X-Men '97 season 2 review: "Proves why the mutants are cooler than the Avengers"

The best kind of TV makes you stand up, shout at the screen, question the choices of a character who can't see or hear you (namely, because they aren't real), and leaves you sitting in a contemplative silence as the credits roll. X-Men '97 premiered in 2024 and did all that and more, filling a void in our hearts that so many of us millennials didn't even know we had after X-Men: The Animated Series ended on a cliffhanger some 27 years ago.

X-Men '97 proved itself to be the best damn thing to come out of the nostalgia-based era of remakes and revival seasons we're somehow still in, and it made sure to end on yet another cliffhanger – in case our hearts weren't broken enough. X-Men season 2 now brings the heat, and introduces a complicated, multi-layered storyline that takes place across three separate timelines: an oppressive, BC-era Egypt, a war-torn future planet that plans on putting what's left of its hope and faith into Nathan (yes, that Nathan), and a 1997 America that's being controlled by fearful bigots following the Prime Sentinel invasion.

What do all three eras have in common? Apocalypse. Prepare to be devastated again, in the best way possible.

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"This ain't our first time at the 'The X-Men are dead rodeo'"

X-Men '97 season 1 ended with our favorite mutants defeating Mr. Sinister and Bastion and his army of Prime Sentinels, but at what cost? After Magneto used what was left of his power to send that giant asteroid into space, he, Rogue, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Storm, Xavier, Logan, Beast, and Nightcrawler are thrown into Egypt circa 3000 BC with a mysterious man named En Sabah Nur. Jean, Scott, and Storm end up somewhere in the Future circa 3960 AD... with a teenaged, pre-Cable version of Nathan. Forge, Bishop Jubilee, Sunspot, and Cable are left on Earth.

X-Men '97 season 2 wastes no time taking us into the action: Bishop and Forge manage to build a time travel machine that will take them to either timeline, leaving Jubilee and Bishop to join Cable, Archangel, and Psylocke on their black ops mission to bring down Apocalypse.

Over in Egypt, Magneto is hard at work convincing En Sabah Nur to use his powers for good (lest he go on to become Apocalypse). In the future, Apocalypse is after Nathan in order to use his body as an ominous vessel.

Back in the '90s, Cable and Jubilee form the X-Force, which goes head-to-head with the government-backed X-Factor team... who is busy rounding up and incarcerating mutants with the help of several former X-Men.

The star of this season is our boy Apocalypse, who seemingly can't be killed. And I have to stop right there and say that his live-action portrayal in X-Men: Apocalypse comes nowhere near X-Men '97's.

Oscar Isaac no doubt gave it his all in the 2016 film, but the performance still comes across as camp (and the makeup/costume design doesn't help). But the animated version, voiced by Ross Marquand and Adetokumboh M'Cormack, is really and truly terrifying, and it's not just the red-and-black eyes.

It's the way we – and Charles Xavier – go from feeling heartbroken after hearing En Sabah Nur's tragic origin story, to feeling absolutely nothing in a matter of seconds after he does what he does at the end of episode 4 (and I won't tell you what that is, in case you haven't already seen it).

All of that empathy disappears once unadulterated evil arrives... and reminds us that Apocalypse is, and has always been, one of the most frightening Marvel villains of all time. Not just in the X-Men universe.

Morally (Jean) Grey

A popular Marvel fun fact: Stan Lee created Spider-Man back in the day so that all the kids reading comics at the time had someone they could relate to – as all the superheroes at the time were adults with glamorous day jobs who also happened to fight crime. Watching X-Men '97 really hammers home how painfully unrelatable The Avengers are, and how they, across all of the live-action movies, really follow that perfect moral formula – always doing the right thing, always getting the happy ending, because everyone gets resurrected somehow anyway.

So, Scott and Jean being perfectly willing to put the fate of the entire world in jeopardy, potentially altering history for centuries to come, all so they could spend more time with their son? Hell yeah.

Scott and Storm telling Mother Askani, this mystical, powerful all-seeing being, to quit with the riddles and just speak straightforwardly? Perfect. The X-Men do not, and have never, given a damn about narrative conventions within the context of a hero story.

And it's not that they're "too cool" for a formulaic, feel-good story for the whole family. It's that they were created as members of a special species of super-powered folk that are viciously othered and oppressed by those around them – which in turn causes them to see and navigate the world differently. The X-Men are motivated by survival, but they're also driven by love. And some of that love is platonic and complicated, like the relationship between Charles Xavier and Magneto, but it runs deep.

Heck, Forge fully asks Storm how they're going to figure out, and I quote, "dating," just mere minutes after time-traveling to the future to rescue her and the others. The fate of the world is cool and all, but the X-Men stop time and space for each other. Just as the meme says, they would find each other in any lifetime.

Dueling fates

This season of X-Men '97 repeatedly asks both the viewer and the X-Men what they would do if they had the chance to change their fate. Can destinies be rewritten? Are some people born evil? We don't get an answer by the end of episode 4, and there are still 5 more to go, but I promise you'll be left sitting by yourself contemplating all of your life choices and your own mortality.

The writers aren't telling us to simply accept things we don't deserve simply because they were already written in the stars... but they are warning us of the consequences that come with attempting to alter those predetermined outcomes.

Sure, The Avengers and the Fantastic Four are cool, but wouldn't you much rather have an existential crisis after watching an array of mutant superheroes argue with themselves over doing the right thing? The answer is yes, actually. X-Men '97 is filled with gritty realism, but love is right there at its core.

I don't know what will happen in the second half of the season, but even when the odds are stacked against them... I won't ever lose faith in my X-Men.

X-Men '97 season 2 is set to hit Disney Plus on July 1. For more, check out our list of upcoming Marvel shows.