The classic Lee/Kirby era of ’The X-Men’ (effectively the first nineteen issues) essentially features two types of story, themselves determined by two types of antagonist. Handily, they arrive consecutively. Following Magneto’s appearance in the first issue, bad mutants become the good mutants’ default foe. While Marvel usually rotated their rogue’s gallery, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (Magneto, plus his henchmen) came back in issues 4, 5, 6 and 7, and were already being called ‘The Evil You-Know-Who’ on the cover of 6.
Adjacent panels often juxtapose the fair-play teamwork of the X-Men against the fractious world of the Brotherhood. Who represent about every way to fail to form a brotherhood; the imperiously commanding Magneto, the obsequious Toad (whose excessive fawning even gets on his master’s nerves), the scheming underling Mastermind, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, trapped by their misapplied sense of duty to Magneto.
Then, as if suddenly noticing how reliant on the Brotherhood they’d become, Lee and Kirby put them out of harm’s way by splitting them up in three different directions. And segue straight into the first Sentinels story. This is clearly intended as something of an epic. It’s not just the first three-part run, even the next issue is largely devoted to the battle’s aftermath.
The Sentinels, as we all know by now, were designed precisely to eliminate the mutant “threat”. Public fear and distrust of the super-powered had long been a distinct feature of Marvel, distinguishing it from DC. Now it comes into its own.
Except here it’s specified precisely as public distrust. Crowds in the street are likely to degenerate into anti-mutie lynch mobs at any sign of unorthodox behaviour. This includes cops, but government and military... they clearly know better. In issue 10 Professor X says casually “Washington has already contacted me” about the latest drama. So the constituency of their designer Trask isn’t ranting Republicans but the salacious popular press. He even launches the Sentinels on live TV.
As robots tend to, the Sentinels then rebel. But this is because they decide the best way to carry out their orders, to protect humanity, is to subjugate them. The story them becomes a parable about the rise of, but also the inherent deficiencies with, machines. They’re often depicted neatly lined up, like beans on a shelf, while their plot is essentially to make more of themselves. But they’re also shown lacking the basics of gumption and initiative.
‘Mutant’ would seem a very science fiction word. But there’s only one alien in the whole Lee/Kirby run, the Stranger, who appears in ’The Triumph of Magneto’ (11). Both sides assume him to be a mutant and so set about trying to win him over to their camp. Only to discover he’s not just literally but conceptually alien, outside their common frame of references. (“Have I not said I am… a stranger?” he asks, channelling Leonard Cohen.) His only interest is in collecting specimens of mutation for study. He picks Magneto, for plot convenient reasons.
Whereas, as we’ve seen the Tomorrow People comes with a plot contrivance where the whole concept of bad Tomorrow People, in brotherhoods or otherwise, is blocked off. Instead, with their first story ’The Slaves of Jedikiah’ (1973) their antagonists are established as aliens.
While Magneto tries to misuse the power of the mutants he manages to pick for his side, Jedikiah tries to limit his, with the recurrent one-eyed motif, with constraining anti-telepathic headbands and the like. There’s a moment where Stephen, rather half-heartedly, Refuses The Call and sulkily claims he’s not a real Tomorrow Person after all. But the premise is auto-inoculated against him voluntarily taking Jedikiah’s side.
Jedikiah turns out to be the henchman of a bigger baddie called (confusing our comparison) the Cyclops. Except, in the very last episode he suddenly switches to sympathetic. As it turns out, his spaceship was broken and he really just needed the psychic equivalent of a push to get him home again. This becomes something of a show staple - not resolving conflicts so much as wishing them away, making it never-was. And one way to manage this is to decide at the last minute the bad guy was just misunderstood. The Prime Barrier perhaps necessitates this. They can’t fight a deciding battle because they don’t fight, so everything has to just turn out to be okay.
There’s some suggestion the Cyclops was simply scared of us (“your planet has an evil reputation throughout the galaxy… you are always at war”), which might be more convincing if he hadn’t recruited human henchmen. In a vain bid to keep the story propulsive, the antagonism abruptly switches to Jedikiah, who in short order is revealed as a robot, goes mad and starts rampaging round Cyclops’ spaceship. (Some robots revolt. Others go mad. Them’s the breaks.)
As we saw another time, the monsters in ’Dr. Who’ tend to be human foibles, which are magnified, externalised and then stuffed in a rubber suit. The penchant of ’Tomorrow People’ is for more generalised social ills which turn out to be the fault of menacing aliens; gang warfare (‘The Blue and the Green’), the fashionability of fascism (‘Hitler’s Last Secret’) and so on. Except, as we’ve seen, they’re not really the aliens’ fault either. They shilly-shally between manipulative monsters and the equivalent of the Stranger.
Human hostility is established. Well, mentioned. Told the TPs can’t make war, Stephen asks the not-unreasonable question “what if someone makes war on us?” While the Cyclops warns them: “Arm yourself against your own species. They will kill you if they find you out.” But unlike the X-Men, unlike every Marvel hero ever, this secrecy doesn’t apply to their own parents. It’s taken for granted Stephen’s must be told.
