Trust me the experiment won't end since we have another season to look forward to of this show. I understand we had 2 other x-men shows before this one and they wanted to try something new. X-Men Evolution made most of the cast teenagers in highschool. And that worked because the x-men started off as a bunch of teens in the comics and its target audience could relate to the characters with growing up in school and such (I was still in highschool when the show aired and consider this the best x-men series). So to shake things up again they wanted to follow the save the world from winding up like the future timeline storyline. Which is good but then we get Wolverine as the leader with the only reason seeming because he had a solo movie coming out around the time it would air in America. For a team show to work everyone on the team has to fit in a role. Cliche? Yes but it makes for good flow in the team and the series. The leader has to be in charge, the comedy relief has to be funny etc etc. While I hate Wolverine I admit he has good qualities being a good fighter and brave and such. But he's not leadership material and he showed why repeatedly in the series. He can't keep still. He left on his solo missions without telling anyone whenever he felt. He didn't own up to his mistakes. How is it ok for him to leave the team but not ok for Cyclops? You have to lead by example. The leader has to be inspiring and decisive. All he did was follow Xavier's orders. Anyone could have done that. They tried to push Wolverine as the leader while at the same time make him do unleader like moves.
I didn't mind EVOLUTION's high school focus, either. The Uncanny X-Men in 1963 did start out as teenagers. And at least whatever compromises happened to spare us a teenage Wolverine, that Kid WB likely wanted. *Shudder* Kid's WB was all about teenage leads, but EVOLUTION was fine. It was a different kind of show, though. It focused more on character relationships than storyline or action, and did take a while to find it's footing.
I agree that they did approach hypocrisy with some of the Logan/Scott stuff. Wolverine's leadership wasn't shown as it should have been because Xavier was still kept there as overall command and Basil Exposition. It's that simple. In an intro for the series in HULK VS., Kyle & Johnson essentially claimed that they wanted to get rid of Xavier, but not kill him outright. Instead the "middle ground" they chose kind of defeated some of their purpose with Logan as leader. Yes, any X-Man would have simply followed Xavier's orders. Beast was the only one still at the mansion; one of the founding five and usually level headed. Why he wasn't tapped was out of sheer WWE style popularity. Granted, he did act as "second in command" for a few episodes to Logan, and that worked. It just ended too soon.
For me Wolverine being the leader was not a problem, he's led missions before in the comics so i didn't see what the big deal was. At the time Xavier appointed a leader Storm was not a member of the team so it couldn't have been her. Beast is far too passive to be a leader he has zero leadership skills. He's too much of a softie. If i was Xavier and i was given a choice to appoint Beast or Wolverine, I'd pick Wolverine everytime. Cyclops needs some sort of female companionship to be a good leader. Just look at his history. And given that Jean had dissapeared he was in no fit state to lead the team. If he would have appeared all together at the beginning then that would completely trivialise his relationship with Jean. He had to still be in the mourning period for us to truly understand the profound impact and depth of relationship he had with Jean.
My only problem was, that Wolverine took up too much screentime and alot of the other characters suffered. Particularly Storm. Out of 26 episodes she had two good features and that was in Overflow and Guardian Angel. Pretty sad really.
Beast is level headed; Wolverine isn't. In some of his actual leadership, Logan did end up making errors in judgment or tactics; the problem was that said errors never were brought up or had any impact on the series, so it was meaningless.
I agree, Storm was wasted. Storm wasn't a whole lot better in EVOLUTION. She's a hard character to get a handle on. She was better here and in Evolution than in the 90's series, where she spouted atrociously melodramatic blather. But that isn't saying much. Considering she is supposedly the "real" natural X-Men leader in many past stories, filling in for stretches without Cyclops, some fans could consider it a missed opportunity that such a thing wasn't looked at more here. And the irony is Logan usually got along better under Storm's leadership than he usually did with Cyclops. He respected her more, and wasn't a rival with her over a woman.
