Shark Bytes

all i can really say is ... Victoria Pratt is HOT! SO... freaking HOT!!!!

I know that some of the premises were ridiculous, but that wasn't why I loved it. I loved the action, powers and characters. I only saw the show when it was quite a way in, but I always thought it was awesome. I WAS sad when I ran out of episodes. It was my weekly ritual to watch it and Andromeda.

Truth be told, it jumped from the get-go. While the premise was interesting and the cast quite solid for a saturday afternoon syndicated action show, the first season scripts were beyond awful, amongst the worst on tv. The stories were completely uninteresting, the dialogue was wooden, everything was wrong, wrong, wrong! The revolving door at the GSA made no sense! I mean come on, Eckhart, if you fire every one of your 'best' agents by sticking them in a pod at the end of the episode, how do you ever expect to defeat Mutant X?!? That said, the show improved dramatically in season 2, in every way, from production values of the plotting, characterizations, and scriptwriting, to the sets and effects (thank god they got rid of that green transition bar that phased in and out between scenes, and that cheese-ball CGI flight over the water towards Sanctuary). Emma became much more interesting in season 2 and it was a shame to see her go. If they were going to axe people based on budget cuts, it should have been Forbes March who, as another poster mentioned above, was by far the least interesting of the entire cast, especially after they changed Emma in season 2. Oh, and in regards to the comment above regarding Victoria Pratt, she definitely never 'jumped the shark' in the looks department; aside from the 'great hair and great body,' she has a beautiful face and charm. It was unfortunate that what later became an intriguing series was doomed from its very shaky start.

Gotta say it, Mutant X was over for me in the show's last season, when John Shea (Adam) and Lauren Lee Smith (Emma) were axed. Prime bait for the shrk. Adam returned for a few 'guest' appearances at the end of the season, but the damage had already been done by that time. Without Adam, the team lacked a leader (would you do X-Men without Professor X?) and minus Emma, the balance was lost. Before, you had one mutant of each type: A Feral (Shalimar), a Molecular (Jesse), an Elemental (Brennan) and a Psionic (Emma). Now you had 2 Moleculars, a Feral and an Elemental, no Psions at all. Sorry, no offense to Karen Cliche, but Lexa never clicked with me; she was clearly the harbinger of the Mutant X apocalypse. Her powers were OK, but unfortunately she changed the entire dynamic of the show. First, like I already said, she threw the balance off by not being a Psion. Second, there was no longer a balance between the women on the show; Lexa was a so-called 'tough chick', which intruded on Shalimar's character as the team's resident 'loose cannon'. Third, Lexa had no history with the others (except for the absent Adam), so it was completely implausible for the others to accept her, let alone follow her orders. They're mutants who can't completely trust anyone, then this woman shows up at their door, won't tell anyone anything about her, and says, "Here it is in a nutshell, I'm the leader now. Follow me, don't ever question me, and don't ask me anything about my past." Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The fact that they dropped Emma to bring in Lexa didn't make me like her any more; Emma was one of my favorite characters, and her power had the potential to be very cool. So did they take her out? Mutant X never recovered from that. The last episode had something to do with a clone Adam and that weird wheelchair guy who I swear was the living image of Ironside and something about aliens, but by that time I had long since ceased to care anymore. I'm actually glad a 5th season never happened.

When Lauren Lee Smith was let go to bring in Karen Cliche, the star of Adventure Inc., which was a sucky show in which she stood out as sucking a lot. John Shea leaving didn't help, but he returned for a few episodes. Ultimately, Mutant X was about the Mutants. It didn't really matter who gave them their missions as long as the chemistry of the team was there. Introducing a terrible actress playing a character nobody trusted, who whom everyone obeyed made no sense and made the show unwatchable. Lauren Lee Smith was young, pretty, and could act. Her character Emma also had an interesting story arc going where she was beginning to abuse her powers and even threaten Adam. Suddenly *bam* cut to a body bag on a stretcher and "Emma's dead, oh well, let's totally ignore that she ever existed and start doing pointless things totally at odds with what we have always done in the past."

They killed off the only character in the series that was interesting and the best looking.

This was a great show. I never missed an episode but lost ALL interest after Lauren Lee Smith (Emma) and John Shea (Adam) left the show. I never felt that the writers really knew what to do with Emma's powers anyway. She was actually the most powerful of the team but they hardly ever had her use her powers because then there wouldn't have been a story. She had the power of mind control. She could make people think or feel anything she wanted them to think or feel. And she could make people see things that weren't really there. At the beginning of every episode they could have just had her do her mind mojo on the bad guys and then that would have been it. But then the show would have only lasted 10 minutes. So, sadly, the writers mostly just had her worrying and fretting about the others while they went off to fight the bad guys and she stayed behind assisting Adam in the lab.

When John Shea left. He was the only one in the cast with any real acting chops. "Incredibly gorgeous"? Victoria Pratt manages to be unattractive despite the great hair and body. Forbes March completely fades into the woodwork (and I'm not referring to his character's power), as did Lauren Lee Holly before she left.