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Review and Media by James Harvey and Stu
Episode #76 - Graduation Day
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy Animation Services By: Phillipines Review: I suggest you get comfy, I could be here a while.Giving the X-Men a fitting finale had to one of the most one of the most daunting tasks ever, but somehow, it’s pulled off, almost flawlessly. Hell, just giving each character the appropriate screen time for a single episode is a near impossible task but giving the fans something to remember their last appearance by must’ve taken some hard graft. The basic plot of the episode is that a critically ill Xavier needs Magneto’s help to survive, but Magneto is this close to finally realising his dream of starting the war between humans and mutants. This episode proves beyond a shadow of all doubt that Magneto himself isn’t actually evil… he just does bad things. This show has never had generic supervillians, and Magneto stands as the best of a great bunch. There are some drawbacks to the episodes, mainly animation troubles. For example, Gyrich shows clips from previous episodes that AKOM animated, which simply clashes with the new Philippines animation. That, and the new Gyrich design was simply unrecognisable from the previous AKOM design. It took me a while to figure out just whom Xavier was arguing with. I loved Xavier’s deathbed speech. I didn’t see this during the show’s original run due to the station airing deciding not to buy the last few episodes, but I managed to catch the rerun a few months and remembering almost disbelieving what I was seeing. Whilst screen grabbing this episode for this site, I almost began chocking up. It’s a very powerful speech, and the episode ends with the very best shot this series ever did, a fitting image for the final moments of the show. This show wasn’t perfect. There’s an inexcusable amount of mistakes in what has to be some of the crappiest animation ever, some of the voice work is excrutiatingly bad and some of the characters do tend to get on your nerves, but all that is missing from this episode. It’s not a perfect episode, but it’s damn close. Considering the task at hand, I think ‘Detective’ Jim Krieg did more than an amendable job. Hats off to you Mr. Krieg, you did us proud, which is especially well done, seeing that he’d never wrote an episode of X-Men before this one. It’s a finale that is seriously hard to fault. It doesn’t quite wrap everything up like Iron Man’s Hands Of The Mandarin but it doesn’t leave a huge hanging cliffhanger like Spider-Man. I’d compare this to the Fantastic Four finale. Not everything is answered, but it’s difficult to ask for anymore. Truly one of, if not the finest episode of the series. Screenshots: 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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