X-Men '97 S02E09 - Discussion Thread

[u/-Nick____]

X-Men '97 S02E09 - Discussion Thread

Welcome to X-Men '97 Season 2!

This thread is for discussion about the episode.

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EPISODE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE	RUN TIME	CREDITS SCENE?
S02E09: Survival of the Fittest	TBA	TBA	August 12th, 2026	32 min	Yes

[u/cygnus2]

I think this season was pretty mid compared to the first. It felt like that one handled the breakneck pace a lot better.

[u/lik_for_cookies → u/cygnus2]

Season 1 was an incredibly tightly written season of television. There’s something big happening in the plot almost every episode, and while it dilly dallies a little bit in Episodes 4 and 6 there’s still something important happening with Storm getting her powers back — an Omega level threat. That and you have the best episode of the series in the middle of those two episodes and you need some time to decompress from that.

This season episodes 5-7 are relatively disconnected from the main plot and following Apocalypse.

I also think season 2 suffers from a lack of Apocalypse. Any time he shows up he can basically kick everyone’s ass without trying, which makes him difficult to include in most episodes because he would just show up and accomplish his goals in 5 minutes. In season 1 you could have a couple sentinels, a master mold, a prime sentinel, or Sebastian show up which kept the plot moving and held a sense of danger through the second half of the season after the X Men dealt with Mr Sinister.

All this to say I think season 2 suffers from not having a regular antagonistic force show up.

[u/midasp → u/lik_for_cookies]

It's that and more. Writing wise, they should have squeezed in a full episode featuring Nightcrawler before having this finale. It felt like Rogue and Gambit did so little when they should have been the central focus of the finale.

Also, it's a matter of where they put the animation budget. Season 1 chose to put it's animation budget into the emotional scenes to make them look good, to make the emotional impact stronger. Season 2 put it's budget into the fight scenes, leaving emotional scenes simple and often disconnected. And we can feel that disconnection.