and promises not to use his powers this time, admitting he too felt lost and scared, and wants to help her take control and help her.. and while it is partly for his own petty scheme.. I do genuinely think he means part of that, that he does genuinely wnat her and want someone like him by his side.. it’s just in his warped head doing crime and whatever he wants is the right thing to do, that control means using this power to knock down whoever’s in your way and TAKE what you deserve. 

Jean instead phones xavier and both agree that if lance fully gets his hooks in her they might never reach her and Xavier tells him to stay on her and that she can overcome lance as an obstacle.. and then bemoans that some obastacles are more annoying than others as the social services building has a large stone staircas,e a nice quip and they beat the ulitmate universe to that joke by a few years. 

Meanwhile our two best buds track Wolvie to a car park because fuck if I know why he decided to make his stand there. Probably because the writers had a cool action scene in mind as we’ll see, but it still comes off dumb though given how every other x-man has been acting this episode it tracks. Anyway Sabertooth strolls up on his demonic wang-shang-a-lang, 

Seriously I mocked it before but it bears repeating. While Wolvie has a normal looking, if still badass, bike Sabertooth’s.. looks like something Skeltor would ride after he man. It Looks like warlock is horribly stucki n the form of a motorcycle. It looks like the kind of bike on some random asshole the bikers from sons of anarchy would beat up forposing. It looks like he stole it from the biker mice from mars. It looks like the polution from it’s exaust alone is the reason big bird die. it looks like Creed just brought it off the joker and remonded it. It looks like something the battletoads bought and regretted. It looks like ghost rider’s first trike. it looks like Tooth lost his dick in a horrible acciden tand is compensating with theree metalic ones. It looks like something the BAND creed sold to victor creed here. It looks.. bad is what i’m saying.  As for his actual outfit.. it’s okay,b asically his movie outfit with osme of the skin missing. That look isn’t my faviorite of his but it works to sell him as a savage monster and fits good with the more tactical less comic booky looks of this shows costumes. 

Creed, the man not the band though  he does look like the lead singer of creed, charges at Logan who simply pops his wheel while tooth falls off the roof.. and then the most rediculous and awesome part of the episode starts.... right after Scott’s car gets hit with the bike because what else did he think was going to happen when the fighting started.  Sabertooth , who apparently has really good super strength in this universe, starts CHUCKING CARS UP THROUGH THE ROOF OF THE CAR PARK UP AT LOGAN. Points to the team while the setting for this fight is nonseical, it is WORTH IT for this, with great action as Logan dodges the cars bursting through the roof. it’s rediclous, over the top.. and UTTERLY spectacular and not just in a so bad it’s good way. Logan eventually slips through a car hole, a sentence i’d never thought i’d say mostly becasue that’s the moe syslack approved term for garages but it works well here too, and into the garage before sabertooth RAMS him with a car, ranting about it’s their “destiny” only one is left. Which seems like some weird “applying highlander logic to former goverment weapon mutants’ bollocks, but instead is foreshadowing for the end of the season. Nice touch. Scott and Kurt arrive, in uniform since even if he’s a bit more personably here, Scott still is no dummy, and they sucessfully save Logan, whose pissy about it because it was his buisness and all, but Kurt thinks he secretly loves them and Scott sarcastically agrees. Not a bad subplot and it makes up for a weird choice of battleground on logan’s cart iwth utter insanity. Fun stuff.  Back at not so fun stuff, Kitty finds lance outside the office and takes him up on his offer, and he admits they ARE outsiders, there is something wrong with them.. but instead of moping about it, they can do something about it and revel in it. It really ties into Lance as a character: He’s probably felt, due to being an oprhan and not having a stable home life likely buffeted around foster care and acting out as a result, that he really is an outsider and his powers not only proved it.. but finally gave him POWER over all the people that cast him out. The power to take what he wanted and return what he got. The power to move you. He finally had power and he was going to make them pay for making him feel like he had none and wants Kitty to join him. And for a moment it works, kitty joyfully breaking in with him and actually enjoying her powers for the first time. Meanwhile kitty’s parents showed up, Jean having called them and somehow got them to listen.. and this is what I meant by that one minute earlier. We COULD have built up Kitty’s parents guilt and fear by having Charles approach them again.. and with them panicked over her not returning from school, have him explain what happened and help her father see how wrong he’d been to hide from it or had her argue with her dad then storm out. Instead they just show up here for the first time in almost 20 minutes so we could get a filler scene of kurt being late. 

