X-MEN 97 Episode 10 Ending Explained | Marvel Easter Eggs, Post Credits Breakdown & Review

Welcome to the Heavy Spoilers show, I’m your host Paul, and in this video, we’re breaking down X-men 97.

The Episode 10 finale is now here, and it’s packed with Easter eggs, hidden details, and a lot of things for the future. The series has come back with a bang, and in this video, we’re going to break it all down. Beau DeMayo has also finished Season 2, and you can see the seeds being set for what’s about to come. I will, of course, talk about that all later on, but we’re going to start at the beginning of the episode. Last week ended with Magneto tearing out the adamantium from Wolverine’s body, which was ripped right out of the pages of X-Men 25. That was part of the Fatal Attractions event, and it eventually led into Onslaught being created.

Back on Earth, Bastion was beating the heroes with Cable being turned against his Jean, who his mother was, of course, cloned from.

It all kicked off, and that takes us into the title sequence.

X-MEN ’97 EPISODE 10 BREAKDOWN

Now we do get an added shot in the intro with Magneto and Charles working together. This comes from their time together as friends in the original series, which explored their backstory. That was “Enter Magneto,” which we see this scene pulling from. This is picked up immediately in the opening of the entry in which we seemingly see them in Vietnam discussing mutants. Both have opposing views, with Professor X believing that they’ll be accepted, whereas Magneto clearly believes it’s best to hide. However, the pair reveal the truth to each other. There are lots of real-world metaphors here, with the idea of prejudice being the main talking point.

We then have it revealed that Xavier is inside the character’s mind, and with him taking him through a psychic trip down memory lane. It’s kind of like a Dickensian journey, with Xavier realising that if Magneto doesn’t restore Earth’s power, he’ll force him to do it. Magneto says that doing so will shatter both their minds, and this clearly is setting things up with Onslaught. Xavier does a big psychic blast, though, and this is clearly laying the groundwork for what’s to come.

Now, though the adamantium being torn out of Wolverine’s skeleton happened in X-Men 25, Onslaught wouldn’t show up until many years later. He first arrived in X-Men 53, almost two years after Fatal Attraction. Onslaught was born out of a blast performed by Professor X in which he absorbed all the pain and misery from Magneto’s mind.

In Xavier’s subconscious, this evil persona lay dormant until it built itself up and broke forth. It was spurred on by the shaky grounds between humanity and the mutants, which really started to worry Xavier. One of the most overpowered characters in the Marvel universe, he’s a fusion of both Magneto and Xavier.

A powerful psychic entity, it wanted to bring all of the planet together into one combined consciousness. Operating as a hive mind, there would be no more hate and anger against the mutants and vice versa.

I think this would be a big thing for Season 2, and with that already being written, I can’t wait to see where they go with it.

This is one of the only characters capable of going toe-to-toe with Apocalypse, which we’ll talk more about at the end of the breakdown. He is still a young man, but obviously, we know what’s going to happen down the line, and they are going to need that at some point. We will also talk about Mother Askani later on, aka Rachel Summers, but they are going in a pretty interesting direction with it. That blast, though, is seen across the planet, with us once more witnessing Silver Samurai. I believe that he will be a Season 2 villain as well.

We have Doctor Doom and Zemo out there as well, but I think they might in fact be used in other shows. Spider-Man was confirmed as being from the Fox cartoon universe, and I’d love to see us getting other things from those universes. As of making this video, we haven’t had any announcements about stuff like a Spider-Man 98 show, but I feel like the success of this might well lead into that.

Obviously, when you’re teasing Captain America and Iron Man in his ’90s costume, you’re clearly leaning into those things coming down the line. The cameos at this point are absolutely insane, with us also getting Daredevil out in Hell’s Kitchen. Doctor Strange is also in the operating theatre at Manhattan Memorial Hospital. Due to the power being out, he’s having to operate with magic, and we can also see candles around the body. It kind of feels like it’s the end of the world, and that takes us into today’s sponsors.

