Who Is the Villain in X-Men ’97 Season 2? Premiere Breakdown

For thirty years the X-Men have been the pop mythology that refuses to die politely, and the second season of X-Men ’97 — which arrived on Disney+ on July 1 with a generous three-episode premiere, opening a nine-episode run — begins by scattering its heroes across five thousand years of history and daring us to keep up. The season picks up after the first season’s finale, in which the X-Men prevented Asteroid M from annihilating all life on Earth only to be divided across time and space. Xavier, Magneto, Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Beast wash up in Egypt in 3000 B.C.; Cyclops and Jean Grey land in 3960 A.D. among future versions of their own children; Bishop and Forge remain in the 1990s, trying to pull everyone home. It’s the kind of structure that would capsize a lesser show. Here it becomes an argument.

And the argument has a name. Though separated by millennia, both stranded X-Men teams face the same menace, the season’s central antagonist: Apocalypse. The first mutant, the survival-of-the-fittest ideologue, the one foe the original animated series could never quite let its heroes overpower. What makes this season’s treatment fresh is that it refuses to present him fully formed. The structure allows Apocalypse to be examined at different points in his life: his early years as En Sabah Nur in Ancient Egypt, when his path toward villainy begins; his culling of the weak in the present; and a far future where his vision has perhaps become reality. By exploring En Sabah Nur before his transformation, the series avoids portraying evil as something that simply exists; we witness the oppression, circumstances, and choices that create the monster. There’s a marvelous formal irony in the casting, too: Ross Marquand voices both Professor X and Apocalypse — the dream and the nightmare issuing from the same throat.

The pharaoh, though, is where the show tips its hand. In the third episode, the X-Men encounter Rama-Tut — a variant of the supervillain Kang the Conqueror — and the show plays it as more than a wink. The story charts En Sabah Nur’s transformation, driven by burning hatred for the kingdom’s tyrannical ruler, Rama-Tut, positioning Kang as the architect of Apocalypse’s descent into villainy — a comic-accurate twist linking two of Marvel’s greatest threats. There’s even a deeper seed planted for the attentive: near the end of the third episode, Professor X enters the mind of General Logos, one of Rama-Tut’s advisors, and glimpses a massive red planet resembling Magneto’s maroon helmet — a visual that seems to tease the powerful mutant villain Onslaught. The show is stacking its dooms like nesting dolls.

But the hour I keep returning to is the second, “A Force to Be Reckoned With,” and it deserves the fuss. It returns to a present day where two teams form to fill the X-Men’s absence: Cable recruits Sunspot and Jubilee to join Psylocke and Archangel in X-Force, a military-style outfit that takes the fight to the enemy, while the government sponsors X-Factor, led by Cyclops’ brother Havok — and the two groups come to blows over their wildly different approaches, replaying the Xavier–Magneto conflict in the next generation. The moral texture is genuine: Jubilee tells Cable flatly that she doesn’t approve of X-Force’s willingness to kill, especially since he prioritizes hunting Apocalypse over helping mutants.

Then comes the set piece. X-Factor captures Jubilee and takes her to a holding facility, but Polaris — who once served alongside her on the X-Men — has a change of heart and uses her magnetism to free her old teammate. Instead of sneaking out, Jubilee deliberately sets off the alarm to draw the armed guards, pulls on her headphones, presses play on her Walkman, and fights her way out to “Volcano Girls” by Veruca Salt, using her fireworks to propel herself around the guards, at one point blasting from her feet to turn herself into a rocket. It is, in a word, delirious — a sequence that holds up against Nightcrawler’s Oval Office attack in X2 or the Quicksilver showstoppers from the films. The mall rat of 1992 has become the coolest person in the franchise, and she earns it in ninety seconds of riot-grrrl ballet.

As for Gambit — the wound that won’t close. The Cajun died in the first season, and the show has been fingering that scar ever since. The same second episode delivers the season’s most chilling image: while psychically interrogating the Horseman called War, Psylocke glimpses a flashback of Apocalypse’s minions delivering what appears to be Gambit’s casket to Apocalypse. The breadcrumbs stretch forward from there. The eighth episode is titled “The Dead Man’s Hand,” a not-so-subtle nod to the card-wielding X-Man, who is theorized to return as one of Apocalypse’s Four Horsemen — a role he actually filled in the comics, briefly serving as Death. The grief plot and the villain plot are converging, and Rogue is standing at the intersection.

What holds all this frenzy together is craft. Each of the three opening installments narrows its focus to one timeline, letting the show concentrate on individual characters within thirty-ish-minute running times, so its abundance of material shines at a steady pace — and the episodes turn Apocalypse’s famous “eternal shore” speech from the original series into a motif, a prophecy spanning centuries. That’s the trick of this revival at its best: nostalgia weaponized into structure. The show even survived a turbulent birth — Disney fired showrunner Beau DeMayo and replaced him with head writer Matthew Chauncey, while the season is helmed by executive producers Eric Lewald, Julia Lewald, and Larry Houston, the showrunners from the original ’90s series — and yet what’s on screen feels unified, confident, almost brazen. New episodes roll out weekly through August 12, closing on a finale called “Survival of the Fittest,” which tells you exactly whose rules this season is playing by. The villain, in the end, is an idea — that the strong deserve the world — and the season’s real suspense is watching three eras of heroes discover, each in their own century, what it costs to say no.