X-Men '97 Season 2 Premiere
A spoiler-free look at the first two episodes of X-Men '97 season 2, screened at Tribeca. Apocalypse takes center stage and the show hasn't missed a step.
The animated tie-in used to be where a franchise parked its B-team, a lower-stakes sandbox for stories the main features could not be bothered to tell. X-Men '97 spent its first season quietly dismantling that assumption, delivering some of the sharpest, most emotionally serious work to carry the Marvel name in years, and doing it in a register the live-action arm has recently struggled to find. So the question hanging over a world-premiere look at the first two episodes of season two, screened to a costumed and raucous crowd downtown ahead of the show's July 1 return to Disney+, is whether that was a fluke or a foundation. Two episodes is not a season, and a spoiler-free preview can only tell you so much. What it can tell you is that the show has lost none of its footing, and that the year ahead for Marvel may run straight through its animation department.
Both episodes pick up immediately where the first season's finale left the team, scattered across time after the events that closed the year, with Forge and Bishop left to mount a rescue and pull the displaced X-Men home. The premiere wastes no time reassembling its pieces, hitting the ground at a sprint rather than easing back in, and it threads in a few sly visual nods to the wider Marvel universe along the way. The time-travel device the characters construct bears a deliberate resemblance to the quantum tunnel from Avengers: Endgame, a wink that keeps X-Men '97 in its own self-contained continuity while borrowing the visual grammar of the films around it. It is a confident way to gesture at a larger universe without surrendering the show's independence, and the restraint is the point.
Where the first season kept its true antagonist threaded loosely through the background, this one declares itself. Apocalypse is front and center as the season's overarching villain, and that clarity is a strength rather than a spoiler, since the premiere makes no secret of it and the season is plainly built around him. The producers, on hand after the screening, framed the choice in a way that tracks: the original animated run and the show's first season never had the room to flesh him out, and the deeper backstory the character has accumulated in the decades since gives this version far more to play with. What reaches the screen bears that out. His presence anchors some of the show's most kinetic action, including a robot-driven set piece that ranks with the series' best, and he gives the season a center of gravity the first one located only late.
To be clear about the verdict, based on the first two episodes, it is a clean five out of five and the second episode really drive home what makes this show great. It is the better of the two by some margin, returning to the main 1990s timeline to spend real, unhurried time with a single fan-favorite character, deepening someone who had often been written as comic relief into something far richer. There is a sequence where the closest comparison, and it is meant as the highest compliment, is to a key action sequence in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. That a Saturday-morning-descended cartoon can deliver that caliber of character work, the kind that reframes how you see someone you thought you already knew, is the whole argument for why this show matters.
The season is also expanding its roster aggressively, debuting a wave of new mutants alongside redesigns of returning faces, and the show's defining habit, finding inventive ways to stage familiar powers, remains intact. The first season's standout flourishes, like the disorienting glimpse of what teleportation looks like from inside Nightcrawler's perspective, get new company here. There is one curious choice in the premiere, a character who simply appears, unremarked and unexplained, in a way that may pay off down the line or may just be a tease, and it is the only beat that reads as a question mark rather than a deliberate stroke. Everything around it lands, the action, the redesigns, and the jokes, which is no small thing for a show balancing this many tones at once.
Two episodes can only promise so much, and the temptation to overpromise on the back of a strong premiere is real. But if these episodes are representative, X-Men '97 is set up to follow one excellent season with another, and to do it while a crowded slate of live-action Marvel projects fights for the same attention. The show returns to Disney+ on July 1, and the full-season verdict will have to wait until all nine episodes have aired. The preview verdict is simpler. This is a must-watch the moment it arrives, and the strongest early sign yet that Marvel's best work this year may be the kind drawn by hand.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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