X-Men '97 S2 Ep 5 Breakdown: Every Detail You Missed!

[00:01] face-sucking aliens, so it feels like a wash. I'm Gina Ippolito and episode 5 of season 2 of X-Men '97 paid homage to two classic horror movies and had callbacks to no fewer than five episodes from the original series. So, this baby is dense

[00:15] references. I'm going to break it down scene by scene for everything you might go over to nerdriot.shop to check out our sweet merch. We've got a bunch of of X-Men designs, and buying some merch is the best way to support the channel.

[00:28] the all-in-one platform that makes launching your own website a breeze. Episode 5, "Weapon X Lies and Videotape", was written by Anthony Scullatti and directed by Chase Conley. Morph speaks the previously on. Morph is

[00:40] previously unseen, at least by a lot of the X-Men, parts of Wolverine's personality. Morph starts this episode considering Wolverine to be a best revelations uncovered about his motivations. We see Wolverine stabbing

[00:53] Magneto and Magneto ripping the adamantium from his skeleton, Morph calls out for Jean. This is right before Morph changed into Jean and said, "I love you" to Wolverine. It was very heavily implied last season that Morph

[01:05] Wolverine fights the cyber hounds in the future, now with his very breakable bone claws. Then, the future group is back in the present waiting for the past group the post-credit scene last episode with Captain America giving Wolverine a

[01:18] Weapon X file. During the opening, most of the team is back together minus dead. So, we get a pretty full roster. Jubilee and Sunspot are still off not here, either. But, Forge gets his own intro for the first time. He stands

[01:32] futuristic-looking guns and missiles, which are probably his own inventions. Notice that in Wolverine's intro, he still has his bone claws, which make the assume that this is the last time in the intro that he'll have these. Next

[01:45] episode, we should be back to the adamantium snikt. Then, we get some new happened exactly like this in the original series, but it's a mashup of stuff we did see. It's Team X, who in the original series was Wolverine,

[01:57] Silverfox, Maverick, and Sabretooth, seen in season 4 episode 16 Weapon X to save Janice Hollenbeck, she's the Sabretooth's tortured memories in original series season 1 episode 4

[02:11] and Hollenbeck died. Wolverine and Sabretooth fighting in the snow is from original series season 1 episode 6 Cold Vengeance. In that one, Wolverine left and Sabretooth tracks him there to kill him. That episode is praised for

[02:25] wandering soul and a kind of samurai, which the live-action movies featured a ton. Then Wolverine kisses Yuriko Oyama and she makes her transformation into Lady Deathstrike. This is from season 3 episode 1 Out of the Past Part 1, and

[02:38] minute. Then the episode opens like a certain breed of '80s action movie with mostly military-esque guys yucking it up with blustering bravado on a helicopter right before all hell breaks loose. I'm thinking of movies like Predator or

[02:50] movies involving the Vietnam War. I wonder if the X-Men '97 team even tried Clearwater Revival's Fortunate Son to play over the scene. It also brings to mind X-Men Origins: Wolverine when the whole squad is on the jet before their

[03:02] sharpens her claws here the way Wade Wilson sharpened his sword in that one. original one written and performed by the Newton brothers called Baby Come Home and they do a great job of sort of parodying those '70s anti-war songs used

[03:16] laughs and shares battle stories. Originally, he was just a highly trained he was turned into a cyborg by the Weapon X program. We saw him briefly in Cable's resistance group Clan Chosen in season 2 episode 7 Time Fugitives. Here

[03:32] be killed off in the first 5 minutes. Okay, so I'm going to pause here to briefly go through Wolverine's backstory timeline from the original series since episodes are referenced in this one. His events were never shown in chronological

[03:45] his memory had been messed with. So obviously, Wolverine is is with an advanced healing ability and a slew of other mutant powers like enhanced together with Captain America during the war. I went over that last week. That

[03:59] was shown in season 5 episode 7 Old Soldiers. He didn't yet have his adamantium. Then at some point after that, years later, he dated a Japanese care of some business promising her he'd be back. But on this trip he was

[04:12] ambushed and then experimented on. This was shown in season 3 episodes 1 and 2 Out of the Past parts 1 and 2. He was brainwashed and given psychoactive drugs along with other members of Team-X. This was shown in season 4 episode 16 Weapon

[04:25] X Lies and Videotape, the precursor to this current episode. Then he was Weapon X procedure that fused adamantium invented and performed by Professor Kenji Oyama, Yuriko's father, and Dr.

