---
title: 'X-MEN ‘97 RECAP: Everything to Know Before SEASON 2!'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=QStlnZOya94'
video_id: 'QStlnZOya94'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 802
---

# X-MEN ‘97 RECAP: Everything to Know Before SEASON 2!

> Source: [X-MEN ‘97 RECAP: Everything to Know Before SEASON 2!](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QStlnZOya94)

## Summary

The video recaps X-Men '97 season 1 and key original series storylines, setting up the Apocalypse-focused season 2. It covers character arcs, major plot twists, and the aftermath of Genosha, including Gambit's death and the X-Men being scattered across time.

### Key Points

- **Original Series Finale Setup** [0:00] — Charles Xavier is shot by Henry Gyrich, enters a coma, and is taken by the Shi'ar Empress Lilandra. Magneto inherits the school.
- **Season 1 Episode 1: To My X-Men** [1:01] — Season 1 opens with mutants facing sympathy after Xavier's 'death'. Sunspot is kidnapped, Bolivar Trask is arming Friends of Humanity with Sentinel tech. A pregnant Jean clone appears.
- **Episode 2: Mutant Liberation Begins** [1:53] — Magneto is put on trial but pardoned after saving the UN tribunal. Genosha is admitted to the UN. The Jean clone gives birth to Nathan.
- **Episode 3: Fire Made Flesh** [2:20] — Mister Sinister's Jean clone becomes the Goblin Queen. Baby Nathan is infected with a techno-organic virus and sent to the future with Bishop. The clone leaves as Madelyne Prior.
- **Genosha Massacre** [3:59] — Episode 5 'Remember It' is the most brutal: a giant Sentinel attacks Genosha, killing many mutants including Gambit. Magneto apparently dies but is later revealed alive.
- **Episodes 6-9: Storm's Return & Bastion's Plan** [5:08] — Storm regains her powers. Charles returns from space. Bastion, the season's big bad, orchestrates Prime Sentinels using Sinister's virus. Wolverine loses adamantium.
- **Season 1 Finale: X-Men Scattered in Time** [8:08] — The X-Men defeat Sinister and Bastion but are pulled into different timelines. In the post-credits, Apocalypse picks up Gambit's Queen of Hearts card, hinting at his resurrection as Death.
- **Apocalypse's Original Series Storylines** [9:28] — Apocalypse's original series arcs: first appearance in 'The Cure', time travel in 'Time Fugitives', and his formless return in 'The Fifth Horseman'. Season 2 will focus on Apocalypse and the X-Men across timelines.

