To Me, My X-Corp

Let’s be clear right up front: this second season of X-Men ‘97 was a bit of a mess. The first season was a shot of fresh air for Marvel Animation, an out of nowhere relaunch of a classic, beloved cartoon from the 1990s that just about everyone that grew up in that decade remembered. It had great art, solid voice acting, and a killer theme song that even years later you could just hum at the drop of a hat. Bringing back the cartoon was a brilliant move, and showrunner Beau DeMayo (who also had a hand in writing seven of the ten episodes in that first season) had a solid vision for the show. It was perfectly executed.

And then Disney fired him. There’s a lot of “he said, they said” allegations going around, with DeMayo saying he was fired for being an openly gay, Black man and having open discussions about that online while promoting the series. Disney meanwhile said that there were egregious sexual misconduct allegations against DeMayo that led to his firing. Considering we haven’t heard much since, and nothing new has come out, it’s hard to say for certain what happened. What is clear, though, is that X-Men ‘97 lost its guiding voice and struggled for it.

After DeMayo was taken off the project, new showrunners were brought in, and the episodes that DeMayo had already written were rewritten and reworked. While the current creative leads on the show, Matthew Chauncey and Jake Castorena, have stated that most of the team is still in place and the vision for the series shouldn’t be compromised, I have my doubts considering the overall quality of this season. While the production still looks fantastic, perfectly evoking the vibe of the 1990s cartoon while updating the art for modern animation, the writing on offer, and the stories being told, fail to live up to the expectations set by that first season.

When the last season ended our team of X-MenLaunched in 1963 and written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men featured heroes distinctly different from those featured in the pages of DC Comics. Mutants who didn't ask for their powers (and very often didn't want them), these heroes, who constantly fought against humans who didn't want "muties" around, served as metaphors for oppression and racism. Their powerful stories would form this group into one of the most recognizable superhero teams in comics (and a successful series of movies as well). had been sent off into two different time periods. Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Storm, and Morph were sent to a future ravaged by Apocalypse, while Nightcrawler, Rogue, Beast, Professor X, and Magento were shot to the distant past in a time when the mutant who would become Apocalypse, En Sabah Nur, was still rising to power. Since each team was stuck in their respective time periods, each tried to find a way to fight back against Apocalypse and prevent his rise. Both teams failed.

Rescued from time by the combined might of Forge and Bishop, the team is reunited in the present where they have to deal with different threats. The anti-mutant parts of the government are rising, and anti-mutant terrorist groups up their attacks. Ostensibly a new, government sanctioned group of mutants, X-Factor, was put together to fight for mutants, but the government team seems compromised, fighting the mutants more than fighting for them. Plus there’s X-Force, a team of mutants put together by Cable to try and stop the rise of Apocalypse in the present. And all sides, including the X-Men, are battling against each other because each team thinks they’re right and none of them can come to an agreement about the best way forward. It feels like a giant mess… which might just be the perfect battle ground for Apocalypse to resurrect into once again.

I think a big thing holding this second season is its scope. It both has a lack of scope, considering all the divergent ways the season wanders off, while also having too big of a story to easily tell in just nine episodes. That’s nine episodes to tell stories about four different teams (both teams of X-Men, plus X-Factor and X-Force), along with a storyline about Apocalypse, a story about the government, and a couple of side adventures as well. That’s too much story for a nine-episode season. Hell, that might have been too much story for the 13 to 21 episode seasons that the original X-Men: The Animated Series got. It’s a lot.

Functionally you could have told an entire season of stories about the X-Men stuck in the future and the past. Each team working to try and find a way to stop Apocalypse, with their stories bouncing back and forth across the nine episodes or so until, finally, we get some kind of conclusion and both teams are rescued, only to see what the present day has become in their absence. That’s not how the season handled it, doing one episode in the past and one in the future before shrugging and saying, “well that’s enough of that storyline, let’s wrap it up.”

It’s, honestly, a pretty shitty way to handle the story, especially considering the previous season ended on a cliffhanger of the two teams being stuck in different time periods with no way home. Resolving it all in two quick episodes and then pretending like nothing happened was the worst resolution the story could have gotten. That doesn’t resolve the cliffhanger; it makes the cliffhanger pointless. And there are plenty of other instances of that kind of storytelling happening in the season, like Wolverine losing his adamantium bones only to get them back, with minimal effort, in a single episode. Or Colossus joining with a band of mutant extremists only to realize, “wait, these guys are bad,” in the span of a single story.

The storytelling in this season is rushed. It’s to the point where major character moments are very often shoved to the side so we can bounce to a completely different story, just so that another major beat can happen, and then get brushed aside to move onto the next thing. Because of these, even major plotlines, like Apocalypse stealing the body of Gambit so he can try and find a new host and become even more powerful, never get the development they feel like they need. The show moves at such a frenetic pace that nothing sticks.

I have to wonder how much of this was in the original scripts and how much of this came about because of rewrites. Not knowing how extensive the rewriting was, we can’t say for certain what state the story was in before DeMayo was shoved off the project. But considering the tight way DeMayo set up the first season, and how they had plans for second, third, and beyond, I have to assume their scripts were very heavily reworked, and a lot of their ideas were condensed, shoved aside, or outright rejected. This second season shows none of the grace or control that DeMayo’s first season had, and it’s clear the new team doesn’t understand the voice of the show the way DeMayo did.

And that’s a pity because so much of the series does still work. The artwork is fantastic, and I loved watching every fight sequence. Many of the characters, old and new, get to show up in fantastic ways, like Jubilee upgrading her powers, or Polaris finding her center, or just watching Psylock go with her cool butterfly psychic abilities. This show constantly pushes the bounds of its artwork, and the design team finds every way it can to unleash and make better and cooler visuals that still feel in line with the classic show from the 1990s. It’s amazing.

And even if the writing isn’t great, the voice actors are still doing a fantastic job. Old and new, this is one of the best teams of voice talent we have working on a show, and each is able to invest in their characters and make them interesting. I wouldn’t say all the characters have a lot to do, with both Cable and Wolverine feeling very one-note due to the story choices made, but when a character gets focus and has a real story beat, the voice actors perform and make you care. I enjoyed this.

I still think the bones of X-Men ‘97 are strong; it was the writing that let the series down this time. But now that the creative team is working on their own for the third season, and aren’t having to work off of scripts that DeMayo half finished before he was kicked out, maybe they can pull it together and get the series back on track. I’d love that because this series can still be great. This was a sophomore slump, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. I will wait and see for now and hope that things turn around.

But if the third season is bad, story wise, as this second season, then I’ll likely tune out. This was a massive misfire for the series. Only time will tell if it was a one-off mistake or the new normal for X-Men ‘97.