Now in the lead-up to this episode, Beau DeMayo said the entry to watch as homework was “The Final Decision.” That just so happened to be the finale of the X-Men Season 1, and it had the battle against Master Mold.

It also had a line that we dropped last week showing where things were gonna go.

Now we started with Magneto kidnapping Senator Kelly, who at that point was an anti-mutant advocate. He wanted to force his hand in making humanity accept them, but things were broken up by the Sentinels. Taken before Master Mold, Kelly was told that his brain was going to be replaced by a machine. This is something that Mold planned to do to all the world leaders, and he would mold the masters into servants of his own. This is, of course, similar to what Bastion’s doing with his Prime Sentinel programme, making them his slaves. Bastion is a fusion between the mind of Master Mold and Nimrod, who was then born into human form. So it makes sense he’d follow this path, with this deep-rooted mutant hate being part of his programme.

However, this will always inevitably extend to Sentinels having to wipe out humans, which was explained by Master Mold.

This always tends to get more focus in stuff like Days Of Future Past, where we learn that humanity gets attacked as well due to the potential that certain bloodlines will always lead to mutations. Trask was involved with this, along with Gyrich, so it makes sense that he was in the series.

“The Final Decision” also had Sentinels launching out and flying the skies against the Blackbird, which is, of course, something that’s been going down.

Anyway, it was the X-Men who saved Kelly, with Magneto also lending a hand. We ended with Kelly announcing his presidential run and then announcing that mutants were human, so they shouldn’t be persecuted.

We also ended with Scott proposing to Jean, who said that if they had children, they would be persecuted as mutants. Closing out on Mr. Sinister spying on them, that kind of set up everything in the series.

Now, this all sort of plays into Kelly’s action, which leads into the Magneto protocols that has him blowing up Asteroid M.

You can really see why he’s scared of Magneto, and he views him as an extremist, much in the same way that Bastion is. Going back on Earth, we see he’s mutated himself and is now more machine than man.

X-MEN ’97 EPISODE 10: ALL SUPERHERO APPEARANCES IN THE SEASON 1 FINALE

He talks about the urges inside him, and this links into the programming that was within Nimrod that eventually led to him having a deep-rooted hatred for mutantkind.

Sending his Sentinels out, we see them swarming the world and once more get Cap and Iron Man, but beyond that, Wakanda. Here is your boy T’Challa in the throne room with his classic ’90s look. The cape is back, mate, which I absolutely loved, and I kind of always wished they brought it into the MCU. Capes are cool, mate. Look at Doctor Strange, but they always kind of steered clear of using them. The Dora Milaje are at his side, and they put up a strong fight against the Prime Sentinels. Unfortunately, Daredevil gets knocked back, but he is joined by Cloak and Dagger. They too had their own show recently, with Marvel really beginning to push them.

Injected with synthetic drugs, they gained light and dark force control. Cloak is capable of teleportation through the darkforce, which is something that the Spot studied. He tried to replicate his powers, which is how Spot eventually got those abilities. Dagger creates, well, daggers… imbued with light, and she can also heal people.

We then see Psylocke along with Northstar and hey, just going mental with the cameos, mate, slow down. This is out in Genosha, which we can tell by the destroyed statue head. It’s clearly a worldwide event, with us also getting attacks out in Russia. That’s when we see Omega Red, who I also think will be a Season 2 villain. I thought they might just leave his freedom as a cliffhanger, but here he’s back with his allies.

If you ever played X2 Wolverine’s Revenge, then you’ll know those chumps did something similar, and we never got a sequel. Still legitimately mad about it, mate, but I think with Season 2 already being written, that we will see Omega Red next time. One of the most dangerous mutants on the planet, he’s capable of emitting a death factor pheromone that can kill people within a matter of seconds. He can also absorb the life force of people and use this as a way to power himself up. In this universe, he’s been used to power a power plant, and yeah, I think he’s going to be a big force in trying to take out humanity.