## Transcript

If you could travel back in time and
kill Baby Apocalypse, would you? I'm
Gina, and I did your homework for X-Men
97. Everything you need to know going
into season 2, I'll be talking about it,
breaking it down in chronological order.
I'll recap season 1 and tell you the
stuff I think will be most important to
know from the original animated series
that might pop back up in season 2. That
original series ran for five seasons and
76 episodes total. It ended with an
episode titled Graduation Day. In that
episode, rabbit anti-mutant dickbag and
co-creator of the Sentinel program,
Henry Guyrick, shoots Charles Xavier
with an energy disruptor device that
causes his psychic abilities to spiral
out of control, overwhelming him. He
slips into a coma. Mutants on Janosha
want to go to war over the assassination
attempt, and they want Magneto to lead
them in the uprisings. Unable to help
Charles using Earth science, the X-Men
and Moira McTager decide that their best
hope is to contact Landra, Empress of
the Alien Shi empire, and someone who
shares a deep connection with Charles.
In the 11th hour, Magneto turns away
from his rebellion and helps the X-Men
contact Landre, who takes Charles away
with her to the sher. No one knows if
Charles will ever be able to return to
Earth. So, he says goodbye to his X-Men.
X-Men 97 season 1, episode 1, To My
X-Men, opens with Charles still gone,
and the world thinking that he's dead,
killed by Guyrich in that assassination
attempt. Because of this, there's more
sympathy for mutants. It's only been a
few months since the events of the
original finale. Roberto Dcasta,
Sunspot, is kidnapped by the Friends of
Humanity, who use a power dampening
collar that we saw a bunch in the
original series. The X-Men rescue him
and bring him back to the X-Mansion. The
X-Men interrogate Guy in prison and
learn that Bolivar Tras, the designer of
the Sentinels, is outfitting the Friends
of Humanity with Sentinel Tech. During
this interrogation, a very pregnant
woman, who everyone thinks is Gan Gray,
probes Gyrich's mind and has a
terrifying vision of doom and
destruction to come. The X-Men locate
Tras and take out the Sentinels. Tras is
taken away by government officials,
headed up by Dr. Val Cooper, UN liaison
to the X-Men. Back at the X-mansion,
Magneto shows up and reveals that
Charles left everything to him in his
will, including the school. In episode
2, mutant liberation begins. The UN puts
Magneto on trial. The trial is attacked
by the Friends of Humanity and the
Executioner, a human outfitted by
Sentinel Tech and Advanced Weapons. He
fires a blast at Magneto, which is
intercepted by Storm. She loses her
powers and leaves the X-Mansion. Magneto
saves the lives of the UN tribunal, who
pardon him. They also say they'll start
taking steps to admit Janosha into the
UN. The woman everyone thinks is Gan
gives birth to baby Nathan, but back at
the exion, a woman who also claims to be
Gene shows up. Episode three, Fire Made
Flesh. It turns out the pregnant Gene is
actually a Gene clone created by Mr.
Sinister, who'd kidnap the real Gene.
The Gene clone under Sinister's control
turns into the Goblin Queen and fights
the X-Men using her psychic powers to
force each of them to experience some of
their deepest fears. The real Gene
battles clone Gene on the astral plane
and helps break her free of Sinister's
control. Unfortunately, he's already
taken baby Nathan and dipped him in
green goo, exposing him to a
technoorganic virus. The only way for it
to be possibly cured or contained is to
send Nathan into the future with Bishop
to find future forge. Before they send
him off, clone Gene leaves baby Nathan a
psychic message to help him remember
that he's loved. Bishop takes Nathan,
presumably back to the future, which is
Bishop's present time. Clone Gene leaves
the ex-mansion, giving herself the name
Meline Prior before she goes. In a bar,
Storm is approached by a young forge who
offers to help her. Episode 4,
Motendo/Life Death Part One. In the
first half, Motendo, it's Jubile's 18th
birthday, and she just wants to play
video games. She and Sunspot get sucked
into a Motendo by Mojo, an
interdimensional producer. They have to
play their way through, and if they die
in the game, they die in real life. A
digital replica of Jubilee named Absa is
already in the game. Jubilee and Sunspot
work with Absa to defeat Mojo and escape
the game. In the second half of the
episode, Life Death Part One, Storm and
Forge work on a solution to her lack of
powers, and things are getting a little
romantic. That is until he reveals that
he was the one who helped build the
early designs for the power dampening
collars that were then used to make the
gun that led to Storm's powers going
away. Forge's mutant power is that he
can basically invent anything he can
picture in his mind. After Storm gets
rightfully pissed at Forge, the
adversary shows up in the form of a
giant terrifying demon owl with Storm's
own voice and bites Forge, poisoning him
and feeding on Storm's misery. Episode
5, Remember It, is the most brutal and
heartbreaking episode of the season. The
UN formerly admits Janosha, which has
been renovated and upgraded into a kind
of paradise vacation spot for mutants. A
lot of familiar mutants are here now,
including the Morlocks, and some are on
the Janosian interim council, like
Nightcrawler, Emma Frost, and Maline
