X-Men ’97 Episode 7 SPOILER Cameo Explained

X-Men ’97 Episode 7 had a massive cameo that Marvel fans had been waiting for. While Rogue’s been on a rampage to locate Gambit and Magneto’s killers, she runs across Captain America. She’s been through United States military facilities designed for The Hulk, and her search extends to a secret site that was supposed to be housing Henry Gyrich. But, when Rogue sets foot on the premises, Cap’s shield lands at her feet. The conversation between the two isn’t exactly warm and fuzzy, but Steve Rogers lets the X-Men powerhouse in on his little operation. 

Interestingly, the United Nations has been keeping Gyrich and Bolivar Trask around to research mutant threat contingencies. A force called OZT, (Operation: Zero Tolerance for comics fans out there.), is planning something big and they need Gyrich and Trask to get it off the ground. One problem, Captain America doesn’t think he can go in there guns blazing and retrieve the prisoner. Rogue is, of course, dismayed at this lack of solidarity and resolved to get Gyrich from Mexico City herself. As a parting shot, she chucks Cap’s shield into the mountain, since he won’t be needing it to help apprehend these murderers. So, Captain America is around again, and there are probably some Avengers running around X-Men ’97‘s world.

X-Men ’97 Addresses 90s Captain America

Fans knew that Captain America was going to enter the fold after a teaser video released on the heels of Episode 5. ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast spoke to supervising director Jake Castorena about the incoming Marvel hero before Episode 6. He said that the massacre of Genosha meant that this was uncharted territory for the X-Men moving forward. Castorena also talked about how X-Men ’97 shows off the best of the X-Men.

“I mean, call space spade. We saw Cap’s shield. You know what, a lot of people tend to forget that Cap of the nineties wasn’t the same as our Steve Rogers. (Referencing the MCU’s popular portrayal.) Steve Rogers in the 90s had a little bit of a bias against the mutants… But, yeah, what I will say is, the reason why I love the X-Men so much, and why I value them over a lot of the other Marvel teams that we have, because there’s a lot of great ones at the end of the day, is they’ve got the danger room. Man, the X-Men trained for this stuff. They have a danger room, and everybody else just wings that stuff.”

“So, this is knocking the team off off their rocker a little bit. This is gonna be some non-sequitur stuff that they have to face. An experience that they’ve never had before. But, I would love to see how the audience reacts to how the X-Men  handle it. Do the X-Men come together? And if they do, How do they do it? Especially after, something like this. And, how does our team dynamic shift? Does it shift? Or does it strengthen? We don’t know, because just like 9/11 or COVID or anything in between, it brought people together and it separated people. And, it did some stuff in between.”

“There’s a lot of people on this planet, we all got to coexist,” he concluded. “So you know, I really look forward to the audience watching our X-Men catch up to the future.”

What other Marvel cameos are coming in X-Men ’97? Catch all of our pop culture discussion at @ComicBook on social media!