Partway through this episode, Rogue reaches out and touches Gambit.
Bare hand. No gloves. Nothing between them.
And nothing happens.
Thirty years these two have been circling that. It is the one thing they have never been able to do, in this show, in the original show, in the books, going back before most of you were watching any of it. And this episode just hands it to her.
And it’s the most horrifying moment in the episode. Because the reason nothing happens is that there’s nothing in there to take.
That’s not a love scene. That’s a test result.
I want to come back to what she does about it, because that’s the whole ballgame and it is not what I expected. But first I need to show you the other five times this episode does the exact same thing to somebody.
Six Scenes, One Scene
X-Men ‘97, season 2, episode 8, “The Dead Man’s Hand,” dropped this morning at 3, and I sat there taking notes in real time like I do. And when I got to the end and read them back, I thought I’d written the same note six times by accident.
Start with the one I just showed you. Rogue gets to touch him, and it means he’s gone.
Remy gets pulled out, and Apocalypse stays in. Candra’s relic can make you immortal, and it turns out to be her heart. Bella Donna and the Guild come home because Remy invites them, and then he turns them into things that walk. The Professor gets a brand new Cerebro and he still can’t win a fight inside somebody’s head.
Six different scenes. Six different people. And it took me a second to see that they’re the same scene.
Because every one of them is somebody getting handed the exact thing they wanted, in a shape they can’t use.
And the show tells you that before the title card. Watch the first minute again. The X-Men are sitting around a table playing cards, and somebody lays down the dead man’s hand, and then the door opens and X-Force walks in carrying Apocalypse’s body.
Roll credits. Cute.
But it isn’t just cute, because the dead man’s hand is aces and eights. It’s what Wild Bill Hickok was holding in Deadwood in 1876 when somebody walked up behind him and shot him in the back of the head. And a lot of the detail around that story is saloon legend, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But the part nobody disputes is the part that matters. It’s a good hand. He never got to play it. He was already dead when he was holding it.
And that’s everybody in this episode.
The Touch
So back to Rogue’s hand, because I want to be specific about why that lands the way it does.
Most shows would spend that beat the other way. They’d play it as the tragic almost, the near-miss, the thing these two can never have. That’s the version you’ve seen a hundred times and it works fine.
This show gives them the thing they can never have and uses it to tell you he’s gone. Her power stops being a curse for about four seconds and turns into an instrument, and the reading comes back empty.
I don’t know who in that room came up with that, but it’s the best idea in the episode, and it’s the kind of idea you only get when somebody in the room actually understands what these two characters have been to each other for thirty years. You can’t stumble into that.
Candra, and Who Called Her
And then Candra, who is the engine of this entire episode and who I would bet money most breakdowns today are going to file under “villain of the week.”
She’s an External. She’s immortal, genuinely immortal, and the reason is that her heart isn’t in her chest, it’s in a gemstone. So that relic Remy kills her for is her heart. Which means the object that could make Rogue live forever is a woman’s heart, and he has to murder the woman to hold it. And she’s somebody he has history with, going back to before the X-Men.
I can’t give you an issue number on that last part because I haven’t checked one, so take it as shape rather than citation. But the shape is the whole thing. He’s trying to solve the one problem that kept him and Rogue apart, with a stolen heart, while wearing a man who isn’t him.
And I’m not the one who called that.
Karaoke King’s Kingdom did. Before the 25th, in my comment section. He went and pulled Candra by name, the External who ran both the Thieves Guild and the Assassins Guild in New Orleans, and he didn’t just drop the name, he started working out what she’d want with Remy when he came back.
And he cited it. He pointed at “X-Ternally Yours,” and I went and checked: season 2, episode 6 of the original series, December 4th, 1993. That’s the one where Candra’s running both Guilds, where Bella Donna takes Remy’s brother Bobby to force a marriage. All of it’s in there. He didn’t guess a name off a wiki. He found the exact half hour this show was going to build an episode out of, eleven days before it aired.
So I’m doing something about that. As far as I’m concerned, for this season of X-Men ‘97, Karaoke King’s Kingdom is the king of the know-it-alls. That’s the crown. We’ll figure out what the crown actually is, because I want it to be a real thing and not just me saying nice words on a Wednesday. But the title’s his, and it’s not up for debate.
(There’s a lot more on Candra, on that 1993 episode this whole New Orleans stretch is built out of, and on where the Professor thread goes, in this week’s sidebar video for members. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll join me over there.)
The Cartoon’s Family
Once you’ve got “X-Ternally Yours” in your head, look at who else is standing in New Orleans this week. Bella Donna. Robert LeBeau. Bobby, Remy’s brother. Candra.
