[COLUMN] In X-Men '97, There Is No Past or Future - Only Apocalypse | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first three episodes of the second season of X-Men ’97, which is now streaming on Disney+. The first four episodes were screened for critics and are pretty good, although it does feel worth noting that the first season only really kicked up a gear from “pretty good” to “excellent” with its fifth episode. It’s an enjoyable slice of nostalgia that is engaged with that nostalgia in interesting ways. But, anyway, consider this a spoiler warning.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that the 1990s never ended.

Author Kurt Andersen has argued that American culture evolved very quickly and dramatically for most of its history. It is, for example, very easy to distinguish the fashion and style of the 1950s from that of the late 1960s, and even the late 1960s from the mid 1970s. The same was true in a broader sense: a song recorded in the mid-1950s sounded very different from one recorded a decade later, and a film from the 1950s had a fundamentally different texture from one made in the 1970s.

“That unmistakable ceaseless stylistic change was the nature of life for most of the history of the United States,” Andersen contends. “But after the 1980s, cultural time slowed down and in many ways stopped. The 1990s looked and sounded extremely different than the 1970s, but by comparison, the 2010s were almost indistinguishable from the 1990s, as 2020 is almost indistinguishable from 2000.”

Andersen points to the enduring relevance of 1980s icon Donald Trump as “living proof of my ’90s theory that the decade never did end.” Writing in 2015, Jason Farago observed that, within the contemporary art scene, “in aesthetic terms at least, the ‘90s are still going strong 15 years past their expiration date.” There was a sense of this in the popular culture of the era as well. Released in 1999, The Matrix imagined a virtual simulation set in a perpetual 1999, “the peak of [human] civilization.”

Recent decades seem stuck in an eternal loop recycling 1990s culture and media: a Frasier reboot, a Friends reunion, an Oasis tour, a Harry Potter reboot, an X-Files revival and now an X-Files reboot, a Tupac hologram, a Next Generation cast reunion, a Sex and the City reboot, a Sopranos prequel movie, Michael Keaton returning as Batman, a computer-generated Nicolas Cage Superman from a movie that never happened, and so on and so forth. This anxiety of a culture living in the detritus of the 1990s even permeates media that is not explicitly about reviving these properties, like Backrooms.

Alluding to Francis Fukuyama’s famous theory that the end of the Cold War represented “the End of History” in a political sense, Andersen makes the case that “this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so certainly feels like an end of cultural history.” Part of what is so compelling about X-Men ’97 is the extent to which the animated series, a revival of the classic early 1990s cartoon, is not just an example of this larger trend, but also in conversation with it.

On the surface, X-Men ’97 is an exercise in this larger culture of nostalgia. It brings back a popular cartoon series, with veteran cast members like Alison Sealy-Smith, Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, George Buza and Christopher Britton reprising their roles and others like Catherine Disher and Chris Potter returning in new roles. It picks up various plot threads and character beats from the earlier series and unfolds against the backdrop of the late 1990s, just five years after the show ended.

There is a perception in broader popular culture of the 1990s as something akin to a “golden age.” Polls suggest that Americans are most nostalgic for the Reagan and Clinton eras, most likely to believe that life was “good” or “great” during those periods. As Douglas Coupland put it, “the 1990s possessed a sense of happiness that seems long vanished.” For the United States, it was a period of economic prosperity and perceived geopolitical stability.

It was also a “golden age” for the X-Men as a brand. At the start of the decade, Jim Lee and Chris Claremont’s X-Men #1 became the highest-selling comic of all-time. Bryan Singer’s X-Men closed the decade by helping to launch the modern superhero movie boom. However, the decades that followed were not as kind to Marvel’s merry mutants. Allegedly due to Disney’s frustration with Fox’s control of the film rights, the comic book characters were frequently marginalized and reconfigured.

Part of the charm of X-Men ’97 has been how the series allows the franchise’s future to haunt this nostalgic present. During the first season, it often felt like the decades of X-Men continuity that lay ahead for these characters were intruding into this invocation of their “golden age.” The early stretch of the first season makes a point to emphasize that these characters exist in an uncanny space and cannot be frozen in the same moment forever.

Early on in the season, in a loose adaptation of the classic crossover Inferno, it is revealed that, at some ambiguous point in the past, Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) was replaced by a doppelganger. In her own words, she finds herself facing “an unknowable future built on an unknowable past.” A few episodes later, the team’s resident teen Jubilee (Holly Chou) faces her birthday, the passage of time pressing against the dream to “be young forever, replay the golden hits. No growing up.”

Midway through the season, the mutant island of Genosha is subject to a horrific genocide, an incident lifted directly from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s New X-Men, which launched in May 2001. The architect of this mass murder is the fusion of man and machine known as Bastion (Theo James), in an allusion to the 1990s crossover Operation: Zero Tolerance, but it also evokes the specter of artificial intelligence as an evolutionary rival to mutants from Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men.

Bastion was a human child infected with an artifact of the Omega Sentinel known as Nimrod, a classic character who became the embodiment of this technological evolution in Hickman’s run. In his own words, this fusion resulted in “creating something new; parts past, present and future.” It is in some ways the perfect statement of intent for the first season of X-Men ’97, an openly nostalgic space in which it felt like the future was making itself manifest.

This was true even beyond the continuity and canon of the X-Men comics. The X-Men franchise has always served as a metaphor for racial politics in contemporary America. Though set in the late 1990s, the series demonstrated a remarkably canny understanding of the grievance politics and anxieties of contemporary racism, the fears of an entrenched demographic worried about a larger culture moving past them.

