When I mentioned yesterday how we had written out four team members from X-MEN:TAS and written in four new ones in what was to have been the series finale, I thought it would be just a fun note to fans. Then last night Julia told me: “People are guessing on Twitter. You have to tell!” Okay, fine. I was going to just wait and let folks read the retelling of the 10-page, 4-episode discarded premise in our “Making of X-MEN:TAS” book next year. But she’s right: I brought it up, I need to answer the question right away. First, who was to go. Jean and Scott, who we’d tried to marry off and get pregnant as early as episode 14 were now married and leaving to start a family. Makes sense. Xavier was leaving, in this case to take on a new set of much younger mutants (the at-the-time new “Generation X”). This is kind of like Vince Lombardi winning a couple of Super Bowls and deciding to go back to coaching highschool football, but there you are. Finally Storm decided that she too had other responsibilities. Bam. After an 88-minute, time-torturing, mega-villain-filled story, the X-Men are four folks short. Well, in our original story, we made Psylocke a major player, and she ended up asking to stay around (fitting in with some of the recent books). Same with Archangel. The two larger surprises were Bishop and Shard. The hard-fighting brother and sister from the future had become stranded in the present time (1996?). Since they too had proven themselves, the X-Men welcomed them. So there you have it — four out, four in. I have no idea how the delicate balance of our core team would have been affected. Making the new team work as well would have been a huge challenge. I’d like to think that if asked we could have risen to it.
BISHOP SHARD