I have a few problems with your reasoning about Cyclops, at least in terms of this series. My problem with how they handled him is that it was hard to really "see" what kind of a relationship he had with Jean from what was presented. The obvious block was that Jean wasn't a character; she was a Maguffin. She spent 3/4ths of the series off camera, and then another episode atop that with amnesia. During the 3 part finale half her lines were screams. Which was a shame because Jennifer Hale I thought did a good job despite usually having little to really play with. But my point is that you couldn't really understand that relationship from her perspective at all, because she was more of a plot point or a goal than a character, like Princess Toadstool. What did she gain from loving Cyclops? Why did she care for him? What did he do for her? Did they ever do anything together beyond pose for pictures and fight bad guys?
That means the only way you can understand that relationship is through Cyclops' eyes, and boy, that was usually a doozy. The subplot of the series and especially Episode 20 painted Cyclops as the poster child for needy, pathetic esteem lacking men. His love for Jean took place almost exclusively because she filled a gap that he couldn't fill in himself. She had to literally lead him by the optic blast to do anything remotely competent when it counted; before that, Beast, Angel, and Iceman would routinely best him in the Danger Room. When Logan shows up, for the first time that "relationship" is tested, and he handled it like a petty spoiled brat, with dishonor to boot. It is hard to see what if anything Jean saw in him. When he doesn't get his way around the Mansion, he sulks alone and is perfectly willing to either abandon the team in battle or not to back them up at all without arm-tugging, regardless of whether they are "friends" or not. Furthermore, at no point in 26 episodes of WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN was even the slightest hint implied that Cyclops was in any way a leader. The only mention is when Kitty chews him out for lack of motivation, which has nothing to do with competence; Forge was always motivated, but he was incompetant. Cyclops had some 3-4 focus episodes and not at any point was any distinct mention of how he was as an X-Man before Logan or even during was really mentioned. From what the show chose to show us, my conclusion was that Scott here was a Never Was, a teacher's pet handed all the keys in the universe but failing to open the door. It wasn't that Wolverine was filling Scott's seat; he was filling a seat that Scott could never sit in. I certainly wasn't alone in this presumption from what was presented. If that wasn't the writers' intentions, then stuff needed to be rewritten.
My problem wasn't that Cyclops' faults were displayed. My problem was they were magnified as literally being his entire character. He had literally no positive qualities. In the comics, yes, he has always in some way or another been attached to a woman, whether Jean Grey or Maddie Pryor to Emma Frost, with even Colleen Wing briefly in-between (with Psylocke pining for him). But he had that good quality of being efficient. He could even be a jerk, but he was efficient in battle; occasionally capable of taking down the rest of the X-Men if he had to (such as one story where Mastermind tricked the X-Men into thinking Scott was a reborn Dark Phoenix). He believed in the cause, could occasionally be sensitive or understanding, and was a sort of surrogate son to Xavier. Cyke in WOLVERINE AND THE X-MEN was all the flaws with none of the positive traits (and Logan took his place in terms of the "surrogate son" part, but Wolverine seems to do that; take plot traits from other characters into his own gestalt). It would be akin to a series where all Wolverine did was flirt with women or get into fights at bars, without any of his positive traits like loyalty, even honor or battle hardened senses.
Wolverine was a jobber in most of EVOLUTION, and that sucked, too. Can't we have a balance between jobber and Goku?
Before I saw this series, I thought Wolverine being the leader was a stupid idea. After watching the first season, I still think Wolverine being the leader is a stupid idea. The only good thing that has come out of making Wolverine the leader and focus of this show, is that the other X-Men were actually written in a manner that made them much more cooler and likable then Wolverine.
Even Cyclops? I'm just curious as to others' perspective from what the show displayed about him. Because as someone who has ended up liking Cyclops more in the last 8-9 years, I thought he came off as quite unsympathetic in this series, even if you could understand why he was so to a degree.
But, yeah, Nightcrawler was awesome.
