X-Men ’97 takes Wolverine back to the ’90s. This wasn’t just the X-Men’s heyday; it was also a time when comics changed, becoming grimmer, darker, and often far more gory. Trigger-happy antiheroes like Cable and the Punisher flourished, supernatural heroes like Ghost Rider and Morbius became edgier, and as for Wolverine… well, a mutant hunter with razor-sharp claws was made for that decade. If you look to the Wolverine comics of the ’90s, you’ll often find stunning but gory splash pages and brutal vendettas.
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X-Men ’97 Season 2 is basically a love letter to the franchise’s history (appropriately enough, viewed primarily through a ’90s lens). But episode 5 is different, because this embraces the tradition of gore and violence the original series famously avoided; right down to featuring villains X-Men: The Animated Series dodged. In doing so, it gives us a brutal, high-stakes Wolverine story the original show would never have dared to tell.
X-Men ’97 Turns Wolverine Into a Brood
Inspired by the Xenomorphs in Alien, the Brood are easily one of the most horrific monsters in X-Men history. Like the Xenomorphs, the Brood implant an egg inside a person; but there’s no chest-bursting here, with the characters subjected to a shocking transformation. Brood victims effectively become possessed, their bodies evolving into human-Brood hybrids, and in so doing they gain access to the host’s original powers. Worse, these abilities are often shared through the Brood’s hive minds. Although the Brood are alien, Marvel has also often hinted they’re actually demons.
The X-Men have encountered the Brood many times before, often on missions into the depths of space. In one of these, Wolverine himself transformed into a Brood, although his body finally rejected it. X-Men ’97 plays this story straight, turning Wolverine into a full Brood, before unleashing him on the allies he’s gathered to his side. Unlike the comics, we only get a minimal sense Wolverine is capable of resisting; instead, the Brood is only defeated when Wolverine gets his adamantium back (the Brood are apparently allergic to adamantium).
This is the Wolverine Story Fox Never Dared to Tell
Oddly enough, the original animated series did tell a version of this story; but it reinvented the Brood in a bizarre way, creating a whole new race known as “The Colony.” who appeared in the Season 4 episode “Love in Vain.” In podcast interviews, the creators of the original series have admitted the Brood felt a little too dark for Fox’s censors back then. Still, they played the story relatively straight, with the Colony possessing a hive mind, ruled by a queen, and traveling the stars in giant space-fish (another odd quirk of the Brood in comics).
All this means X-Men ’97 Season 2, episode 5 is the X-Men story we never expected to see. Fox hadn’t exactly used the Brood, but they’d come as close as they could, and most of the original concepts had been played out. But X-Men ’97 pulls it off by merging the Brood with a completely different story, setting up the history of Weapon X and the Winter Solder, while also giving Wolverine his adamantium back. The Brood plot works because it isn’t the only driver; other things are in focus as well, and they come together in a fairly effective manner.
X-Men ’97 Brings the Real Wolverine Back
Back in the ’90s, it became something of a running joke that Wolverine would leave the X-Men to go on his own side-quests, usually with a different (more brutal) supporting cast, and probably a sidekick or two. X-Men ’97 just followed that format to the letter, with Wolverine even assembling the old Team X. It immediately confirmed this was a very different story; one Team X member was killed during the crash landing, and Wolverine promptly gutted another of his allies while he was under Brood control. Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, and Mystique were the only ones who made it out alive.
The episode’s real goal, of course, was to get Wolverine’s adamantium back. He understandably went after the Weapon X Project, the people who originally implanted it in him in the first place, and he got his wish; the real Wolverine is back, and he’s as badass as ever. The tragedy, of course, lies in the reason he chose it this time; Wolverine now believes he’s a weapon first and foremost, and his adamantium claws are what make him effective. No doubt those claws will come in very handy, though, when Apocalypse returns.
The first five episodes of X-Men ’97 are streaming now on Disney+, and new episodes will be released weekly. Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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Image courtesy of DC Studios