Prior. The council wants Magneto to rule
Janosha, and he agrees, but only if
Rogue agrees to be his queen and serve
with him. There's a lot of messy
romantic entanglements in this episode.
Gene discovers that Scott has been
having a kind of mental affair with
Meline. He claims to love both of them.
Rogue tells Gambit about her
relationship with Magneto, which started
when they realized that his
electromagnetic powers protect him from
her touch-based draining powers. Rogue
seemingly chooses Magneto, telling
Gambit that since they can't touch each
other, they'd never work out. But after
doing a sexy flying dance with Magneto,
she also rejects him, which sadly Gambit
never finds out because in the midst of
a huge celebration party, all hell
breaks loose. Cable comes back and tries
to stop the upcoming massacre, but he's
pulled away. We find out in a later
episode that it's because it's a fixed
point in time. There's an explosion and
then a giant bug-like sentinel attacks
and kills a whole bunch of mutants.
Gamut dies performing a heroic act.
Magneto also seemingly dies, although we
find out in a later episode that he's
still alive. Episode 6, Life Death Part
Two, takes place at the same time as the
previous episode. Charles is still with
the Shar in Space. Empress Alandre
announces that she and Charles are going
to be married, but Charles has a vision
of what's going on on Janosha, and he
can't go through with it. Meanwhile, the
adversary taunts Storm as its poison
makes its way through Forge's system.
Storm finds a cactus plant to cure him
and defeats the adversary, which gets
rid of the mental block that was keeping
her powers suppressed. Storm turns on
the TV and learns of the Janosha attack.
This is also the episode where we learn
that Tras is in league with Sinister.
Episode 7, Bright Eyes. Instead of going
to Gamut's funeral, Rogue goes on a
tear, breaking into a military facility
and demanding to know where Guyrick and
Tras are. Captain America tells her
about the existence of an organization
called OZT, which we find out in the
next episode stands for Operation Zero
Tolerance. Bastion, the big bad of the
season, kills Guyrich. The X-Men find
Tras and Rogue drops him off a roof, but
instead of dying, he transforms into a
human sentinel hybrid called a Prime
Sentinel. He's very hard to fight, but
Cable shows up and tosses an
electromagnetic cluster grenade at him,
taking him out for the time being. Scott
realizes that Cable is actually Nathan
all grown up. Sinister has been working
for Bastion, who has Magneto held
prisoner in some very skimpy clothes.
While all this is going down, Roberto
tells his mom that he's a mutant. She
apparently already knew this, but she
says they need to keep it a secret
because her shareholders are squirmy
about anything involving mutants.
Episode 8. Tolerance is extinction part
one. Cable explains that in his
timeline, Bastion used the fallout from
Janosha to get backing for his prime
sentinel project. Then he upgraded
humans to the human sentinel hybrids and
used mutants as slave labor to provide a
utopia for the humans. The Prime
Sentinels were created using Sinister's
technoorganic virus, the one he infected
baby Nathan with. A whole bunch of
people signed up to be turned into these
things, and they don't even have a
memory of having had the procedure done
until they're activated. Gene and Scott
go to Bastion's childhood home. They
discover that his father was infected by
Sentinel tech from the future. And when
his mother had Bastion, he had the
ability to communicate with the
machines, including Master Mold. He's
basically the descendant of every
Sentinel. He orchestrated Janosha,
knowing that that much tragedy would
overwhelm humans, and they'd eventually
feel apathy about it all. A bunch of
Prime Sentinels get activated and start
attacking the X-Men, including Bastion's
mom, Sunspot's Butler, and reporter
Trish Tilby, who spent a few episodes
flirting with Beast. Dr. Cooper, who it
turns out was a member of the OZT group,
sets Magneto free and he uses his power
to basically EMP the whole Earth,
shutting down the Prime Sentinels.
Charles crashes back down to Earth in a
sheer ship. Episode 9, Tolerance is
extinction part two. Charles is back in
the mansion and Magneto is back in his
original outfit, which you know can't
mean anything good. If the Earth's
magnetic field isn't turned back on by
Magneto within 24 hours, it and
everything on it will die. Magneto
offers the X-Men a home on asteroid M,
planning to take off and leave Earth to
its fate. and Rogue and Sunspot actually
join him. Half of the remaining X-Men go
to fight Magneto and try to convince him
to save Earth. So Magneto, Rogue, and
Sunspot end up fighting Charles,
Wolverine Cyclops Nightcrawler and
Jubilee. Wolverine stabs Magneto, who
then rips the adamantium from Wolverine
skeleton. The other half of the X-Men,
Storm, Gene, Morph, Beast, and Forge, go
and try to neutralize Bastion. Sinister
shows up and controls Cable to make him
fight Gene. Episode 10, Tolerance's
Extinction Part Three, the season 1
finale. The X-Men, with the help of the
Phoenix Force, still inside Gene, manage
to defeat Sinister and Bastion. But the
president targets Asteroid M with
missiles. And now it's going to crash
down into the Earth. The X-Men stay
behind and work together to destroy it,
which will save humanity, but likely