Now, Operation Tolerance’s ultimate goal was to wipe out the mutants, but I feel like they’ve stepped it up a notch here with it wiping out humanity.

That seemed to be what Bastion was doing under the guise of it improving the world. We did see a future world in which mutants were enslaved, with the Prime Sentinels ruling over all.

However, they’re still enslaved by Bastion and can be activated at any point.

Operation Zero Tolerance was similar in the comics. Gyrich signed off firing on American citizens on American soil.

Graydon Creed, aka Sabretooth’s father, was also assassinated in a false flag attack. This was used to justify the Prime Sentinels. Bastion also discovered something known as the Xavier files, which were ones Professor X had made as a contingency.

This was basically like the ones Batman has on the Justice League, where they showed a way to kill the X-Men if they ever went rogue. Like Rogue rogue… not Rogue rogue.

Anyway, it was kind of an Iceman story more than anything, but they have definitely taken all things in a new direction.

Anyway, Bastion torments Cable, and we learn that he made 200 attempts to save Madelyne. He says that both ended up dead in the end, but we do get the Phoenix rising from the water. This is similar to X2, in which this caused her powers to activate. The Phoenix has, of course, been teased throughout the intros, and it was so good seeing her back. Now Bastion goes to kill Cable, but Sinister says he needs him. In case you haven’t kept up to date with our videos, the techno-organic virus is the weapon Sinister was planning to use to kill Apocalypse. This has weakened him before, and this is why he cloned Jean in the first place. He was obsessed with the Summers family and felt like their child could be the one thing that could kill Apocalypse through the use of the virus.

Anyway, the Phoenix wipes out the Sentinels across the planet, and she strips Sinister of the DNA that is keeping him together. This instantly ages him and takes him from the bloody, bloody handsome guy he was to Mr. Burns. He runs off after looking at a mirror image of himself in Morph, which has some poetry to it. Morph was who Sinister captured and he enslaved the character.

Bastion too rises from the ashes and rips off Cable’s arm. Now we sort of have two sides to this thing with both these key characters taking different approaches to humanity. Cable tried to save his mother, and even though he couldn’t, he still found one in Jean. He did whatever he could and ultimately didn’t want her death to be on his hands. On the opposite side of this, Bastion’s mother was used in the Prime Sentinel programme.

Now, Bastion having his mother like this is something that Beau DeMayo touched upon on Twitter. Posting an emoj… not an emoji, is it mate, I dunno, but one of those faces… anyway, he posted this next to a photo of Norman Bates.

Bates’ mother was, of course, a major part of the movie Psycho, with her corpse being kept in their family home. Norman had a split personality, with the other side of it reflecting his control and overbearing mother.

Going to his final form, Bastion wants to basically Ultron us and throw Asteroid M into the Earth to wipe us all out. Akin to how the dinosaurs died, this will be an extinction-level event that kills us all, yay.

Back with Magneto and Xavier, we see the pair are still locked together psychically while Wolverine heals up. In the comics, we learned that Wolverine kept his claws and that these were revealed to be bone. Up until that point, they’d just been thought to be adamantium that was added to his skeleton, but this revealed that wasn’t the case.

Now Deadpool and Wolverine is the next project coming down the line, and though I thought this might set it up, that unfortunately isn’t the case. Well, I say unfortunately, it stands fine on its own, and yeah, not everything needs to be tied in. I kinda hope that’s a lesson Feige and Marvel take from this and we can have stories off doing their own things. Anyway, total tangent there. This was deliberately kept separate, though we now know due to DeMayo confirming it on Twitter. He said Deadpool was off-limits, and thus we know they wanted to keep it all separate. I do wonder if we will perhaps touch upon the larger X-Men multiverse there, as we have seen a lot of different versions. There was probably a version connected to Xavier in the Multiverse of Madness, the ones at the end of the Marvels, these, the ones in Deadpool and Wolverine, and on top of that, the Fox ones. If you add in Logan being its own universe along with First Class and so on… you’ve got a lot, mate, you’ve got a bloody lot. Anyway, that’s why they didn’t really wanna touch upon Deadpool, even though he did feature in the original series.

