Let me make a confession before I say anything.

I originally reserved this spot to review Coyote vs. ACME. I had the day reserved to go see it but, in a cruel twist of fate, it turns out no one in the Philippines got the distribution rights for Coyote vs. ACME! This is very disappointing but it does turn out the Philippines is not the only one not getting the film as other countries have reportedly not showing it yet. So, there is hope for me to see it in the cinema in the near future. But by then, the film will be very old news and also I do have to put up a review for this week. This is when I realized there is another animated product I can review for this week: the second season for X-Men ’97.

Like a dunce, I thought the second season was going to be ten episodes. But it turns out Marvel and Disney only made nine. I had been watching it but stopped on the seventh episode as I wanted to binge watch the last three episodes. Well, that just meant I only had to binge watch the last two episodes, which I did a couple of nights ago. So, is it as good as the first season? Well…

By the way, although the second season just got completed a couple of weeks ago, I will still be making this a SPOILER FILLED review. I believe it’s necessary for me to do so as a lot of my gripes do deal with specific things that happen. So, yeah. SPOILERS incoming!

The second season takes place some time after the end of the first season. The X-Men have been blasted through time, with some of them travelling to the distant past while another group sent to the distant future. Regardless of the time period, the two teams have to make the best of the situation while trying to find a way back to their own time as well as having to contend with Apocalypse, both before he became a savage foe and after he conquered the world.

Right on the outset, I already had my issues with the second season because of the villain. I know Apocalypse is supposed to be one of the X-Men’s greatest foes, I find him to be one of the most boring. I mean, his power is essentially controlling every atom of his body. This basically translates to “anything the writer wants him to do.” Sometimes, giving a villain the power to do anything makes him very uninteresting and that’s certainly the case for Apocalypse in my mind. Also, I really hate his design. He has a really dumb gorilla looking face and his costume sucks, especially the giant letter A on his belt buckle. This is a look that screams a makeover. And as the season progressed, my opinion didn’t really change. Apocalypse still sucks as a villain.

I also have an issue with how the season was plotted out. While there is the overall story of Apocalypse doing… stuff, there are also a lot of secondary stories but some of them just seemed to jump out of nowhere. Yes, it was fun to see X-Factor and X-Force show up but it seems like they just popped up suddenly. I do know X-Factor shows up in the original cartoon but this is the first time we’re seeing this iteration of X-Force in animated form. It just seems a little too abrupt to all of a sudden have Cable running a team, especially since he was running solo in the previous season. Still, I did love how they actually animated a complete X-Force intro just for that one episode!

All of these subplot inserts kind of got on my nerves as they kept on introducing stuff without really introducing them properly. All of a sudden, we have things like the X-Men’s Danger Room going rogue to create Danger, Professor X creating a new company called X-Corp and, apparently, we have the Presidential election with mutie hating Grayson Creed winning the position in the end. I get some of this is probably set up for season 3, which has already been greenlit by Disney. Even so, I just feel these episodes could have been replaced so that more focus could be placed on the main story.

Even with my issues with the overall plotting, I can’t say I wasn’t at least intrigued by what they were doing. They were indeed throwing a lot at the viewer but that was also part of the fun. I did like the secondary story of Wolverine reassembling Team X so he can get his adamantium skeleton back. Getting hit with this hodgepodge of stuff did keep things interesting and made me want to watch more at the time. However, like I said, looking back, I really wish they did a better job introducing them without having to delve through Marvel comic history and the original cartoon to figure out how this all links to the current season.

Once again, Disney and Marvel did outdo themselves when it came to animating the show. The colors are crisp and bright, making everything pop. The animation, especially during the action scenes, are all very fluid and fun to watch. The only real issue I have when it came to how the show looked was how resurrected Dark Gambit looked. Because they could only use a gray color palette to sell the “undead” look, he comes off as pretty flat looking. This is especially true when it came to showing off Gambit’s face as the gray skin messed up how the shadows struck him.

I also have to applaud the very bombastic final episode of X-Force and X-Factor teaming up to attack X-Men’s X-Corp tower. I do wish they actually made this episode much longer as there were some beats, like Storm and Forge taking on the piloted Sentinel forces and Wolverine and Morph fighting off Psylocke and Archangel, that needed a little bit more time to really showcase how awesome they really were. Oddly enough, I have no notes for the Jubilee and Havoc dogfight. I just love how ridiculous for Jubilee to leave her plane and shoot Havoc’s ship with her powers and then fly back into her plane! That’s some RendeZook level of crazy right there! I love it!

Even so, I kind of have an issue with the very deus ex machina way the season ended. Once again, this felt rushed and I feel it they just devoted the second to the last episode to Beast, Rogue and Nightcrawler going on a massive quest to find Apocalypse’s Ship, it wouldn’t have felt like that. But I do have to give credit for how somber the actual ending was, with Nightcrawler’s narration about how his sacrifice will allow life to go on without him. Nightcrawler has always been one of my more favorite X-Men characters. While I’m sad he had to die, it did feel like this was the kind of selfless sacrifice he would make for his family. Nice touch.

Overall, I did like X-Men ’97’s second season… but I didn’t love it. A part of the reason why is that the first season set the bar really high and my expectations were simply too high. I was hoping they could have found a way to make Apocalypse interesting but I guess that was too hard of a task to complete. The overall story could have been a little tighter so I’m really hoping those story threads they introduced here will be tackled in the next season. Still, this was indeed a good show and I’m still looking forward to what’s next.

Still, where’s my Coyote vs. ACME?

Have you seen the second season of X-Men ’97? What did you think of it? Let me know in the comments section below!