Author: Charles Murphy

If the emotional devastation of Magneto’s sacrifice and Charles Xavier being stranded in the past wasn’t enough to process, the Russo-level mid-credits scene in “Rise of Apocalypse: Part II” sets up next week’s episode brilliantly.

Shifting directly away from ancient Egypt and back to the 1990s present, the camera finds a somber, bone-clawed Wolverine on a Paris rooftop. As he waits in the shadows, he is intercepted by a jaw-dropping Avengers vanguard: Captain America and Black Widow.

When Logan vows to “get the band back together” at the end of “Rise of Apocalypse: Part II”, the narrative is pulling a direct thread out of the old videotapes to see what happens when the digital age exposes the program’s latest horrors.

The visual framework of the trio standing together is  love letter to the iconic Jim Lee cover art of 1990’s Uncanny X-Men #268—the classic “Madripoor Knights” storyline that established Cap, Logan, and Natasha working spy missions together fifty years ago during World War II.

The Setup for Episode 5: “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs”

The title of next week’s X-Men ’97 Season 2, Episode 5—“Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs”—is much more than a clever, format-updating pun. It is a direct, canonical sequel to a classic episode of the original 1992 animated series: Season 4, Episode 16, “Weapon X, Lies, and Videotapes.”

In that classic ’90s chapter, the show adapted Chris Claremont and John Buscema‘s comic lore to reveal that Logan, Sabretooth, Maverick, and Silver Fox didn’t just share a dark military past—they were the foundational core of Team X, the CIA’s premier, covert (mostly) mutant black-ops unit.

To understand where next week’s episode may be heading, it might be useful to explore the psychological wreckage left behind in the original series. In “Weapon X, Lies, and Videotapes,” the members of Team X are drawn back to the abandoned Canadian testing facility after suffering massive, debilitating mental collapses.

There, they discover a shocking corporate truth: the vast majority of their deeply personal memories were entirely fake. The Weapon X scientists had  constructed artificial backstories and projected them directly into the subjects’ brains inside a Hollywood-style soundstage, using physical props and simulated environments to manufacture trauma and turn them into compliant, cold-blooded killers. Classic Weapon X!

By shifting the nomenclature from analog magnetic tape to digital media, “Weapon X, Lies, and DVDs” may look to highlight how the remnants of the program have evolved alongside technology. The military-industrial complex didn’t stop because their old soundstages were destroyed; they simply upgraded their technology…and this could very well tie into one of the many Easter eggs fans caught during the three-episode, Season 2 premiere.

Official episode loglines indicate that Logan, Morph, and an unlikely vanguard of former rivals will track down a newly weaponized, active branch of the project. Rather than relying on simple, external memory-projection theater to control their soldiers, the modern Weapon X faction could be utilizing crisp, digitized genetic sequencing to construct flawless clones and cybernetic templates such as Fantomex or Weapon XVIII.

The Reunion of the Damned

When Logan looks at the Weapon X file handed to him by Captain America and Black Widow, he recognizes that his bone-clawed status leaves him entirely outmatched against automated, digital-era threats. To take down an enterprise that thrives on rewriting identity, he needs the exact specialized killers who know how to survive a psychological simulation.

By bringing Sabretooth and Maverick back onto the board alongside Morph’s shapeshifting utility, the episode may well force the old Team X remnants to confront how much of their collective trauma is real versus how much was encoded. Next week’s episode is shaping up as a dark, claustrophobic reckoning with the military ghosts that have spent decades trying to claim ownership over Logan’s soul.