X-Men ’97 Has a Lesson and a Warning For Would-Be Allies

Midway through the eighth episode of X-Men ’97, superheroes Cyclops (Ray Chase), Cable (Chris Potter), and Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) visit a sweet elderly lady (Kari Wahlgren). The trio may be mutants, a hated and feared race of people born with amazing abilities, but the nice lady welcomes them and offers them refreshments.

But just as the mutants feel safe, the woman hunches over. Her body shudders and twists into unnatural configurations, the sounds of crunching bones mingling with electronic beeps and hums. When she stands back up, the sweet woman has vanished. In her place, a killer cyborg appears, ready to blow our good guys away.

Such over-the-top twists and turns come as standard operating procedure for superhero stories like X-Men ’97. When dealing with people who can shoot laser beams from their eyes and control metal with their minds, stories will grow larger than life.

But when the nice woman turns into a killer machine in X-Men ‘97, I saw more than the extremes of genre fiction. I saw what members of marginalized communities fear in their privileged friends and loved ones. I saw myself.

Hated and Feared for Sixty Years

To hear Marvel Comics pitchman Stan Lee tell it, he and artist Jack Kirby devised the idea of mutants in 1963’s X-Men #1 because he grew tired of designing new origin stories. Instead of crafting tales about radioactive spiders or gamma explosions, Lee and Kirby could just say that Cyclops and Iceman were born with their powers.

Lee flirted with ideas about oppression and equality in these comics from the '60s. But, ever the centrist and opportunist, his scripts tended to stay simplistic. Magneto led the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants while Professor X and the X-Men used their powers to help humanity.

However, when writer Chris Claremont revitalized the X-Men in the mid-70s, staying on to write the characters through 1991, he pushed the minority metaphor to the center. Mutants came to stand in for various oppressed groups, allowing writers to use stories about superheroes and supervillains to address racism, homophobia, sexism, and other forms of hatred.

Claremont changed Magneto from a simple maniacal baddie to a Holocaust survivor with first-hand knowledge of human bigotry. Although editorial restrictions prevented full expression, Claremont worked queer coding into several of the team members, including Storm, Kitty Pryde, and Longshot. Furthermore, shape changers such as Mystique disrupted gender norms.

That said, the mutant metaphor went just so far. Unlike actual people who experience oppression because of their skin color or the people they love, some mutants can kill people with their minds or eyes. The metaphor works within the framework of superhero fights, but cannot withstand much scrutiny.

However, a bigger problem may involve those who tell X-Men stories. For as much as Claremont integrated progressive themes into his work, he also fell short in memorable ways. X-Men such as Kitty Pryde would equate the word “mutant” or “mutie” to real-world racial slurs and even used those slurs when making a point. At the end of the acclaimed “Demon Bear Saga” in The New Mutants, two white characters change into Indigenous people, a strange racial shift presented without interrogation. Claremont’s dialogue shorthand often reduced diverse groups into a single type or stereotype.

Some might argue that Claremont deserves a pass for such shortcomings, that the good work he did recognizing and welcoming oft-neglected communities outweighs the times he repeated harmful beliefs or stereotypes.

But as a person who belongs to no disadvantaged group, a cishet white male, middle-class and Protestant to boot, I say that no pass exists. And X-Men ’97 shows why.

Unreliable Allies

The aforementioned lady transformation occurs at the climax of “Tolerance is Extinction Part One,” the first entry in the finale of X-Men ’97’s inaugural season. Director Chase Conley, working from a script by showrunner Beau DeMayo and Anthony Sellitti, intercuts the transformation with two other, similar reveals.

In the X-Men’s home base, the Xavier Mansion, the blue-furred hyper-intelligent hero Beast (George Buza) welcomes Trish Tilby (Donna Jay Fulks), a human reporter who has produced sympathetic stories about the mutant plight. Elsewhere, the Brazilian teen Roberto Da Costa (Gui Agustini) and his friend Jubilee (Holly Chou), both mutants, spend time with the former’s mother (Christine Uhebe), a glamorous human society woman.

In the meantime, one of the show’s big bads, a cybernetic government agent called Bastion (Theo James), reveals his evil plan to Val Cooper (Catherine Disher), a human government liaison to the mutants. Through a program called “Operation: Zero Tolerance,” Bastion finds humans who feel “left behind” by the arrival of mutants and offers them a chance to, as he puts it, “be relevant again.” While Bastion does give humans augments that will make them feel superior to mutants, he also embeds them with technology that turns them into killer cyborgs called Prime Sentinels when triggered.