That isn’t the comics version of Gambit’s family. That’s the cartoon’s version, out of 1993, and the show went and got all three of them and made them load-bearing.
Which is a different thing from a callback, and I want to be fair to myself here, because I’ve spent weeks on this channel complaining that this show keeps shoving itself back into its original packaging. Last week I said the title was signage, a word flip on a 1994 two-parter that shared a setting and nothing else, and I stand by that.
This week the show reached into the same era and came back with a working structure: three characters and a relationship map, and it built on top of it. Same instinct, and I’ve got no complaint at all about the second one.
He’s Doing It to Them
And that last part is the beat I can’t stop turning over, and I’ll say up front that this one’s me, not the episode. The episode doesn’t connect these two things for you.
Bella Donna and the Guild are in New Orleans because Remy invited them. Bobby too. His own brother. They came because he asked. And then he turns them into these undead things that move when he wants them to move.
The man who never got the question is now the one not asking it.
Which is either Apocalypse driving, and that’s horrible in a fairly clean way. Or it’s Remy, the thief, the gambler, doing what a man from that Guild does: working an angle and telling himself he’s still holding the reins. And I genuinely don’t know which, and I don’t think the episode wants me to know yet, and two weeks out from the finale, that’s the right call.
Who Was Actually Driving
Which brings us to the thing everybody is going to spend today arguing about, so let’s deal with it. Is he back? Is he evil? Did he kill Apocalypse?
He’s back, and he isn’t. And that conversation is two weeks old, because we watched him come back on July 22nd. The question that actually matters this morning is who was driving, and the episode answers it. Apocalypse was inside him the whole time.
And a lot of you had that before I did.
Graywolf50000, six days ago, looked at the title of this episode and read it as a dead man getting a new hand on life, and said he wouldn’t be surprised if Gambit turned out to be a vessel for Apocalypse. TheWhitePhoenix1 landed on the same word. So did ADAM_COLLECTS, who caught something I’d completely forgotten: the original series already did this. Season 1, episode 5. Apocalypse takes Fabian Cortez as a vessel after they fail to get Jubilee. Thirty years ago. Same show. And there were a lot more of you than that.
I’ll be straight about where I sit in it, because I always am. I made the vessel call on camera last Wednesday, and I also said that same day that I didn’t have it, that I’d turned it over and couldn’t make it sit still. Some of you were ahead of me. Some of you landed at the same time from somewhere else entirely.
That’s the channel working the way it’s supposed to work.
Whose Scene It Is
Okay. So Rogue knows he’s not in there, and she goes in after him anyway. And this is the part I said I’d come back to.
I went looking on the craft side of it, and I found something that reorganized the whole episode for me after the fact. Jake Castorena, a supervising producer on this show, was talking to Nerdist about season 2 and about how they staged Magneto’s death, and he said it’s as much about the main character’s death as it is about Xavier watching Magneto die.
That’s a guy telling you how his show builds its biggest moments. The scene belongs to whoever’s watching it.
So look at what this climax actually is. It isn’t Gambit. Gambit’s unconscious cargo for the back half of it. It’s Rogue, watching, and then reaching. And that’s why the touch lands and why the pull lands: the camera and the story are both parked on the person it’s happening to instead of the person it’s happening in.
And then she gets him. She pulls Remy out.
And leaves Apocalypse in.
Now. Eleven days ago, in the Files, I laid out the four men who have been Death. Archangel buys his wings back in X-Factor #24, 1987. Caliban buys strength in Uncanny #294, in ‘92. Logan gets his adamantium back in Wolverine #145, December 1999, and pays for it with his name. And Remy walks in on his own two feet in Blood of Apocalypse, X-Men vol. 2 #182–187, 2006, Peter Milligan writing, Salvador Larroca on art. Four men, thirty-nine years, and every single one of them had a hand on the wheel.
And I said this show did something none of those books did. It didn’t offer Remy a contract. It dug him up. He’s the first one who never got the question. And I said that if this show has any real interest in the story it’s actually telling, somebody was going to have to give him the choice back before the season was out.
Well, they did it this morning. And they did it in the cruelest currency available, because he’s awake, and he’s himself, and the thing that took him is still sitting inside his chest.
Castorena said something else in that same conversation I keep chewing on: they’re not afraid to let things breathe, not afraid of silence, because whatever you slow down is what buys you the fast stuff later. And that’s exactly the standard a second-to-last episode lives or dies on. Does it turn setup into dread, or does it just run plot to get to the finale?
This one converts, and it converts the whole way through, and that’s rarer than it sounds.
