X-Men '97 Episode 7 Breakdown: Bastion, Operation: Zero Tolerance and the Messiah Complex Clues Hidden in Bright Eyes

X-Men '97 Episode 7, Bright Eyes, revealed that the machine pulling the strings is Bastion, a mutant hating fusion of Master Mold and Nimrod tied to Operation: Zero Tolerance. Along the way the episode was packed with easter eggs and hidden details, and at the time I felt a lot of it was pointing toward the Messiah Complex storyline from the comics.

There is plenty to get through: Cable's origin, Rogue tearing through a prison built for the Hulk, a major Captain America cameo, Emma Frost's second mutation and a full rundown of Mister Sinister's history.

The opening shots and the Bright Eyes title point back to Cable

As always, we got a couple of additional shots in the opener. This included a clip of Cable's war against Apocalypse, which happens close to the year 4000. Nimrod also continued his appearance from inside Master Mold, with a shot of Bishop taking him down. At this point I felt like all of this was leading towards Messiah Complex, which I will come back to.

The episode title, Bright Eyes, pulls from the original series. It comes from Time Fugitives Part 2, in which Rogue said it to Cable. That fits, because Cable has played a big part in this series, with him pretty much getting his origin story.

That origin has always been a bit convoluted in the comics. It was so complex that they even dropped covering it for Deadpool 2. The filmmakers realised it was just too much and skipped over the planned flashbacks and images of Cyclops and Jean, or Madelyne, in his home. Here, though, the show fully went into it, showing his birth and then his journey to the future. I loved how the first person he ran up to and stopped was Madelyne. It shows the true person he is trying to save, which is of course his mother.

Nightcrawler leads the funeral for Gambit and the fallen of Genosha

The episode starts at a graveyard with the funeral for Gambit and the X-Men who fell during the events of Genosha. Nightcrawler acts as the priest, which suits a character who is heavily religious. He is often depicted as living in a church, which his appearance in X2 echoed. The original series did that too, with him lying low at one. The local villagers thought he was a demon, and in the end he was saved by Rogue and Gambit.

So it makes sense why he would want to lead this, and it is a sombre way to start things off. Joining him is the Assassins Guild, with Belladonna in attendance. The card puns are out in full force, and while everyone grieves, Rogue is angrier than ever.

Rogue's prison break shows just how overpowered she is

We then segue into a scene that was released early, the night before, by a great bunch of people who got it as an exclusive clip, and it was awesome seeing them get it. We really see Rogue tearing up shop, and "you sometimes forget how overpowered she is." She has absorbed the abilities of Captain Marvel and is capable of wrecking up shop. Punching the ground knocks lots of soldiers down, and those are the powers she took from Avalanche.

She also busts out a kick that is a clear callback to a lot of things. It is based on her Dive Kick, first introduced in X-Men vs Street Fighter and later used in Marvel vs Capcom. You might know it as a rider kick, a move that appears in lots of different things. Rider kicks are a big move, and seeing Rogue get hers as well made it such a cool scene.

We then cut to General Ross monitoring the surveillance feeds. He talks about how this is the place built to hold the Hulk, and that location featured heavily in the Red Hulk storyline. I will not spoil who that is in case you have not read it, but it took place after the events of World War Hulk. Banner was put in a cell underground while a new Red Hulk was roaming on the surface, and they had to go to Banner for advice, with his cell being somewhere we visited here. While breaking in, Rogue also mentions her father, who raised her out in Mississippi. Both her parents wanted her for nefarious things, so it makes sense they would talk to her about breaking into a prison.

Scott's call for hope could be a nod to Hope Summers

We cut to Scott talking to the UN, who have abandoned the rescue attempt. Due to optics they cannot help with the death tolls, and we see Magneto's statue has been destroyed. Symbolically, this shows his fall as well, with the character seemingly killed the week before.

