“X-Calibre”
Review
At the start of this episode it seemed that we were in store for another “getting the band back together” type episode with Wolverine going to get Nightcrawler. Though there was elements of that this episode mainly focused on Nightcrawler and part of his origin as well as him fighting off to help out some mutants from being captured by Mojo’s Reavers. And this episode was better for it.
While the “getting the band back together” episodes we have gotten so far haven’t been horrible it is a formula that gets old fast. And I am glad the writers had the whole episode focus on Nightcrawler since he is one of my favorite X-Men and has been vastly underused for the past few years. The animators really seem to have a lot of fun using Nightcrawler’s teleportation powers as we seem him able to take on all the Reaver’s by himself. It seems that they were inspired a little by the X-2 opening scene with Nightcrawler and it was cool seeing him use a sword during his dual against Spiral.
And from the looks of it we are not done with Mojo since this was probably just an introduction to the character. Hopefully we will see the Mojoverse the next time he appears since it is a nice plotpoint to ensure not every episode will be about Xavier giving the X-Men missions to divert the future he is in.
Even though I enjoyed this episode I was a bit disappointed that Kitty wasn’t more involved in this episode. From the episode title I was kind of expecting that Kitty would play a much larger role than she did. Plus other than Wolverine none of the members of the X-Men team have actually had any large screen time. Hopefully we will see more of the X-Men play a larger role in the show instead of having only Wolverine take the spotlight of every episode.
Overall though this was a very good episode that focused on Nightcrawler were we got to see him cut loose with his powers. Even though he is not a part of the team I hope that we see Nighcrawler in future episodes and also see what happens when Mojo finally gets his hands on some of the X-Men.
Episode Rating – 9/10