Last time I said if "Lifedeath – Part 2" didn’t knock my socks off, I wouldn’t continue watching. It didn’t, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt anyway and "Bright Eyes" made me decide that, no, I don’t actually like the series.

By the way, you know how I said this show had no business with a TV-PG rating? Uh, yeah, it got upgraded to TV-14, which basically means I can be PG-13 here and not lose sleep.

Spoilers ahead, naturally.

Time to breathe

The biggest problem is "Lifedeath – Part 2" is the second part of an episode that was already half an episode. I thought that meant it was going to get all the time it needed to breathe. It didn’t. It split its time between actual "Lifedeath" and Professor X dinking around in space. I wanted more of Storm. I wanted more of her working out her relationship with Forge. That simply didn’t happen. She’s already calling him her love interest even after she was JUST about to leave, because this show just can’t help itself when it comes to shipping.

The bigger problem is the show neatly ties up everything that made it interesting. Storm gets her powers back because Forge’s fix worked after all and her problem was just that she was lying to herself about it, helped along by The Adversary (that demon owl thing). She lightnings herself a new outfit based on her original outfit in the comics. It’s a neat callback to how she lightnings herself her original outfit in the first episode of the original run, but it would have been more interesting to leave her that de-powered for a while. She did all SORTS of cool stuff without them in the comics. Even the team lamented as much. They talk a good game about the break-neck pace of the original, but I might remind you the Phoenix Saga had 5 episodes. Claiming the original didn’t take its time with important arcs is, pardon my French, but bullshit.

It also has Professor X throw away his relationship with Lilandra to return to Earth when it would have been more interesting for him to forsake his memories of Earth and the X-Men for her, but I at least understand why. It paints the Shi’ar as racists and imperialists, because, well, they are. And they’re not shy about it. And he literally schools them on it with a classroom and everything. Professor X does nothing but call out the Jingoism and even throws in "saying the quiet part out loud" like it was a phrase back in the time, but if anyone had any doubt the X-Men were "woke," this should remove it. The franchise has always been a political commentary on oppressed minorities. Stan Lee was an enlightened man. You can replace "woke" with "enlightened" from now on. Please.

Honestly, calling out imperialism – and pointing out that the only good part of the Shi’ar is that Lilandra (who Professor X all but personally installed as empress) is significantly less fasist than either of her siblings – is the high point of the episode and as much of a high point as it is, it doesn’t make up for the fundamental flaw of the show.

It doesn’t trust its fans

As many complex topics as the show has, "Lifedeath" has finally made me realize the show simply doesn’t trust the fans. It’s speed-running all the greatest hits of the comics because it’s desperate to have eyes on it and doesn’t trust that fans would pay attention to original storylines. It kills off a major character that everyone likes for shock value because all publicity is good publicity. It more or less does a mid-season reset to bring the show back to its 5-season comfortable baseline.

It goes in assuming fans don’t have the patience for it to do anything else and that it needs to make broad concessions to them to keep them watching. And if any of the fan backlash of recent years is any indication, it’s not wrong, because we live in a world where all the good little kiddies who idolized the heroes have grown up to become the villains.

Like, real talk: this show says some really uncomfortable things. And I think it owes a lot of that to its former showrunner, because as a gay Black man, he’s used to his entire existence being political. It HAS things to say. Things that really needed to be said in a show that was guaranteed to do numbers like this if it was going to be at all in the spirit of the franchise. But I think Disney simply didn’t allow the show to say TOO much to avoid pissing off the notoriously conservative nerd base. The man was fired a week before the premiere after having written an entire second season. Season 3 is apparently already in production. And everyone left on the show has been suspiciously mealy-mouthed about the whole ordeal, and he’s been silent, because Mickey Mouse will break your kneecaps. I have a feeling that there were "creative differences" and that whatever he wrote for season 2 is going to be gutted before it gets animated.

In that context, all the straight sexuality on display almost feels like it was exchanged for one bit of coy LGBT+ sexuality. It got the Friends of Humanity using clear conservative imagery and storming a political building like the Jan. 6 insurrection because it danced around the Holocaust (not that the original didn’t). It got to call out Jingoism and imperialism and racism all in one episode in the most direct manner possible because it meant Professor X is back on the team. It has to offer fans a bucket of candy every time it slaps them and says "WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU!?"