Human mistrust only really appears with the biker gang who aid Jedikiah. Except ‘aid’ is a loose term, and he’s forever telling the serial bunglers “no more incompetence will be tolerated.” Which makes you wonder why he thought he needed them in the first place.
Their outlaw attire suggests that rather than adult authority figures they’re ‘bad kids’, the delinquent hooligans who plagued Seventies popular culture. They even have laddish nicknames, Ginge and Lefty. Which leads to an emphasis on brains triumphing over brawn, as if they’ve been set up to fail. There’s a scene where the TPs repeatedly jaunt out of their charging way, leaving them to fall in lakes and other hilarious consequences, which recalls the ghost cat taunting the live dog in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon ’The Funky Phantom’.
We’re told rather late on that they were recruited ideologically, told “you lot were just a bunch of freaks”. But this shows up out of nowhere, and is used as a convenience for them to swap sides, following the show’s No True Villains rule. Like school bullies, they’re tauntingly confrontational on the outside but really need the nerd kids’ help. From that point on they reappear as the pacifists’ handy contracted-out muscle, a little like the Ian role in ’Doctor Who’.
’Secret Weapon' (1975) is the nearest to a Sentinels-like story. Opening the third season it again introduces a new Tomorrow Person who’s conveniently ‘breaking out’, Tyso. Who’s wanted by a secret Government department, to make him the secret weapon of the title. The distinction between him and them is established with a first shot, a toff car appearing on the road behind other gypsy kids as they play. And of course experiments on gypsies recall Nazi horrors.
The story’s tension lies between Professor Cawston and Colonel Masters, scientific curiosity against military instrumentalisation. One is handily colour-coded black and the other beige, against the Tomorrow People’s perpetual white. And like Jedikiah though he seeks to harness their powers, Masters spends virtually the whole time dampening them, giving Guards “dope guns”, placing Tyso and Stephen in comas.
In this way it’s almost the inverse of the Sentinels, the military being informed becoming the very problem. “Can you imagine living your whole life in a tribe of monkeys?” Cawston asks Masters. “With your very survival depending upon their not finding out you’re a human being, a superior creature?” But Masters’ reaction to their powers is not so much fearful as avaricious.
Writer and series creator Roger Price was in many ways an old Sixties radical, and the story resounds with anti-establishment and internationalist pacifism. Though he’s careful enough to portray Masters as sincere in his beliefs, however ruthless, allowing him counters in a stand-off argument with Elizabeth. (When he asks what would happen if such powers were to develop in Russia or China she replies there’d simply be more Tomorrow People like us, perhaps the series’ ethos encapsulated.)
But then the finale is a let-down even by the standards of the show, whether measured dramatically or politically. They essentially defeat military intelligence by going to its manager, leading to the so-bad-its-great line “what’s the Prime Minister doing here?” To get to the PM, they need to jauntingly kidnap him, which luckily he is rather sanguine about. See, kids? The system works.
Worse still, Chris, not a Tomorrow Person, can be presented as less enlightened, a slightly less street-level Ginge and Lefty. He’s essentially the hot-headed agitational radical, the peace hawk, against John’s sober-minded faith in reason. He’s even willing to threaten the old boy with a “Martian ray gun”, only for John to give the game away. Yet it’s him who cooks up this half-baked plan in the first place!
And the two most interesting features of the story, that the Tomorrow People initially underestimate Masters’ threat, and that his assistant is herself a telepath, are essentially orphaned by this rubbish resolution. Her powers seem lesser than the TPs, and are limited to telepathy, but still seem to grant her greater empathy than Masters. This is eventually explained as her being a kind of forerunner, who failed to fully break out.
And while Tyso may seem another point won for diversity casting, his actual role in the story is so slight he’s effectively a boy damsel in distress. He really does spend most of his time asleep, so much that he nearly gets forgotten at the end. And his Romany family are portrayed absurdly, his father even willing to sell him to Masters! The message would seem to be that we are such generous and tolerant folk, we even apply it to these backward Gyppo types.
Which shouldn’t surprise us. Frequently referred to as a critique of racism, this trope’s perhaps worse than useless for that. It exists to flatter its audience, convincing them it works as some sort of anti-racist credential, like those diversity training certificates workplaces give you. The truth is, people follow this stuff because they like to see some bigged up version of themselves, particularly with bigged up brains and hearts.
Being part of a band of elite pariahs, the tension over this trope is how much it can be a fantasy and how much a phobia. Witch-like powers come with witch hunts, after all. (As future instalments in this series will show, a feature of this trope is the way it weaves between kids’ TV shows and outright horror films.) This can be used creatively, making the dish into a sweet and sour.
’X-Men’ got this at some level, ’Tomorrow People’ less so. True, it suffered from cheap budgets even if compared to the often-mocked ’Doctor Who’, and from often-excruciating child acting. But chiefly it feels auto-inoculated against everything which might make its own scenario involving. Its utopianism may seem distant from us now, so it’s tempting to frame the problem as to do with eras. But it was dramatic too, forever presenting us with an enticing situation of conflict then whisking that conflict away. It took a great premise and fumbled it with wooly well-meaningness.
Coming soon! More mutants, more future...
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