Josh Reviews X-Men ’97 Season Two

Back in 2024, X-Men ’97 was one of my favorite surprises of the year!  I’d watched the original X-Men animated series from the nineties, but I was never all that taken with it.  So I wasn’t sure, at first, if I was interested in watching the revival on Disney+.  I’m glad I did, because I thought that first season was terrific!  It was incredibly faithful to the original show while also elevating it on every level — the animation and the storytelling were both far more sophisticated than the old show ever was.  The show reminded me of how much I loved the X-Men comic books in the eighties and nineties, most especially when those comics were written by Chris Claremont.

When that first season of X-Men ’97 ended, I was jazzed and ready for more.  Unfortunately, as is so often the case in this streaming era, it took Marvel/Disney forever to get us this next season.  And so here we are, well over two years later, with a shortened second season (running nine episodes, instead of ten).  I was super-excited to return to the world of this show.  Did it live up to my expectations?

Well, yes and no.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching all nine of these new episodes.  Each one is a blast!  There’s nary a stinker in the bunch.  The animation continues to be top-notch, and it’s a pleasure to see how the show has continued to expand the storylines and the cast, sending these classic X-Men heroes off on various new adventures, many/most of which pull directly from classic stories from the comic books.

At the same time, the storytelling felt a little bit wobblier this season, and while there are a lot of terrific sequences and moments, nothing this season reaches the emotion heights of episode five in season one.

My main objection to this season is that, after a very cool opening four episodes episodes, which explored different groups of X-Men having adventures at three different points in the timeline, the remaining five episodes felt very rushed to me.  This was occasionally a problem in season one as well, most notably in episode three, which gave us an extremely fast-forwarded version of literally YEARS of storytelling from the comics — the entire Madelyne Pryor/Goblin Queen storyline — all smushed into one half-hour episode.  But I really felt that throughout this season.  I wish they’d had one more episode to spread out the storytelling a bit and given more time to follow-up on the characters and the emotional repercussions of these adventures.  (For instance, we really needed an episode between episodes 4 and 5 that would have better explored the characters’ return to their present day in the nineties and the fallout of all the momentous events that happened in the past and future, before just dropping us into the Wolverine and Morph Brood story in episode 5.  Similarly, after that Wolvie/Morph team-up leaves the two in a dark place, with Morph’s feeling betrayed by Wolverine, I couldn’t believe that we never even got one scene in the back half of the season to follow up on that and explore where those two characters were, emotionally.  The back half of the season also rushes through a variety of other plot points, such as the establishment of X-Corp and the dividing of the team into a squad based in Westchester and a squad based in Genosha.  If the show had better paced out these storylines and taken a little more time to explore the accompanying emotional/character beats, I think this would have been a much stronger season.)

That being said, there’s a TON this season that I loved!  If you’re an X-Men fan and you’re on the fence about watching this show, I think you should go ahead and dive in!!  This show really captures the most classic version of all these characters, and it does a great job at capturing the tone of classic X-Men stories, filled with tons of action and also plenty of interpersonal soap opera.  It’s really a hoot.  You can watch it now on Disney+!

Shall we dive in and explore this season further?  Beware SPOILERS ahead!!  Stop reading here if you haven’t yet seen this season!

Episode 1: “Days of Past Future”

• I really like the approach of starting the season with a series of episodes that each focuses in on one time-period and the adventure the characters are having there.  This allows us to have episodes that feel like complete, satisfying chunks of a story.  This is a smarter approach than constantly cutting back and forth between the various time-periods.
• It’s absolutely wild — but it makes me very happy!! — to see the show adapt The Adventures of Cyclops & Phoenix, a pretty obscure miniseries from the nineties!  (It’s a great comic, written by Scott Lobdell and illustrated by Gene Ha, that presents the strange idea that Scott and Jean raised young Cable/Nathan Summers in the future.)
• I love the new costumes!  It makes me very happy to see Scott & Jean in their eighties X-Factor duds, and Ororo in her Jim Lee-designed nineties look.  (Though where did the time-lost X-Men get these new costumes??)
• I really liked seeing the cool-looking bullet train with Apocalypse’s face on the front.
• I’m glad we found out quickly who brought the X-Men through time, rather than stretching that out into a season-long mystery.
• I’m glad they didn’t overdo feral Wolverine after losing his adamantium. I thought the monster-like, nose-less Wolverine we got in the comics for a while, after Magneto tore out Wolverine’s adamantium, was dumb.  I liked that the show nodded to that without making it too silly.  I like the look they gave to Wolverine, and I’m glad he could still talk normally.  These were good choices.
• I loved seeing Ship!  (Brings me back to the X-Factor comics from the eighties!)
• I also liked that they worked in Ozymandias, a character from the aughts who was connected to Apocalypse.