Now, though everyone thinks they should take out Magneto, Professor X wants to save him. This likely calls back to what he did in “The Final Decision.” In that, Professor X was gonna fly the Blackbird into Master Mold to destroy him. It was loaded with explosives and pretty much a one-way ticket, but Magneto helped him to get out.

The divide between the group is healed with Rogue saying the cards are in their favour. Obviously picked that up from her lover Gambit, with her too saying to Bastion, “Remember it.”

This, of course, calls back to Episode 5, and I just saw last night that’s been put forth for Emmy contention. Deserves it as well, mate, as it was an incredible episode.

Rogue takes him to the blue side of the moon, which is a location that’s featured a lot in Marvel comics. It’s an oxygen-rich environment in which several civilisations have lived. Created by the Skrulls, it more recently became the home of the Watcher’s Citadel and played a big part in the comic Original Sin.

This is why all the monuments are there, and it’s a great place to have a fight go down.

Joined by Sunspot, we cut to Times Square, which is also one of the locales where we started off the season. There’s WHIH news, which is the main news station in the Marvel universe.

Urged on by his council, we see the only people trying to talk him down are T’Challa and Steve Rogers.

In a file on Magneto, we also see the name of his children being Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. It also says that he’s widowed, with this being Magda. The kids are, of course, Pietro and Wanda, with them being shown in shadow on the boat in the vision.

Magneto has lost so much, and we really see the pain in him as he thinks about his mother and father. It’s such an incredible way to take the character, and it’s balanced perfectly by the battle happening with Bastion. Everyone goes all out defending the asteroid. We do get a beam vs. beam bit, but Cyclops basically breaks out his special from Marvel vs. Capcom and completely messes the villain up.

Thrown into the Sentinel throne, this symbolically represents where he came from and the monster that he created. Even the good will eventually bring this down, which is highlighted in the rest of the team’s arrival in one. This sort of Trojan horse shows how his ideals will always be destroyed by the good that dismantle them from the inside.

Bit of a reach, but I love how there’s this deeper layer to it. Cyclops decides to stop fighting the future, and he instead informs him that Xavier tried to look after Bastion, but it was his mother who stopped this. Crippled under the weight of a Sentinel, it shows that hatred and destruction will always weigh you down. Still, though, the X-Men want to support him, even if humanity won’t support him.

Now, if you wanna support the channel, then definitely check out our merch store right below the video. There we’ve got our X-Men inspired 97 shirt from our favourite moment in Episode 1. That’s going into the vault very shortly, so this is your last chance to pick it up. We also have our It’s All Connected shirts, Theory Time ones, and ones for the upcoming shows House of the Dragon and The Boys. So yeah, loads of stuff on there, and huge thank you to everyone who’s picked one up..

Anyway, as the asteroid comes crashing down, we get Morph turning into Reed Richards. Nice little tease at the show from the ’90s too, and I’d love to see a revival of that. Cyclops says he will stay behind while they remain on the jet, and this is akin to how Gambit stayed behind on Asteroid M during Sanctuary.

He survived there as well, mate, and yeah… we’ll talk about it.

Force ghosting themselves to Nathan brings up the people in the future who talked about the X-Men. It foreshadows what’s to come, but it created the legends that inspired him. Talking about how Nathan has his eyes… I felt like my eyes were hurting, mate… ‘cos… ‘cos there was so much dust in the room… making it look… look like I’m crying.

Banding together to stop the asteroid, we see the UN and also confirm something massive.

Seeing Peter Parker and Mary Jane watching the news report confirms something big from his series. Turns out Peter indeed found MJ, which yeah… been waiting like 30 years for that, mate. 30 years, and we now know for good. Morph transforms into Jean to tell Wolverine something to spur him on, and yeah… it’s an amazing moment in the season. Even just Nightcrawler praying, it’s all… it’s great, mate, and yeah, I think this is my favourite Disney Plus show. Just on a character and action level, it’s yeah… it’s something special. Might be recency bias, but seeing Magneto and Xavier’s friendship reunited in a vision of the bar they first revealed themselves in, it spurs them on.

