Why it was inevitable the X-Men were going to face this foe in Season 2.

X-Men ‘97 may have just wrapped its first season on Disney+, but we already have a pretty good idea of where Season 2 is headed. Season 1 ends with the X-Men scattered across time and encountering the mighty Apocalypse at different points in his immortal life. It’s clear that this long-time X-Men villain has a big part to play in Season 2.

Just how does Apocalypse factor into Season 2? What’s next for Wolverine following his near-death experience? IGN spoke with several of the minds behind the series, including executive producer Brad Winderbaum, supervising director Jake Castorena and episodic directors Chase Conley and Emi/Emmett Yonemura, to learn more about what’s next for the series. Read on to learn why all roads lead to Apocalypse.

Airbnb’s X-Men ’97 Mansion – Photo Gallery

Revealing the Origin of Apocalypse

The X-Men clearly aren’t being given much opportunity to rest following their climactic showdown with Bastion. Season 1 ends with most of the team still aboard Asteroid M when it implodes. One group – Xavier, Magneto, Beast, Rogue and Nightcrawler – is dragged backward in time to the year 3000 BC. Cyclops and Jean Grey, meanwhile, are thrust forward to the year 3060 AD. The rest – Wolverine, Morph and Storm – are still MIA, but, presumably, they’ve also traveled in time.

The common thread linking past, present and future is none other than Apocalypse. In the past, we see a young En Sabah Nur battling the forces of the Pharaoh Rama-Tut. In the future, we see Clan Askani as the sole form of resistance against the tyrannical Apocalypse. And in the present, Apocalypse is seen on Genosha, mourning the dead and contemplating resurrecting Gambit as his Horseman of Death.

Apocalypse has a major part to play in Season 2, in other words. This is hardly the first time the X-Men have tussled with Apocalypse in this animated universe. However, the fact that the conflict will now play out over multiple, distant points in time changes the equation quite a bit.

“With the X-Men, for better or for worse, all roads usually end up leading to Apocalypse, right? It’s either Apocalypse, Sinister, or Magneto,” Castorena tells IGN. “What I will say is we do things on purpose. Everything is meticulously done for a reason. For those looking to see where Apocalypse goes with the tattered card in his hand, just have to watch Season 2 to find out. But I guarantee you we wouldn’t plant stuff if it wasn’t going to go on.

What makes this Apocalypse appearance so different from previous story arcs on X-Men: The Animated Series is that we’re seeing a much younger version of the character, before he became the immortal tyrant who preaches survival of the fittest. Expect Season 2 to reveal much more about the character’s origins and the choices that lead him to become the villain he is in the far future.

“It is not a deconstruction per se, but it is nice to kind of see the steps of how a character becomes someone like Apocalypse, and so just hinting and setting that up I think is something that I would personally want to see,” Conley says. “Even if I wasn’t working on the show, I’d love to learn more about En Sabah Nur and just the way that he navigates the world given his immense power and what corrupts him.”

“What’s really compelling about Apocalypse is that he lives for so long,” Winderbaum says. “So whether you go to the distant past or the distant future, he’s there. His ideas do change over time, like anyone’s. So being able to compare his way of thinking at different eras is something that’s really exciting to explore.”

“There’s a lot of fun that we’re teeing up there,” Yonemura adds. “I’m just really excited to just show even En Sabah Nur. I just find that character alone fascinating, so I hope fans are excited.”

Bastion as Season 1’s Main Villain

Even as the show quickly looks ahead to Apocalypse, we wanted to take a step back and focus on Bastion’s role as Season 1’s main villain. Bastion is a character who makes quite an impression, first attacking Genosha from afar in Episode 5 and leaving thousands dead, then making a proper debut in Episode 7 before going on to anchor the climactic “Tolerance Is Extinction” story arc. Winderbaum reveals that Bastion was a part of the conversation early in the development of the new series.