On the plus side

I think showing that Professor X’s dream, everything he stands for, being against the Shi’ar empire is probably the smartest way they could have forced him out and back to Earth. Because the Shi’ar are, to be blunt, fascist. They have no value for art and brand most of it a form of insanity, but have no problem enshrining the few bits they make. They have very little value for anything that looks vaguely like religion except for the bit that gives them the excuse to be the way they are. They have zero tolerance for idealism and brand that insanity, too. Essentially any form of hope or wanting things to be better is quashed as an illness, just as effectively as making it illegal. The only things allowed are support for their own power structure. Just because Lilandra is on the throne and much more open to these things doesn’t mean she’s not fighting an uphill battle that’s baked into her own dynastic power that the higher-ups of her own people very much want to keep as-is. They are a conquering race who simply haven’t bothered with Earth because Earth poses no threat of making a competing empire. And they show very little appreciation for the X-Men for saving their butts, because what the X-Men stand for is dangerous to them.

Professor X was being asked to forget everything about what he stood for to be Lilandra’s husband and, honestly, I can’t blame him too hard for being unwilling to do that, because he was never going to slot neatly into that. The people were never going to accept him. He would have given up everything for nothing. Or at least only having a ceremonial throne next to a woman who would have become the only thing he remembered. There would have eventually been resentment there. The situation never would have worked.

The problem I have is I would have maybe liked to see that play out because it would have just been better drama. For him to know what he was missing, have it restored, and make a more informed decision that he just needed that life again because things were not working out for him where he was no matter how much she wanted him to do for her people what he tried to do for Earth. The concept of thinking bigger for a greater good is not new to the show; "Remember It" addresses it neatly, but like everything, it plays out quickly and side-steps the repercussions. Doing it with Professor X would have given it all time to breathe, which is the one thing this show never does. The same question is answered in the same way: it’s cut short with a decision to not do it and the consequences are not dwelled upon.

I didn’t want Professor X to come back to Earth this season. That should have been a "next season" thing. I didn’t want Storm to get her powers back. That also should have been a "next season" thing. Things would have been more interesting with Storm kicking Cyclops’ butt and assuming leadership because everyone knew his wasn’t working. Having Prof. X back to resume leadership and have Storm be just another combatant again is not interesting. It’s not challenging. It’s a mid-season reset to drama caused by the original ending because it can’t afford to ask fans to stick with it any other way.

The only thing "Lifedeath" does to set up the finale is give a news clip that the displaced mutants on Genosha are being denied passage back to their home countries, left to try to survive in the rubble of a government that wasn’t even properly formed before it was destroyed. Because ultimately Gyrich, slimeball that he is, was right in the first episode. All of the acceptance that mutants enjoyed was performative. Sympathies are suddenly low in the face of an attack the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since World War II, Prof. X is going to come back, and everything is going to be restored to the comfortable familiarity of the first 5 seasons of the continuity.

At the same time, as cynical as that is, restoring the status quo is exactly what’s happening in the real world right now.

If you don’t see that, you don’t understand that this show is holding up a mirror and you’re somewhere in it. Just like Kylo Ren in the new Star Wars or the Whispers in Final Fantasy VII Remake, there is a distinct meta-narrative here: "this is you." If you have a problem with which "you" is reflected in the mirror, you learned nothing. By GOD does it ever show when geeks shriek about how something is "suddenly woke" when it has always been that way. Nothing is "suddenly" anything. You just took a morality test for six-year-olds and failed.

Just to address "Bright Eyes"

No real surprises here. Nightcrawler has a brother-sister moment comforting Rogue like I anticipated. By that point she’s feeling pretty garbage after lashing out and doing some questionable things. She’s already broken into the government facility where Gyrich was supposed to be housed to ask him where Trask is, which the staff note was designed to contain the Hulk, so we all know what power level she’s on. He’s not there, but she’s able to get the info of where he should be (slipping in a good "you killed all the good ones; now you deal with me" for the LGBT+ crowd) only to find Captain America there doing his own research and he’s able to give her the next location. She tosses Captain America’s shield forever away because he wants to do things by the book, but there’s a shady organization and she’s having none of it. She doesn’t hurt him or anything and it’s nothing a search party and a few months won’t fix. Kind of a dick move, but the US has more or less betrayed mutants by this point. It’s a symbolic gesture. But she flies to the new "facility" only to find a cushy Mexican villa and uses her power on Gyrich to extract the info, after which the team finds her passed out in an alley.