Episode 2: “A Force to be Reckoned With”

• This was a highlight of the season for me!  I loved getting to see the nineties version of X-Factor (from the start of Peter David’s long run writing the series), when they were a government-connected group overseen by Val Cooper.  I love it!
• And, of course, it was also fun to see Cable assembling his own X-Force group, harkening back to Rob Liefeld’s series from the nineties!  It feels correct that Cable wants soldiers, not students.  It also makes sense that the show used Jubilee in the Boom Boom role.
• One of the most fun aspects of X-Men ’97 for me has been the way they have playfully adjusted the opening credits from episode to episode.  They really kicked that into high gear here with an absolutely incredible X-Force opening!!!  Brilliant!
• It was fun to see lots of familiar faces in the group mutant kids, including Quentin Quire (who was introduced in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men run from 2001-04).
• Overall I’ve loved all the new costumes that the characters have gotten this season, and I like that they’ve allowed Jubilee to look a little older and a little cooler.  Though it’s a bit silly that Jubilee’s new costume is basically just the black outfit we saw her buy at the mall at the end of last season.
• Wow! Cable and Archangel just shoot War in cold blood!  Hard core!  That was a surprise.
• I loved seeing Jubilee kick ass and win the day on her own, AND be the moral high ground for both X-Force and X-Factor!  This is a great version of Jubilee!  I love seeing the growth since last season (when she was just battling Mojo video-games).
• Back in the future, I’m not sure I buy why the X-Men couldn’t stay with Nathan, or take him back with them to the present.  Aren’t they already changing the timeline?  Isn’t that the goal of the team in the past?  I understand that plot-wise the show needs Nathan to stay in the future, so he can grow up to be Cable, but character-wise I don’t believe that Scott and Jean would leave him.
• Also, there’s no real in-the-story logic that I can understand, for all the time-travel happening.  It seems like the characters only have time travel tech when the writers want.  Natan can easily send the X-Men back to 1997, but he can’t use that tech to stay in touch with his parents (until he’s full grown adult Cable, when he can timeslide at will)?  This doesn’t make much sense to me.  And of course there’s no reason I can see why Nathan doesn’t give the X-Men this tech, except because story-wise the show doesn’t want Scott & co. to be able to help the team in the past at the start of the next episode.  Very convenient.

Episode 3: “Rise of Apocalypse” Part 1

• To the makers of this show: THANK YOU for using 3000 BCE instead of BC, when labeling the year in the on-screen text chiron!!!  BE stands for Before Christ, while BCE means before the Common Era.  Not everyone is Christian, you know!  I was so surprised and happy to see the more inclusive BCE used here.
• I assumed that En Sabah Nur built the advanced looking technological dome in ancient Egypt, but that was a fake-out — it was Rama Tut!  I love that!
• What a pleasure to hear Michael Dorn as Baal, and Gates McFadden as Mother Askani!  And John de Lancie voices Rama Tut!!  Yay for Star Trek: The Next Generation!
• It took me a while to understand where Magnus and Charles were, emotionally, but once I understood, I liked the idea that Magnus wanted to redeem En Sabah Nur into being the first X-Man, instead of the villain Apocalypse.  I like that Magnus is perhaps being a little more noble, here, but he’s still Magneto, and he still winds up making a mess of things.

