podcasts – Page 4 – Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

416 – The Screaming Room

July 2, 2023 Jay 7 comments

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In which we are incapable of X-Plaining the Great Lakes Avengers; Pete Wisdom evolves; Douglock hacks the island; Nightcrawler cosplays Nightcrawler; and we find ourselves bafflingly defensive of the Bamfs.

X-PLAINED:

How to recruit Unus the Untouchable to your super-team
What Excalibur has been up to
Excalibur #118-120
An excellent use of danger room technology
Some fairly deft metacommentary
Colossus vs. another tree
Bamfs and the character assassination thereof
Nightmare
Characterization via lettering
Several nightmare scenarios
Pete Wisdom vs. Nightmare
Meggan’s true form (again)
A poorly conceived romantic gesture
Foreshadowing
Relative Bamf quality
Other Marvel villains we’d like to see menace the X-Men
Our thoughts on Legion and The Gifted

NEXT EPISODE: A pterodactyl with a gun!

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415 – Stardust

June 25, 2023 Jay 6 comments

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In which Gambit does Stardust; Wilbur Weston holds no one’s redemption; Gambit is unequivocally bisexual; Lucifer is kinda goofy; and we still don’t know what’s in the box.

X-PLAINED:

Family businesses
Gambit vol. 2 #1-4
What Gambit’s been up to
Some peculiar parallels
Father Miguel Bonavita
Sister Katrina
Father Marcelo
A box
Tante Mattie Baptiste
Olivier Stoker and/or Lucifer
Fancy captions
The Cross of Redemption
Anielle, who may or may not Hanael and may or may not also be a fallen star and/or angel
Gambit’s subconscious
Octopus Gambit
The Grigori
Sibyl
Cerberus
Wormwood
Pew surfing
CyberFork
Spitting locusts, sadly
A bad take on the trolley problem
An ambiguous ending
A pecular transition
Genre displacement
Warlock as a form of art
Elon Musk’s closest X-villain analog

NEXT EPISODE: Dark night of the Bamf!

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414 – Blackwater Boy Band

June 18, 2023 Jay 7 comments

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In which Wild Child makes an unlikely Santa Claus; Sabretooth champions continuity; Random’s last name should’a been Violence; Forge doesn’t have to like you; and Mackie’s X-Factor run gets interesting—right before its untimely end.

X-PLAINED:

Another X-Factor
X-Factor #142-145
Unrealized anticipation
Deadline
What Val Cooper wants for Christmas
The evolutionary symbolism of noses
Several breeds of dog
The secret history of Val Cooper and Wild Child
Wildheart
The Secret Empire
The X.U.E. (more) (again)
Ice skating, interrupted
Another cool way to draw Havok’s powers
A clever retcon
The X-Factor that might have been
Greystone’s origins
Micah
A temple of doom
The hierarchy of cool skulls
Branching timelines and the implications thereof
An Alex Summers / Moira MacTaggert chimera

NEXT EPISODE: Gambit, again.

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413 – Convergence (feat. Douglas Wolk)

June 4, 2023 Jay 12 comments

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In which X-Force goes to Burning Man Exploding Colossal Man; Douglas Wolk may or may not have superpowers; Karma gets girlfriends; we are already tired of Reignfire; Meltdown and Sunspot initiate a love triangle; and Jay is writing some more X-Men.

X-PLAINED:

Road trips
X-Force #75-76
New Mutants vol. 4 #30
A gatefold and a half
Burning Man
Exploding Colossal Man
Karma’s name
Echidna Faire
Text
Selene (more) (again)
Crowd scenes
Various character relationships
Callbacks
Mud
A magic box and a fancy stick
Eitri the Dwarf
A grand conjunction
A big, silly fight
Peak late ‘90s queer culture
Echidna Faire
Bowling
Etienne Rousseau
Updating Bastion’s facial hair
Wolverine’s mentees

NEXT EPISODE: The beginning of the end of X-Factor

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412 – Yappin’ and Scrappin’

May 28, 2023 Miles 7 comments

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In which Kelly and Seagle’s X-runs begin with immense promise; dark psychic residue gets just everywhere; Storm’s past is literally buried; Wolverine is just saying is all; Cecilia Reyes’s job doesn’t deserve her, and Cyclops and Phoenix are the worst at being normal.

X-PLAINED:

The Grey family reunion
X-Men #71-72
What counts as an Uncanny X-Men #138 cover reference
Baggage and also suitcases
Steve Seagle’s (scuttled) Phoenix plans
Bone whiskers
Telemarketer power moves
Cecilia Reyes
Marrow (Sarah)
Sam Guthrie’s tiny ponytail
The ol’ wall-of-televisions trope
The cost of one banana
Sebastian Shaw vs the IRS (maybe)
A mostly empty attic
Wolverine’s etiquette lessons
The dessert claw vs the salad claw
The physicality of Carlos Pacheco’s art
Cannonball, the grown-up in the room
Magneto’s increasingly complicated past
Magnus, Erik, and Max (again)
Uncanny X-Men #351-352
Cecilia Reyes’s return-to-office
Intersectionality
Pyro, forever dying of the Legacy Virus
Daredevil vs Cecilia Reyes’s bedside manner
Kevin, Lord of the Jungle
Ending conversations by turning into a bird
A.I.M.* (*Advanced Idea Mechanics)
Crows of Ill Portent
A Box of Entity
Condors and Cockatoos
Logan’s denim proclivities
Arcade vs. Mojo

Special thanks to Dylan Higgins for edits and production assistance!

