X-Men ’97 returns for Season 2 with three episodes set across time: “Days of Past Future” written by Brian Ford Sullivan and directed by Emmett Yonemura, “A Force to Be Reckoned With” written by Anthony Sellitti and Mariah Wilson and directed by Yonemura, and “Rise of Apocalypse Part 1” written by Beau DeMayo and JB Ballard and directed by Chase Conley.
In the grand scheme of reboots, sequel series, revivals and other 21st century TV nonsense, the first season of X-Men ’97 was something of a rare success story. While actual numbers for a streaming series remain as obtuse as ever, by all accounts it was a popular series that did good numbers for Disney+ — certainly good enough to merit additional seasons and, following a longer break between the first and second seasons, a commitment to releasing future seasons annually, the way all TV used to be. Thanks to the fact it was released after Disney bought Fox and put those pesky “a rival studio owns the mass media rights to the X-Men!” issues to bed, it also capitalized on the X-Men being a license-able property again, which as Mel Brooks taught us, is where the real money is.
More importantly, the first season (mostly) managed to be a creative hit, striking the right balance of stoking the nostalgia feels (for both a generation of viewers who grew up on the animated series, and olds with an abiding love for the original comic book stories) while remixing known story beats and characterization and elevating the level of craft relative to the original series (which, let’s be honest, was often beset by cheap animation and hamstrung by 1990s standards and practices) while also occasionally pushing the story into a darker, messier, more complicated place. The second season of X-Men ’97, which bowed July 1 with a trio of episodes before settling in for a more leisurely one-episode-a-week pace, more or less picks up right where the first season left off, narratively and creatively, for better or worse.
In a smart move given the show’s sprawling cast, each of the three episodes focuses on a different chunk of that cast (something that makes me a little less grumpy about dropping all three at once). In “Days of Past Future,” the X-Men sent into the future — Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Morph and Storm — in last season’s cliffhanger team up with the Clan Askani to help set the future Cable (currently a 10-year-old boy, and also the son of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s clone, whom they sent into the future to save his life last season) on the path of his destiny to destroy Apocalypse. In “A Force to Be Reckoned With,” the adult, gun-wielding Cable recruits Jubilee and Sunspot, left behind in 1997, to his black-ops X-Force group and their hunt for Apocalypse (who has fled from the future to the past/present of ’97), which brings them into the crosshairs of the government-sponsored mutant team, X-Factor. And in “Rise of Apocalypse Part 1,” the narrative catches up with the other half of the time-traveling X-Men — Professor X, Magneto, Rogue, Beast and Nightcrawler — who are chilling in ancient Egypt with a young, pre-evil Apocalypse, who is leading a rebellion against the despotic (and secretly time-traveling) pharaoh Rama-Tut (who is also actually Kang the Conqueror, a fact the series could actually acknowledge now that all of Marvel’s TV rights reside under the same studio).
All three are of a piece with the previous season, in terms of being, at their heart, Saturday morning cartoons for people who really like the X-Men, punched up with better animation and better action sequences. While there are obviously connective threads stretching across each episode, each episode also strives to tell a complete story in and of itself (even “Rise of Apocalypse” has a complete arc, despite being the first part of a two-part story). The desire to keep an air of “done in one” about the show is both admiringly quaint and contributes to the feeling that the series occasionally speedruns X-Men history, cramming a ton of plot into each episode and squeezing out characterization. In that regard, these first three episodes are a marked improvement over the first season (which essentially did all of “Inferno” in one episode and crammed both “Operation: Zero Tolerance” and “Fatal Attractions” into three). Apocalypse is clearly being positioned as the big bad of the season — at least initially — and three episodes in, that’s still true. If we’re ultimately heading toward some kind of animated adaptation of “The Twelve” or “Blood of Apocalypse,” the show is, relatively speaking, taking its time to get there. The fact that the first episode concludes by setting up the second, which concludes by returning to the setting of the first episode to wrap up its plot, is downright languid for this series.
For as much as I’m an easy mark for Cyclops/Cable paternal drama, the strongest episode of the three is “A Force to Be Reckoned With,” not because of its dedication to completely redoing the opening credits to match the episode’s focus on Cable’s X-Force team (which is nevertheless an impressive level of dedication to a bit) but for the way it tries to say something about the morals of superheroing by having Jubilee push Cable on his “shoot first, ask questions later” approach and argue that there’s no point in saving the world from Apocalypse if it comes at the cost of making that world a better one. It’s also a fantastic showcase episode for Jubilee, one that pushes the character beyond the audience surrogate/untrained newbie role she all too often finds herself in. If one of the arcs of the season is going to be “Jubilee becomes the moral center of the X-Men,” I am here for it.
Ultimately, this initial trio of episodes accomplishes what you want to see from a returning show’s debut: more of what you liked in the previous season, along with some course corrections regarding the things that maybe weren’t working as well, and an expansion of the show’s world. There’s not much on display in these three episodes to suggest the series is going to raise its ceiling above the level of “well-crafted cartoon for nostalgic adults and X-Men nerds,” but it does show it’s able to hit that ceiling with verve and aplomb.
X-Traneous Facts
- The image on the landing page on Disney+ is an homage to the cover of X-Men Alpha #1.
- I laugh every time a character says “the 1990s” in a deeply dramatic way.
- Apocalypse’s quasi-Terminators appeared in the original series.
- Wolverine has gone full feral regression – bone claws, tattered costume, long hair, bandana, but does appear to still have his nose.
- Cyclops and Jean, meanwhile, are wearing versions of their Walt Simonson X-Factor uniforms, and Storm is rocking a version of the blue-and-yellow training uniform.
- Apocalypse having his face on his citadel and his train is broadly consistent with a man with a big A belt buckle.
- Whither Stryfe?
- Mother Askani is absolutely Rachel Summers (as she is in the comics), and I’m not sure why the show is being coy about that.
- Did it work for me when Cyclops and Jean repeated their goodbye to Nathan and it motivated him to break free? Yes. Did his ability to break free despite the power dampening collars make sense? No.
- Similarly, I’m not sure why Ship downloading its consciousness into Cable’s arm gives said arm the ability to send people through time, but whatevs.
- The song playing when Jubilee busts out is “Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt.
- The title of the second episode is the same as the title of the story in X-Force #1.
- Back in the ’90s, when the series adapted “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” the Hellfire Club was called the Circle Club; it’s the Hellfire Club in Episode 2.
- There’s an interesting bit in “Rise of Apocalypse” where Magneto — the reformed villain — argues in favor of trying to prevent Apocalypse from turning evil and Xavier — the moral visionary — is basically saying, “Nah, he’s evil and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
- When Xavier experiences his trippy vision in Episode 3, at one point the moon transforms into an image that resembles Onslaught’s helmet.
- The guest cast is filled with Star Trek: The Next Generation vets: Doctor Crusher (Gates McFadden) is Mother Askani, Q (John de Lancie) is Rama-Tut and Worf (Michael Dorn) is Baal.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him @austingorton.bsky.social.
