Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

Category: podcasts

419 – Stuff Happens

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Run, Penance! The retcons are coming for you! (Generation X #40)

In which the St. Croix family is constructed largely of retcons; Generation X adjusts surprisingly quickly to a massive status quo shift; Psi-War is coming soon to a podcast near you; Snow White – I mean, Bianca LaNeige – has an intriguing but exceptionally minimal backstory; and if you die in this podcast episode, you die in real life.

X-PLAINED:

  • Hellfire Club history
  • Generation X #40-43
  • MillXnials
  • Mercy General Hospital vs Our Mother of Mercy Hospital
  • Ambiguous psionic overlap
  • Nicole & Claudette & Monet & Marius St. Croix
  • The Downtown Stomp
  • Synch, agreeable and bland (for now)
  • Vincent Adultman
  • The nature of Penance
  • A glacial but effective pace
  • Bianca LaNeige, evil Snow White from space
  • Warpy, Stinky, Spiky, Windy, Greasy, Brainy, and Blurry
  • The Enchanted Forest of Oregon
  • Claremont:Body Swaps::Hama:Getting Stuck In Other Dimensions
  • Jay vs. Accents
  • Terminal Dream Syndrome
  • A surprisingly gruesome fill-in
  • An underrated era for Emma Frost
  • Betty & Veronica, presenting like mandrills
  • Zak the Neutrino
  • Albert & Elsie-Dee (briefly)
  • The Dodsons vs Mike Allred
  • Dr. Bronner’s uncredited Marvel career
  • Our coverage of Ultimate X-Men (or lack thereof)
  • Dr. Phil Zimbardo’s xplainthexmen study

NEXT EPISODE: Queering Wolverine with Dr. Christopher Michael Roman!

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418 – Reignfirefighters

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In which S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are scarier in suits; Reignfire is the new Erik the Red; “background assets” would be a very funny euphemism; it’s always either time travel or clones; and you should probably not get a corporate logo tattooed on the side of your head.

X-PLAINED:

  • Crimes of Dark Beast
  • X-Force #77-80
  • The Mutant Liberation Front
  • Reignfire (repeatedly)
  • Video Renaissance
  • Almost Reno, NM
  • The inversion of several common tropes
  • Small towns
  • Different kinds of mutants
  • X-Force Fun Facts
  • Skids (Sally Blevins)
  • Several continuity errors
  • Some kidnappings
  • Sexiness without prurience
  • Background assets
  • Dr. Joshua (again)
  • (Henry Wallinger)
  • Psychic shenanigans
  • Las Vegas
  • Word-balloon disambiguation
  • X-Force’s new HQ
  • Historical X-Men we’d like to see

NEXT EPISODE: Generation X and the Seven Dwarves

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417 – Pterodactyl with a Gun

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In which you, too, can use Cerebro; Jubilee is here, for some reason; the Xavier School should absolutely not be accredited; Hulk Hands would solve many of Rogue’s problems; Sauron gets a gun; Psylocke pulls a Lois Lane maneuver; you really shouldn’t spring a Phoenix costume on anybody; Joseph has (another) identity crisis; and Canada has problems.

X-PLAINED:

  • Miles at SDCC
  • Uncanny X-Men #353-355
  • X-Men #73
  • A running motif
  • Wolverine’s sons
  • Margaret Stone
  • “fun”
  • The location of the original X-jet
  • A red herring
  • Sauron (more) (again)
  • Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy… in space!
  • How to ship a pterodactyl
  • Mighty appendages
  • The Agee Institute
  • Boundaries
  • Wallpaper
  • Joseph (more) (again)
  • New Year’s Resolutions
  • Sebastian Shaw and his wraith buddy (again)
  • The X-Men’s answering machine
  • What Wolverine does
  • Alpha Flight
  • Canada problems
  • A crossover
  • Phoenix problems
  • Jean Grey’s ‘90s costume
  • Found families
  • What makes the Dark Phoenix Saga an X-Men story

NEXT EPISODE: Reignfire, resolved!

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416 – The Screaming Room

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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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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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415 – Stardust

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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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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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414 – Blackwater Boy Band

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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)

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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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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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412 – Yappin’ and Scrappin’

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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

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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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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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410 – Jubilee, Don’t Eat That

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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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