NEXT EPISODE: X-Force goes to Burning Man!

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Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

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411 – Tearaway Pants

May 21, 2023 Jay 6 comments

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In which we actually kind of like a Sabretooth story; we’re not asking for viscera, here; all pants on Earth-616 are tearaway pants; we’d like to see more Wolverine stories about bodily autonomy; Gambit’s hallucinations have hallucinations; and there are probably too many X-books.

X-PLAINED:

Punch-clock villains
Hydro-Man’s secret weakness
411
‘90s fashion
X-Men Unlimited #17-18
X-Men Unlimited vs. annuals
A difficult casting decision
Forge’s neutralizer gun
Costume injuries
Color symbolism? Kinda? I guess?
Mrs. Hoo
Saberine & Wolvertooth
Warren Kenneth Worthington III vs. shirts
How to dress for Earth-616
Hot buttered whatever
Boob foliage
Clones
Very tenacious blood stains
The return of the Angry Claremontean Narrator
Lots of hallucinations
Oscar the Fixer
Hydro-Man
Redemption, symbolic and otherwise
The evolution of Magneto’s name
Our ideal X-line

NEXT EPISODE: Back to the core!

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410 – Jubilee, Don’t Eat That

May 7, 2023 Jay 12 comments

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In which the M-Plate Saga continues; Jay gets into the spirit of the day; we briefly give up on our primary mission; the story is coordinated if not coherent; Miles is not allowed to continuity-shame about Tolkein; Gaia is extra chill; Dirt Nap discovers altruism; and Jubilee should absolutely not have eaten that.

X-PLAINED:

Vampires vs. Marrow (again)
Whether Marrow is a mutant
Drugs
X-Plaining the inexplicable
Generation X #37-39
M-Plate (more) (again)
A Boojum
How to correctly identify a snark
The Universal Amalgamator (more) (again)
A door
Moria, kind of, I guess?
Mysterious topiary
An equally mysterious train
The Citadel of the Universal Amalgamator
Gaia
How to make a deal with a Token
Orange milk
A network of interdimensional water closets
The Bill the Pony Effect
An attempted murder
Monet vs. Northstar
Characters we’d like to see come out of the subtext

NEXT EPISODE: The Angry Claremontean Narrator Returns

CORRECTION: Miles said that the previous episode was #410. This episode is in fact #410; the previous episode is #409.

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Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

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409 – Lurid Malarkey

April 30, 2023 Jay 11 comments

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In which nobody is sure what Emplate actually eats; airport food is not a good peace offering; Larry Hama writes a good Jubilee; the St. Croix siblings merge; and we honestly have no idea what a Token is.

X-PLAINED:

Emplate vs. Marrow
What’s been up with Generation X
Generation X #34-36
Claudette and Nicole St. Croix
Emplate (more) (again)
Controlled chaos
Tracy Authier
Bullying
Dorian and Weasel (again)
Treasures
EAT
Some unusually friendly blackmail
Wizard Magazine
Husk’s diary and hypothetical fanfiction
Chimera
A Lepton imploder
Dirt-Nap
M-Plate
A dream, we think, probably
Jubilee in Wonderland
A Token
Chief Authier
Elwood
Landau, Luckman, & Lake (again)
The Citadel at the Edge of Reality
The Universal Amalgamator
Magik on screen
Our favorite villains and alignment shifts from the Krakoa era

NEXT EPISODE: The M-Plate Saga concludes

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408 – Yabba Yabba Yabba

April 23, 2023 Jay 7 comments

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In which Bishop gets another miniseries; splinter timelines make fun narrative sandboxes; the X.S.E. goes detecting; the Statue of Liberty never fares well in dystopian futures; “Booger” is not a name you give yourself; and we can’t believe it’s taken us this long to make a hanky code joke about Bishop.

X-PLAINED:

Graymalkin
Bishop: X.S.E. #1-3
Bishop (more) (again)
Earth-1191
The X.S.E.
Hecate
Malcolm
Randall
The popularity of Earth-1191 miniseries
The solid-light hologram of Theseus
The Fanatix
Pulsar
Dogface
Hardball
Razorback
Kali (but not that one)
Shadowbox
“Quotations”
Seldon Trask
A mystery
The Rook
Annabella Knox
Anthony Shaw
The Bay Borough
The best episode of Justice League Unlimited
Organic LMDs
A disguise
An uncanny child
Dazzler’s career
X-Adjectives

NEXT EPISODE: The M-Plate Saga!

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Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!

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