Viewers get to see Operation: Zero Tolerance in action, when Trish Tilby takes Sentinel form and begins attacking the X-Men. The Da Costa’s butler follows suit, as do others at his mother’s party, trying to apprehend Roberto and Jubilee. When the nice lady becomes a Prime Sentinel, she blasts Cable, Jean, and Cyclops out of her house, where they find themselves surrounded with heretofore regular people in Sentinel form.

For those who watch X-Men ’97 on just the surface level, including the young children for whom the original cartoon was intended, “Tolerance is Extinction Part One” offers nothing but cool superhero action. But those with even a modicum of media literacy will see a metaphor, not just for oppressed groups, but also for those who would stand by them, so-called “allies.”

When friend to mutants Trish Tilby tries to kill Beast, when regular Americans tired of talking about “the mutant issue” line suburban streets with hand cannons raised, or Da Costa’s untransformed mother hands her son and Jubilee over to the Prime Sentinels “for his own good,” we would-be allies see the fears of those that we would love and support, that our kindness and solidarity will turn to aggression at a moment’s notice.

Friends of All Humanity

Without question, it’s not fun to see one’s self portrayed in such unflattering terms. Because I do not identify with a maligned group, I don’t often see myself as an animalistic buffoon, a laughable perversion, or an inconstant weakling. Instead, I see myself as Luke Skywalker or Neo from The Matrix, the hero of my own story and prepared at birth to do great things.

It would be easy for me to turn the channel or, worse, go online and complain about how the X-Men have gone “woke” (which would, of course, call into question my ability to read as much as it would my moral fiber). I could even assume that the Prime Sentinels of Operation: Zero Tolerance reflect other people, resting assured in my history of right-thinking and right-feeling.

But doing so would miss the point of the metaphor at work in “Tolerance is Extinction Part One.” Before their eyes glow and their hands turn into guns, the Prime Sentinels show kindness to the mutants. They behave like allies, doing the good things that other, worse humans, such as the militant hate group the Friends of Humanity, refuse to do. Yet, it takes no more than a second for these allies to change to enemies.

My attempt to miss the point would have to deal with the episode’s striking and necessarily on-the-nose dialogue. Bastion explains Operation: Zero Tolerance to Val by describing scenarios that would activate a sleeper Prime Sentinel. When a mutant gets a job that they want, when a mutant behaves in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable, the otherwise sympathetic human becomes an attacker.

When I see myself in the Prime Sentinels, I also see people I know and love in the mutants they attack. I see people who have encouraged with tearful conversations, whose side I’ve taken against others who harm them. I see people who, despite all the work I’ve done, still remain in vulnerable states, a vulnerability even I can exploit or aggravate at any second, even without intention.

When I watch X-Men ’97 from this perspective, I take the episode’s challenge less as an offense and more as a plea for help. If I just want to feel better about myself and walk around convinced that I’m a very good person, my work is done. I’ve done enough to pat myself on the back. I don’t care about others.

But if I do care about other people, if I want to be the best version of myself, I need to accept the lesson and keep learning.

Intolerance is Extinction

Humans who betray mutants have been part of the X-Men story from the beginning, even longer than the mutant as a minority metaphor. But by depicting the danger that allies pose to vulnerable people, X-Men ’97 offers another twist on the long-running franchise.

“Tolerance is Extinction Part One” frames the transformation into a Prime Sentinel as a grotesque change. Bones crack, faces elongate, and bodies take twisted forms. When the sweet older lady becomes a Prime Sentinel, it’s not just her sweet demeanor that’s gone. Her humanity is gone as well.

Within the world of the X-Men, plots by Bastion and other villains threaten to eradicate all mutants. But in the process, they threaten to destroy humans as well, if only by stripping away all the qualities that made them human.

That’s a dire warning that would-be allies, such as myself, need to heed. Yes, we care for other people and accept and learn from the reminder that we can harm these other people because that’s the right thing to do. But we also do it because it’s good for ourselves, as it allows us to stay human and not change into a hateful monster.

In X-Men ’97, such vigilance involves knockdown drag-out fights and feats of super science. In real life, such deeds require so much less. We must apologize when we hurt or offend someone (even if we didn’t mean to or were operating on what we've been told before) and then change our actions.

Moreover, we must have gratitude for those who offer these lessons, whether real people or a superhero cartoon. After all, those lessons help us stay human.