Tear Jerker / X-Men '97

Moment pages never use spoiler tagging — so beware of unmarked spoilers

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”What must we do to be good enough? Is this the high road's destination? If so, I say as I have too many times before...Never again.”

To Me, My X-Men

• The loss of Xavier has clearly left its mark on the team, but this is probably most noticeable in Scott - who in trying so hard to fill his mentor and father figure shoes ends up being more stand-offish with them than usual.
  • When learning from Jubilee that Logan had scared Roberto off, a frustrated and angry Scott rudely tells Logan to find him and rather aggressively orders the rest of the team to join him. An angered Wolverine then hits Scott where it hurts.
    Wolverine: What Gyrich did was pretty horrible, but you wanna know the worst part about the professor being gone? YOU.
  • The reason why Scott was so angered in the first place; in fighting with Wolverine on the basketball court, Jubilee smashed the picture of Charles with the First Class of X-Men (Cyclops, Jean, Beast, Iceman, and Angel).

Mutant Liberation Begins

• Already struggling with the decision to leave the team, Cyclops is also struggling to understand why Xavier would leave everything to Magneto and not him. Though he does get a little better...
• The doctor in the emergency room refusing to deliver Jean's baby because she's a mutant. Sadly Truth in Television, as medical professionals have historically refused to treat black people, trans people, people with HIV, etc.
• Storm losing her powers. It is heartbreaking seeing the proud woman driven to tears as she realizes she's human now. Specifically, she's suffering the shock of being disconnected from nature; in a sense, Storm went deaf or blind.
  Storm: (she reaches towards the skylight) The breeze... is gone. I cannot feel it, nor the moisture in the air. What has he done to me? (she starts to cry)
  • Afterwards, Beast gives a diagnosis that her loss may be permanent... which Storm coerces him into admitting when he insists on more tests needing to be done, showing that he doesn't want to believe it.
  • Upon Storm hearing the bad news, the camera closes in on her disbelieving face while Jean and Beast's voices are drowned out.
  • The poor woman later gets startled by thunder from outside. The proud Weather Goddess felt vulnerability/fear from what she once commanded and felt so used to.
• Though Magneto lifting X-Cutioner and the panel of judges above Earth's atmosphere is undoubtedly awesome, as he's giving a speech to them about how he could so easily kill them, he's shedding tears the entire time, either angry that the humans would willingly strip Storm of something that defines her even after everything the X-Men have done for them, or remembering the will of his dear friend, tempering his wrath at the last moment.
• Gambit's heartbroken reaction upon learning that Rogue and Magneto have a thing going on. The card he drops in the hallway is the Queen of Hearts...

Fire Made Flesh

• "Jean" being told that she's a clone of the real Jean Grey. Making it worse is that nobody apart from Magneto (who wants Beast to be sure) comes to her defense or believes her claims of being the actual Jean. Not even Scott.
• When Mister Sinister starts using the cloned Jean to mess with the minds of the X-Men, none are more frightened by it than Morph, their abuse at Sinister's hands being brought back to the forefront. When they spell out to Logan that they are in "Hell", even before the X-Men are Dragged Off To (a psychically projected version of) Hell, they are speaking from the heart.
• Nathan becoming infected with Sinister's toxins, and both his parents having to make the heartbreaking decision to give him to Bishop so he can be cured in the future timeline, with no guarantee that they'll ever see their son again.
  • This situation is especially hard for Scott, who doesn't want to abandon his son like his father did to him, causing Scott to grow up an orphan. Even when he concedes that this is the only way to save Nathan, emotionally he just can't bear to watch it happen.
    Cyclops: No, no, no, there has to be another way! I don't want to be like my father! I won't abandon my son! [...] Don't any of you know how it feels to be abandoned?! I won't have him feel that. [...] I... can't be a part of this. I'm sorry...
• Madelyne having to say goodbye to her baby boy. She telepathically imprints him with the memories of him having loving parents and makes it clear how much he means to her.....and then the tears come when she has to hand him to Bishop so he can get treatment in the future.
• The end of the episode, when the real Jean and Scott just stare at each other from across the room. Both of them now having to deal with the fallout of Scott living the life they both wanted with another woman.

Modento/Lifedeath Part 1

• Storm and Forge seem to be building a relationship, only for him to reveal that he was responsible for the Mutant Restraining Collars that Storm herself had been put under before during her captivity in Genosha — and which served as the basis of the X-Cutioner's De-powering rifle. She angrily berates him for having a hand in it and as much as he tries to apologize, she cannot forgive him.

