Motendo/Lifedeath - Part 1

The novelty of the nostalgia starts to wear off in Episode 4, and we're left with one throwaway story for the first half, followed by a lame drama that cuts to "To be continued..." the moment the story picks up. Boo!

The first half is definitely the most pandering episode we've seen so far in terms of lazy virtue signaling, but that's really not the problem. The problem is that it focuses on arguably both the least interesting heroes AND villain, so as soon as they say, "What's a Motendo?" in the first 3 minutes (assuming you've seen the show/comics/video games) you know exactly what's about to happen, and yup, that's exactly what happens. Yay. The inclusion of memberberries for the arcade machine that took the 2nd most amount of my weekly allowance next to Ninja Turtles was nice, but ultimately does-not-an-interesting-story-make. It just made me want to play the arcade game. Also Jubilee is kind of a brat and Sunspot is kind of a loser, which doesn't help anything.

Cut to Storm in a desolate bar re-enacting 'Casa Blanca', followed by the beginning of a plot thread to get her powers back involving Forge, then the villain is introduced in a dramatic fashion, and SMASH CUT TO CREDITS.

I really liked Episode 3 and had high hopes for the rest of this series, but Episode 4 is a harsh reminder that at the end of the day this is a show that was intended to air on Fox Kids. The only thing missing from the Jubilee episode was a PSA telling kids to "Stay in school and just say 'No!' to drugs!" The original series had some banger episodes as well as some real cringeworthy ones, so expecting 'X-Men '97' to knock it out of the park every week may be a bit unrealistic. So far we have 1 miss, 1 hit, and 2 not-bad, which is a not-bad average; and the Storm storyline was really intriguing right before the abrupt ending, so maybe they're saving the fireworks for Episode 5(sorry, Jubilee, that didn't count!).