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X-Men ‘97 understood the power of perfect timing

X-Men ‘97 worked in part because people had time to watch it.

It’s easy for studios to tout how many hours people have generally spent watching a movie or show, but it’s far harder to quantify the degree to which a new project has reached Game of Thrones or Stranger Things-like status — especially at the outset. There is so much more to Marvel’s Inferno 1989 comics crossover event than what’s detailed in X-Men ‘97 ’s “Fire Made Flesh,” but the episode’s twisty exploration of how Jean Grey was secretly cloned brought meaty drama(and the pretext for psychic infidelity) to the series. It’s a coincidence that a real-world electromagnetic storm gave people across the world the ability to see the (typically) northern lights the same week “Tolerance Is Extinction - Part 2” featured Magneto floating down from the heavens with an asteroid in a sea of aurora.

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