X-Men ’97 launched on Disney+ in March 2024 as a direct continuation of X-Men: The Animated Series, picking up roughly a year after Charles Xavier faked his death and left Earth with the Shi’ar to heal his wounds. With Xavier gone, his X-Men were left to weigh their responsibilities to a world on edge against their own personal lives, and the season wasted no time throwing the team into chaos.
Magneto stepped into the role of leader in Xavier’s absence, an unsettling shift for a team built around Xavier’s dream of human and mutant coexistence. Early episodes leaned into political tension, adapting classic comic storylines like “The Trial of Magneto” and a condensed version of “Inferno,” while reintroducing Mister Sinister as a returning threat working alongside a new villain, Bastion, who was building a fresh generation of Sentinels designed specifically to hunt mutants.
The season’s emotional turning point came with the destruction of Genosha. The mutant nation, newly welcomed into the United Nations, was wiped out by a massive Sentinel attack that killed thousands, including Magneto, who appeared to sacrifice himself protecting Leech. Gambit died in the same attack, taking out the Master Mold responsible for the slaughter. The Genosha massacre reshaped the rest of the season, pushing Rogue toward vengeance and forcing the remaining X-Men to decide whether to pursue healing or retribution.
It was later revealed that Bastion orchestrated the Genosha attack, and that he had been infecting humans with a techno-organic virus to create nearly unstoppable Prime Sentinels. Cable, the time-displaced adult version of Cyclops and Jean Grey’s son Nathan, intervened at a critical moment to help the team survive an assault from a mutated Bolivar Trask. Even with Cable’s help, Xavier’s mansion fell when Bastion’s sleeper agents destroyed it during a separate strike.
As Bastion’s true scope of cruelty came into focus, including keeping a captured Magneto as a trophy, Dr. Valerie Cooper turned against the human supremacist movement she once served and freed him. The final three episodes leaned on “Operation: Zero Tolerance” from the comics and split the X-Men into Blue and Gold teams to take on Bastion directly.
The finale saw Bastion absorb Cable’s techno-organic virus and attempt to crash Asteroid M into Earth as an extinction-level event. Cyclops tried reasoning with him, revealing that Bastion’s mother had lied to him as a child about Xavier rejecting him from the school, a wound that fueled his hatred of mutants. Xavier himself returned in the finale, entering Magneto’s mind to pull him back from despair and convince him to fight again. The X-Men ultimately destroyed Bastion’s gravity drives, and Bastion was disintegrated as the base imploded.
The season ended with the team scattered across time as a result of the final battle, including Rogue and Nightcrawler landing in 3000 B.C. alongside Magneto and Beast, where they rescued a man who introduced himself as En Sabah Nur, the early form of Apocalypse. A mid-credits scene showed present-day Apocalypse surveying Genosha’s wreckage and picking up one of Gambit’s playing cards, hinting that his story was far from over.
X-Men ’97 was met with widespread critical acclaim during its run and earned a Primetime Creative Arts Emmy nomination. Season 2 picks up with the team scattered from ancient Egypt to the far future, racing to find their way back to the 1990s to stop Apocalypse, with new arrivals including Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, Psylocke, Archangel, Colossus and the X-Force roster joining the fight.
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