X-Men Anime: "Countdown" Review

We're heading into the home stretch of this series, and oddly enough I find myself not really caring about what happens. All the great mysteries of the series have turned out to be rather lame, the characterization has fallen short of its potential, and the series still comes off as lazy and uninspired.

But, despite having a lot of gripes, I was at least mildly entertained by this week's installment. The episode doesn't waste any time at all with getting into the action. The U-Men do a great job of putting up a good fight. It's almost kind of sad that the whole X-Men team has trouble with just two guys. Somebody's been slacking in the Danger Room, methinks.

After the fight is over, what follows is a bunch of talking – recap and explanation for events that came before. Parts of it are pretty boring, and the episode could have used some more editing here. I don't think it was really necessary to spend all that time explaining the mechanism behind the anti-scanning field we already knew was there. The bigger issue is why it was there, and that's where the big twist comes in...

The U-Men were working for Sasaki! In her quest for a cure, Sasaki was the one behind the torturing of those poor mutants and the cruel experiments that turned them into monsters. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say, and Dr. Sasaki has apparently laid down a lot of bricks on that trail. Beast spends most of his dialogue giving her a much-deserved lecture about how messed up she is, but his sarcastic tone is a bit much, and it detracts a bit from his moral high-ground.

So then we're back to Mastermind, and there's...more talking. I have nothing against riveting dialogue, but this stuff is again mostly recap and plot points that would have been better revealed through some scenes where things actually happen. What we have here is a bunch of infodump, and it's just not the best way to tell this story. "Show, don't tell" is the oldest rule in the writing book, and the writers/producers of this story don't seem to have taken that lesson to heart.

The episode also has a number of animation cheats, like the long pans of still shots that have come to be a trademark of this series. Except for a few scenes at the beginning during the action, the art just doesn't pop. It feels flat and boring and the same laziness in the storytelling seems to have applied to the art direction as well. That's unfortunate, because this series has certainly had some great animation moments, but there's no semblance of consistency.

Then there's the much-awaited appearance of Takeo, which is yet another bummer. He's just kind of vegged out for most of the and when he does start to freak out under Mastermind's manipulations, there's really not too much to get excited about. Even Xavier's psi-battle turns out to be a dud with little value to the story. With all this buildup, Takeo could have proven to be a very interesting aspect of this series, much like Xavier's son in the comics (Legion, who is most certainly the inspiration for Takeo). But right now, with only two episodes left, Takeo has been a disappointment, like much of the series.

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