As part of my holiday weekend, I had the luxury of being able to do something I hadn’t really done in a long time, which was to sit down and simply shotgun a show. I had X-Men ’97 season 2 on my list of things to watch, and I admittedly drug my feet a little starting it, mostly because I had such questionable feelings about the first season of the reboot.
Primarily the fact that the pace of the show moved at a breakneck speed, rushing through a number of arcs that in the comics would’ve been 5-9 months worth of storylines, somehow condensed and absolutely blown through in a single episode, and sometimes two, when they’re rushing right into the next one without any sort of pallet cleansing.
So after sitting down and watching all of S2 of X97, I can say that nothing changed, and the show picked right up going 280 mph, and covering at least five notable arcs and touching on at least two others, within the span of nine 30-minute episodes, which seeing that in writing is absolutely bonkers. To my recollection, they dealt with Days of Future Past, X-Cutioner’s Song, X-Tinction Agenda, Fatal Attractions, that one arc surrounding the Brood, and a couple of other arcs that I don’t remember the names to and can’t really reference the plot without giving things away.
The series moves so fast between everything that it’s difficult to breathe, and I admittedly like to glance at my phone sometimes when I’m lazily imbibing in television, but I can’t really do that with X97 because they’re cramming so much context into every second of the episodes, that I found myself having to constantly rewind 10-20 seconds to figure out what’s going on before punting on multitasking.
It actually becomes comical just how fast they’re moving, because there are events that happened in the last episode of season 1, and they come full circle in 4-5 episodes in season 2, which was funny to me, because it took nearly three years in the comic books from event A and event B occurring, with a tremendous amount of fleshing out and making some interesting storylines in between.
The Brood are basically reduced to a single episode, and Apocalypse’s Horseman of Death is limited to the final 2.5 episodes of the season, and the crazy thing is that by this point, I became very casual with my following of X-Men comics, and even still I think that these were rushed to the moon and I can’t believe just how rapid-fire the series executes.
That being said, I’m not sure I’m going to continue watching future seasons should there be more coming. It’s absolutely nothing like the FOX Kids cartoon from the actual 90s, that gave episodes time to breathe, and for viewers to develop rapport and attachment to characters. I know all the players, but the show doesn’t really ever stop to let viewers care about anyone that the show isn’t intending on you to focus on. It’s clear the show has a real big hard-on for Rogue, and Gambit by proxy, and they spent a lot of time on Professor X, and feeding into the current narrative of his general slow burn character assassination of today, seeing as how Charles’ go-to attack tactic is to make his opponents re-live traumatic moments in their lives.
It’s ADHD pace makes me less inclined to want to continue watching it, and seeing as how the show is close to having caught up to as far as in the general X-Men comic arcs that I actually followed, it might not be a bad place for me to bail on the show, seeing as how I’d be missing things that I hadn’t even known existed, so out of sight, out of mind.
