Fridge / X-Men '97

Fridge pages never use spoiler tagging — so beware of unmarked spoilers

Fridge Brilliance:

General

• Making Magneto the heir to everything Xavier had built may seem like a major demoralizing blow to the X-Men, and a rather foolish move of Charles—who on the team would want to work for their worst enemy? But Xavier is The Chessmaster in many a continuity, and he knows that Magneto's pro-mutant tendencies could get the better of him. Thus, it would actually encourage his X-Men to stay to keep an eye on Erik, ensuring he stayed in line and didn't try to force humanity to his whims again.
• The portrayal of Cyclops has been praised for making him more likable as a person and more daring as a superhero, complete with a revamped fighting style, compared to the original series where he was an uptight milquetoast (a portrayal that carried into the movies). Pop culture in the 90's was all about being "cool" and "edgy," and thus Wolverine, Gambit, and Rogue took centerstage due to their checkered pasts and carefree personalities, while Cyke was made a stick-in-the-mud to contrast. Thirty years later, the urge to make everything superficially cool has long since died down, giving the writers room to let Cyclops shine in his own way.
• There are many production reason for why Wolverine's voice has a smoother delivery in this iteration as opposed to the raspier voice he had in the original, but there is also a in universe explanation for it, as well as an explanation for why Logan is no longer seen with cigars in the show. Jean got pregnant, and Logan quit smoking because no one wanted a pregnant lady around second hand smoke.
• The liberation of Genosha within the Time Skip seems like a pretty sudden development - the original series revealed that Forge set up X-Factor as a mutant group under secret government oversight that even Xavier didn't know about. One thing the real US government has been accused of is using the CIA to destabilize foreign governments - it makes sense that a mutant black bag group with no obvious ties to the more public X-Men would get that job. It's also in line with Forge having become The Atoner.

Season 1

To Me, My X-Men

• Trask's Aesop Amnesia regarding Master Mold makes sense when two things come into play: the fact that Gyrich would have undoubtedly wanted a backup just in case, and the fact that Gyrich's assassination of Xavier would have undoubtedly emboldened more anti-mutant sentiments as much as it increased public sentiment for them. If the most prominent mutant in the world was proven killable, why not take his followers too?
  • However in Episode 6 , it turns out that Trask was Forced Back Into Evil by Mr. Sinister who made him as his puppet to restart the Sentinel program and create the Tri-Sentinel to attack Genosha. Trask was so guilt-ridden and horrified, he outright begged to be killed.
• Gyrich's sentence of 25 years, with the option of being brought down to 10 with cooperation, is an early indicator of Xavier's survival, which will be fully confirmed in episode 6. That sentence would be far too lenient for murder, but it tracks with an attempted one.
• The NOT! line in general has fallen out of favor in public and is generally regarded as a relic of The '90s. However, the show is called X-Men '97, which takes place in the The '90s, and it hasn't been so long since the classic show's Grand Finale. So, when Cyclops re-used the NOT! line as a Call-Back, it's still making sense and not something too outdated.

Fire Made Flesh

• With The Reveal in the third episode, and the fact that it's "Jean" (actually Madelyne) who is the one to name the baby Nathan, it's very likely she subconsciously chose the name "Nathan" after her own creator's true name, "Nathaniel" (or rather, Mister Sinister subconsciously planted the idea in her head given his disgusting ego).

Montendo/Lifedeath, Pt. 1

• As much as he probably wants to give Jubilee a day to celebrate her birthday, there have been far more eyes and scrutiny on the X-Men ever since Magneto has become its new leader. He wants to keep Jubilee within the mansion walls to protect her for now.
• Of course Storm would be quick to reject Force's advances. After all, the last time a man has tried to woo Ororo within moments of meeting her, he turned out to be a psychotic alien dictator. There's no way Storm would let herself fall that quickly for a man again.

Remember It

• Creator Beau DeMayo has specifically stated that Episode 5 was meant to serve as a mutant analogue for 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting (as DeMayo himself is gay), and similar massacres, which even extends to the episode title — perhaps "Never Forget" would have been too on-the-nose.
• Apples grow best with a winter dormancy period, meaning a tropical island like Genosha would have to import them and, being a young nation that recently underwent a regime change, it probably doesn't have many trading partners yet. It makes sense that they are so expensive as Gambit pointed out when he noticed the price tag.
• Rogue initially seems happy during her dance with Magneto and is shown smiling with her eyes closed turned away from him during the most touch heavy, intimate part of it when he is turning her around. Then she opens her eyes and is facing towards him, the sadness is noticeable. Shortly after is their kiss, once again done with the eyes closed and happy and fading as soon as the eyes open and she tells him that she recognizes her feelings for Gambit. She was most likely picturing Gambit when her eyes were closed and also desperately trying to convince herself that touch was needed.

