X-MEN ’97 Finally Gives Wolverine the Savage Story the Original Animated Series Couldn’t Tell

X-Men ’97 has done an incredible job celebrating every era of Marvel's mutant history, but Season 2, Episode 5 takes things in a direction that feels ripped straight out of the blood-soaked pages of the 1990s.

This is the decade that turned Wolverine into one of comics' biggest icons, where his stories became nastier, more violent, and packed with unforgettable fights. WhileX-Men: The Animated Serieshad to play things safe because of television standards, X-Men ’97 finally gets the chance to tell the kind of Wolverine story fans could only imagine back then.

The episode fully embraces the darker side of the X-Men mythos, bringing in one of Marvel's creepiest alien species while delivering a Wolverine story that simply couldn't have existed during the original cartoon's run.

The Brood have always ranked among the most terrifying villains in X-Men comics. Clearly inspired by the Xenomorphs from Alien, these creatures reproduce by implanting eggs inside living hosts. Instead of the infamous chest-bursting horror, though, the victim slowly transforms into a horrifying human-Brood hybrid.

It gets even worse from there. The Brood don't simply take over someone's body. They gain access to the host's abilities, and through their hive mind those powers can be shared across the entire species. Even though they're technically aliens, Marvel has often hinted that they may actually have demonic origins, making them even more unsettling.

The X-Men have battled the Brood many times in the comics, particularly during their adventures in deep space. One of those stories even saw Wolverine infected and transformed before his healing factor eventually rejected the creature.

X-Men ’97 takes that idea and cranks it up. Instead of giving Logan much control over the transformation, the series unleashes a fully Brood-infected Wolverine on his own allies.

It's a vicious twist that leads to some genuinely shocking moments, and the only thing that ultimately saves him is the return of his adamantium skeleton. Apparently, adamantium and the Brood don't mix very well.

Fans may remember that X-Men: The Animated Series technically tackled this storyline once before, although not quite the way comic readers expected.

Rather than using the Brood themselves, the series introduced a similar alien race called the Colony in the Season 4 episode "Love in Vain." The Colony shared many of the Brood's defining traits, including a hive mind, a queen, and even their bizarre habit of traveling through space inside giant living space fish.

The reason for the change was simple. According to podcast interviews with the original creative team, Fox's censors considered the Brood far too disturbing for a Saturday morning cartoon. The Colony became a toned-down substitute that captured the general concept without leaning into the body horror that defines the comic version.

That's exactly what makes this new episode feel so refreshing. Instead of simply adapting the Brood storyline by itself, X-Men ’97 folds it into a much larger narrative. The episode ties together Wolverine's past with the Weapon X program, connects to the Winter Soldier storyline, and finally restores Logan's adamantium skeleton.

Everything feeds into one another, making the Brood more than just monster-of-the-week villains. The episode also leans into another fun piece of Wolverine history from the '90s.

During that era, Logan frequently wandered away from the X-Men for solo adventures with entirely different supporting casts, usually resulting in much more violent missions than anything happening back at Xavier's school.

X-Men ’97 fully commits to that formula by assembling the classic Team X lineup. Things go downhill almost immediately.

One member dies during the crash landing, and after Wolverine falls under the Brood's control, he brutally guts one of his own teammates. By the end of the episode, only Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, and Mystique are still standing.

For a series that grew out of a Saturday morning cartoon, that's a pretty wild escalation! Of course, all of this chaos serves a larger purpose.

Wolverine confronts the Weapon X program, the people responsible for covering his skeleton in adamantium in the first place, and this time he willingly takes it back.

The result is the return of the Wolverine fans have been waiting for. The real Wolverine is back, complete with his iconic adamantium claws, and he's every bit as badass as ever.

There's also a tragic layer beneath that victory. Logan chooses to become Weapon X again because he now sees himself as exactly that: a weapon. He believes those claws are what make him effective, even if accepting them means embracing the darkest parts of who he is.

With Apocalypse waiting in the wings, though, those claws are probably going to be needed sooner rather than later.

The first five episodes of X-Men ’97 Season 2 are now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes arriving weekly.