Remember It

• Rogue tearfully admitting to Gambit how hard it is to feel like she can never touch him. No matter how Gambit tries to reassure her that he loves her and it's deeper than skin, she can't convince herself it's real, and he tells her they'll just be friends if that's what she truly wants. Which is made all the worse once the episode ends, with him never knowing that she did choose him after all.
  • Gambit burns his lucky card, ''Rogue's card," the Queen of Hearts as a symbolic gesture of him giving up the game.
  • Despite Gambit quietly summarising that Magneto will let Rogue down, he concedes to being "just friends" with Rogue...and refers to her as mon ami. The term is entirely appropriate, as Remy is both respecting and setting down boundaries, but the "demotion" of Rogue to what he calls almost everyone else is heartbreaking. To Remy, Rogue has always been chere.
  • In the 90s series, Rogue and Gambit stuck by each other through hell and back. The only thing that can kill Gambit's hopes is Rogue herself giving the word.
• While Genosha is having a gala, Madelyne suddenly gets a nosebleed and heads outside. Cable comes rushing to her, urging everybody else to evacuate as soon as possible. He reaches his mother but before he can fully explain what is going on, he gets dragged back into a different time. He can only apologize to Madelyne, and mere seconds later she is caught in the Tri-Sentinel's beam, along with everyone else in the gala.
  • Even more somber is this was the first and last time Madelyne sees her son alive and grown up before he disappears from her sight and then she ends up in the Tri-Sentinel's beam attack.
• Nightcrawler being seriously injured when teleporting Magneto and Rogue away from the blast of the Tri-Sentinal. Rogue rushes to see to him, panicking when she realizes she cannot touch him, or even give him any comfort. Even Gambit assuring her he's alive doesn't quell the sombreness of the moment. It's another perfect example of why Rogue is the very epitome of Blessed with Suck.
  • Kurt's body sprawled on the ground covered in blood will also bring tears to eyes of the comic readers. If they've ever seen his original death. The image seems to have been based on that heartbreaking panel.
    • Thankfully, at the episode end he's shown alive and back on his feet, but it's likely that his joyful, happy-go-lucky personality from just earlier will now be shattered forever.
• Magneto is thrown right into the statue of Charles Xavier, which topples over from the impact and falls, crushing a group of innocent mutants underneath it. The agony of knowing he was (indirectly) responsible for killing them sends him into a trauma-induced rage that almost levels the city around him.
  • Erik's rage and grief is shown perfectly through his own eyes, which show us some very brief flashes into his troubled life... including the time he spent in Auschwitz as a boy.
  • Made even worse is that the statue of Xavier falling and killing innocents is highly symbolic: the home Charles worked so hard to build and the dream he shared with his dear friend Erik has now been destroyed, along with any chance of human and mutant relations ever being the same again, the very thing his life's work was dedicated to. And Erik caused it, but not by being a villain or terrorist, by trying to fight against those who wished to see it undone.
• Magneto's last words to a frightened Leech, in German, as the Tri-Sentinel is about to kill them.
  Magneto: Do not be afraid.
• The episode's last shot is Rogue weeping over Gambit's corpse. Her holding him with their bare skin drives his death home.
  Rogue: Sugar...I....[screen fades to black]...I can't feel you...!
  • It gets worse, because just before the Tri-Sentinel attack, Rogue had decided that she wanted to be with Gambit and finally let him in fully into her heart. She never got the chance to tell Remy that she loved him and would be with him, even if they could never physically touch.
  • Just to twist the knife even further, MCU fans will recognize those words as what Wanda says to the deactivated and disassembled Vision in WandaVision. Rogue's delivery is every bit as heartbreaking as Wanda's.
• The remaining X-Men watching the terrorist attack in abject disbelief and horror. Scott demands to know how many have died, and all Beast can do is put his head in his hands and try not to weep. And they have yet to find out that two of their own are gone.
• Showrunner Beau DeMayo would break his social media silence to reveal that the episode is based on how it felt to experience September 11, Charlottesville, Va., and Pulse Nightclub. He would also note elsewhere that Magneto and Gambit dying without resolving either of their storylines was done on purpose to better get across that tragedy has no targets, just victims.
• Gambit's Dying Moment of Awesome, somehow gets even sadder when you recall the last words the Professor said to him.
  Xavier: Gambit, how often must the scoundrel prove himself a hero, before he believes it himself?
• The last thing Callisto hears before she dies is that her Morlocks are being killed or just plain dead.
• If the ending didn't drive the point home on the aftermath of the attack, even the ending credits song was a somber rendition.

