X-Men ’97’s big villain reveal gives mutants their second-greatest enemy: AI
With only its three-part finale blitz left to go, X-Men ’97 has revealed its big villain, and it’s the same as their old one.
This isn’t a criticism! It’s precisely in line with the biggest theme of X-Men history that most adaptations have refused to touch — that mutants only represent one option for the future of humanity. There are other children of humanity’s hubris, they want their day in the sun, and they’re willing to kill mutants and humans to get it.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 episode 7, “Bright Eyes.”]
In “Bright Eyes,” the X-Men search for the mastermind behind the kaiju-Sentinel slaughter at Genosha, tracking leads to Mutant Enemies No. 1 and No. 2: Henry Peter Gyrich, a human-supremacist government agent in prison for (seemingly) murdering Professor X; and Bolivar Trask, the creator of the Sentinel robots.
We see a shadowy figure smother Gyrich so he won’t be able to reveal any more secrets. And when the X-Men meet up with Trask, it’s in a secret facility housing advanced cybernetics, staffed by guards bearing an “OZT” insignia. Trask undergoes a strange transformation and seems about to beat all the X-Men singlehandedly until Cable shows up to help, and to deliver a warning: Gyrich, Trask, and even Mister Sinister are working for someone even more terrifying.
The final moments of the episode reveal that person to be that shadowy figure, and even give him a name: Bastion.
Bastion has been around the X-Men villain block a few times, but he’s best known as the villain of the 1997 story arc Operation: Zero Tolerance — hence that acronym seen in “Bright Eyes,” and the title of X-Men ’97’s three-part finale arc, “Tolerance Is Extinction.”
In a period when anti-mutant sentiment was at an all-time high (the X-Men had to kill the Avengers and Fantastic Four in order to save the world; they actually survived, don’t worry about it), a mysterious guy named Sebastian Gilberti convinced the U.S. government to back his plan for mutant
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