Our episode begins with a guy walking through a desert. He eventually collapses. Some other guy shows up on camel-back to help. But when he gives the fallen man some water, the guy's eyes open to reveal that they're black, never a good sign. Then he touches the new guy's face, and the blackness is transfered to him. The first guy collapses, and the new guy, now with black eyes, rides off.
Cut the title sequence. Nice teaser.
The episode picks up with Logan in bed, and Charles whispering to him. He wakes up and heads down to see Xavier. Then Charles yanks Logan's mind into the astral plane. Why he didn't stick with the Big, Giant Head-o-vision, I don't know.
Anyway, Charles shows Logan a picture of a devastated Africa, caused in Logan's time by Storm. Logan's skeptical, but Charles says that Storm died while destroying the continent. Then, Charles detects that Emma's eavesdropping. Though why this bothers him is not explained, since Logan's just going to tell everyone in the morning.
Logan asks how she entered the room, and Emma has to remind him that she's a telepath. That's enough for Logan to throw her out of the room and tell her to leave the mansion.
Cut to Logan and Hank, who's investigating climate abnormalities in Africa. According to him, everything there is fine. So Hank points out that they need to find Storm. Which means Cerebro. Which means the lady he just threw out.
Cut to Logan dragging Emma into the Cerebro room. Emma decides that she's tired of being treated as a component in Cerebro and starts demanding some respect. Well, maybe if you stayed out of people's minds... Anyway, Logan disagrees, saying that she has to earn her place on the team, just like everyone else. She says that he at least trusts them. Well, maybe if you stayed out of people's minds... Logan says that she hasn't earned it, so she starts to leave. Logan gives in, agreeing to trust her, so she activates Cerebro and begins the scan.
They eventually find an image of Storm wearing tribal gear.
Cut to Storm filling a dam with rainwater. After finishing that, her surprisingly light-skinned adjutant tells her that she needs to water some crops, then attend a celebration to further honor her for her efforts.
Well, enough of that; cut to Kitty knocking on Scott's door to tell him that they're going to help Storm. Scott's just sitting on his bed, ignoring this. Bobby walks by and informs us that Logan told her not to bother with Scott, but she had hoped that some of the old Scott would have come back by now.
Cut to the hanger, where Forge has apparently been polishing the Blackbird. Yeah, that polish will last what, five, maybe six seconds when they break the speed of sound. Anyway, he starts objecting when everyone comes in to actually use it for something of value. They wisely ignore him as he tells them how he hopes they're just taking it for a test run. And it's been a while since I had the opportunity to say this: Komedy!
Logan enters to let Forge know they're going to Africa. Then, he bears is claws and scratches the plane, saying, "The first scratch is always the most painful. So now you can relax."
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Scott enters, and no words pass between Logan and Scott as he boards the plane.
Cut back to what I can assume is somewhere in Africa. The guy who caught the black eye thing transfers it to someone else, where we see it jump from person to person for a while. Eventually, we see the last person who got it find his way to Storm's village, where some surprisingly light-skinned people are giving her stuff. The black energy is transfered through the various people in line until the last one touches Storm and she gets it.
We see Storm pulled into a place where a voice speaks to her, saying that he's glad to meet her again. The darkness forms itself into a creature and claims that he is her master.
Back in the real world, Storm stumbles around a bit, and her adjutant tells everyone to leave. Back in her mind, she asks who he is, and he shows her. Apparently, when she was young, she worked for him as a thief. We see her pouring her latest findings onto a table, but as she leaves, he asks her where the rest is. She says that she didn't have time to get more. Then she says that she has a friend.
He tries to play on her confidence issues, saying that nobody would care about her, but apparently her friend does. The man demands to know who it is, but she won't tell him. So he reaches a dark energy claw into her mind and pries it out of her. It's Charles Xavier. No, really, Charles is right there in the door. We find out that his name was Farook. The two then have a telepathic duel. We don't see the outcome, but it's not hard to guess.
Back in her mind, Storm says that he was destroyed. Apparently, only his body was, because Charles Xavier is well known for killing people. His mind survived, becoming a "Shadow King." He then tells her that he will destroy "her precious Africa". Because Africa is just one big country, right?
And then we see the village start to spontaneously catch fire. Except... the village isn't on fire; that's just what Storm sees. So she starts to summon rain, while Farook laughs and taunts her.
Cut to Hank watching a massive hurricane appear over Africa. Um, writers, Africa is not that small. The X-Men fly through the cloud cover.
Cut back to "Africa," where the nearby damn has burst and water floods the village. As Storm sees the Blackbird approach, Farook turns it into a fireball. So naturally Storm sends a tornado after it. Fortunately, it crashes into the dam's reservoir. We see everyone unconscious as the ship sinks.
But this is just a pre-commercial cliffhanger, as next we see Cyclops's eye beams blast a hold to get some of them out, and Kitty pulls the rest free. Bobby builds them an ice bridge and they head towards Storm.
Farook shows her that her powers don't seem to be working at all, everything's still on fire, so she tries harder. Apparently, this involves... shards of ice. Not hail; actual pointy shards of ice. Because that will help stop fire in some way.