Lifedeath Part 2

• Professor Xavier is shown to be alive and well, enjoying his time with Lilandra and The Shi'ar. They seem to be soon be wedded as well, however when he senses Gambit's death on Earth, he knows that even though he loves Lilandra, his place is with the X-Men.
  • On the other hand, not everyone in Shi'ar Empire accepted Professor Xavier including Deathbird, the sister of Lilandra, who called him "Milky Way Trash" to his face. Human or not, it seems that Xavier can never escape the prejudice of others.
• It seems that Boliver Trask has a measure of morality as he's completely and utterly horrified that the Master Mold-type that attacked Genosha murdered so many.

Bright Eyes

• The episode opens with Gambit's funeral, attended by almost every X-Man and members of Gambit's family in the bayou. The eulogy Kurt gives is not only incredibly moving, but also serves as a nice Call-Back to Xavier's final words to Gambit in the original series. ("How often must the scoundrel prove himself the hero before he believes it himself?")
  Kurt: Remy LeBeau would be the first to tell you that life, like the cards, is wild. Yet he moved through his life as a force who believed better times lay ahead, that luck always won. Per his kinetic gifts, Gambit had endless faith in potential, yet he seemed so blind to his, haunted by the life of Bayou crime into which he was born. A sinner beyond saving. "Such was the cards", he would say. But I think he was bluffing. How could Remy, so tuned to potential, fail to see how his sins made him into a hero? (wipes a tear from his eye) Every gambler has a tell. Modesty was Gambit's.
  • The X-Man who doesn't appear? It's Rogue, hellbent on finding Bolivar Trask and getting revenge for the attack in Genosha. Underneath her rage is guilt and grief, which finally pours out of her in very realistic, heartbroken sobs when Kurt talks to her. Lenore Zann's performance in this scene is nothing short of gut-wrenching.
    Rogue: Remy's dead, but that don't mean I'm ready to accept it.
    Kurt: We all grieve in our own way.
    Rogue: You sure pulled the short straw in the "Adopted Sister Department", didn't you? Got the gal who goes bonkers over... (voice breaking) losing a boy.
    Kurt: Over losing two. And her confusion is only natural, for she did not cause Gambit and Magneto to be killed... she helped them live.
    Rogue: (finally breaks down sobbing as the other X-Men arrive to comfort her.)
    • Lenore Zann would later confirm on Twitter that her performance came from losing her young niece to cancer.
• Scott tries to get President Kelly to help search for more survivors in Genosha, but Kelly says that with the world on edge from the massacre, the UN can't send any troops to help. Not only that, but Kelly also informs Scott that he's Slave to PR to ensure that he remains as President or else someone else with anti-mutant prejudice will take his place, meaning the X-Men are effectively on their own. Feeling abandoned by the humans he constantly fought to protect in the face of prejudice, Scott begins to openly doubt Xavier's dream of peace between humans and mutants and even begins to think that maybe Magneto was right all along.
• The entire scene involving the search for survivors in the aftermath of the Genosha Massacre is one massive tearjerker.
  • Scott and Jean begin to reconcile over Madelyne and everything that happened. Then Jean gets psychic feedback from a telepath, and Scott hopefully calls out for Madelyne. When the mutant is revealed to be Emma Frost (who survived thanks to developing her diamond skin powers), everyone is overjoyed that they found another survivor. Cut to Scott, tears of anguish falling down his face as it hits him that Madelyne - the woman he loved, mother of his only child - is truly gone.
    • The fact that Scott still has to keep his visor over his eyes even as he weeps.
    • For Jean, she has Parting-Words Regret with Madelyne as she called the latter "it"; overall demeaning her as a clone when she caught Madelyne trying to comfort Scott about their son and his issues in their psychic link before cutting off their connection. With Madelyne gone, Jean can never reconcile with her.
  • Amelia breaking down in tears as she recounts all the survivors who walked away with horrific injuries.
    Amelia: Triage stays down when the dead stay dead. When we first set up and the injured started flooding in bad things happen, and everyone wants to be a survivor. But when you actually see one fresh off the belt... a survivor is the last thing I'd want to be.
  • Hank's attitude during the survivor search is equally heartbreaking. While he initially tries to keep everyone's spirits up by quoting Fred Rogers, he's clearly heartbroken by the destruction of Genosha, flat-out calling it "the death of the dream". He and Trish take a walk and come across a mutant girl at a shrine for the deceased Callisto and Leech. The two then talk about the mutant riots that have sprouted in the wake of the massacre, with Trish saying that humans won't accept mutants if they feel afraid. Unfortunately, that was the wrong thing to say at the wrong time as Hank begins to doubt Xavier's dream of peace between humans and mutants and bitterly wonders if begging for humanity's tolerance was their first mistake before leaving off in a huff. You know things are bad when the kind and gentle Beast becomes unusually cold and distant.
• Jubilee convinces Robert to open up to his mother about his mutation. There's a moment of hope when his mother reveals that she always knew, and was just waiting for him to open up... Then she asks Roberto for 'discretion' about his powers and his relationship with Jubilee, all so their family's enterprise doesn't take a PR hit from the Da Costa heir being an open mutant. Even if she might've thought she was working in her son's best interests, considering the Wild Sentinel attack on Genosha was recent and has led to mutant-human relations becoming the worst they had ever been, the hurt of Roberto's face at the realization that his mother's acceptance of his powers is conditional is palpable.
• As bad as Bolivar Trask has been, the sight of him standing over a ledge and prepared to end his life over his part in the Genosha massacre illicits pity, and it turns out that not even death was a release as Trask's dead body revealed to be a Human-Sentinel that then attacks the X-Men, following the anti-mutant programming. Judging from his words, it seemed as if he knew what he had become.
  • Prior to the above, Rogue murdering Trask by letting him fall is a mix of both this and Nightmare Fuel. The X-Men are too shocked to even move; with Scott, Morph, and Kurt horrified. But Logan curtly says that Rogue just did "what we wanted to do." Morph questions what the team even is now before Rogue makes a bitter justification in murdering Trask, who already wanted to die from remorse. After the events of Genosha and their own lingering bitterness towards humanity, the X-Men seem to be falling more in line with Magneto's way of thinking, in that even "mere tolerance" is too much to hope from humanity.
• When Cable shows up to disarm the Human-Sentinel, Jean and Scott realize that he's Nathan. Cable coldly tells Jean to get out of his mind because, "You're not [Madelyne]," and is more cold with Scott, seemingly affirming Scott's worst fears about Nathan growing up feeling abandoned by his father the same way he did.
  • When Jean does probe Cable's mind, his eyes actually turn sorrowful as though he were still grieving for Madelyne.
• During the battle with Trask, Morph takes a nasty blast to their head. Wolverine is quick to react, belting out a Big "NO!". This no doubt reminds Wolverine of nearly losing Morph from the original series.

