The X-Men have always been political. Well — maybe not always. Stan Lee may not have thought through the ramifications of his decision to say that a group of teen heroes were just born with powers. What was initially a convenient way to sidestep coming up with new ways to douse people with radiation over and over again quickly mutated into something more real, and by default more political. With the introduction of the mutant-hunting Sentinels in 1965’s X-Men #14, there was no going back. Mutants, those born with powers ranging from the mundane to the godlike, were hated and feared — and the X-Men’s purpose got a bit more complicated. They still had to fight to save the Earth, including all of a humanity who hated them. But now they also had to fight for the right to merely exist. The allegory writes itself, and that’s why personal politics have become intrinsically tied to the best X-Men stories — and X-Men ’97, even though it literally just premiered, is already telling one of the best, most relevant X-Men stories we’ve seen on TV.
Despite very clearly having a timestamp in its title, X-Men ’97 pulls the X-Men from our childhoods into the present day, with all of the tension that elicits. And in Episode 2 of X-Men ’97, Marvel’s mutants are dropped into one of the darkest moments in American history: the insurrection of January 6th. It’s not literally that horrific event (which really did happen, by the way), but X-Men has always been a franchise of metaphors and allegories. But when the metaphors are this apt, this potent, this fully-realized, it’s impossible to not see the truth hidden under the animation.
The episode “Mutant Liberation Begins” features the trial of Magneto, an iconic moment pulled directly from the comics.
Having just learned that he’s been willed the entire Xavier estate, including the school, the X-Men, and nominally Xavier’s dream of mutant/human coexistence, Magneto doesn’t fight back when troops from the United Nations come to arrest him. He’s going to try Xavier’s dream and stand trial, a move that Magneto hopes will show his late friend’s heirs — the X-Men — that he truly wishes to honor Xavier’s wishes.
The Friends of Humanity don’t take too kindly to this. The FOH are a heavily-armed militia of bigots in jean jackets who spend their time protesting mutant rights (when not outright hunting mutants and selling them to a mysterious benefactor). They, of course, are protesting the trial — presumably alongside plenty of other folks who hate mutants enough to make a sign and spend a day shouting at a building. While most of the X-Men are inside the UN, Wolverine’s watching the protest from the mansion. He can see that “folks outside are pissed he’s even getting a trial.”
And then the protestors break through the barriers, breach the perimeter, and are met with smoke and resistance from UN security.
In a cartoon on Disney+, we see protestors armed with signs fight their way into the United Nations, physically assaulting officers of the law. These shots of insurrectionists in sunglasses and cargo shorts forcefully, angrily shoving their way into building defined by order instantly cut into the viewer’s mind. We’ve seen all of this before, live on our screens. When one protestor shouts, “This way to the traitors!,” it’s as if the animators rotoscoped actual footage from that day.
At the trial, the UN guards scramble into position to protect the judges — because the judges are a target just as much as Magneto. Why? Because they deigned to give a mutant a trial. These judges are by no means explicitly pro-mutant, nor are there any indications that they’re going to let Magneto off easy. They’re just following the rules, placing laws and order above all else, and for that they’re targeted. Does this not sound familiar? Swap out “support a person’s right to a trial” with “certify the results of an election.” As Magneto says to the shocked and fearful judges, “Now you are traitors to your kind. Oh, to play by the rules and still they come for you.”
And if the parallels are still too subtle, the FOH’s own super-soldier X-Cutioner mouths off a motive that sounds like it was pulled from the darkest corners of the web: “Know what I hate about your kind? You act like you got it so bad. Normal people have it hard, too. Harder! We just have the dignity not to whine about it. You see? It’s the whining. I hate your whining just as much as I hate you.”
The kind of people who actually believe and say that out loud will say this is bad writing, fake, “woke,” or some other nonsense. The kind of people on the receiving end of comments like these know this is real, maybe too real.
The insurrection plays out — well, it plays out exactly like we’ve seen happen in real life. The protestors break in and global ambassadors all duck and cover their heads, people accustomed to wielding power laid low by a mob spewing hatred. Except in the world of X-Men ’97, the protestors and X-Cutioner are met with resistance from two of the most powerful beings on Earth: Storm and Magneto. But all that power can’t stop all that hatred, not entirely, and the insurrection fells one goddess. The fight’s over, but it’s left a brutal, deep scar that will never heal.
And just in case all of this is not clear enough, the news literally calls this an insurrection.
The entire sequence of events is shocking, an unbelievably bold move for a show that has been marketed as a feel-good nostalgia grab. But the inclusion of this insurrection and the stark parallels to real life are absolutely earned, because this is what X-Men is and always has been. This level of emotional realism, this intensity, it was in the cartoon from the start. In 1992 and 1993, X-Men dug into prejudice, government-mandated oppression, political fear-mongering, apartheid, and so much more that was nowhere near as 1:1 as what we see play out in “Mutant Liberation Begins.” But you can trace this forward-thinking, even blunt political agenda all the way back to the very first episode, “Night of the Sentinels” — an episode where the X-Men swap coming out stories on their way to breaking into a government building and setting drawers full proto-Patriot Act-esque information ablaze.
This is what X-Men is all about. It’s meant to respond to very real acts of discrimination and oppression. If you think X-Men ’97 shouldn’t have gone this political, don’t blame the show. Blame the insurrectionists.