“Bastion was an idea that Beau [DeMayo] brought to the table, smartly, because he was a villain who was not in the original show,” Winderbaum says. “So much about X-Men ’97 is about the nostalgia for the original series. Obviously, there’s that pivot point in the center of the first season with the tragedy at Genosha that sends the second half of the season in a wildly different direction that the audience is not and that the characters are not prepared for. We needed a new face as a villain to represent that new frontier that the second half of the season was going to launch into. Bastion was a perfect idea, in my opinion, because he is as much Sentinel as he is mutant or human or anything else. In a poetic way, while mutants are the next step of human evolution, technology is ultimately this devourer of souls that can come for everybody. So he was a great choice.”

As vicious as he is, viewers are given a chance to sympathize with Bastion over the course of “Tolerance Is Extinction.” In his own way, Bastion is as much a mutant and an outcast as the X-Men themselves.

“That’s the best about a good villain, is that if you want somebody who makes you actually question, ‘Oh, am I sympathizing?’ If you can understand where they’re coming from, I think it always gives them greater grounds to then be scared of them, but also to sympathize,” Yonemura says. “And I remember in Episode 9 when you realize that he’s actually one of Xavier’s failures, that he never did save this child and bring them onto the team, and when Storm points out that he could have been in the First Class photo, I think there’s a lot to unpack there and there’s a lot to unpack with his backstory that Chase expertly told, because I think the most interesting villains are ones who you could actually easily see as right, similar to Magneto.”

“If you can understand where they’re coming from, I think it always gives them greater grounds to then be scared of them, but also to sympathize.”

While Bastion was always part of the plan for Season 1, Castorena reveals that plans did change in regards to how and when to introduce the villain.

“For Bastion, it really was, how long can we really genuinely hold off on revealing the main villain until it’s absolutely critically necessary? It was originally we’re just going to reveal Bastion in Episode 8. Episode 8, bam, Bastion revealed,” Castorena says. “As time and story went on, it came down to, oh, we can tease him and highlight him in 7 to give an audience a little bit of the breadcrumbs. You know it’s Bastion, but it’s not confirmed it’s Bastion. But it gives precedent to want to come back to get that confirmation. So that’s what I love about and appreciate about just the execution of the vision that we did in tandem with trying to give Bastion the ambiance and presence, and to be quite honest, threat that the character deserves and the respect that character demands, because he is a genuinely new and real threat to the X-Men and what they stand for.”

Though Bastion is ultimately defeated in the Season 1 finale, the character has left scars on the team that will take time to heal. The X-Men’s family ties were already fraying thanks to developments like Jean Grey being revealed as a clone and Storm leaving the team after losing her powers, but Bastion furthered that division, to the point that both Rogue and Sunspot defected from the X-Men to join Magneto’s cause. Expect the fallout of that division to be further explored in Season 2.

“It’s such a part of what the X-Men are – the evolution of their relationships and that no one is ever in a static place,” Winderbaum says. “Characters are growing and changing. As they change, so do the characters around them that they are embroiled with. Friends change into enemies. Enemies change into friends. Romances rise and fall. It’s a very dynamic soap opera on the page in the comics. Certainly, the original series did it, and it’s something we strive to do in X-Men ’97.

Cyclops, Jean Grey and Cable

Fatherhood and abandonment are easily two of the most important themes explored in Season 1, particularly where Cyclops is concerned. Early on, Cyclops is forced to reckon with the fact that Professor Xavier left the team behind and didn’t place him in charge. Then, Cyclops confronts the looming prospect of fatherhood, only to realize he’ll never be able to be the father baby Nathan needs. The mutant melodrama is only increased when Nathan returns as the full-grown Cable, highlighting the fact that Scott and Jean missed out on an enormous portion of their son’s life.

Or did they? Season 1 ends with the couple being thrust into the future and reuniting with Nathan in 3060 AD, where he’s still a boy in the care of Clan Askani and their leader, Mother Askani. Cyclops’ superhumanly difficult journey as a father will only grow more difficult and more bizarre in Season 2.

“It’s so great to see that they get to interact with their son when he’s still a child, but obviously it wouldn’t be the X-Men if things were easy,” Winderbaum teases. “So we can expect a bumpy road ahead for everybody.”