“You’ve no idea how it feels to be left behind by the future,” Boliver Trask (Gavin Hammon) warns the mutants. “Did you honestly think we’d roll over and let mutants take over the planet?” asks Henry Gyrich (Todd Haberkorn). “Normal people know the more room we make for your kind, the less we leave for ours.  So we might wear tolerance on our sleeves, but we know the naked truth. Tolerance is extinction.”

Despite the show’s late ’90s setting, Gyrich is offering the rhetoric of the modern “great replacement theory”, alluding to underlying demographic shifts that seem to be at the root of the reawakening of so much modern racism. This anti-mutant sentiment is rooted in a fear of the future, an interesting tension in an overtly nostalgic show.  It is a large part of what makes X-Men ’97 so much more interesting than other nostalgic revivals. It is in many ways a show about nostalgia.

However, if the first season of X-Men ’97 was in part about the inability of the X-Men (or the larger world) to remain frozen in time, built on the understanding that the future must eventually confront the present, then the second season seems to offer something of a grim counterpoint. The second season of X-Men ’97 unfolds across three separate time periods – Ancient Egypt, 1997, and the distant future – charting the past, present and future of the villain Apocalypse (Ross Marquand).

At the end of the first season, the primary cast was scattered across these three time periods. Those thrown into the past found themselves witnessing the rise of En Sabah Nur (Adetokumboh M'Cormack), the mutant who will become Apocalypse, as he begins his ascent. The mutants sent to the future find themselves in a wasteland ruled over by Apocalypse and his acolytes. There is a sense in which the overall structure of the season communicates a grim reality: Apocalypse is inevitable.

In the past, Magneto (Matthew Waterson) argues with his old friend Charles Xavier (Marquand) that their encounter with the man-who-would-be-Apocalypse is fortuitous. “What if a mutant with Apocalypse’s power had championed your dream 5,000 years before you did?” Magneto ponders. “Not merely the first mutant, the first X-Man. The chance to rewrite all of history in our favor.” Magneto sees in Apocalypse the chance to break an endless cycle of violence and horror.

When Charles accuses Magneto of attempting to author history, Magneto counters, “Mankind has long authored history. The result? Countless volumes of trite barbarism. Every new chapter scrawled in blood. Each generation plagiarizing the prior, from these Sandstormers to the cowards who sponsored Bastion’s smiting of Genosha.” There is a question implicit in this argument. Can the future be changed? It’s an interesting point to broach in the context of a 2026 cartoon set in 1997.

At least in the opening stretch of the season, X-Men ’97 seems to offer a rather grim answer. In the past, Magneto and Charles encounter Apocalypse as a freedom fighter rising up in opposition to the time-travelling despot Rama-Tut (John de Lancie). Rama-Tut is really not too dissimilar from the historical pharaohs that he displaced, with his overseer Logos (Chris Britton) directing slaves to tear down monuments to those old leaders so they might be replaced with the visage of Rama-Tut.

This past is not so different from the distant future where Apocalypse reigns. Like the ancient pharaohs and like Rama-Tut, Apocalypse rules through strength and terror and builds monuments to his own ego. “Let us see who is more fit to survive,” Rama-Tut muses of their inevitable confrontation. “The slave or the conqueror.” There is a sense that in order for the slave to survive in a world as chaotic and violent as this, the slave must perhaps become the conqueror.

It’s a clever conceptualization of Apocalypse, a character with a cool name and great design who has been at the center of some of the best X-Men comics ever published, but often struggled to make much of an impression himself. Here, he offers an existential challenge to the utopianism of Charles Xavier. Xavier believes that the inevitable outcome of conflict between humanity and mutantkind must be peaceful. Apocalypse suggests that there must always be struggle and oppression.

The delineation between past, present and future feels cosmetic. For example, in the distant future, Jean Grey and Cyclops (Ray Chase) raise their child Nathan (Michael Johnston), who through the wonder of time travel was already their teammate Cable (Chris Potter) in the present. How can cause and effect even work in such a universe where it seems like the entire spectrum of history unfolds in parallel with itself and where the past and the future feel like nothing more than aesthetics?

If the first season of X-Men ’97 was in large part about how the future cannot be escaped or avoided, and how it is impossible to live within a comforting bubble of nostalgia, the second season offers an unsettling counterpoint. Is history doomed to repeat itself? Is the world destined to find itself trapped in a perpetual cycle of atrocity and horror? Is the dichotomy of slave and conqueror fixed and eternal, with only the individuals or groups playing the roles shifting over time?

It is a theme that fits comfortably within the larger framework of a series like X-Men ’97, a series that is implicitly about the idea that it is still 1997, even in 2026. It’s a clever use of the animated series’ nostalgic framework, inviting a contemporary audience to question what it means to watch these characters struggle in the context of 1997, fighting a battle that is still painfully resonant almost three decades later.

It is an idea that is very clearly in conversation with the nostalgia that drives X-Men ’97. This is in some ways a direct literalization of what Mark Fisher, quoting Franco Berardi, described as “the slow cancellation of the future.” In X-Men ’97, the past and the future are ultimately just variations on the same desert nightmare, just with monuments built in honor of a different warlord, with the “present” setting of 1997 existing as a waypoint between the two extremes.

Maybe the world doesn’t move on. Maybe the future never arrives. Maybe it’s just variations on the same battle, echoing across history, with only the actors changing.