Waking Magneto up, he restabilised the asteroid, but in doing this, it scatters them across time.

We get an 8-bit display saying there’s no signal and pick up six months after E-day.

On a news report, we hear mention of Graydon Creed, with that being whose death kinda kickstarted OZT in the comics. On a bulletin, we see the status of the X-Men and learn of several fates.

The main crew are presumed dead, but Scarlet Witch is off-world along with her brother. Cable has gone AWOL, and though I couldn’t read what it says for Archangel, I believe it says missing presumed dead due to the layout being the same as the other ones that say that. Jubilee and Sunspot are AWOL too. Colossus and his sister Magik are fine. Dust is fine, Iceman is cool, Havok, Exodus, Shadowcat, and Emma Frost are all gravy as well. Who is taking heat is Kelly, though, with Magneto being martyred.

At this point, Bishop walks in with a haircut and talks about how he and Forge will be friends one day. Standing in front of a containment device, this would later show up in Time Fugitives when Bishop kept changing the timeline to alter things. He and Forge become great allies, and the latter is who creates his time travel devices.

X-MEN ’97 EPISODE 10 ENDING EXPLAINED

Now the ending scenes culminate with the gang being scattered across time. I’m just gonna talk about them together as they kinda point to something similar. They’re not in Kansas, and we see as Cyclops and Jean come across Mother Askani.

Eagle-eyed viewers and comic readers may recognise that Askani is actually Rachel Summers.

Rachel was seen briefly in a vision of Bastion’s future where the mutants were enslaved to build the perfect world. The one where you click the like and subscribe button.

She is the daughter of Jean and Cyclops from the Days of Future Past storyline. It’s the dark future where Robert Kelly was assassinated, leading to a mutant holocaust.

However, with the help of Kitty Pryde, she managed to avert this future and bring herself into the main timeline.

The wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff would continue as later she aimed to help Captain Britain, she was split into alternate beings, with one ending up at the end of time.

As we see in the show, she is in an apocalyptic world, and this is after Apocalypse has taken control of it.

She would form the Clan Askani, which can be translated to the clan of outsiders, as they aim to take out Apocalypse and have the spirit and ideals of the X-Men of their past.

In the comics, Cyclops allowed Nathan to be taken to the future and fixed as Apocalypse had infected him with the techno-organic virus. This is because she thought Nathan would become the saviour of their time.

Apocalypse would end up cloning him and create Stryfe, to use as a means for his resurrection.

In the comic The Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix, Mother Askani brought her parents to the future to help raise the other Nathan.

We do see Nathan in the future, and in the comics, he along with his parents, nicknamed Redd and Slymm (so as to keep their true identity as parents secret), as well as Mother Askani, went on to defeat Apocalypse.

So it seems like Season 2 will see an adaptation of that comic.

In the show, we see the rest of the X-Men save En Sabah Nur, aka Apocalypse, around the time he was a slave way in the past. So it seems we will be seeing a battle in the past and the future.

Now, as for that post-credits scene, we return to the future and see a present-day Genosha and see Apocalypse out there digging up Gambit’s queen of hearts card. This is what he had for Rogue.

We have said for a while now that we think Gambit will be brought back as his Horseman Death, which was a theory first brought up by Rob from Comics Explained.

The creative team said that they wanted his death to mean something and shot down a lot of the time travel rumours about the character.

However, there is another way he can come back.

That is through Apocalypse, who can bring him back, which this is clearly teasing too.

Several characters have been in his gang, such as Angel and Wolverine. The way he says… so much death… well, it’s obviously Death, and yeah… great way to end things.

Now, I think going ahead that we are leaning towards Messiah Complex and the arrival of Hope Summers. We’ve talked about it a fair bit, but they are laying the groundwork for it. Hope was basically the mutant messiah, and she returned and really kickstarted a rebirth in them after House of M.