Episode 4: “Rise of Apocalypse” Part 2

• It’s fun to see Rama Tut, and I liked hearing him call himself Nathaniel and Kang.  (Seeing how Kang has been involved in the MCU in recent years but has vanished once Disney decided to stop employing Jonathan Majors, it might have been fun to have seen the Rama Tut version of Kang more involved in the story here in this animated show.  Though I suspect the opposite happened and they decided to downplay Kang’s involvement.  Apparently Jonathan Majors was originally supposed to voice Rama-Tut here in this series!!  Oh well.)  I liked the touch that Ramah Tut has a circular time sphere that looks a lot like the one Kang had in Ant Man: Quantumania!
• I smiled to hear Rama Tut mention the Externals.  That was a big deal for a while in Rob Liefeld’s X-Force comics in the nineties.  Though I think the animated show is using the Externals differently here.
• It’s pretty brutal that Apocalypse murders Magneto.  Will this be undone by time travel in future episodes?  (My guess is yes.)
• Once again, the use of time travel is so inconsistent.  Bishop is able to time travel back to rescue Xavier, but conveniently only after Apocalypse killed Magneto?  Why couldn’t Bishop travel back a few minutes earlier and rescue Magneto?  I don’t get it.
• Why aren’t the X-Men changing the timeline and creating an alternate future while they’re mucking around in the past?
• I loved the post-credits scene with Logan, Captain America, and Black Widow!  It’s of course a reference to the classic Uncanny X-Men #268, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Jim Lee!!  I loved that!  (Though was the show purposefully making it unclear when that scene was taking place?  I didn’t know if we were in the past or in the show’s “present” of the nineties.)

Episode 5: “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs”

• That’s a great title to the episode.
• I was very confused at first about when this episode was taking place.  It took me a whole to figure out that we’re back in present day, having another adventure.  That felt jarring to me; I wanted to see all the time-lost X-Men reunite and compare notes, and deal with the emotional impact of all that they’d all been though.
• I loved seeing Wolverine reunite with his old teammates Maverick and Sabretooth (harkening back to X-Men # 4 & 5, written by John Byrne & Jim Lee, and illustrated by Jim Lee & Scott Williams)!  Though I’m not really buying that Logan would willingly work with Sabretooth.
• I rolled my eyes when they had Maverick say “Game over!” like Hicks from Aliens.  Too obvious.
• But I LOVED seeing the Brood-infected Wolverine, mimicking the famous cover image from Uncanny X-Men #234, illustrated by Marc Silvestri!  That was great.
• I also loved seeing Wolvie mimic the famous cover image from issue #1 of the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller Wolverine mini-series, illustrated by Mr. Miller!
• I laughed when Morph as Cyclops taunted Logan about smooching Jean; that was very funny!
• This was a great episode until the end; I wasn’t happy with the too-fast and way-too easy wrap-up, in which Wolverine gets his adamantium back and purges the Brood from his system, all in about two minutes, and he’s totally fine immediately after.   That felt like a cheat to me.
• I liked the tension between Morph and Wolverine at the end of the episode.  I’m shocked that was then completely dropped by the show and never referred back to.

Episode 6: “Danger.exe”

• Another great episode title!
• I was happy the show finally got back to the repercussions of what happened to Xavier and Magneto at the end of their time-travel adventure.
• I was happy to see X-Factor still involved in the story, and I loved the spotlight on Polaris.
• I enjoyed seeing Danger from Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men from around 2004.  I like that the show is pulling from various different eras of X-Men comics.
• I found it silly that it was OK for Polaris and Bishop to take an X-jet and go fight, but not Storm and Forge.  President Kelly would really parse the difference, and be OK that those two aren’t official X-Men??  They’re all X-Men!  The show needed to find a better reason why they wouldn’t all go and help.
• I loved seeing the Grant Morrison era costumes!!  But here’s another example of the show moving way too fast — why are we already getting another costume change?  I think it’d have been more effective had they waited to the start of season 3.  It’d have been cool if each season had a different look to the costumes.
• I liked seeing Xavier being smart and tough, and working together with Lorna.  Though I wish he’d found a way to reason with Danger, rather than murdering that A.I.  As a long-time Star Trek fan, I tend to root for our heroes to find a peaceful path to understanding with their antagonists, rather than just treating them like monsters that need to be destroyed or killed.
• Bringing in X-Corp, another concept from the Grant Morrison era, was interesting.  Wouldn’t it have made more sense, though, to wait reveal the new uniforms AFTER that change, rather than before?  Also, I wish the show explained more about 1) what X-Corp would be doing and 2) what life was like for the X-Men now, all alone on Genosha, living amongst the bones of millions of murdered mutants.  This seems like a strange choice that the show never pauses to explore.
• I think the show missed a big opportunity in not connecting Danger’s “survival of the fittest” mantra with that of Apocalypse, especially since they bring him back at the end of this very episode!
• Gambit’s return was inevitable, but I wish they’d waited longer, maybe until season three.