Anyways inside Lance steals the answers and Kitty is horrified to find out that “Gasp” the juvinele delinquent who hurt someone to impress her is doing BAD THINGS. Lance tries to change her grades but she refuses.. and then Jean and the Prydes show up, with Kitty’s dad admitting he was wrong, he shouldn’t of hid fro her power and shoudl’ve been a better parent.. better than her comics dad who got in bed with gangsters i’ll give him that. But Lance not wanting to loose his new sorta girlfriend knocks a bookcase on kitty and abusively tries to drag her with him.. while jean says if you go with him now, her powers will be a curse like she thought earlier... even though Kitty’s pretty terrified of lance right now and dosen’t actually want to go with him.  it comes off like this bit from final space played entirely seriously

So yeah apparently I need this too...: God Dammit Jean Count: 3 The other two are for the telepath thing earlier and the duncan thing last episode. And given the duncan thing is going to be going on till season 3 yeah i’ll need this. I’ll probably also need a WHAT DOES SHE SEE HIM HIM COUNT, but i’m playing that one by ear. But yeah kitty does the obvious and breaks it off and phases out and Lance takes it well.. by trying to destory the entire school.. my god this really is heathers! Did .. did lance kill some popular kids before this? I have questions. Jean struggles to hold things up and worries about kitty, who falls under some ruble but charles assures her to focus: She can do this.. and as we seen Chuck likely sensed kitty who phases out and reuintes with her parents before rescuing them all. Kitty realizes her powers are a gift after all and says the x-men have her best intrest and heart and Charles finally decides to have an actual discussion with the prydes which had he had one might’ve helped this episode go faster.  We then end on Lance, angry and hurt starring into the distance, when Mistque approaches in her principal disguise, saying there may be an opening for her and transforms ending with a great line “I have much to teach you, my avalanche”. Which ihs a better code name than Rictor when put like that credit where it’s do. And we’re out. Final Thoughts:  This one was a bit of a step down as you could tell: The main core of Lance and Kitty IS really strong, being a good way to breifly touch on toxic relationships. If this gets better in season 2 I have no idea but it’s a compelling dynamic here, with Kitty being terrified of her power while Lance loves his and both are what prop this episode up alongside the fun car park fight and great dynamic with Kurt and Scott. HOwever what drags the episode down is EVERYONE but Kitty and Lance, who act in character, and Scott and Kurt, who had no idea logan was going into combat and were just curious what their cool teacher was up to acts like a fucking moron: Logan, rather than pick a fighting ground where he has an advantage chooses one where sabertooth can easily use stealth and gives him an opening too as well as a garage full of weapons that nearly ends him, Xavier decides just randomly revealing he knows where they live wiill impress scared parents, Jean decides telling someone she’s in their head is a great idea, Kitty’s parents think not talking about the thing tht just happened will make it disappear, which is at least realistic if nothing else, and Sabertooth thought that was a valid choice for a motorcycle. The climax is good but feels unearned and overall this episode could've neen fantstic but is bogged down by bits of stupid, but is still enjoyable thanks to it’s emotional core. Next time, whenever that is, another popular charcter arrives as we go Rogue. Until then, follow for more reviews, like this if you enjoyed it, send asks iwth suggestions for more shows and episodes to cover and until then, stay safe and stay mutant and proud.