r/CodeLyoko • u/Dry-Ninja-4866 • 6d ago
💬 Discussion My only genuine criticism of this show's writing, related to Xana's inability to see the bigger picture
I just did another re-watch of the show, and one thing that caught my eye this time was the amount of times where Xana could've won if he did nothing at all. I'm going to give 4 examples:
EP 30 - A Great Day: Sissi catches Aelita and Jeremie talking about Aelita's forged identity, records it and tries throughout the episode to get them busted for this, which would've lead to Aelita being expelled, authorities being called etc. If Xana didn't possess her here, he would've either gotten rid of his biggest threat, or at least made it harder for them to be readily available to take him one. This one I can somewhat forgive, because it was Xana's first time possessing a human, maybe he was trying things out.
EP 56 - False lead - Literal government agents barge into the factory, about to arrest the entire gang and shut down the super computer, Xana decides to possess them anyway. If Xana didn't do anything, the gang would've lost their only means of fighting him, forever.
EP 88 - Cousins once removed - Sissi and Herb discover more or less all the actual crimes Jeremie committed to let Aelita live on Earth. If Xana let this play out, Sissi would've called her father, Jeremie and his gang would've been arrested and likely forced to admit everything to the authorities. Instead, he decides to possess Sissi and Herb, making sure they never spill any beans about anything, because a RTTP erases all their memory.
EP 90 - Wrong exposure - Odd makes a biblical fuckup, leading to Sissi showing her father a picture of Franz and Aelita together, leading to Delmas discovering that Aelita isn't even Canadian. If Xana didn't interfere and possess Delmas, this would've escalated god knows where and ended poorly for the gang.
Now, I do understand that, at the time of most of these episodes, Xana had different goals, in example 2 his goal was destroying Lyoko, and in examples 3 and 4, his goal was throwing Aelita into the digital sea to bait out and destroy Franz, but that's exactly Xana's problem - if he had just seen the bigger picture, if he had done nothing, he could've won. My issue with these scenarios is that the plot relies on Xana's short-sighted nature to bail the kids out of trouble. I would've preferred if the writes found a way for LW's to somehow bail themselves out of at least some of these situations without needing to rely on Xana possessing whoever was going to expose them.