X-Men '97 Season 2: Every Storyline Teased In the Season 1 Finale Explained
Here's everything you need to know about how the X-Men '97 Season 1 Finale sets up Season 2.
X-Men '97's Season 1 finale literally and figuratively stuck the landing, as Marvel's mightiest mutants dusted themselves off and stood up to the threat of Bastion, Operation Zero Tolerance, and Magneto crippling Earth's technology.
(SPOILERS) As always, however, the cost of victory was high for the X-Men; the team rallied together with Magneto to stop Bastion's final salvo of hurling Asteroid M at Earth, and they were mysteriously transported away just as they stopped the asteroid's descent.
The X-Men '97 Season 1 ending and post-credits scene set up multiple new story arcs for Season 2, based on some pretty exciting X-Men comic book material!
How X-Men '97 Season 1 Finale Sets Up Season 2
The ending of X-Men '97 Episode 10 reveals that the X-Men Blue and Gold team members who fought Operation Zero Tolerance and/or Magneto end up displaced in time. That fact is confirmed by Bishop, who returns from his hiatus in the future to approach present-day Forge, six months after Bastion's defeat. Bishop has fun with the fact that this younger version of Forge doesn't know him yet, since it was Future-Forge he worked with in X-Men: The Animated Series – a mission that inevitably helped create Bastion. Bishop reveals that a mysterious foe pulled the X-Men through time – and it's up to him and Forge to search for and rescue them.
THE PAST – The first set of X-Men characters (Prof. Xavier, Magneto, Nightcrawler, Rogue, and Beast) find themselves in Ancient Egypt, in the year 3,000 BC. The group has a skirmish with some Egyptian soldiers who are attacking a lone target. The X-Men intervene and save the man – only to discover he is "En Sabah Nur," the Egyptian slave who became the first known mutant... known as Apocalypse. The group look from a cliff to find that advanced technology in the form of a great sphere is also present in this bygone era.
X-Men '97 seems to be setting up its adaptation of the "Rise of Apocalypse" comic miniseries for Season 2. Released in 1996, "The Rise of Apocalypse" was the official origin story of Apocalypse, detailing how he manifested the first known mutant powers while working as a lowly outcast and slave for Pharoah Rama-Tut – an early variant of Kang the Conqueror. Apocalypse rebelled against Rama-Tut, claiming the Pharoah's advanced technology to transform himself into the near-immortal leader and mutant messiah we know him to be.
THE PRESENT: In the present day, Bishop approaches Forge about the mission to save the X-Men from the timestream. A radio that Forge is listening to explains that after Operation Zero Tolerance and Magneto's attack on Earth's magnetic field, anti-mutant leader Graydon Creed is gaining political ground against President Robert Kelly. It seems X-Men '97 Season 2 will see a dark period of anti-mutant hysteria take hold – even as a darker response from mutantkind takes shape.
The X-Men '97 Season 1 Finale post-credits scene reveals that the present-day version of Apocalypse isn't dead (as last seen in The Animated Series). Apocalypse is in Genosha combing through the dirt where Gambit died. Apocalypse finds a playing card of Gambit's even as he's monologuing about how much "death" there is in the place.
It seems that X-Men '97 Season 2 will adapt the "Blood of Apocalypse" storyline that ran through X-Men and Cable/Deadpool comics during 2006. That storyline was set one year after the "House of M" event, in which Scarlet Witch reduced mutant population levels to near-extinction. Apocalypse returned to lead mutantkind in its time of peril, and he brought new horsemen with him – including Gambit as the new Horseman of Death. Like so many 2000s X-Men comics, "Blood of Apocalypse" was quickly paved over by Grant Morrison's "New X-Men" run, but Gambit's white-haired, black skin look as "Death" remains iconic.
THE FUTURE – Cyclops and Jean are taken to the distant future of 3900 AD. In that dystopian setting, they find themselves surrounded by a clan of warriors, led by a robed figure. The robed figure identifies herself as "Mother Askani," and she has a young boy with her as a her charge: a boy named Nathan. Scott and Jean realize that they've arrived in the future Nathan Summers/Cable grew up in.
X-Men '97 Season 2 will be doing an adaptation of The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, a 1994 miniseries that filled in a much-needed gap in Summers Family canon. In the comic, Cyclops and Jean have their minds forcibly sent into the future, where they possess the bodies of two future people. Naming themselves "Slim" and "Red," Scott and Jean got to raise Nathan from a young boy trying to master psychic abilities and keep his Techno-organic virus at bay, to becoming the future's most formidable warrior.
Cable didn't know his actual parents were the ones raising him, which led to some funny continuity knots. X-Men '97 will streamline things, by having Scott and Jean actually inhabit their own bodies, in the future.
WTF Are They? – Finally: where are Storm, Wolverine, and Morph? The X-Men '97 Season 1 Finale conspicuously leaves their fates unknown, after they vanished along with the rest of the team. Are they also in these past/future periods with their teammates? Or have they been transported somewhere else entirely?
X-Men '97 is streaming on Disney+.
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