Episode 7: “Strange Land, Savage Heart”

• I was happy to see Polaris still on the show, and even in the opening credits!
• I liked seeing the Acolytes – who were such major players in the X-Men comics of the nineties, and the show’s version of the storyline in which Colossus leaves the X-Men to join them.  (This happened in Uncanny X-Men #304, during the 1993 “Fatal Attractions” storyline.  I didn’t love that crossover — I think the X-Men comics had somewhat lost their way in that period, after Claremont was forced to leave the books — but that moment of Colossus’ betrayal was memorable!)
• It’s a smart change that the show has Colossus’ sister Illyana get killed in Genosha, rather than by the Legacy Virus.  That works!
• I like seeing Nightcrawler given the spotlight.
• What are Exodus’ powers, exactly?  (I wasn’t quite clear on that in the original comics, either!)
• Overall, this was a great story, questioning whether even a horribly evil person is worthy of grace, and if the possibility of redemption exists.

Episode 8: “The Dead Man’s Hand”

• I was sort of dreading Gambit’s inevitable resurrection, but I thought they did a decent job depicting the storyline in which Apocalypse transforms him into his horseman War.  I like seeing Rogue back in the spotlight in these final two episodes.
• It was nice to see Jubilee and X-Force reunite with the X-Men, finally.  (The X-Men have been back in the present for many episodes.  I wish the show had taken the time before now to check-in with Jubilee and let us know when/if she learned they were back, and to show her struggling with whether to return to the X-Men or stay with X-Force.)  I like how Jubilee plays bridge between the teams.
• I smiled to see Cerebra from Grant Morrison’s run, even though I always felt that a female version of Cerebro was sort of silly.
• So, Apocalypse’s love is the External, who’s the goddess worshipped by the thieves guild that Gambit comes from?  This seems to me like a weird combination of different strands of X-Men lore, though I think we already saw the External in the original run of the X-Men animated series.  So I think this has already been established in the show’s continuity, though I don’t remember.
• I love seeing the X-Men all assembling together at the end!!  That was an awesome moment.
• Wow, evil Nightcrawler kicks ass!!
• I liked having Rogue saving Gambit, inside his mind.  That feels like a classic type of X-Men plot.
• I smiled to see “XM-266” on the medical scanner (which is of course a reference to Gambit’s first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #266, written by Chris Claremont and illustrated by Mike Collins & Josef Rubenstein).
• I like the X-Force/X-Factor team-up at the end!  But where are Polaris and Bishop?  The show has introduced a LOT of characters by this point, which is great, though I think the show didn’t always do a great job of juggling them all and making clear what everyone was up to.

Episode 9: “Survival of the Fittest”

• I liked seeing Val Cooper and and X-Force at the end of the opening credits, replacing Magneto & the Brotherhood as the X-Men’s main enemies!
• There’s some great action in this episode.
• I love seeing a Celestial!!
• I don’t buy that Havok and Cable would consent to fighting alongside Val when she is using Sentinels.  This also seems like a surprising villain-turn from Val, who was mostly sympathetic in season one.
• I loved seeing Cable vs Scott & Jean.
• So much for the X-Corp tower.  But that moment falls flat, because the show hasn’t taken the time to establish X-Corp or allow us to understand what it is, or to see it in operation.
• Interesting ending with Nightcrawler’s sacrifice.  It’s an emotional moment, and the ending lands.  Though it felt a little random to me that the Celestial allows this.  Also, I loved Nightcrawler and hate to see him written of the show, even if it’s only temporary.
• I liked the stinger with Mystique shooting & replacing Val Cooper.  It’d be fun to see Mystique as a main villain in season three.
• We also see that Graydon Creed has been elected President.  Hmm, a supervillain as President feels quite of the moment…

I enjoyed this season of X-Men ’97, even if it didn’t quite reach the highs of season one!  I hope we don’t have to wait too long for season three, and I hope they bump the episode-count back up to at least ten episodes!

Thanks for reading!  Please support my website by clicking through one of my Amazon links the next time you need to shop!  As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.  That means I’ll receive a small percentage from ANY product you purchase from Amazon within 24 hours after clicking through.  Thank you!