[04:38] Cornelius, who we'll later see in this episode. Trauma and confusion from the and wreck the lab causing an explosion which presumably killed Professor Oyama. Then an almost feral Wolverine ran through the Canadian wilderness until he

[04:51] husband James, aka the Canadian superhero Vindicator. Heather rehabilitated Wolverine and nursed him back to health and she and James which Vindicator was the leader of. And that team is basically the Canadian

[05:04] for the Canadian government. Eventually he left Alpha Flight pissing them off and the Canadian government off who'd invested time and money into him. This was all shown in season 2 episode 5 Repo Man. He goes back for Yuriko, but she's

[05:17] gone. She blamed Wolverine for her father's death and was also furious that Wolverine hadn't come back. So she had a procedure done to turn her into a cyborg and joined the group of cyborgs known as the Reavers. Animated series Yuriko is

[05:29] live-action movie when she was played by Kelly Hu. All her abilities here come from cybernetic enhancements just like Garrison Kane. Then Alpha Flight lured rejoin the team. When he refused the Canadian government who was

[05:43] Weapon X procedure threatened to basically dissect him and retrieve the adamantium. Heather and most of Alpha Flight helped him escape and he went back to the X-Men. Then Yuriko, now Lady Deathstrike, lured him to the sewers to

[05:55] use him to open an alien ship, which unleashed a crazy soul-drinking alien Wolverine and Sabretooth frequently butt heads and fight. They have a rivalry that has spanned years. At one point, Team X is lured back to the lab where

[06:08] a lot of their memories were falsely implanted. This includes Wolverine's memories of Sabretooth leaving Silver Fox to die, who Wolverine was basically these two realize that their rivalry was kind of based on events that

[06:21] never happened. And then after that, they have a very tenuous kind of ceasefire. So, to sum up, Wolverine is always being lured places by scientists, rivals, and old lovers, and the dude is always leaving and then coming back and

[06:33] All that insanity I just ran through there will come back in this episode. that he's got the real guns right here, lady. And I love that lady has a dual meaning of him trying to be derogatory, but it's also her villain name. Lady

[06:47] Ishii. In the original, she was voiced by Jane Luke. Sabretooth is voiced by Darren De Paul, who also voices Omega Red later. Don Francks was the original 2016. Wolverine has duped the others into coming out to a different Weapon X

[07:00] facility, telling them they can find Dr. Cornelius and the other scientists who experimented on them. And while all of this is true, he leaves out the main which is that he wants his adamantium back. He's willing to put all of them in

[07:12] danger for his own selfish reasons. Maverick says that the old band is back Wolverine did last episode. Maverick is the mutant Christoph Nord. He can absorb high-tech armor suit, which can do things like infrared scans of the area.

[07:26] Morph gives a much more succinct version of the past events I just spelled out. Morph is asked, "Why did you come on this mission?" Morph will be asked this several times and will never answer. You don't need to know the chemistry of fire

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[08:43] theoretically leave the door open for him to return in a later season. He Everyone is separated for a brief moment, which leads to the paranoia infected. When the crazy-looking polar bear jumps out, Morph changes into

[08:57] Sasquatch, a member of Alpha Flight who we saw in the original series. Sasquatch thing due to his gamma radiation experiments. The team notices Deathstrike is shocked since it was always assumed that the adamantium

[09:10] process her father developed couldn't be reversed. This already dysfunctional team grows even more suspicious of Wolverine after he omitted this detail. fact that he wasn't the one who got the adamantium. Morph calls Wolverine and

[09:22] Sabretooth alphas, and just like Sabretooth's use of the word lady They're both acting like stereotypical alpha males here, or the alpha males in a pack, but it's also a reference to Wolverine's Canadian team. The setting

[09:35] are an homage to John Carpenter's The Thing. And this snowy lab recalls the film's events were set. Inside and around the facility, there's wreckage, some crazy [ __ ] went down. On their way to the control room, they see dead

[09:49] everywhere. There's also the same green blood around that the birds and the stabs one of the scientists to see what color his blood is and to smell it for >> When Logan told me Graydon Creed was

[10:03] can't unsee [music] it. Jr. was ahead of the Friends of Humanity anti-mutant hate group. He created a lot of issues for mutants, including helping engineer a plague that he blamed on

[10:16] the Friends of Humanity and outed Jr. as being the son of Sabretooth and his followers turned on him. In season 4, episode 14, Bloodlines, it's revealed that Jr.'s mother is Mystique, making him Nightcrawler's half-brother. Jr.'s

