Episode #45 - No Good Deed
Original Airdate September 6th, 2003

After a fluke accident leaves Bayville thinking The Brotherhood are heroes, Quicksilver devices a plan to cash in on thier new found popularity.

Credits
Story By: Greg Johnson, Boyd Kirkland and Craig Kyle
Written By: William Forrest Cluverius
Directed By: Doug Murphy
Music Composed By: William Anderson

Review: What would have happened to the Brotherhood kids if Xavier had reached them first? Would Pietro still be too cocky? Fred too temperamental? Todd still… toadlike?

Each of the Brotherhood members are damaged goods. Between the five of them, they have one parent to speak of, and he’s a violent separatist who (seemed to have) died violently last episode. Fred and Todd were ostracized by the public, Lance excluded, Wanda abandoned, but Pietro was coddled. This fact becomes key in this episode.

In No Good Deed, the Brotherhood members show their true colors. Pietro, the manipulator, feels that his praise is long overdue and will cause mayhem to reap it. Fred and Todd, the hangers-on, play along because they are content to be accepted. That, and of course, they don’t mind the accoutrements of fame. Lance is both an unwilling hero and an unwilling villain here. He simply wants to get by with the companionship that the Brotherhood affords him. His Achilles’ heel is that he despises the pompous Cyclops (who also spent most of his youth in a foster home). Wanda also eschews the trappings of fame until Pietro drums up some resentment toward the X-Men per their father’s death.

Each member gets their moment in this episode, except for Fred who remains the fringiest of fringe characters. Pietro doles out orders, Todd clamors for attention, Wanda precipitates the “elephants on ice” debacle and Lance is the antagonist of No Good Deed’s two best moments. First, he threatens to take on the entire extended X-team and then he buries an exploding train beneath the ground. He’s the badass in this series—not Wolverine who was limited to babysitting.

Naturally, things go wrong for the Brotherhood, because things never go right. But they are like Charlie Brown—you love ‘em because they lose. If their machinations would have succeeded, they would have lost that outsider status that makes them so damn cool. But for twenty minutes, it was nice to see our anti-heroes—not just anti-heroes, but anti-everything—get everything they wanted.