When “X-Men ’97” wrapped its first season with one of the most emotionally devastating finales in recent animated memory, the question wasn’t whether a second season could be good. It was whether it could be this good again.
Four episodes in, we have our answer, and it comes in the form of a villain who has been waiting, quite literally, since the dawn of civilisation.
Season 2 picks up immediately where we left off. The X-Men are fractured and flung across time.
The show splits its attention across three threads — one following Rogue, Magneto, Charles, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, Bishop, Forge, and Beast, stranded in the ancient past; another set in the far future, where Scott and Jean find themselves navigating the earliest chapters of a story fans will recognise; and a third back in the ’90s, where two teams are left to hold the line. X-Force — Cable, Jubilee, Sunspot, Psylocke, and Archangel — are operating on one front, while X-Factor, led by Havok and Polaris, bring their own corner of Marvel’s mutant mythology into the fold.
It’s a genuinely ambitious structural choice for an animated series to make this early in a season, and what’s remarkable is how confidently the show pulls it off. The Egyptian past carries a weight and mythic gravity befitting its setting. This is civilisation at its earliest, brutality at its most naked. The far future weaves in the show’s deeper emotional mythology around Scott and Jean. And the ’90s storyline moves fastest, leaning into action and moral urgency in ways that keep it from ever feeling like a placeholder between the more epic threads.
Now, we’ve got some X-traordinary nuggets in the mix here, and episode 2 is worth singling out because it’s a feature that belongs entirely to the X-Force. It even arrives with its own distinct creative energy and a bespoke opening credits sequence just for that episode. It’s a small but smart decision that signals Cable’s crew aren’t merely a subplot waiting for the main story to catch up with them. They have their own identity, their own stakes, and the show is committed to making that felt.
But let’s… address the ancient mutant god in the room.
The 2016 live-action version of Apocalypse left a wound that Marvel fans have been quietly nursing ever since. Because how is it that a villain of supposedly limitless power became a reduced hollow vessel that strangely felt weightless on screen. But “X-Men ’97” Season 2 is kind of that apology in that regard.
If you’ve watched the trailer for this season — or if you haven’t, the link’s at the bottom — it arrived with a “Godfather-esque” musical gravity. It’s this sweeping, operatic kind of score that promises something weighty and mythic. Sure, the show itself doesn’t quite replicate that exact register. After all, it’s still “X-Men ’97,” and it’s propulsive and emotionally kinetic rather than stately. Yet, En Sabah Nur’s portrayal gets closer to the weight that trailer was reaching for than anything this franchise has managed before.
Here, we meet Mr Nur at the pivot point. It’s the X-mark in time of the man who is about to become Apocalypse, but hasn’t yet. The show grounds him in the full weight of his origins. He’s abandoned at birth, found and raised by a ruthless nomadic warrior, forced into slavery, until the emergence of his powers allowed him to turn on his masters and take everything he’d been denied. Out of that crucible came a philosophy, as extreme as it was coherent, the survival of the fittest, the conviction that weakness is not merely an obstacle but an offence that deserves to be destroyed without mercy.
This is, crucially, faithful to the comics. What makes it work so well on screen is the combination of three things: real menace and physical threat in how he is written and voiced; genuine moral complexity, because a man forged in suffering and abandonment is harder to dismiss than a villain who simply wants power; and a mythic, ancient quality the character has always demanded but so rarely received. He feels, for the first time in a long time, like the right Apocalypse.
The dramatic tension the show wrings from this is quietly inspired. The past-set team is led by Magneto, who is no stranger to the idea that the world is shaped by those willing to impose their will upon it. And they arrive in ancient Egypt with a plan to reach En Sabah Nur before the philosophy fully calcifies. If they can change this first mutant, perhaps they can change the future. Perhaps they can rob Nur of the very moment he became the undefeatable Apocalypse.
It’s a fascinating premise that gives Magneto a genuine dramatic function rather than simply making him the senior X-Man in the room.
And yes, our plea is… If and when the live-action “X-Men” reboot eventually circles back to this character, PLEASE look to this as the template. Apocalypse deserves to be the Thanos of the X-Men, and treating him as the giant threat he is should be the only way.
But anyway, back to the show, so back in the ’90s, the ideological gap between the two teams was part of what made the present-day thread crackle. X-Factor, led by Havok (do they ever declare that he’s Cyclops’ bro in this continuity) and Polaris, operates as the government’s state-sponsored mutant task force: officially sanctioned, politically palatable, working within the system. X-Force are not. Cable and Archangel represent a more ruthless, off-the-books school of getting things done with an efficient, pragmatic, and openly contemptuous method of anything that slows them down.
The show is smart enough to put these two teams at odds at a certain point, and their conflict cuts to the heart of what the X-Men have always been about: what does mutant advocacy look like when the people who usually set the moral tone have vanished?
Jubilee is the driving emotional force through all of it as she is caught between both camps. She’s the most goody two-shoes, kinda like the Captain America bunch of the team. But ultimately, she’s asked to figure out where she stands.
Her sparks, it must be said, are genuinely beautiful this season: kinetic and bright, deployed with a visual flair that makes the chronic under-utilisation of the character in live-action feel even more baffling. There is a prison escape sequence that is exactly the kind of setpiece “X-Men ’97” excels at, with it being economical in its setup, joyful in its execution, and quietly character-defining later on.
The animation remains as vibrant and stylistically assured as ever, but there are sequences this season that push into genuinely new territory. A scene involving Professor X navigating the psychic landscape of another mind is rendered as a vast, trippy temple space. It’s the kind of formally adventurous work that reminds you this show is operating with real artistic ambition beneath its nostalgic surface. Gorgeous and slightly unnerving in equal measure, which is exactly right.
And surely, episode 4 closes on a cliffhanger that reframes the emotional stakes for everything that follows. And it’s a gut-punch. Perhaps not quite as sombre as the Gambit one, but still…
Four episodes in, “X-Men ’97” Season 2 is exactly what it needed to be: a show that hasn’t forgotten what made its predecessor extraordinary, and is already thinking seriously about how to surpass it. The X-Men have faced worse odds. They’ve rarely faced a villain this good.
Watch the trailer here:
“X-Men 97” streams on Disney+ on 1 July 2026. Don’t miss it!
The Review
"X-Men '97" Season 2 hits the ground running with three timelines, a genuinely storyline in the age of Apocalypse, and enough emotional stakes to remind you why this show matters. Four episodes in, it's everything season one promised it could do, and then some.
Review Breakdown
- Good
The post “X-Men ’97” Review (Episodes 1-4): Apocalypse Arrives And He’s Already Everything appeared first on Hype Malaysia.
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