Check out our thoughts on the new episodes of Season 2 of X-Men 97! Photos provided by Disney/Marvel PR for this review.
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Of all the episodes in Season 2 of X-Men 97, Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs stands out as the most graphic and violent. Understanding this is still an animated show on Disney Plus, they do push the TV-14 rating.
X-Men 97 Season 1, Episode 3 Fire Made Flesh was a horror story with Jean’s clone Madelyne Pryor turning the mansion into a nightmarish haunted house situation. Weapon X, Lies and DVDs, in the same vein, uses tropes of light body horror, isolationism, and paranoia from horror films Aliens and John Carpenter’s The Thing to set the mood.
Teased at the end of episode 4, Wolverine is going to a Weapon X Facility and he isn’t going alone. Members of his team include Sabretooth, Maverick, Lady Deathstrike, Garrison Kane, and Morph. The four prior characters having an association with Weapon X in the comics and the first 3 having previously appeared in the original X-Men The Animated Series. Garrison Kane, while previously having a cameo in the original series, does get slightly more to do in this appearance.
The outlier of the group is Morph because of his loyalty to Wolverine. In many ways, X-men 97 has taken how characters were presented in the original animated series and found ways to recontextualize what they mean and who they are without really changing the core of the character. Because the episode involves Weapon X, obviously Wolverine is the subject matter, but the episode looks at Logan through the eyes of Morph who is our eyes in the story.
To avoid spoilers, I will simply say in summation that by the end of the episode, Wolverine’s famous comic quote “I’m the best there is at what I do” is reframed to reflect that it is how he sees himself and that is the only value he puts on himself and as one character muses aloud “Doesn’t that make you sad? That makes me sad.”
Check out Season 2 of X-Men 97 streaming now on Disney+!