Several sides were after her, including Mystique, who was masquerading as Mr. Sinister. We had his forces going out after the baby, with the Purifiers also attempting to grab her as well. The X-Men were trying to save her as well, but Bishop was secretly trying to kill her. Flash forward 80 years to the camps, and we learned that Hope was the reason that the mutants had been placed in them. We didn’t know exactly why it was, but Bishop believed that if he killed her in the past, then that might be the way to avoid this darker future.

Now, speaking of time travel, Cable was attempting to save Hope as well.

In the end, Mystique managed to get her hands on Hope, and we learned exactly why she wanted her. Turned out that Rogue was in a coma, and she believed that pressing Hope to her skin would lead to absorption. The energy passing from the mutant messiah to her would hopefully then wake her up, and yeah… you kinda get the thinking behind that.

In the end, Hope actually survived the absorption, and she didn’t seem affected by it at all. However, Rogue woke up, but she was furious that a baby had been put in danger for it. It could have and would have killed any other child, and thus she lambasted her adoptive mother. I think that kind of stuff could be a great direction for Season 2, and it would then lead into Avengers Vs. X-Men. Cable ended up taking Hope to the future to protect her.

Upon returning, the Phoenix Force then sought her out, and the Avengers wanted her to take a long walk off a cliff while the X-Men were trying to protect her. So yeah, lots of directions they could go, but I’m excited to see what the direction next time is.

Now, as for my thoughts on the season. Bloody loved it, mate. I was pretty skeptical coming into it because, let’s be honest, the Disney Plus shows ain’t exactly been some top-tier television. I think on the whole, they’ve probably diluted the brand a bit, and it’s obvious that the studio sort of thinks the same thing. They’ve done a number of talks about how they’re scaling back now and how they’ve had a lot of projects that have been hit and miss.

I think that’s the right way to go, and you know, give us a show like this, Deadpool 3, and space them out, and you get that fan apathy to turn back to love.

This was an incredible season, and I really think they pulled off a difficult task.

Not only did it stay true to the original series from the ’90s, but it also built upon that and took things in a new direction. That’s kind of what you want from one of these legacy reboots.

It grew every single character and built on the past but evolved them beyond what they were.

Every character went in a really interesting direction, especially the ones that got overlooked. Rogue going the direction she did, Storm in that life-death arc, you know, it was all really well-structured and built the key characters up in really interesting ways.

I think the action was incredible too. There are some really creative things that they did with it, and overall it balanced the drama and action beautifully. Considering these episodes were only 30 minutes each, we had a tonne of things in them. There were so many shocking moments, and the three-part finale especially knocked it out of the park. If you viewed that as one episode, it would be incredible, and I can’t wait to watch it all in one go.

So yeah, I loved the series as a whole, and I’m already really excited for where Season 2 goes. This is how you take an old property and pay tribute to the past while also making something new.

Beau DeMayo summed it up perfectly in a tweet, and he said:

The show talks about nostalgia, what parts of us to keep versus what parts of us to carry forward. The X-Men have been rocked by so much change, but as Storm says it’s all the same because they find themselves back in their old costumes racing off against humanity and Magneto.

I think that kinda sums it up in that we have these battles that will always happen. X-Men vs. Magneto, Joker vs. Batman, Ryan Arey vs. Heavy Spoilers, all classic battles, but it’s what you do in between that matters. This show has done something new that still feels classic, and yeah, brilliant series.

Now, I wanna thank you guys for coming with us every week as we go through the episodes. You guys always provide incredible insight, things I missed, new perspectives, and it’s been incredible watching the community come to these videos every week to discuss the show. It really means a lot to me, and thank you for all your support.

Now, we will be back to break down House of the Dragon and The Boys in June, and I can’t wait to talk about those shows.

From what I’ve heard, there’s a lot to look forward to, so make sure you’re subscribed for our breakdowns on them over the summer.