Coming in, we see Jean with her hair down, and I was wondering if this was a cheeky misdirect. That used to be an indicator to retroactively show it was Madelyne, and the opening credits have her that way. The pair also held hands at the funeral, but it looks like they are just coming together. Checking over the reports, we see they come from WHIH News, the in universe news station that is also part of the MCU. They cover a range of things and are pretty much the go to for news reports in the Marvel Universe.

Scott says that in the wake of mutant genocide they need hope, which could be a reference to Hope Summers. That takes us to Messiah Complex, which builds off the back of House of M.

How Messiah Complex unfolded in the comics

In one of the most famous panels in comic history, Wanda uttered "No more mutants." That took the population of mutants with powers from millions to hundreds in the blink of an eye. During Messiah Complex, however, mutant genes began to reactivate, with the first of these being seen as a messiah.

That is Hope Summers, who quickly gets a target painted on her back. She is attacked by the Purifiers in her hometown in Alaska, led by Nimrod. The Purifiers believe she will wipe out countless humans during what they call the six second war, leading to a new rivalry between humanity and mutants. Bishop shares that belief and aims to stop Cable from saving the child, as it leads into the dark future Bishop is from. The Marauders and X-Men also seek the child, leading to a big power struggle as both sides try to get the first post House of M mutant.

While it appears Mister Sinister hired the Marauders just like in the past, it is revealed that it is actually Mystique masquerading as him. Her former lover Destiny told her that the baby, upon touching Rogue, would be able to revive her from a coma. Thankfully, the baby survives Rogue's touch while also waking her up. Hope is then entrusted to Cable by Cyclops, and the pair go into the future, much like Bishop travelled with Cable at the end of Episode 3. Down the line this eventually led into Avengers vs X-Men, which I would love to see them adapt further down the line.

Genosha's survivors and a massive Captain America cameo

The Blackbird lands on Genosha, and we see the Blob, Pixie and Multiple Man. He has his multiples doing multiple jobs, which I thought was a nice little touch. He played a big part in Messiah Complex, with two versions of him travelling off into future timelines to report on what happened. Beast also talks to Amelia Voght, a member of the Acolytes, who gives a harrowing account of how surviving is not all it is cracked up to be, showing how lives have been completely destroyed.

Following on from the report at the X-Mansion, Trish Tilby joins the scene. She and Beast have had a big romance in the comics, which we see blossoming here. Then we cut to a massive cameo from Captain America, with his old World War 2 bike parked outside the hut. He rode it in The First Avenger, where it was part of the big action scene in the woods. It was so good seeing him pop up, and it really helps to expand the Marvel universe.

He is of course an arm of the government, but like Rogue, he has gone against them as well. Civil War saw him turning against the Superhuman Registration Act, and mutant registration is also a hot topic. On the lookout for Gyrich, they find a secret compartment below the cabin, much like the reveal in The Winter Soldier. There are data banks at the back, similar to the layout of the secret SHIELD basement, and on the screen we see OZT, which stands for Operation: Zero Tolerance.

Bastion emerges as the villain behind Operation: Zero Tolerance

In the end we learn that the villain is Bastion, a step up from Nimrod. I love that name, because a nimrod in the UK is an insult. Beau DeMayo hinted at this on Twitter, and we saw the villain in the intro the week before. Bastion was also seen back in Episode 4, where we could catch a photo of Forge with his arm around the character.

Bastion is a machine that is a fusion between Master Mold and Nimrod, and we could see the pair of them in the previous week's intro. He was part of Operation: Zero Tolerance, which involved Sentinels wiping out the mutants, and that is what Rogue finds here, clearly a reference to it. This might explain why he was with Forge, and potentially the anti mutant weapons were designed by him. He is basically a mutant hating machine who was embroiled in Messiah Complex as its main antagonist, seeking to wipe them all out.

Captain America's hands are tied, though, and while he says where Gyrich is, he cannot help out yet. I love how Rogue just throws away his shield, with real kicking away the ball because you lost the game energy.