She also throws Bolivar Trask off a building, but he literally had jumped off it first and she’d caught him to press him for more info. So while everyone else is shocked, it’s literally nothing he wasn’t trying to do anyway. He comes back as a zombified human Sentinel, which is a thing from the comics, and kicks everyone’s butts, but Cable shows up with an EMP grenade and makes short work of him. Cyclops gets to realize Cable is his son when Jean tries to read Cable’s mind and he resists. Cable is significantly less amused by the reunion. He has work to do.

It’s not that Rogue is even wrong in all the stuff she’s doing. She’s going outside a system that has, very clearly, abandoned mutants. While she may or may not know it, world governments are refusing to take back the mutants who left for Genosha. Very little or no aid is going in; most or all of the effort is being done by the people who were at ground zero taking care of themselves. The UN itself, of which Genosha just became a member, doesn’t seem to be doing much, even trying to find their own agent, Val. The US president acts like he’s doing mutants a favor cutting the cord because any aid might lose him the next election and someone "less sympathetic" might end up in power, which Cyclops is livid about and takes as proof that dealing with the government at all was something he never should have trusted. It’s one of the few cases where he’s right, by all accounts. Neither the US nor the UN have done any of the legwork for any of the heroes and even Captain America is running into walls and resorting to hacking.

But the absolute most garbage thing about the episode is that Jean seems to be forgiving Cyclops for all his BS and she’s suddenly wearing her hair out in her suit again like Madelyne did and that makes zero sense. I feel like that’s meaningful somehow like maybe the two merged or maybe there’s something else going on, but we know the two didn’t switch because Cable confirmed it. Jean is standing by a man who didn’t stand by the mother of his child and nobody treats Madelyne in a consistent manner. Jean is suddenly talking about having her as a sister like Storm when that was a conversation Madelyne had with Storm and oh, my God if the implication is that Madelyne is possessing her I am going to be unhappy! Regardless, I feel like something is going on with that because this show is very intentional in what it shows. But any forgiveness toward Scott without an appropriate conversation on-screen to show them working things out is pure BS and after their last argument, it feels like that’s exactly what happened. Jean is suddenly just sympathetic to what Cyke is dealing with.

Honestly, I would be surprised if Madelyne isn’t involved somehow because Jean seems to still be feeling her way around her powers, yet gets to engage in a high-speed aerial battle with the Trask Sentinel on telekinesis alone and frankly does better than anyone else with it before being thrown into a car. That’s the sort of comfort level that Madelyne would have had, but not someone like Jean who’s still having problems, unless, like Storm, her problems are all from her own mental barriers.

Otherwise, you get a rather sweet, yet sinister conversation between Sunspot and his mother where she reveals she knew he was a mutant because 4 of their houses burned down and just other signs, because a mother knows, but it was his secret to keep. It’s a best-case scenario conversation that every LGBT+ viewer is going to recognize. It unfortunately ends with her saying there are going to need to be some new rules for the sake of optics, though, because shareholders have become especially skittish about mutants. As in, there’s going to probably be more or less exactly what he’s always been afraid of. Just because his parents know doesn’t mean anyone else can. On one hand, nothing is changing, but on the other, she might discourage him from hanging with Jubes or else he’s very much going to have to wear a mask. Thing is, I don’t think he’s going to have a problem with this because his conversation with Jubes just before going there is about how being visible makes you a target, in reference to Genosha. It’s his whole worldview up to this point. And he’s not wrong.

The two big reveals are that Magneto is alive (which I’m not surprised about per my last review, because Leech had the necessary power to disable everyone’s powers) and that Bastion has been working with Sinister. If you don’t know who Bastion is, he’s an evolved form of Nimrod, a Sentinel from the future that the heroes have been shown blasting to bits in the last couple intros, because this show has kind of done that, actually; I just took a bit to get wise to it. They are very intentional with the clips that go in the intros because they’ve completely re-animated them, so Lilandra appearing weeks ahead of her actual appearance was just as much of a tip-off, but it didn’t register until now. One has to wonder if the Phoenix Force is actually going to become important again, because it’s been in there quite a lot, too. If anything can revive Gambit or anyone else who died, it’s the Phoenix Force. And if anything would get its attention, it would be some version of Jean dying. Oh, and Bastion hacked a Shi’ar satellite and saw the big announcement that Prof. X was to wed Lilandra, so we know he’s going to share that with the world, because of course he is with mutant sympathies once more at a low point.

