X-Men 97 Reveals Who Attacked Genosha, And It's Not Who You Think
This post contains spoilers for "X-Men '97" up to and including episode 6.
"X-Men '97" has been fantastic. There's nostalgia in there, sure, but also some stunning storytelling — a desire to use this opportunity to tell new stories that go harder and further on certain elements that the Fox Network couldn't touch back in the '90s.
Case in point: how episode 5 weaponized nostalgia to shatter the hearts of the audience with a devastating attack on Genosha that killed a bunch of fan favorites in what the head writer calls a cataclysmic event meant to change everything for the show. This is the moment mutants realize that things are in fact dangerous (and not just in alternate futures).
It was a bold, bloody choice to adapt one of the darkest Marvel storylines, "X-Men: E is For Extinction." This was the opening storyline of Grant Morrison's run with "New X-Men," and in the comics, it was Professor X's evil twin sister Cassandra Nova who was responsible for the genocide, after she hijacked a huge Sentinel and let it destroy the island and its nearly 16 million mutant population. Though Nova is not the villain of "X-Men '97," she will make her live-action debut in "Deadpool & Wolverine." But who was responsible for the attack in "X-Men '97"?
A sinister plot
In episode 6 of "X-Men '97" we learn that it wasn't Cassandra Nova, but actually Mister Sinister who planned the attack. This is a bit disappointing considering Sinister doesn't have a very strong anti-mutant sentiment and this ultimately takes away from the thematic resonance of the Genosha attack. Making it worse is a scene where Bolivar Trask appears to be mortified over what his Sentinels did — despite this being the very thing he designed them to do, at a much smaller scale than he planned for over and over.
And yet, it makes some sense to have Mister Sinister be the man responsible for the Genosha genocide. After all, it helps connect both "X-Men" series. That's because we've seen Mister Sinister fight the X-Men since season 2 of the original animated series, where he took away Professor X and Magneto's powers in the Savage Land. The original series' final season also included a plot with Mister Sinister, showing his origin story. It revealed the friendship-turned-rivalry between Sinister and an ancestor of Charles Xavier, and how Mister Sinister (then known as Nathaniel Essex) became obsessed with the theory of evolution. Though he is not a mutant, Mister Sinister does seek to reshape the world using mutants — as seen with his attempts at experimenting with Nathan, son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor.
What makes this even more interesting is that a news broadcast in the new episode describes the Genoshan genocide as part of an "Evolutionary War." This is the same name of a comics crossover that involved the High Evolutionary and Mister Sinister to jumpstart human evolution across Earth. Given that the High Evolutionary already appeared in "X-Men: The Animated Series" it is possible we'll see an adaptation of this story.