Tolerance is Extinction, Part 1

• Bastion's backstory. As a boy whose father was merged with the time-traveling remains of Nimrod, Bastion was troubled by the voices in his head telling him that he'll one day become the strongest mutant in the world when he just wanted to be normal. Although his mother tells Bastion that he's still normal to her, that wasn't enough to prevent her son from becoming the monster we know today.
• The Reveal of Val Cooper being The Mole for Bastion and Sinister the whole time is this as she comes off as a Reasonable Authority Figure who gave Magneto a fair trial and took part of the official integration of Genosha into the United Nations, even though she didn't know the full extent of their plans and was horrified of the Genoshan massacre she was caught in the middle of. Fortunately, she turned against them and freed Magneto despite the fact she would suffer the consequences later on.
• Roberto's mother handing him and Jubilee over to the Prime Sentinels when they renounce killing mutants, despite showing her support for Roberto being a mutant in the previous episode.
• Trish Trilby being revealed as a Prime Sentinel is this as she was one of the few media figures who fully supported mutants, despite her earlier Innocently Insensitive remarks, in an attempt to make them relatable to humanity. It even shocked Beast when she attacked him. And it's ambiguous whether or not she willingly or even knowingly underwent the process that transformed humans into Prime Sentinels, as Bastion explained to Val Cooper that most of them did it voluntarily and then all have no memories of the process.
• Cable revealing that he and Bishop got separated in the time stream while going to the future. Meaning that he - as a helpless, sick infant - ended up in the future alone, horrifying Scott and Jean.
• Magneto's mass-EMP wave that stops the Prime Sentinels in their tracks is treated as an awesome moment, but according to Wolverine, this could very well be Erik finally having enough of humanity continuing to mistreat mutants and declaring war on them all. All despite having renounced his vendetta against mankind and actually trying to see Charles’ dream of a shared world through;
  Magneto: Enough.