Disney+'s X-Men '97 is a twisted soap opera on fire — a radical break from the MCU and return to comic roots

Well sugah, that was a ride indeed.

I was almost hesitant to watch Disney+'s X-Men animated revival, even the lure of that theme song bursting through like it was a Saturday morning in the 1990s wasn't enough, at first. After the letdowns of Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix, I figured it was safest to let my memories of the original '90s series and Evolution rest undisturbed. But then Sadie Sink showed up to wreck everyone's minds in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, I said, alright, why not.

It wasn't a bad decision. It might not have been the best decision, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable one, the kind you make after staying out too late and partying the night before a workday. X-Men '97 is thoroughly messy, stuffed with the juiciest bits of drama the comics have to offer, all crushed into two seasons. Everything happens in the blink of an eye: marital fractures, infidelity, death, characters leaving the party and coming back, or not.

X-Men '97 is a comic fever dream set alight, but in spurts. The first season juggles several plots at once, chief among them the deliciously tangled saga of Madelyne Pryor, Jean Grey's clone, and an arc my soap-opera-loving heart had to watch. Cyclops faces a genuinely unusual dilemma: what do you do when you discover the woman you married is a clone of the woman you actually loved, and you have no idea when the swap happened? Oh, and there's a baby involved too, just by the way.

The storyline pulls in Mr. Sinister, who begins puppeteering the clone he named Madelyne Pryor, and it makes for one of the show's most fun stretches, mind-boggling, absolutely batty, and full of the X-Men scrambling to fight off Sinister's swarming powers.

None of it resolves cleanly. Scott returns to the real Jean Grey carrying, understandably, a very complicated set of emotions. Their relationship, dramatic flair and all, is fun to watch precisely because it's so frazzled here, with fresh hints of infidelity stacked on old ones: Jean and Wolverine's history, and later Jean turning the tables, irritated that Scott is still meeting Madelyne on a psychic astral plane like it's nothing. Lady, who was cheating before?

But, count me in for the drama. I've missed this particular flavour of Marvel mess, especially after sitting through sanitised MCU films where every love interest is either killed off or has their memory wiped, leaving you to wonder if they'll ever even be allowed to reunite. That was always the joy of reading the comics: Everything twisted and unworldly and unimaginable, clones, ghosts, mutant variants around every corner, and the strange beauty of a good retcon.

So while Scott and Jean telepathically hash out their issues, there's an even bigger mess brewing: Rogue, Magneto (my eyes, my eyes), and Gambit. Rogue, the fiery Southern belle, stereotype and all — is in love with Gambit but can't touch him without draining his entire life force. So she stays with Magneto instead, while Gambit pines from a distance.

So long, sugah.

And here's where the show stops being fun and messy in the soapy sense and becomes something else entirely. For most of the first season, Genosha is being rebuilt as the mutant safe haven it was always supposed to be, the show ponders shots of the capital thriving, ordinary mutant culture and commerce going on in the open, with even the visibly freakish" mutants like Pixie and Glob Herman getting to just exist without fear. It's the show's one unclouded vision of what mutant life could look like, and it spends just enough time on it that you actually believe in it.

Then it hosts Genosha's induction into the United Nations, with Magneto, Rogue, and Gambit there for the ceremony, and a wave of Sentinels descends and turns the celebration into a massacre. Madelyne Pryor — yes, the clone, the one whose entire storyline had just wrapped — is shot within moments of the attack starting. Callisto, Sebastian Shaw, and Moira MacTaggart die on screen alongside her. It's brutal, and it's clearly meant to be: this is the show's "nothing is safe" thesis stated as plainly as it can be stated.

And then Gambit charges a Sentinel from the inside, blows it and himself apart, gets off his "the name's Gambit, mon ami, remember it" line on the way out, and leaves Rogue holding a body she can't even feel, because of course the one time she gets to hold him is the time there's nothing left to hold. It's a genuinely cruel piece of writing, in the best way, the show understood exactly what it was doing to their romance.

The scale of Genosha burns. It's the moment that ends the show's optimism about mutant integration for good, and it's what pushes even sympathetic humans like UN rep Valerie Cooper to conclude, watching mutants get vaporised in front of her, that Magneto was right about humanity all along. It's the rare superhero-cartoon massacre that actually reorganises the show's entire moral architecture afterward, instead of just being a sad episode you move past.

The team gets scattered across the timeline: Cyclops, Jean, Wolverine, Storm, and baby Nathan land in a far future where Apocalypse rules everything; Professor X, Magneto, Beast, Rogue, and Nightcrawler land in ancient Egypt with a young, not-yet-villainous En Sabah Nur; and Cable, Jubilee, and Sunspot are left holding down the 1990s without any of the actual X-Men. It's the most structurally ambitious the show has ever been — three timelines, three separate ensembles, cutting between them episode to episode.

The Scott-and-Jean of it all gets its softest, strangest twist yet: stranded at the end of time, they actually get to raise Nathan themselves, the same baby that was ripped from them at the end of Season 1 to become Cable. After an entire season of clone swaps, psychic affairs, and marital wreckage, the show finally hands them something calm: a family. It just does it by exiling them to the apocalypse to get it, which feels very on-brand.

And then, because nothing stays resolved, Apocalypse ends up possessing Gambit's own body, meaning the plan to finally kill Apocalypse is also, functionally, a plan to kill Gambit, again.

Rogue refuses to accept that trade and goes looking for another way, warned explicitly that she's messing with forces beyond her, and marches in anyway, because obviously she does. Watching her repeat the exact same reckless calculus that got him killed the first time is either the show underlining her character, or just doing the thing it always does, pulling a dead man back through the plot machinery because the drama demands a second act. Honestly, a bit of both.

Where the show stumbles a little is pacing. Season 2 is juggling Apocalypse, three timelines, X-Force, X-Factor, Genosha's fallout, Wolverine's arc, Rogue's grief, and Cable, all in nine half-hour episodes, and it shows — storylines that deserved to breathe get resolved in a single beat, emotional gut-punches land and the show is already sprinting to the next one before you've caught your breath. Season 1 knew how to sit in a moment; Season 2 too often just clears its throat and moves on. The animation somehow gets even more gorgeous doing it, which almost makes up for the whiplash. Almost.

What makes X-Men '97 work isn't restraint, it's the opposite. The show trusts that decades of soap-opera plotting are a feature, not a bug, and it moves with the breathless, over-stuffed pace of someone catching you up on twenty years of gossip in one sitting. It's not clean storytelling. It's not always good storytelling, in the tidy, prestige-television sense, Season 2 in particular could've used a couple more episodes to let its biggest swings land properly. But it's alive in a way so much modern superhero media isn't , willing to let its characters be reckless, unfaithful, grief-stricken, and messy on purpose, and willing to actually let a massacre change the shape of its whole world instead of resetting by the next episode. That messiness is the whole point, and it's why the show earns its nostalgia instead of just coasting on it.