Directed by Chase Conley and Emmett Yonemura; written by Brian Ford Sullivan, JB Ballard, Beau DeMayo and Anthony Sellitti. And yes, that’s DeMayo’s name on another one, and I’ve said what I’ve got to say about that name and I’m not re-litigating it every week.
Nightcrawler
While I’m handing out credit: Nightcrawler.
Kurt’s a problem in this episode. A genuine, terrifying problem, and he’s on our side. And I think last week was partly built to set this up. We spent twelve minutes watching him argue over a man’s soul in a courtroom, and then this week he goes through the Assassins Guild like weather. And that reads as one thing across two episodes instead of a guy being unusually good at fighting on a Wednesday. Kurt’s a scary man when he isn’t being merciful, and the show earned that by showing you the mercy first.
The Professor
The Professor, though. And this isn’t really a complaint, it’s a thread I want somebody to pull.
I said this out loud while I was watching, so I’ll say it here: does anybody actually think Charles Xavier is any good at fighting in the mindscape? Because I don’t. He’s got a brand new Cerebro this week, and the helmet’s got a look to it a lot of you are going to clock immediately from the more recent books, and I’m not putting a date on that because I haven’t checked one. Bigger rig, bigger reach. And he goes into Gambit’s head and gets shoved straight back out, and there’s this purple smoke rolling out of the machine, and I’ll be honest with you, I fully expected that to be the moment something got into him.
And it wasn’t. Not this week. But that’s twice in three episodes now that this show has put Charles inside somebody’s head and had him come out worse than he went in. Last week he’s standing there conceding that the machine in his basement was right about the world, with En Sabah Nur’s face floating over his shoulder. This week he can’t hold his ground in a mind he’s supposedly the most powerful practitioner alive in.
Something’s happening to the Professor across this season, and the show keeps showing it to us in the middle of scenes about other people, and I don’t think that’s an accident.
That’s as far as I’m taking it. I’m not going past what aired.
Honest Edges
Couple of small things and then I’m done poking at it.
They get jumped in the air on the way to New Orleans, and the Guild comes at them on flying motorcycles. And I went looking for where that comes from, because I assumed I’d missed a reference, and I couldn’t find one. Not in X-Force, not in the Guild material. Far as I can tell that’s original to the show, and it looks like a biker gang out of a completely different comic. I’m not mad at it. I laughed out loud. But it’s the kind of choice that makes me want to know who pitched it and what problem it was solving.
And Scott and Jean finally get to sit down with Nathan, now that they know, and it plays as a betrayal, and it’s a good scene stuck in an extremely full episode. I wanted another ninety seconds of it. That’s the entire complaint. I wanted more of a good thing.
Oh, and there’s no post-credits scene on this one. Don’t sit there waiting. I did.
The Shape of It
Which puts the whole thing in front of you.
Two episodes ago this show took a man’s death and turned it into a resurrection nobody asked for. Last week it put a burned card next to a body and let you assume the wrong thing on purpose. And this week it gives everything back. Rogue gets the touch. Remy gets his body. Candra’s heart ends up in the hands of the one person who could use it.
And not one of those hands can be played, because the game was already over when they got dealt.
Which is exactly why I keep saying the unit here is craft and not franchise. I cover Strange New Worlds tomorrow, a completely different show doing a completely different thing, and the question I’m going to ask it is the same question I asked this one. What did that choice cost, and did anybody in the room notice?
The Verdict
Here’s where I landed. And I want to be careful with the word I used when I finished watching, because I said this was the most consistent thing we’ve gotten, and consistent’s a weak word if you don’t say consistent with what.
Here’s what I meant. This is the first episode this season where what the show’s about and what the show’s doing are the same thing the whole way through. Last week was exceptional for twelve minutes and paid franchise tax on both ends of it. This one hasn’t got a twelve-minute island. It’s got one idea, it says that idea out loud with a card game before the title card, and it pays it off with a woman pulling half a man out of himself. The touch is the best single idea this show has ever had. Nightcrawler’s a two-episode setup landing right on schedule. Candra’s a deep cut used as an engine instead of an Easter egg. And the only thing I actually wanted was another ninety seconds with Scott and Jean and their son.
This episode does everything right and very little wrong, and that puts episode 8 at a 9.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Rogue got the one thing she was never allowed to have, and all it told her was that he was gone. That’s this whole episode. Everybody at that table was holding a winner, and every one of them was already dead.
Your turn, and I want a real answer on this one, because I’ve argued myself in a circle twice already: when Rogue pulls him out and leaves Apocalypse in there, is that a rescue, or is that a hostage situation with better lighting? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.