If there’s any actual surprise, it’s that Val Cooper is MIA, implying she might be dead after all. Emma Frost, predictably, survived, but now has her diamond form from the comics as a new power to thank for it.

At any rate, I feel like Rogue is on a dark path here and Magneto being alive may or may not be good for that, because I have no question that Genosha is going to set him back to his old ways, especially with Prof. X returning.

The episode also ends with both Trask and Gyrich dead. Bastion smothers Gyrich in bed after he survives Rogue. Though to be fair, neither of them are necessary anymore. Trask finally saw the horrors of his own creations and wanted no further part of it, but a shady organization (probably led by Bastion) picked up where he left off. Gyrich was only useful for finding Trask and while the heroes missed their chance of finding out anything more than that, I think they’re going to find out everything they need to know in short order.

And just because it has to do with the shipping, it looks like Beast and Trish are over before they began, which I only say because it was building up to a fling between them like in the comics. I guess that was one relationship too messy to handle, for reasons well beyond appropriate for this blog or the rating of the show, even with it getting bumped up.

If I do have to give props to one bit of attention to detail, it’s that Nightcrawler during the funeral is wearing a violet vestment, which is correct for his being a Catholic priest, even if it isn’t quite right in other ways. To put it this way, a vestment is never going to have silver on it in practice, and while what’s in the show is pretty spot-on for the "violet" depicted on Wikipedia, the truth of the matter is that most of it is more appropriately "purple" with a much more distinct reddish tone. The thing this tells me is they did research, though, because they didn’t use black (which, while valid, absolutely no one has in their vestments) and because thread of silver (which absolutely no one has in their vestments) is listed on Wikipedia as being valid for solemnities, which they probably mistook for "sad" rather than the more technical definition. Someone looked it up and made a design decision for the scene. I could complain that the vestments are only technically correct and certainly not of any design you’d actually see, but the fact that they did the research for a Catholic character performing a religious service is well appreciated. You can tell nobody involved was Catholic, but they could have done far less.

Conclusions

I don’t think X-Men ’97 is bad. It’s hobbled. Which is why it’s so disappointing to me, but realizing that has made me more charitable to it. It is a challenging show subject to the limitations of being owned by one of the most powerful companies in the world using it to drum up hype for its movie universe and needs it to capture as big an audience as it can. It spends its run fighting against that fate as best it can. The end result never seems able to go as far as it wants and that’s the most frustrating thing, because you can tell how much potential is wasted.

I still don’t like the show. Cyclops is definitely the explosive bloody diarrhea in the elevator of the whole production and everything in his vicinity suffers for it. It fails to manage its cast. Even if you account for the fact the original wasn’t allowed to let Wolverine use his claws on anything that bled, he certainly doesn’t see much action here, probably won’t with organic enemies whose minds are still in there set up for the future, and serves more as an accessory to Cyclops and Jean’s marital strife. And that’s kind of the rub when it comes to who gets focus: they have to be romantically involved with someone to matter. Everything is so high school about it.

Even ignoring that, it’s simply written less like a single drama or even one comic book and more like at least two comics, maybe three. Outside of the cliffhangers at the end, the stories are not really blended in any meaningful way and maybe some of that would be dramatic whiplash, but not really? It’s able to juxtapose Prof. X having problems in space with Storm overcoming hers in Arizona just fine. Heck, it even uses cuts between Cyclops and Jean really well to tell two halves of the same story from two emotional places and it’s one of the better sequences in the show because you actually get to see some glimmer of humanity from Cyke. It’s capable of contrasting people’s different emotional arcs. If anything, having the three main plot threads end with Genosha on fire feels like maybe everything is finally back on the same page.

The show has a lot going for it. Its messages are clear and strong and it’s not afraid to show the heroes making bad decisions in their moments of weakness. The cast is acting their butts off. It’s capable of being funny, sad, sweet, and infuriating. The dialogue is excellent when it’s not delivering ham-handed exposition. It’s very intentional in what it shows. If I do have to compliment one thing with the animation, which is for the most part fantastic in general, it’s just how much body horror this show is able to get away with and how well it does it. The way it uses light and shadow and glow effects is also still fantastic. It doesn’t use the same techniques as the old show because those techniques simply don’t exist in a digital world, but it does the best a digital production possibly can in the spirit.

