RECAP: X-Men 97 Season 2 FINALE
Well that was unexpected.
One of my personal mantras is to enjoy pop culture for what it is, not what you personally want it to be. I think that’s a problem that took hold thanks to internet message boards and social media starting in the 00s — arguably even in the 90s with “The X-Files” — with viewers trying to figure out what would happen next, and then getting disappointed when it didn’t turn out that way. That isn’t really fair to the creators. We can’t put our expectations on the story they’re trying to tell. We are ultimately the consumers here, not the creators.
With that said, I don’t know if Season 2 of “X-Men ‘97” works as a whole. Certainly I think it is less cohesive and satisfying than the first season. This finale felt especially random. Multiple character and plotline decisions left me baffled, especially from a mega-arc perspective. There is still good to be found here, but more than anything, I found myself confused by a lot of what happened.
Read on for my take on the episode, titled “Survival of the Fittest.” Warning: there WILL be spoilers!
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I’ll focus on the finale itself, breaking it down into the Good, The Bad, and The Disappointing.
The Good
There were some great action sequences in this episode. X-Factor and X-Force teaming up to infiltrate X-Corp and murder a comatose Gambit before Apocalypse reawakened inside of him gave us numerous memorable fights. Jubilee vs. Havok in the jets once again showed us how good this show is at showcasing Jubilee and her powers — she is far more effective in “X-Men ‘97” than she has ever been in the comics. Sad but true. We also got a great throwdown between Morph and Wolverine and Psylocke and Archangel, with Psylocke in particular making strategic use of her multifaceted telekinetic abilities. (I think it’s BS that Wolverine would be completely unphased by Psylocke’s psychic knife, but whatever.)
The fight between Cable, Cyclops, and Jean Grey was also pretty epic. And I thought my family reunions were brutal! Cable, relentless in the pursuit of his destiny to destroy Apocalypse by any means necessary, did not hold back in taking on the X-Men in general — the X-Corp building was destroyed just as the X-Mansion is every other week — and his parents specifically. I think that’s an accurate read of who Cable is, and the inherent tension between him and Scott and Jean. Nathan is a soldier who will do what needs to be done, no matter how grisly. Scott may fancy himself a tactician, but there was no good argument against Cable’s logic: Remy LeBeau is one man, and if/when Apocalypse takes back over of his body, he WILL kill billions. You cannot balance that scale via Care Bear Stares or whatever.
I also was excited by the post-credits teaser for Season 3. As anticipated after the Acolytes episode, Graydon Creed has won election as President of the United States and is launching a strict anti-mutant agenda. We see Val Cooper in her office reading through a file on Mystique, the shape-changing villain who has been absent the entirety of the series thus far. In through the office door walks…Val Cooper, who is shut in the gut by desk Val, who quickly shape changes back to her true form as Mystique. Having Graydon Creed putting the full weight of the U.S. government into rounding up mutants, and Mystique secretly operating as Val Cooper, who will likely be heavily involved in those operations, is an interesting, albeit much lower-stakes threat the previous two seasons. But I think a more narrow focus can only help this how, which is trying to do way too many things way too fast.
The Bad
This Big Bad of this season was supposed to be Apocalypse. He was built up from the very end of last season, and we saw him as a massive, world-ending threat both in the distant past and the distant future. And the X-Men in the present never fought him. Not really. The Apocalypse corpse discovered by X-Force wasn’t a red herring; it appears that Apocalypse deliberately transferred his consciousness into the Horseman version of Gambit, OR Gambit somehow overpowered this supposed world-class threat moments after being resurrected, and Apocalypse’s psyche somehow Trojan Horse’d his way into Gambit’s brain, slowly gaining control.
I’m choosing to interpret Gambit’s actions last episode — kidnapping Rogue and Nightcrawler, taking over the Thieves and Assassins guilds of New Orleans, summoning and killing The X-Ternal to acquire the gem Apocalypse gave her (off screen) in the distant past — as Remy driving the bus and accessing Apocalypse’s knowledge. This episode, after Gambit is shot dead in the head by Cable, the malevolent force that then revives him and transforms his body is Apocalypse, with Gambit wiped out.
That is a very strange way to have the X-Men fight Apocalypse. I don’t understand why Remy, of all the mutants who died in Genosha, was picked by Apocalypse as his new host. That was never explained to us. I don’t understand why Apocalypse, who seemed to look fine when we saw him in the present this season, either chose to jump into Deathit’s body, or how he was killed by Deathbit. I don’t understand how the future Apocalypse teleporting into the 90s is tied to any of this. I don’t understand why Deathbit went through the whole gem-retrieval process from last episode, just for Rogue to be robbed of the Celestial seed moments into this episode. It feels like the writers were scrambling to cobble together a plot, and given how long this season took to make, that’s disappointing.
