X-Men ’97 is winding up for one of the best stories about weathermancer Storm ever told
Maybe the most impressive thing about X-Men: The Animated Series is how it committed to directly adapting X-Men comics stories — or at least getting as close as the Saturday morning cartoon format would allow. And X-Men ’97, Disney Plus’ new continuation of the classic series, is not shirking that mandate.
With the last-minute appearance of a certain mutant, and a certain tragedy befalling one of the X-Men’s greatest heroes, ’97’s first three episodes show that the season is approaching one beloved X-Men arc in particular.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for “Mutant Liberation Begins.”]
In just the first few episodes of its season, X-Men ’97 includes three events that will be very familiar to fans of 1980s X-Men comics: Storm taking a laser blast that strips her of her powers, leaving the X-Men, and subsequently running into the mutant known as Forge.
Forge (voiced by Yellowstone’s Gilbert Birmingham) sidles up to Storm at a bar, and she testily asks what his deal is. He suggests they should partner up for reasons that are left mysterious. But based on X-Men history and what’s already been released about upcoming episodes, we can make a strong supposition.
Even if you have fond memories of X-Men: The Animated Series, you might need a refresher on Forge’s deal. He was in the original show, but not in a particularly central way; he appeared as the leader of X-Force, but mostly showed up in alternate timelines.
Forge has been a part of the X-Men setting since 1984, when Chris Claremont and John Romita Jr. included him in their Uncanny X-Men. Forge (he just goes by “Forge”) is a mutant, a veteran, an amputee, and a member of the Cheyenne nation — and at least in Claremont’s early stories about him, he was a guy whose unresolved trauma (watching the rest of his platoon die, making a Big Magical Mistake because of that) had made him selfish and self-isolating.
His mutant power is an entirely mental one: superhuman technological intuition. Forge can
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