At the same time, there are just all manner of things that make it hard to watch. The villains are of the sort that they’re hard to stand. There’s no "love to hate them" here; they’re all thoroughly revolting.

There is very little joy to the production and a whole lot of misery. Any joy is fleeting. It goes places the original never could, but many of those places involve compromised morals and it robs the cast of their moral authority, especially Cyclops. You can’t even call him a Boy Scout because he’s committing war crimes in the opening minutes of the first episode. The cast struggles to be redeemable, which was the most important trait all of them had. There’s even an "is this what we’ve become" moment from Morph when Rogue throws Trask off a skyscraper.

The sheer body count of the show is also discouraging. It’s playing its cards straight into the fire. Very little is being left for any potential complexity later. It’s all fun games where it spits out a reference to a character. I get to point and giggle for that. It’s a lot less fun when they’re suddenly dead.

All of this adds up to a growing sense of ambivalence. At "Lifedeath – Part 2," I was kind of just to a point of not caring. I figured I’d watch the rest at my leisure. After "Bright Eyes," I’m not entirely sure I will. Or at the very least it’s going to require me to be mentally prepared for negativity that I just can’t handle on the average day. It took me three sessions to watch it, just like it took me 3 sessions to watch "To Me, My X-Men." This is a show where half the episodes require me to stop, take my mind off it, and come back later, which I could get from the news just fine, thank you very much.

I want to like the show. I want to even just adjust my expectations and like it for what it is, understanding what it is. But the ways it goes too far and the ways it doesn’t go far enough make it just not very fun.

Ultimately, what makes the show unbearable is the distinct lack of hope. I can deal just fine with it not trusting the fans, and I can deal just fine understanding it’s a flawed production that is ultimately going to do the safest thing anytime it has a chance to do anything interesting, and I can appreciate characters who are not being their best selves. Believe me, I am a defender of FF13, I can appreciate a story where people are under extreme strain and showing their ugly sides. But what I ultimately have the most problem with is that there is simply no hope to the story. Prof. X is nothing but an anchor of hope and I really hope that his return is able to restore some of that. This series has failed to find a solid rock to build a foundation on. Cyclops isn’t it. Storm could have been, but shows no sign of becoming it. Nightcrawler tries to offer it, but he’s fighting upstream and can only do so much. With the next 3 episodes being "Tolerance is Extinction," and with the board set up the way it is, I really don’t see any way the season is primed for a happy ending and I see no way the writing is interested in delivering one. And I’m frankly not interested in watching Cyclops run around like the main character when he’s easily the least sympathetic of any of them. I essentially don’t see any viable way forward into a Season 2 that’s going to make Season 2 worth watching except for the fact Prof. X is going to be back, Magneto is going to be evil again, and everything is going to be set back to the X-Men fighting in a world that’s more dangerous and hateful than ever.

I don’t expect anything with multiple seasons to have a "happily ever after;" I just expect that there’s still going to be a world worth saving. And that just doesn’t appear to be on the table.

I may still watch the last 3 episodes of the season, but probably not until the last one is out so I can marathon them. …Is what I wrote like a month ago when all three were still in the future, thinking I’d post this by then. But now after all three of them are out and ready for a marathon, I got not even a minute into the first of the three before deciding it wasn’t worth the psychic damage when I don’t have much to spare. I feel more at this point like I kind of just need to watch them to cross it off my list, but it could be weeks, months, or maybe even never based on the season so far, because I am not obligated to intentionally hurt myself and as many virtues as the show has, forcing myself to do something that I know is going to hurt just isn’t healthy.

I’m not going to say the show is garbage; it’s not. There’s a lot to like. There’s also a lot to dislike and the biggest is the team acting like it needed to be this way "to be more like the original" when the original simply is not like that and is on the same damn streaming service to prove it. Like my God, you could at least try to respect your audience’s intelligence.

The show does, however, make me feel like garbage watching it, and I simply don’t have time for that. There will be a weekend when I’m in a good enough mood that I can sit down and prepare myself for that, but honestly, as a contributor to a dip in my mental health, the show simply doesn’t get to claim my attention for that until I’m ready for it. And I dunno, maybe it will finally knock my socks off, but chances are it’s just going to be confirmation that I’m not going to wait up for Season 2.