Superhero fatigue is definitely a thing, but X-Men ’97 Season 2 proves the picture is more complex than that. Yes, it’s true that the biggest names are the ones who retain real value; there’s a reason Marvel has brought back Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, and the X-Men were bigger than the Avengers until the MCU began. But it’s also about quality. X-Men ’97 is far from perfect – this week’s episode was a brutal Wolverine story that felt more than a little tangential – but it is still phenomenal.
Videos by ComicBook.com
That point is proved on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. X-Men ’97 Season 2 has that rare 100% RT score, with both critics and audiences falling in love with the time travel epic. Most interesting of all, though, is the fact this season increasingly feels like a secret sequel to one of the MCU’s most disappointing movies – Eternals.
X-Men ’97 is Straying Into Eternals Territory
We knew X-Men ’97 Season 2 was going to take a “show, not tell” approach to the origin of Apocalypse. The show used time travel to scatter the X-Men across time, after all, with one group ending up at the dawn of Apocalypse. What I never imagined, though, was that the origin story would be subtly rewritten to tie Apocalypse’s origin more strongly into the Celestials. It introduced Eson the Searcher, a cosmic being of phenomenal power who was shown wielding what is clearly one of this universe’s Infinity Stones.
Even more impressively, the Eson appearance fitted in perfectly with Guardians of the Galaxy in the main MCU timeline. There, Eson was shown wielding the purple Power Stone, using it to judge civilizations for unknown reasons. X-Men ’97 presented Eson as a Celestial from a faction known as the Gardeners, who believe evolution requires suffering. “All creation must crash against the eternal shore,” Eson explained, “in order to thrive and grow.” It was a remarkably comic book accurate portrayal, too – all the more impressive given the mainstream MCU is a little unsure what to do with the Celestials. They’re tied to one of Phase 4’s biggest disappointments.
X-Men ’97 Goes Where the MCU Fears to Tread
The MCU has always struggled with the Celestials. Guardians of the Galaxy played them straight, honoring the comics and revealing Eson using the Power Stone; it strongly implied the Celestials were the ones who had bound the power of six singularities into Infinity Stones in the first place. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 went in a different direction, transforming Ego the Living Planet into the last of the Celestials and even unveiling Peter Quill as a human-Celestial hybrid. It was all a bit messy, to say the least.
Chloe Zhao’s Eternals pivoted again, drawing on an alternate universe comic book story where Celestial “eggs” grew inside planets, ultimately hatching and tearing the world apart. Eternals changed the MCU on a fundamental level, with a Celestial emerging from Earth’s core only to be transformed into metal. Then, even more shockingly, Arishem the Celestial appeared over Earth and promised judgment. And yet, despite the scale of these events, they went unaddressed by the MCU until Captain America: Brave New World, which turned the Celestial corpse into the origin of the MCU’s adamantium. The Celestials themselves have been dropped.
There’s a reason, of course; Eternals didn’t come in for the popular or critical acclaim Marvel hoped for, and it barely broke $4 million in the global box office. It was one of Marvel’s biggest disappointments, and the MCU struggled to figure out what to do with it afterwards. Even now, we have no confirmed Eternals for Avengers: Doomsday or Secret Wars, while Kit Harrington’s Black Knight – also set up in the movie – has essentially been forgotten.
Will X-Men ’97 Double Down on the Celestials?
The interesting question, of course, is whether or not X-Men ’97 will choose to revisit Eson and double down on the Celestials. Season 2 is currently feeling a little scattershot; the time travel plot was resolved a lot quicker than I expected, while the latest Wolverine-centric episode felt like a tie-in rather than part of the main event. It’s possible – distinctly possible – that the Celestials will not be revisited.
Whether X-Men ’97 does return to Eson or not, though, one thing’s for sure; this animated TV show has already done more with the Celestials than the main MCU timeline has dared to in the past five years. That, more than anything else, shows boldness and courage in the writing team. It’s also telling that the show’s popularity has not diminished, confirming superhero fatigue isn’t really quite so much a force as we sometimes think. If you make the story good, people will still love it.
The first five episodes of X-Men ’97 are streaming now on Disney+, and new episodes will be released weekly. Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
Marvel Just Set Up 11 New X-Men, Villains, & Super-Soldiers in 10 Seconds