Roberto, the Morlocks and Beast's broken dream

Back on Genosha, we can catch the character Forearm working in the back. Another survivor says there is going to be a war, so Roberto had better start bulking up. Roberto does not really want to be involved, and it is clear he is not ready for a war. He has not come out to his parents yet and wonders what would have happened if he had died, because they would have found out that way. He argues these attacks go ahead because people do not stay hidden. That reasoning does not hold up in the end, though, because you cannot hide away who you are forever.

Jubilee tells him she will go with him, and we see people mourning the dead, including the Morlocks, who have repeatedly appeared throughout the series. Magneto saved them in Episode 2 and then seemingly died with them in Episode 5. Beast quotes Martin Luther King in front of the destroyed Xavier head, symbolising how his dream for mutants and humanity has not worked out. We see a real change in the character, and if they lose him, it shows how mutantkind can change.

That change is shown metaphorically with Gyrich, who we see surrounded by butterflies. Butterflies are a symbol of change, with the mentality of the characters changing. Some figures go through literal changes, though, with Trask becoming a human Sentinel.

Rogue absorbs Gyrich and Emma Frost reveals her diamond form

Rogue confronts Gyrich, and he reveals he has been outfitted with anti psychic tech. Rogue does not need it, though, and absorbs him directly, initially getting a flash of Bastion. This then changes to Nimrod, which was its own transformation, just like the butterflies. Picking up on the psychic echoes, we see flashes of Genosha, including a shot of Madelyne, alongside Sebastian Shaw and Emma Frost. It seems like she is seeing things through the eyes of rats who would have witnessed the attack.

Cyclops and Jean have not had the best of times, and she references her seeming deaths at the hands of the Phoenix Force and so on. When they find Emma Frost, they see she has activated her second genetic ability, transforming her skin into diamond form. That was invented by Grant Morrison, who wanted to use Colossus in a scene but realised they could not. So he simply established that mutants could also have second abilities, and Emma gets hers here. Emma is a psychic as well, which explains why Jean was able to pick up on her.

They then get a direct message from Bolivar Trask, who first appeared in Night of the Sentinels Part 2. After the Sentinel program was shut down, Trask travelled to Genosha to build Master Mold, but it turned against him. The X-Men stepped in to save the day, and he went into hiding until popping up at the start of Episode 1 this season.

Madripoor, Roberto's coming out and Rogue's grief

Trask wants them to come to Madripoor, a big location in the Marvel universe. This crime infested locale is one of Wolverine's haunts and showed up in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

Roberto, meanwhile, goes to his parents' penthouse. It is adorned with butlers and Jackson Pollock type paintings, showing the family has money, and their company was referenced in Episode 1, where we could see a sign for them in Times Square. His mother is accepting and says she always knew, with parents being more accepting of this kind of thing these days. It is clearly a metaphor for coming out, something also explored in X2. However, she wants them to keep it quiet, showing she perhaps is not as tolerant and supportive as she would like to be.

Cutting to Rogue, Nightcrawler comes across her. It is the Day of the Dead, normally a time of acceptance, but Rogue cannot do it. I joked that maybe she should not have kissed Magneto in front of Gambit and ruined his last moments, but Nightcrawler tells her she helped them live.

Bastion kills Gyrich as Trask reveals his secret lab

Over with Gyrich, we see Bastion arriving. "Voiced by Theo James he sounds more Sinister than Sinister," and his first act is killing Gyrich. In Madripoor we see signs for Vista Corp, which owns the news station WHIH. The Hammer Tech building is there too, along with Horizon Labs, a big company that predominantly appears in Spider-Man.

Using another secret gateway, we see hybrid humanoid Sentinels and more things pointing towards Operation: Zero Tolerance. Quoting Oppenheimer after he made the atom bomb, Trask reveals that he unwittingly ushered in a new dawn of destruction. He brings up how Sinister has been working on Trask, which explains why Bastion needs him.

