X-Men '97 Season 2 Finale Does Not Earn the Same Benefit of the Doubt I Gave Wolverine in July

In July I put out a video explaining why I let X-Men '97 get away with the Wolverine episode, the one built around the adamantium and the bone claws that had a lot of people upset. I said a show that takes a swing that big is a show that thinks you can keep up with it, and that I was willing to extend that credit. I watched the season 2 finale, "Survival of the Fittest," twice this morning, and I want to be careful here: I was not wrong in July. I ran the same test I always run. The show is the one that changed.

I was excited watching it, genuinely, the way I get up early for every one of these. By about ninety seconds in, something started sitting wrong with me and I could not name it right away. It was not the plot, which is fine and easy to follow. It was not the animation, which is gorgeous, some of the best looking work the show has done. By the end I was annoyed, and I do not love being annoyed, because guys who are annoyed online are usually just annoyed a show did not go the way they wanted. So I stepped away, watched it again, and asked myself the only question that actually matters: am I mad about what happened, or am I mad about how it was built? It is how it was built.

This finale was made for somebody who was not going to look very closely. It tells you its payoff before it earns it, cuts around the moments that would have been expensive to draw, and hands you spectacle in the spot where a consequence is supposed to sit. I felt talked down to, which is a strange thing to feel about a show I was defending four weeks earlier.

Kurt's Own Line Gives Away Nightcrawler's Death Twenty Minutes Early

Rogue, Beast and Nightcrawler get down to Apocalypse's ship. Rogue goes into the shrine, faces Essence, comes back out in gold, and leaves. Kurt watches her go and says out loud, wondering, "No one enters that shrine without paying a price." I knew right then, not suspected, knew, the whole back half of this episode from one line, from a guy it had not even happened to yet.

Guessing an ending is the weakest complaint there is, and I guess endings all the time; sometimes you are just familiar with the shape of things and that is not the show's fault. But this was different. When I guess an ending I cannot point at the moment, I just gradually feel it coming. This one has an address, a specific line at a specific spot in the runtime, and everything before it is story while everything after it is receipts getting printed.

"Because I Have Faith" Lands Like a Thud

Twenty minutes later, Kurt makes his case to Essence, laying out that his sacrifice will make his memory into a seed that people grow something out of. Essence asks him, "How can you be so certain your end will bring forth all this life?" and Kurt answers, "Because I have faith." I watched it twice to be sure I had it right.

It lands like a thud, not because it is badly written, but because you can hear what it was built to do. You can hear the whole production leaning on it, turning to say, see, that Nightcrawler faith you have been watching all season, here it is, this is what it was for. I did not feel anything.

The Counterargument: Creed's Redemption Earned Its Payoff, Kurt's Death Did Not

There is a real argument against me here. Kurt's faith was set up properly six weeks earlier when he stood in front of the acolytes and defended Graydon Creed. He did not change Creed's mind, but he changed the judges, and Colossus walked away from Magneto's people because of it. Nobody announced that. You watched it happen and understood it later. That is the real thing, and the show did it.

Why does that not cover the sacrifice? Because that setup was already paid off, and it paid off in the post-credits scene, where Graydon Creed is President of the United States on an anti-mutant platform. Kurt's faith saved that man's life, and now that man runs the country. That is a payoff with teeth, built right. It is not the same setup as the death. One of them you watched, and the other you were handed a program for, and the finale wants you to accept the second on the credit of the first.

Cable Shoots Gambit and the Camera Never Lets the Two Men Share a Frame

Cable puts his gun on Gambit, the biggest thing that happens in the episode, a son executing a man in front of the man who raised his father's whole worldview. It is shot wide with all three in frame, then cut in tight on Cable as the gun comes up and fires, then cut way out to establish distance as Gambit's body is falling. Three shots, and not one of them is the two shot. Nobody ever has to draw these two men together in frame while it happens.

Before anyone tells me that is restraint, or that it is a kids' show, the series has already shown blood, evisceration, and Magneto vaporized. Whatever is going on in that sequence is not protecting anybody's sensibilities. The camera goes exactly where the drawing is cheapest.

Skipping the Walk Through Apocalypse's Ship Costs the Finale Its Stakes

They break a hole in the top of Apocalypse's ship to get in. Rogue drops down, and Kurt teleports himself and Beast straight into the throne room. We get nothing in between. Fine, teleporting is what he does, except think about what a walk through that ship would have been: two old friends, one of them about to make the biggest decision of his life, moving through the birthplace of the thing that has been hurting them all season. Nobody says anything. Nobody sees anything. Nobody works anything out.