In any case, we see how the X-Men deal with the dagger ice, starting with Logan and Scott selectively attacking fragments that come near them. And yes, watching Wolverine claw at flying daggers of ice is just as stupid as it sounds. Bobby gets knocked down by the roof of a house, and Kitty is sidelined while attempting to rescue him by a random piece of ice. Hank is sidelined by protecting them while the rest go on.
Well, they accomplished much.
Logan tells Emma to stay behind him and Scott, since they can blast/cut ice falling from the sky. Emma simply turns into living crystal and walks past them. Irritated, Logan asks why she never mentioned she could do that before, but Emma just exposites that she can't do her telepathy while in diamond mode.
When they reach Storm (by which I mean get a bit closer than they were before), Emma suggests Scott shoot her. Logan instead wants Scott to shoot him, thus using him as a projectile aimed at her. I'm impressed writers; you wrote Colossus out of the show, and you still found a way to get a Fastball Special. This works and Logan pulls her down safely. Somehow.
Emma enters Storm's mind, seeing the flames that she sees. She tries to reason with Storm's mind, but Farook mind-slaps her away. After reporting what's happened to Logan, she tries again, but Farook knocks her away, which seems to have some physical component to it. Anyway, this has all somehow made Storm realize what's happening.
After a moment, Storm's eyes go from all-black to her normal blue. And after she sees the flooded ruin of her village, they turn white and she turns off the rain. But Farook isn't done yet; he tries to body-surf into Logan, but Emma cuts him off by mind-tackling him.
The two fight as disembodied spirits for a bit. However, Farook's power outside of a body starts to wane, so he looks for a new body. Given the ability to create any weapon imaginable to stop him, Emma's first thought is a whip. Of course it is.
The pair fight again, but this is all just a delaying tactic, as Farook starts shriveling again. And while he looks for a body, Emma takes the opportunity to cut his head and upper body in half. He disintegrates.
After Emma finds her way back to her own body, she and Logan exchange smiles. So now he trusts her.
Cut to the mansion, where Storm is looking at Xavier's body. She has exposition that lets us know that she's been informed about the whole time-traveling messages thing. And she decides to stay, calling them her family.
Remarks
This was not a good episode; overall, it is poorly constructed. Let's look beyond the general silliness (Africa as a country, the light-skinned Africans, etc) and examine the real meat of the episode. Such that it is.
First, this is not a Storm episode. Oh, the plot is build around Storm. But she's nothing more than the force of nature to be fought, the object to be rescued, the distressed damsel. Even her backstory is half-assed. We get exactly one scene of her interactions with Farook before Xavier steps in and deals with him. In her backstory, just as in the main story, she is nothing more than the victim. She doesn't even have a personality; her dialog is minimal and reveals very little beyond that she's nice.
Just look at how Storm is portrayed. In the past, she is weak-willed, doing whatever Farook says unless a more powerful telepath shows up. In the present, her people tell her what to do: fill this dam, accept our offerings, etc. She accepts this as the way of things with barely a sigh. Once Farook shows up again, we see the same thing. He seems to have no problem controlling her. Until some white-folk interrupted, she believed his illusions completely. Such is the force of personality and will of Storm in this series.
While the plot is built around Storm as an object, this episode is really about Emma and her relationship with the team (which in this series means "Logan"). She wants to be on the team, and she wants Logan's trust. And by the end of the episode, she has that. She gets it by showing that she's useful and willing to fight when the situation warrants it.
The problem with this is two-fold. First, this doesn't reveal much of Emma's character. The most it does is show that she's willing to fight someone she believes to be stronger than she is. But little is really made of this moment of courage; it passes without comment or emphasis. The moment comes and, with neither hesitation or recognition of the act, she fights. You can't have courage without fear, or at least an acknowledgement of there being something that one should be afraid of. All we have is Emma's word that this thing is more powerful than she.
What this needed to properly sell this was either Emma hesitating to fight this creature, or it beating the hell out of her constantly. Neither really happened. Their fight wasn't nearly as one-sided as it needed to be to make the courage of the act worthwhile. To pull it off correctly, we needed to see that Emma's life was threatened. We needed to see that Emma herself was being beaten into submission. And then we needed to see that she would not yield, that she was willing to go to the mat for Storm and the team.
The other problem is that the actual trust issues don't revolve around that. The thing that set Logan off early in the episode was her casual use of telepathy. Yes, the show didn't say that, but the inference is clearly there: she says she stole the door's passcode from his mind, and then he's kicking her out. It's not hard to follow the breadcrumbs.
For the last two episodes, Emma has been shown to casually invade the minds of anyone around her. For her, mental privacy is neither a right nor a privilege; minds are there to do with as she pleases. She'll stay that way for the rest of the series, but nobody on the show seems to mind.
Can you really trust someone who can know anything about you at any time? Indeed, there was a revelation in this episode that could have lead to something: the fact that she can't use her telepathy in diamond form. I could see Logan cutting a deal with her: trust, so long as she's in diamond form when not actively attacking people's minds.
But no, instead, this episode has a standard, pat ending, the kind that gives Hollywood a bad name. She fought the badguy, ergo she's trustworthy.