kill all of them. At the last second,
they're pulled out of time by some force
and sent to two different timelines. 6
months later, people don't know what
happened to the X-Men or where they are.
Bishop shows up to tell Forge that they
were pulled through time and that they
need to be rescued. In the post-redit
scenes, we see rogue nightcrawler beast
Charles and Magneto in 3000 BC as they
meet and Sabanor, the first mutant who
will become Apocalypse. Meanwhile, Scott
and Gene meet Mother Escani and young
Nathan in 3960 AD. In the present day on
Janosha, Apocalypse picks up a Queen of
Hearts playing card, Gambit's Queen of
Hearts playing card, and says this,
>> "So much pain, my children, so much
death." hinting at the fact that he may
in fact be resurrecting Gambit as his
horsemen death. So season 2 is going to
open with the X-Men split up between
three timelines. Rogue, Nightcrawler,
Beast, Charles, and Magneto in the past,
Forge, Bishop, Jubilee, and Sunspot in
the present. Although Bishop is
presumably about to travel through time
to join the past group. Then there's
Jean, Scott, and according to the
trailer, Storm, Wolverine, and Morph in
the future with young Nathan. It's
pretty clear that season 2 is going to
focus on the X-Men dealing with
Apocalypse at different points in time.
So, I'm going to go through his
storylines from the original series very
briefly. Apocalypse was first introduced
in the animated series in season 1,
episode 9, The Cure. In this and the
following episode, episode 10, come the
Apocalypse. Apocalypse's machine turns
Warren Worthington III's angel into his
horseman death, Archangel. When mutants
become horsemen, they're under
Apocalypse's control, but Rogue uses her
powers to drain Archangel just enough
that it snaps him out of it.
Apocalypse's whole thing is that he
hates and is disgusted by society and
wants to rebuild the world in his own
image. With only the strongest humans
and mutants left, he turns mutants into
his horsemen slaves and uses them to
help him try and wipe out humanity.
There's death, famine, pestilence, and
war. And in these two episodes, we see
three other mutants transforming into
the remaining horsemen. Apocalypse is
known as the first mutant, so he's super
old, and he maintains his immortality by
visiting his Lazarus chamber and
hibernating once every hundred years. In
season 2, episodes seven and eight time
fugitives parts one and two, Apocalypse
creates a plague that's supposed to wipe
out both humans and mutants. Time
traveling Bishop tries to stop the
plague, but time traveling Cable needs
the plague to happen because his
timeline is being rewritten due to the
interference. At the last second, Cable
has the idea to infect Wolverine with
the plague to use the antibodies created
by his rapid healing capabilities to
develop an antidote. In season 3,
episode 9, Obsession, Archangel is
obsessed with finding Apocalypse and
making him pay for turning him into one
of his horsemen. The X-Men appeal to
Apocalypse's future tech sentient ship
for help, and she seals him in an escape
pot and blasts him into space,
neutralizing him for the time being. But
Archangel is still completely focused on
getting his revenge. At the very end of
season 4, episode 4, Sanctuary Part Two,
Apocalypse rescues villain Fabian
Cortez, from an almost destroyed
asteroid M, and says he has a use for
him. In the season 4 finale arc, Beyond
Good and Evil, parts one through four,
the end of time, Cable infiltrates
Apocalypse's Lazarus Chamber in the
future, but Apocalypse steals Cable's
time travel tech and goes on a time
jaunt. This inadvertently bumps Bishop
off course of his own time travel, and
he gets stuck in the axis of time, which
is looked after by Bender, who turns out
to be a disguised immortice. Apocalypse
kidnaps all the mutant psychics,
including Gene, Charles, and Psylock.
Cable tries to travel back in time to
destroy Apocalypse's Lazarus chamber
before it's even built, but he gets sent
to the present instead. But then Cable
and the X-Men travel back to Egypt in
1200 BC where they fight the original
four horsemen. Cable blows up the
chamber which Apocalypse claims he no
longer needs as he's now sustained by
the Nexus outside of time. His plan is
to kill all the psychics at once,
releasing a burst of psychic energy that
ends all of existence. But Cable and the
X-Men manage to stop him. The psychics
combine their powers to expel
Apocalypse, causing him to cease to
exist. But then in season 5, episode 5,
the fifth horsemen, Apocalypse, now
formless and in a void, uses Fabian
Cortez as his vessel to bring himself
back into existence. And that was where
Apocalypse's story in the original
series ended. So in season 2 of X-Men
97, I think we're going to see the X-Men
in the past grappling with whether or
not they should kill and saber before he
becomes Apocalypse. Knowing that Charles
and Magneto are both in the past, this
should lead to some interesting ethical
debates. And meanwhile, the X-Men of the
future might have an interesting time if
anything done in the past messes with
their current existence. And I think
it's all leading up to Gambit being
resurrected by the end of the season by
Apocalypse as the Horseman Death. So,
that's everything you need to know
before X-Men 97 season 2 comes out. Let
me know in the comments where your hype
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