[10:29] punishment and it's assumed that Sabretooth really did a number on him. In the original series, Dr. Cornelius was frequently shown as simply a shadowy here, when he pops up, his eyes are obscured by his glasses before we can

[10:42] fully see him. He's voiced by Todd Haberkorn, who also voiced Henry Gyrich Cornelius and then we get another quintessential alien movie parody, which is Aliens. Morph changes into Puck, another Alpha Flight member. Originally

[10:55] powers. He was just a small guy who was later, he was retconned to have been cursed this form after he trapped an ancient sorcerer. And then, to hammer home that this episode is an homage to

[11:07] The Thing, Morph smashes down as The Thing. Wolverine reveals again that he team when he brought them out here when he says that the reports had said the episode, Lady Deathstrike, Sabretooth, and even Morph clock these

[11:20] moments and become less and less pleased with him. Wolverine says that he caught a whiff of something similar once. He's referring to the Colony, a hive-mind parasitic alien species that showed up in season 3, episode 19, Love and Vein.

[11:33] into a member of the colony in that episode, but his healing factor helped him fight off the change. Reportedly, the aliens in this episode, the brood, the colony, but were deemed a little too horrific for children, so they switched

[11:46] Wolverine was able to fight off the change in that episode, but not in this one, is due to the fact that he still had his adamantium then. Wolverine tells second alien invasion, referring to the events of out of the past that I talked

[11:58] one another of being infected with an Thing. Like in any good horror movie or D&D campaign, they split the party. Wolverine and Maverick go one way, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, and Morph

[12:11] second person to ask why Morph came along, and Morph again doesn't answer, she keeps saying the word Tomo. She explains that Tomo was a magical shapeshifting fox who was a companion to a heroic samurai, and Tomo's story did

[12:25] not end well. In Japanese mythology, kitsune are shapeshifting fox spirits, and Tomo or Tamamo-no-Mae was one of the most famous. After basically wreaking governments, she was hunted down and killed. And again, in media, Wolverine

[12:39] samurai, and Lady Deathstrike is calling Morph the Tomo in this relationship. I love [clears throat] that he's a tech bro, very on brand. I could write an on these DVDs and their connections to the Weapon X and Weapon Plus program,

[12:54] but instead, I'll very briefly summarize who each one is. First, because I've seen this asked online a lot over the years, the Weapon Plus is the huge 1940s and is responsible for pretty much every hero who got the super soldier

[13:07] serum, like Steve Rogers. That program basically uses mutants and regular humans to try and create living weapons. Weapon X, or Weapon 10 since it's meant under that larger Weapon Plus umbrella that is responsible for Wolverine,

[13:20] Deadpool, Sabretooth, and a bunch of others. It was the 10th installment in because Weapon X is also the name of a facility that conducts experiments and All the names here have something to do with the Weapon Plus program and some

[13:34] program. First, from left to right, there's X-23. That's Laura Kinney, who version of her was played by Dafne Keen in Logan and Deadpool and Wolverine. Then there's Ajax, Francis Freeman. He has enhanced strength and reflexes and a

[13:49] nerve endings being destroyed. He was trained at the Weapon X facility to become a member of their staff. He was played by Ed Skrein in Deadpool. Aurora of Alpha Flight that we saw in the original animated series. She's

[14:02] Northstar's twin sister. Fantomex, also known as Charlie Cluster Seven, also known as Weapon 13, is a techno-organic organism fused with nanotech who escaped join pretty much every hero group at one point or another, including the X-Men.

[14:16] there's a DVD with the Roman numeral for 18 on it. Since this is the one Morph grabs and watches, it's likely just the 18th video in a series of videos techniques used on T-Max. Then Cyborg, aka Aldo Ferro, a Weapon X scientist and

[14:31] at one point. Mastodon is another enhanced member of Team X and Weapon X test subject. Winter Soldier, I think we all know who that is, James Buchanan, the MCU. Weapon Six refers to the super-soldier serum that gave Luke Cage

[14:45] part of the Weapon X program. I'm honestly not sure who Ant-Man is in this the comments. The only thing I can think of is that it's somehow related to Ant-Man or one of the experiments related to Ant-Man. Garrison Kane and

[14:58] is David North. We saw him in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, played by Daniel the movie, he was also an expert marksman. He's also, in different versions, a name that Maverick sometimes goes by. Kimura was X-23's evil, abusive

[15:12] facility. She's a skilled fighter with one of Magneto's Savage Land Mutates, but that one had nothing to do with the Weapon Plus program. So, this might be referring to Worm Cunningham or David

