Sentinels
On X-Men, being a new parent, and Giant Robots as an apparatus of the security state.
Edited by Althea May Atherton.
In the wee hours of the too-late night and the too-early morning, I’ve been revisiting the 1992 X-Men cartoon. I recall excitedly finding it after it came highly recommended on the preschool playground. Beyond the nostalgia, it today fulfills an important purpose: I can throw it on the TV on low volume while bottle-feeding and burping my kid, where it’s compelling enough to keep me awake through the routine of cares while not so compelling I can’t go back to bed immediately after.
Over the last week of May, I finished the 13-episode pilot season. It is, as purchase orders of a show based on existing properties go, pretty jam packed. There’s a team of nine distinct protagonists, an extensive rogue’s gallery, and in the space of season one, four outstanding villains. These include the iconic antihero Magneto, time-traveling false deity Apocalypse, anti-mutant Senator Kelly, and mutant-hunting robot creator Mastermold.
These villains’ arcs all wind together, with minor henchmen showing up as barflies in one episode and potential assassins in another. It is a remarkably tight story package, especially given the deep and interwoven arcs of the comics on which the cartoon drew. The mutant allegory, where they stand in for every minority from ethnic to religious to sexual identity and expression, comes through especially well. Rhetoric chanted by anti-mutant mobs and demagogues in the show is identical in form to that used by the book ban bigots and anti-trans reactionaries of the 2020s, much as it held consistent for the anti-black reactionaries of the 2010s and the Islamophobes of the 2000s.
What gives the series enduring power, beyond the durable scourge of mass intolerance, is that the show’s threats largely exist in the realm of near-future technology.
By design or perhaps constraint of broadcast rules, the guns are mostly energy weapons, firing colorful beams instead of bullets. Pre-cell phone, the X-Men communicate by comm badge, not unlike in Star Trek. When the military shows up, as it often does, it drives tanks, but it features flying hoverbikes and pilot-driven mech suits.
Most striking of all the technologies featured are the Sentinels.
The Sentinels first appear on screen in the cartoon’s pilot, the two-part “Night of the Sentinels.” Stories-tall, these metal-and-plastic robots, cast in purples and pinks, are maximalist technology. They arrive at a mall, tracking runaway foster child Jubilee, a teen mall rat with a mutant power that lets her…explode electronics in a dazzle of sparks? (For a far better explanation of the character and her powers, I recommend listening to the Cerebro Cast episode). The Sentinels know to track Jubilee because her foster dad submitted her information to a registry of mutants. This immediately characterizes the Sentinels as not just powerful enemies, but weapons connected to a broader system of power and control.
While the mutant registry starts in the show as something mutants and their families can opt into, the premise and the fear is that it will become mandatory through legislation, permanently creating a second class of citizens and subjecting them to surveillance. The show does an impeccable job for a Saturday morning cartoon of showing this bigotry as not just driven top-down, but as linked to a broader reactionary movement. The “Friends of Humanity,” reactionary goons, outfitted in the denim and military surplus style of the 1980s and 1990s, are a menace that easily maps onto a host of far-right streetfighters.
Before they destroy the Sentinels, the X-Men target the registry, destroying digital and paper records as best they can until the arrival of security backup forces them to flee. Multiple Sentinels arrive, and in the retreat, scholarly teammate Beast is captured and the shapeshifter Morph is left presumably for dead. Such a loss is quite the opening for a show, though it of course had years of comics already running similar plots to back it up.
I received a Sentinel toy for Christmas as a small child. It towered above the other action figures, with a removable plastic chest covering that could hold a captive X-Man. I was enamored with the toy, the scale of monstrosity it represented, and the fights it would get into with the heroes.
It’d be easy to draw a straight line from Sentinels as outsized villains in my childhood to a professional career describing the robots and machines. I can’t imagine that’s the cause, though there is certainly something to be said for the ambient war machines of nearby Kirtland Airforce Base and mechanical monstrosities of the fiction on which I grew up.
The Sentinels operate on a scale unlike any vehicle or machine in real life. Bipedal robots are much easier to animate than to engineer. Flying surveillance robots are either large and tens of thousands of feet in the air, or small enough to fly inside a building, instead of crashing through it. Surveillance generally comes either in pervasive ambient security cameras or in the tracking of individuals that cell phone communications make possible.
Sentinels also let X-Men outsource the villainy of mutant-hunting to mechanical monsters. Police are at most benign in the show.When the Sentinel arc needs a truly monstrous government to execute anti-mutant policies, they turn to Genosha, a mutant apartheid state, where people are stripped of their powers and forced into labor camps. This leads to a nicely circular plot, where the labor of enslaved mutants builds a hydroelectric dam that powers Mastermold, the Sentinel that can make Sentinels.
We see little of the complicity of other state forces in anti-mutant violence, though anti-mutant Senator Kelly is turned from bigotry to sympathy after escaping Mastermold’s plot to create world peace by installing robot brains in the bodies of world leaders.
In this way, there’s one part of the arc that absolutely anticipates the present moment of automated military machines. By shifting the responsibility and blame onto the machine itself, the errors of autonomy become about improper engineering, rather than about machines that cannot be used responsibly. Sentinels are delightfully absurd in this sense, because it’s impossible for all but the most literally cartoonish villains to look at them and see a promise of safety or security. All autonomous tech, especially all armed autonomous tech, should be seen as similarly absurd.
Thank you all for reading. I’m happy to have found time to write for you again. As the timing of this newsletter’s story indicates, this was supposed to be a late May entry, but then travel, COVID, and the various demands of life kept me from it.
I enjoy the freedom of this newsletter, and especially the audience support. Every subscriber has already made my life, as a freelancer and a new parent, that much easier. In a just society we’d have basic social protections not linked to employment, but in the absence of that, I am grateful for what you all can spare to help me and mine get by.
Thank you for your continued support and patience, and I look forward to writing for you more in the future.