That is the space where you build the thing you are about to spend, and because it is not there, twenty minutes later a man has to stand at the bottom of that same ship and announce the ending out loud, because there is no version of the scene where you could have worked it out on your own.

Gambit's Horseman Identity Has Been Rewritten Three Times in Four Episodes

Going back through the comments left on the July video, one viewer wrote that "like too much in the show, there are often no consequences," and that things get "dropped and forgotten as soon as it's inconvenient with far too much done just to key jangle iconic comic moments just to have them with no intention of following up on them or having them have lasting consequences." At the time I read that and thought, sure, but that is the cost of the swing and I am buying the swing. Four weeks later I am watching a finale that key jangles a horseman, key jangles a celestial, key jangles a Sentinel, and drops all three the second they have been looked at. He was not complaining about one episode. He was describing a habit, and I called that habit risk. That one is mine.

Six weeks earlier, the show dug up Gambit's corpse and made him Horseman Death, black skin, white hair, cards turning into tarot, a real thing pulled from Blood of Apocalypse, X-Men volume 2 issue 185, cover dated June 2006, written by Peter Milligan in a story called "Salut d'Amour," one of the great Rogue and Gambit scenes, where she tells him there has to be some part of him left that loves her. Two weeks later the show said, actually, he is not Death, he is a vessel, and Apocalypse is riding around inside him. This week Cable shoots the vessel, and Apocalypse just steps on out of him, leaving whatever that thing is now on screen.

That is three different ideas in four episodes, and the villain of this finale is not a horseman at all. There is a track on the soundtrack album that dropped that morning called "The Horsemen of Apocalypse," and the horsemen are not what any of this turned out to be about. What we get instead looks amalgamated, like Gambit's silhouette with Apocalypse's parts hung on it, on screen for about three minutes before Rogue takes a glove off and it is finished.

Sentinels Attack X-Corps at Genosha and Nobody Mentions the Irony

X-Corps headquarters is built in the ruins of Genosha on purpose. Charles put it there and said so out loud, as a memorial to Magneto and to every mutant who died the day the Sentinels came. In this episode, the United States government attacks it with Sentinels. Human piloted, sure, mechs, fine, but the silhouette coming over that horizon at that location is a Sentinel, and nobody says a word about it.

I went back a second time specifically listening for it, assuming I had missed a line. They call out that the Sentinel mechs are inbound as a tactical fact, as information. Storm gets a moment about being careful with the pilots. That is the whole acknowledgment, sitting where the emotional center of that entire battle should be. In better hands, somebody stops for one second and asks whether anyone understands where they are standing. Instead, those Sentinels are in the episode because an army was needed and Sentinels look good. Used as function, not in service of anything.

A Finale Owes Two Debts, and This One Defaults on the Second

A finale owes the season behind it and the season in front of it. I had made peace going in with the idea that not everything gets resolved cleanly in twenty-odd minutes, because I assumed this would do what season 1 did, ending in a way that carried the first three or four episodes of season 2 on its back, an ending that was an engine with a job after the credits rolled. This one hands almost nothing forward.

What it does hand forward is a character introduced in a post-credit sting, and that is a very different instrument. A sting is a promise. A cliffhanger is a debt. They feel similar for about eight seconds, and then only one of them is still working on you months later. A lot of people had Val Cooper called a long time ago, myself included, one of the very things planted in the show itself, so nobody in the room actually got surprised by it.

Back in May 2024, while the season was still in animatics, a supervising producer on the show told CBR, "We wouldn't plant stuff if it wasn't going to go in," and that "everything is meticulously done for a reason." I believe that. The Creed thread is meant, the Val Cooper thread is meant, but that is the standard, the same standard I gave the show credit for in July: plant it and let it go. The finale plants things by saying them out loud and then moves on in the same scene, sometimes in the same sentence.

My Score Moved From a Five to a Six, But Only Because of the Animation

My score moved while I was working on this, and the movement is the real part for me. Coming off the episode I had it at a five, average, mediocre, and I hated writing that about this show. After sitting with it, I moved up to about a six. The entire reason is what is on the screen. This thing is beautiful. The fight is legible, the celestial material looks like nothing else on television, and Rogue coming down out of the sky in gold is a genuinely great image, none of it cheap or an accident.

What I cannot get past is what it is in service of. I never once felt a stake in this episode. I am a guy who loves the rule of cool and have defended it, but cool that is not attached to anything is just noise with a good render on it. In July I let this show get away with things because it was swinging at me. This week it was not swinging. It was hoping I would not look too closely.

Tell me where you were when you knew Kurt was going to be the one, was it the shrine line like it was for me, or did it land clean for you?