The X-Men have died before, and it usually takes about six episodes for the door to swing back open. That is what makes the “X-Men ’97” season two finale land the way it does. “Survival of the Fittest” dropped on Disney+ on August 12 and spends its half hour doing two jobs at once, staging the mutant-on-mutant war the season had been promising since X-Factor turned up wearing government colors, and quietly attaching a price tag to saving Gambit (A.J. LoCascio). One of those jobs is loud. The other one costs Kurt Wagner (Adrian Hough) everything, and Marvel Animation does not blink when the bill comes due.
Season two has been a sprawl, and the BR team said so while it was still airing, with the roster flung across eras, Apocalypse (Ross Marquand) squatting inside Gambit’s resurrected body, and a human establishment whose only answer was a better Sentinel. The finale pulls all of it into one siege and one bargain. It earns its emotional landing even when the plotting gets impatient, and the impatience is real, because there is a season and a half of story compressed into these thirty-odd minutes. What saves it is that the show knows which beat is the important one, and it gives that beat room to breathe while everything else sprints. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “X-Men ’97” season two and the death at the center of “Survival of the Fittest.”
It earns its emotional landing even when the plotting gets impatient, and the impatience is real, because there is a season and a half of story compressed into these thirty-odd minutes.”
The assault itself is the season’s argument stated in artillery. X-Factor, fronted by Valerie Cooper (Catherine Disher), and Cable’s (Chris Potter) X-Force hit X-Corp together, backed by a SHIELD helicarrier and a legion of Sentinel Squad O*N*E pilots. Government mutants in government mechs, coming to solve the Apocalypse problem by killing the man he is wearing. That is the ugly logic this season keeps circling, and nobody in the sky above X-Corp thinks of themselves as the villain of it. Which is why the fight reads less like a superhero brawl and more like a family arguing with ordnance.
The brawl is choreographed with a care the 1990s series could only dream about. Wolverine (Cal Dodd) and Morph (J.P. Karliak) take Archangel (Christopher Barger) and Psylocke (Naoko Mori), with Morph pulling the most unhinged gag in the episode by shifting into the Doctor Octopus design from the 1994 “Spider-Man” cartoon, mechanical arms and all. Jubilee (Holly Chou) and Havok (Teddy Sears) trade fire in an aerial dogfight that keeps finding new ways to be readable. Cable ends up pointed at his own parents, Cyclops (Ray Chase) and Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale), and the episode plays that for exactly as much discomfort as it deserves, while Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith) and Polaris (Carolina Ravassa) hold a line against the rest of X-Factor. Every matchup carries a grudge, which is the difference between a set piece and a fight.
While the sky burns, the actual solution is happening somewhere much quieter. Rogue (Lenore Zann), Beast (George Buza) and Nightcrawler board Apocalypse’s Ship looking for a way to pull him out of Gambit without putting a hole in Gambit, and what they find is the Celestial Shrine, the same chamber that turned En Sabah Nur into a god in the first place. Waiting inside it is Eson the Searcher (Matthew Waterson), and Celestials do not do favors. This show has been building a theology all season, sitting Kurt’s faith directly across from Apocalypse’s survival-of-the-fittest sermon, and this is the scene where it stops being subtext and starts being a contract.
Down below, Cable makes the call the entire assault was built on and shoots Gambit, and it does the opposite of what he intended. Apocalypse stops sharing the body and takes it outright, wearing the Cajun like a suit and turning the X-Men’s own on them. What answers him is Rogue, remade. She takes Eson’s deal, accepts the power, and the terms are not complicated, because her life is the fee once the threat is over. She peels Apocalypse’s essence out of Gambit, seals it inside a gem and hands it to Cable, and for one moment it plays as the cleanest possible win. Gambit is breathing, Apocalypse is a rock in somebody’s palm, and the war stops in mid-air.
Then Rogue waits to pay, and nothing comes for her. Beast arrives holding Kurt’s Bible instead, and the episode turns the knife by showing us the scene we were not in the room for. Nightcrawler had gone to the Celestial first and offered himself in his sister’s place. “I know they will grieve, but I also believe, in time, my memory will be a seed from which new ones will grow,” he says, and when Eson presses him on how he can possibly be sure, the answer is four words. “Because I have faith.” It is the most X-Men thing this show has done in two seasons, and it works because the writers spent an entire arc making his belief a character trait instead of a costume detail.
What follows would be sentimental if it had not been paid for on screen. The school is full again, Professor X (Ross Marquand) is teaching, and kids who spent a season as refugees are behaving like students. The camera lands on Rogue and Gambit sitting together, the pairing this franchise has been circling since 1992, with Kurt’s Bible in her hands and a photograph of the two siblings tucked inside it. No speech, no swelling music cue, no resurrection tease. Just the cost, sitting in her lap, and a show confident enough to let a quiet shot carry the weight of a nine-episode season.
And then the stinger rewires the entire board. A television in Valerie Cooper’s office reports that Graydon Creed has been elected President of the United States, which means Kurt’s mutant-hating half-brother takes the office the same week the X-Men lose their gentlest member. At the desk, Cooper is reading a file on Mystique (Randall Carpenter) when the real Cooper walks in, and the woman in the chair shoots her and then changes shape. Mystique now has the government liaison’s face, her clearance, her files, and a son in the Oval Office. Season three does not need to invent a threat, because it already has one holding a security badge.
We are not going to pretend the episode is flawless. It has to service two rival teams, a Celestial, a possession arc and a presidential election in about thirty-two minutes, and the Apocalypse resolution lands faster than a season of buildup deserved, which is the note most reviews landed on and they are not wrong to. What the finale does not fumble is the part people came back to this show as adults for. Season three is already confirmed, and it now inherits a President who wants mutants gone, a shapeshifter running national security, and a roster missing the one member who kept insisting the future was worth having.
What Do You Think? Was Nightcrawler’s sacrifice the right ending for this arc, or did the show spend its most beloved character to pay off a debt Rogue chose to take on herself? Does Mystique wearing Valerie Cooper’s face make her season three’s real villain, or is she the only mutant alive with a way into her own son’s White House? And do you believe a gem holding Apocalypse’s consciousness stays sealed for a full season, or is Cable carrying the next apocalypse around in his pocket?
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