Lifedeath, Pt. 2

• When Professor Xavier's psychic class session goes awry, his globe catches on fire. But it's not normal fire or even random psychic energy; it's pink fire. Gambit's energy signature.

Bright Eyes

• The Prime Sentinel Trask, calling back to the first episode, mockingly asks a helpless Cyclops how it feels to be abandoned by the future. Cyclops is then saved by an EMP grenade by Cable, who is from the future. The fact that Cable is Nathan Summers is another whammy: Trask calls Scott an orphan, but it is by Scott's own son, whom Scott agonized over "abandoning" him to save his life, that the X-Men live to fight another day.

Tolerance is Extinction, Pt. 1

• The future being one where Bastion succeeded in his Prime Sentinel plan and made slaves of mutants explains how Cable was able to stabilize his Techno-Organic Virus.
• Mr. Sinister being behind the Genosha massacre seemed rather out of character for him, given his For Science! motivation. With the reveal that Bastion was the actual mastermind behind it and that hundreds of mutants were actually captured alive, and now Sinister is free to experiment on them, him being on board with this plan becomes very much in character.

Tolerance is Extinction, Pt. 2

• When Xavier tries to reason with Magneto, saying they aren't gods, Magneto responds saying that gods abandon those who worship them. Its sounds like a bizarre comparison, almost like Magneto's complimenting Xavier. But Magneto is a Holocaust survivor. Living through such a nightmare, Magneto long since lost his faith.
  • It seems appropriate that when Magneto says his retort, it cuts mainly to Nightcrawler. Kurt still has faith despite everything that has happened, while Erik lost his faith because of everything that has happened.
• In episode 2, Magneto said in his trial, "don't make me let you down". When Magneto did his global EMP, he wiped out the earth's magnetosphere, exposing the earth to a lethal amount of solar radiation and cosmic radiation. It's as if the Earth was going into a free fall with nothing stopping it from falling apart. He did warn them not to make him let them down.

Fridge Horror:

Season 1

Bright Eyes

• Rogue's Roaring Rampage of Revenge almost certainly had a body count of more than just Trask with the way she was literally flattening tanks and mechs at General Ross' base.

Tolerance is Extinction, Pt. 1

• Bastion's Prime Sentinels are converted from regular people. It's still not definitely confirmed whether any of the transformed people are even biologically alive anymore or are all only undead robotized corpses, or even if any (like Trask) still have remnants of their original minds trapped within.
• Magneto's EMP is shown to have global effects, which cause countless casualties just from moving traffic, airplanes and other disrupted high risk events such as surgery. For that matter how many of those who were on life support, in surgery, or using some other critically-needed medical equipment survivors of the Genosha massacre?
• One location shown shutting down appears to be a nuclear power plant... just one of the many such plants around the world. Unable to operate and control them properly, worldwide nuclear catastrophes loom.
• If the Prime Sentinels worldwide were all killed by Magneto's EMP, then he's racked up a bigger body count in an instant than the entire massacre of Genosha, along with the worldwide collateral-damage holocausts from technological infrastructure being disabled.
  • Fortunately, the following episode confirms that the Prime Sentinels are simply disabled and it may even be possible to undo their conversion... but Beast warns that developing the method to do so could take years.
• If Bastion turned everyone in his childhood hometown into Prime Sentinels, did he only go after the adults or were not even children safe from him?
• As analyzed by Beast, the Sentinel attack on Genosha was an Absolute Point, which viewers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe know shouldn't be tampered with. If Cable had successfully rescued at least one mutant who died there, like Gambit for example, it would've meant the destruction of the entire universe. Just ask Doctor Strange Supreme.

Tolerance is Extinction, Pt. 2

• Magneto's blackout has lasted at least 12 hours. Not only would the EMP have initially killed a lot of people, that loss of technology for that long is going to put a severe strain of society as a whole and people will devolving into to rioting, looting and lawlessness, and probably blaming mutants for it all the while.
• Now that Magneto had ripped out Wolverine's adamantium from his skeleton, an infamous Moral Event Horizon moment for him in Xavier's eyes, this is probably only going to lead one way with Season 2 going as Xavier finally swears off his old friend and wipes his mind—then cometh Onslaught.
  • Imagine what others are feeling right now. Rogue left the X-Men because she felt that Magneto was right to retaliate against humanity's cruelty, still grieving over Gambit. Now she gets to see that same Magneto use that same cruelty against another friend, one that she was fighting just a few moments ago. Not to mention that Cyclops broke Xavier's hold on Magneto's mind, which led to Magneto starting to use his helmet to cave Xavier's skull in and Wolverine stabbing Magneto to stop him. They both helped cause this.
  • And lets not forget who helps Wolverine get his adamantium back, at a cost though.