Mister Sinister's origin as Nathaniel Essex

As Morph mentioned earlier in the season, Sinister was a scientist in the 1800s who went by the name Nathaniel Essex. Obsessed with evolution, he studied Darwin but had his own theory about what was going on. Essex believed evolution stemmed from untapped powers and could alter humanity. In his personal life he was married to a woman named Rebecca, but the pair lost their only child. That was the driving force for him to find a way to improve humanity so others would not face that kind of pain.

After his son's death, he brought his findings to other scientific minds, who kicked him out due to what he wanted to do. He believed human experiments were fair game because the discoveries would improve the species. So he assembled a gang known as the Marauders, who took homeless people and gave them to him for his work. One of these was Daniel Summers, and I am guessing you can figure out who he is related to. Sinister became obsessed with the family and studied several of them and the untapped powers in their genetics.

Rebecca discovered the experiments and found that Essex had dug up their son's body and worked on him too. Pregnant at the time, she went into labour and lost too much blood. Her final words condemned him for the sinister double life he had led, and yes, she said it. He then came across Apocalypse, who wanted him to create a worldwide plague to kill most of humanity: the techno organic virus we saw Nathan infected with. Only the strong would survive, reshaping the world for Apocalypse. In a twist of fate, Sinister used it on Apocalypse, who had to return to hibernation to heal. Realising he would need someone who could combat the villain, he cloned Jean Grey so that she would have a child with Cyclops who could be the most formidable mutant to stand against him. It is a long one, but at the time I thought it would probably lead us into the Messiah Complex story down the line.

Trask becomes a human Sentinel and Cable's timeline comes back into play

Rogue kills Trask, again showing the mutants are not playing around. They do not want to work together anymore and would rather just kill, but we see how this leads to something worse. Revived as a human Sentinel, Trask goes on the attack and destroys the building, and in the falling shots we can catch Stark Industries in the background. Morph transforms into Quicksilver and takes on his powers, which I was not aware could happen. I would just be Apocalypse the whole time and one shot everyone.

Cable saves them with futuristic weapons capable of taking down Sentinels with ease. In the future, Cable fought a war against terminator like machines under the direction of Apocalypse, all of which went down in Time Fugitives Parts 1 and 2. That took place in the year 3999, a darker future for mutantkind that played off the Days of Future Past timeline. The world started to fall apart because Bishop had changed things in the past, so that timeline was being wiped out. Bishop arrived in his present of 2055 and learned things had still turned out badly: rather than Senator Kelly weaponising the Sentinels, a plague had spread across the world.

That was the techno organic virus, so Bishop travelled back in time. Part 1 was about him learning who was behind it and stopping Apocalypse. That destroyed Cable's reality even more and wiped out his son Tyler, so Cable travelled back to stop Bishop, meaning he had to help Apocalypse. His computer said millions had to die in the past so billions in the future could live. Realising they needed to create the antibodies while still allowing the plague to be unleashed, Cable used Wolverine because of his healing factor. That meant Apocalypse could be defeated while preserving the past, but Bishop returned to find his future still in ruins, and so "time travel often creates more issues than it fixes." I wondered whether they would address that, and whether they had ushered in an even darker timeline by possibly allowing Bastion to rise up.

Bastion collars Magneto to the sound of The Purple People Eater

With Sinister and Bastion, he brings up how he has failed to beat the X-Men since 92. The show started in 1992, so it is a nice little reference. It turns out he has been spying on the Shi'ar, which I covered the week before, and I was guessing we would go back to it.

We cut to desolate streets that look like the ones Trask ran through the previous week. A record goes on, and it is Sheb Wooley's The Purple People Eater, a song about an alien descending from the sky to eat humans. Here, though, we have a purple figure coming down to eat mutants, and we see he has Magneto with an inhibitor collar on. Shaving Magneto, it is clear the next step in his plan is getting the mutants to become his weapons. It was a big, big way to end the episode.

Did the show end up reckoning with the way time travel creates more problems than it fixes, and did Cable and Bishop's meddling really open the door for Bastion? Let me know what you think.