Speaking of Rogue, I don’t understand that whole arc at all. First of all, Rogue, Beast, and Nightcrawler — who all interacted with En Sabah Nur in the distant past earlier this season — start the episode by trying to locate Ship, the Celestial craft that gave birth to Apocalypse and was last seen in the present day in the original “X-Men” cartoon, deep underwater, where it was left in the original series. They hoped it might contain the solution to saving Gambit. That, I get. But how does Ship still exist in the present, when I am almost certain that Magneto fed it into a black hole over Egypt earlier this season? Am I hallucinating that? If the craft was destroyed in the distant past, how does it still exist in the 1990s (to say nothing of the far future, where we also saw it earlier this season)?
Rogue insists on entering the portal that turned En Sabah Nur into Apocalypse, where she comes face to face with a Celestial, who rejects here and explains that for life to grow, it must be challenged — and Apocalypse is necessary for those challenges. Rogue fights back, impressing the space god, and offers a bargain: the Celestial will give her the power to save Gambit, but it requires a sacrifice. The implication is that Rogue will sacrifice her life to save Gambit, and Rogue doesn’t hesitate to make that deal.
The Celestial empowers Rogue, giving her a fancy cosmic makeover (capes really can save the world, you guys). She has a tearful goodbye with her adopted brother, Nightcrawler, who understands something is very wrong.
We next see Celestial-powered Rogue swooping in to save the day, after the ascendent Apocalype has taken mental control over the defeated X-Men, threatening to annihilate Charles Xavier. Rogue swoops in and makes contact with Apocalypse, pulling his energy into her palm (reminder, last week Rogue’s powers had no effect when she touched Deathbit). There was a weird scene where she seemed to crush Apocalypse’s spirit into her hand, and ultimately it became a similar gem to the one Deathbit took back from The X-Ternal. Rogue handed this new crystal prison of Apocalypse over to Cable, and that was the end of that.
Rogue and Gambit — now miraculously alive, and also able to physically touch — reunite, and Rogue realizes that her expected sacrifice is not happening. She turns to Beast, holding Nightcrawler’s Bible. In a flashback we see Kurt also having an audience with the Celestial, offering to be the sacrifice to enable Rogue and Gambit to be together and happy. It’s a sweet scene, and I think it’s fully in character for Nightcrawler. But it feels very strange to have Kurt sacrifice himself off screen — we never see him die — and then the season just…ends.
The Disappointing
One of this season’s throughlines has been family and sacrifice. I get that. I don’t even take issue with Kurt doing what he did. I more take issue with them not giving Kurt his dramatic death, the way they gave Gambit his in Season 1. And that’s a recurring issue with this season. We didn’t see Apocalype either die or will himself into Gambit, either. For some reason the show is telling us about these big sacrifices, but not showing them. And they have done so in the past. It’s just very strange from a storytelling perspective.
It’s also deeply unsatisfying to build up Apocalypse as the Big Bad, and at literally no point this season did the X-Men as a team actually fight Apocalypse. Cosmically-powered Rogue basically one-shotted him with a touch. Nobody else laid a finger on the guy. We had conservatively like 16 heroes in that room, and not one of them did a single thing, except for Cable, who just kept impotently shooting at him. That does not make any sense from a storytelling perspective.
I know this is also a personal expectation, and therefore not really fair to the creators. But you’re going to use Apocalypse, a character known for his Horsemen, and not give us ANY other Horsemen? Don’t you think that would make for a more compelling final act, and give the X-Men, X-Force, and X-Factor something to fight against other than themselves? I guess it’s kind of a play on “The X-Cutioner’s Song” crossover, but lacking in a true big battle. Compare it to the final clash against Bastion in Season 1. There is no comparison here.
Season 3 has been promised next year, and Season 4 is also actively being worked on. The intention is to push these seasons out much more regularly than the three-year gap between seasons 1 and 2. That’s good. But I really hope the showrunners are able to focus their energies more successfully in Season 3. I know there’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes drama; I’m not interested in going into that. I’ll just say that as someone who loved Season 1, and was super excited for Season 2, I don’t think they executed at the level Season 1 showed us is possible. There were so many plotlines either thrown away (Wolverine without adamantium) or pointlessly shoehorned in (what was the purpose of the Danger threat given how completely useless Xavier was in this episode?). The X-Men comics are renowned for their dangling plotlines, but surely we can do better here.
I’m also dismayed at the characters who were killed off this season with fairly little fanfare. Magneto probably has the most impact, especially on Charles and Polaris, but I don’t think we saw any other X-Men even react to Magnus’s death. Exodus was killed within a single episode. Nightcrawler sacrificed himself off camera. Compare it to the weight of the deaths in Season 1. The storytelling is not as strong, and I hope they can course correct for Season 3.
What did you think of “X-Men ‘97” Season 2? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