[15:25] the facility with Wade being experimented on. Sluggo is Bernard Hoister, who we saw in Deadpool 2 in the icebox. In the comics, he was a member of Weapon X and is invulnerable. Kestrel is John Wraith, played by will.i.am in

[15:37] X-Men Origins: Wolverine, another Weapon X test subject. He has teleportation abilities. The last one is hard to make out, but it looks like m a r something. I think it's Marrow, aka Sarah, since she has Weapon X ties. Marrow was killed

[15:49] her dead body. Morph takes the disc with the Roman numeral 18 on it. Cornelius brainwashing techniques they used in Weapon X lies and videotape. Then Brood were found in. We saw a similar excavation and excavation site in The

[16:04] The scientists used the Brood's cranial fluid to create a serum to make their test subjects more pliable and open to control. Morph almost gets alien face that the Brood are killing most hosts and only breeding with the best of the

[16:17] best. And then they stumble upon Omega Red. I'm so happy to see this psycho back. He's from the original series season 2 episode 4 Red Dawn and season 4 those episodes, the Russians thawed out a frozen Omega Red, a super strong

[16:30] super soldier version of Captain America. Red is crazy and fanatical about Soviet supremacy, so he goes rogue. He always goes rogue. Storm again, but then later he was thawed out by the Americans who wanted his help to

[16:44] retrieve an unstable nuclear Russian sub. Shocker, dude went rogue and to the bottom of the ocean trapping him. But I guess they retrieved his ass because here he is and with his same Russiany intro music and everything.

[16:56] before, so they've obviously crossed paths at one point or another. Wolverine said he was headed for the vehicle bay, this obviously isn't that. And they see the adamantium chamber and again, Wolverine, you lying ass.

[17:09] >> Game over. >> That's it. It's game over. from Aliens. >> That's it, man. Game over, man. It's game over. >> And then Maverick dies. X-Men '97 is

[17:22] nothing. Wolverine turns into a brood alien and then Morph changes into comics, his powers all came from an advanced battle suit, although at one point he went to space and he and the suit merged, so he really had those

[17:35] "Take that, you lying runt." Runt is one of his favorite nicknames for Logan Red is released and now they're really screwed. Omega Red has an old grudge many times and Wolverine keeps helping to defeat him. Morph changes into

[17:49] Deadpool, then a little later the Silver Samurai, who we saw in season 4 episode 15, Lotus and the Steel, which was another Wolverine-centric episode. Morph Wolverine-related characters in this one. In Lotus and the Steel, Wolverine

[18:02] helped a small Japanese village defeat a gang that was serving Silver Samurai. Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. Notice that when Morph stabs the door melts. This is because Morph created the sword out of flesh and although Morph

[18:16] can add density to created weapons, they're not as strong as the originals. to disabuse Morph of his romantic notions of Wolverine. But in the original series, Wolverine was the one who never gave up on Morph and even came

[18:28] to blows with Cyclops for leaving Morph behind in the pilot. Although by the end taken off the rose-colored glasses when it comes to Wolverine. To purge choice but to give him his adamantium back. And this gives us my favorite

[18:41] moment of the episode, Morph pretending to be Cyclops. It's awesome. >> I'm going to tell Jean. He's going to be so upset with you that I'm just going to Logan. >> It reminds me of Loki turning into

[18:55] >> On my way down to coordinate search and rescue. On my way down to coordinate >> Cyclops's voice actor, Ray Chase, is really having some fun here. Sabretooth tries to murder Wolverine. Morph tries to appeal to Wolverine, but it's only

[19:09] breaks through. Lady Deathstrike, who's really just kicking so much ass in this chamber and he gets his adamantium back, parts of him. Omega Red gets a few last licks in. Morph changes into Spider-Man,

[19:22] then Wolverine does this. >> I'm back, baby. >> It's a recreation of the 1982 Wolverine number one comics cover. The lab explodes with Omega Red still inside, crushed under a pillar. This team loves

[19:34] will be back at some point since some rubble and a fire can't keep this dude two members down. Wolverine's got his claws back, but he may have lost Morph's love and respect for good. And Lady Deathstrike gives Morph a look that I

[19:48] you come on this mission? And once it for this breakdown of episode five of X-Men 97. I'm all about a Wolverine episode and a good horror movie homage. Let me know in the comments if you dug

[20:01] to Bro who supports us at the executive producer level. Big thanks to studio tech Brian Kim and New Rockstars editors Josh Hurd and Abby Freel and all the at Gina Ippolito. Subscribe to all channels in the New Rockstars network

[20:13] of everything you love. Thanks for watching. Bye.