Review: X-Men ’97 “Remember it”

Overview

As Genosha prepares to join the UN, select members of the team head to the island nation to be honorees. Back at the mansion, a behind-the-scenes press event risks airing the X-Men’s dirty laundry…

Our Take

This time around, we have two separate subplots that slowly converge, the first involves a news crew visiting the X-mansion, aiming to broadcast their message of peace and coexistence. However, tensions arise within the interview, particularly with Scott/Cyclops and Jean, who are grappling with their internal struggles and the uncertain future of their relationship and aren’t further helped when Jean begins to experience a psychic vision, adding to the emotional turmoil.

At the same time this is going on, Magneto, Gambit, and Rogue go to the newly reformed Genosha under Magneto’s rule. In past episodes of the original cartoon, (and the comics) Genosha was once an Island Nation with an ugly history of mutant abuse and enslavement, that’s now been transformed into a sanctuary for mutants. Aside from a random yet fun appearance of Nightcrawler which I couldn’t help but smile seeing him again after so many years, the episode takes a dramatic turn with the arrival of someone from the future attempting to deliver a dire warning to a familiar face. And in traditional X-Men fashion, a lot of relationship drama comes at the forefront of various characters that appropriately sell the inner-turmoil’s of their respective situations while this story is sort of an adaptation of Grant Morrison’s run of the comic during the early 2000s. 

Overall, this was one hell of a tonal shift from the last episode, but impactful stuff that went so damn hard in terms of escalation and urgency. Not since RWBY Vol.3 have I witnessed something similar to this happen within fiction where the status quo changes from something fun and lighthearted to scary and fucked up in the worst ways imaginable but for all the right reasons. I’m sure this will leave many of us wondering what the hell is going to happen next, as the proceedings near the end were every bit as ugly, brutal shocking, horrifying, heartbreaking, and harrowing as Morrison wrote it…