Yonemura adds, “You have that beautiful moment in Episode 10 where you feel like you have this beautiful closure between the characters. And then, moments after they’ve said goodbye to their adult son, then they’re put face to face with Nathan Askani’son. And it’s just like, what does that mean for them? And I love that emotional roller coaster because that to me is very soap opera and very X-Men. So I think it’s safe to assume that we’re going to be talking about it. We’re going to be exploring that.”

Wolverine’s Role in X-Men ‘97

As we’ve explored in the past, Season 1 is surprisingly judicious in its use of Wolverine, placing the character in far more of a supporting role than tended to be the case in X-Men: The Animated Series. Castorena confirms that this was a very intentional choice on the part of DeMayo and the writer’s room. Early on, the writers opted to place Wolverine on the back-burner, slowly building to important moments like his fight with the prime Sentinels in Episode 8 and Magneto ripping out his adamantium in Episode 9.

“Being able to not have Wolverine steal the show, but supplement the rest of the team, I am a huge Wolverine fan and I’m grateful we did it the way we did. That was in the bible from Day 1,” Castorena says. “The best part is when you pull the character back, ideally, is when you give them their time to shine. It means even more so than it normally would if we had seen that every episode. So I think that’s why in Episode 8, Wolverine is doing his tornado claw in the sky and slicing up the primes. Then he and Nightcrawler are doing their back-to-back stuff. Shout out to Chase Conley and David Maximo for handling that stuff. You are even more invested, because you don’t realize you’ve been yearning for that moment. You’re given it and it’s satisfying, hopefully. Then ideally, it holds you over for the rest of it as a while until he gets that adamantium out. But yeah, I really appreciate it. I love how we handle Wolverine. I really do.”

“We’ll get a chance to really explore more of Logan and his own personal kind of rogues gallery coming up.”

That said, viewers should probably look to a greater focus on Wolverine in Season 2, especially in light of his adamantium loss and brush with death. But that won’t come at the expense of other main characters.

“We’ve got the second season as well,” Conley says. “And as you can see in Episode 9, we teed up a lot as far as a pivotal stage in Wolverine’s history as far as comic runs go. So we’ll get a chance to really explore more of Logan and his own personal kind of rogues gallery coming up. But it seems like the easy thing to do. I feel like a lot of times you just lean into Wolverine because he’s a fan favorite, but there’s so many other characters that have tragic backstories.

Conley continues, “Rogue is one of my favorite characters of all time, just by the tragedy of her character not being able to touch anyone. I think in terms of just the psychological impact of that, that’s just something great to explore. Jubilee as well. We’ll get into more and more of these characters as time progresses, but it was intentional, but not malicious. We didn’t want to hurt fans by being like, ‘You like Wolverine?’”

How Far Along Is X-Men ‘97: Season 2?

With Season 1 finished, the obvious question arises – when are we going to get Season 2? While Marvel has yet to reveal a release window, it does sound as though work is well underway on the next season. In fact, Winderbaum reveals that production is about halfway through on Season 2 right now, suggesting this won’t be another case like Rick and Morty or Invincible where fans are waiting multiple years for the next season.

“We’re about, I would say, halfway through,” Winderbaum says. “We’re still in animatic phase where a lot of narrative changes can still be made. We’re about halfway done with [voiceover] recording. The storyline is really fun. I don’t want to say too much, but I think it delivers on the promise of the second season.”

“We are well underway on Season 2. We have been. There is really no stopping with us,” Castorena says. “We wrapped Season 1 and we were already rolling and overlapping on Season 2. The way it was happening was I’m in a lot of the post-world for Season 1. Our directors are in the pre-production world for Season 2 at the same time. We were making this all happen.”

Conley adds “I will say that we are knee-deep in Season 2 and really just taking the lessons that we learned from creating Season 1 and trying to maximize on everything that made Season 1 great. And exploring other very interesting characters and new frontiers.”

For more on X-Men ’97, check out our Season 1 ending explained breakdown and brush up on every Marvel movie and series in development.