‘X-Men ’97’ Season 2 Episode 7 Review: A Courtroom Drama Hiding Inside a Jungle Adventure

‘X-Men ’97‘ has never been shy about swinging between tones, and its seventh episode of season two pushes that elasticity further than almost anything the revival has attempted so far. Titled “Strange Land, Savage Heart,” the hour drops the team into the Savage Land while Magneto’s absence leaves a vacuum that the Acolytes, now led by Exodus, are all too eager to fill. It arrives at a moment when the season has been juggling multiple storylines across Genosha, X-Corp, and the hunt for Apocalypse, and this episode chooses to slow down rather than sprint forward.

The premise sounds almost like a bottle episode. Graydon Creed, captured and dragged before an Acolyte tribunal, becomes the subject of a trial that pits Nightcrawler’s faith in redemption against Exodus’s belief that mercy is a luxury dead mutants can no longer afford. It is a bold structural choice for a superhero cartoon to spend so much of its runtime on debate rather than combat, and for long stretches it works, because the show has built enough goodwill with its characters that watching them argue still feels like watching them act.

Where the episode truly earns its keep is with Colossus. Piotr has spent two seasons as furniture, a wall of muscle who rarely got interior life, and here his grief over losing Illyana becomes the emotional spine of the hour. His pull toward the Acolytes, his flirtation with the idea that gentleness has run its course, gives the season a genuine gut punch that the writers clearly wanted to land for a while. Watching him return to the Institute at the end carries more weight than any laser battle could, and it is the strongest piece of characterization the show has handed him since it began.

That said, the episode stumbles in ways that keep it from greatness. Illyana’s death opens the hour and never gets the room it deserves, functioning almost entirely as fuel for someone else’s arc rather than a loss worth sitting with on its own terms. The pacing wobbles too, cutting between the trial, a jungle skirmish involving Bishop and Polaris, and a closing tease about Apocalypse’s fate in Greece, and none of those threads gets quite enough oxygen to breathe fully. It is the rare episode of this show that feels like it is servicing the machinery of the season more than telling its own complete story.

Still, there is something admirable about a cartoon willing to let its heroes sit in discomfort instead of handing them a clean win. Exodus never becomes a cartoon villain here, he is written as someone who genuinely believes coexistence has failed, and Nightcrawler’s answer to him is stubborn hope rather than a knockout argument. Neither side gets to declare victory, and that refusal to wrap things in a bow is the kind of maturity this franchise has chased for decades without always achieving it. The final image of Cable and the X-Force standing over Apocalypse’s husk, with a telltale card left behind, sets up a back half of the season that suddenly feels unpredictable in a way I did not expect twenty minutes earlier.

Taken as a whole, this is an episode that trades momentum for introspection and mostly comes out ahead for it. The character work with Colossus alone justifies the detour, even if the show occasionally seems distracted by its own supporting cast to the detriment of the central grief it opened with. I walked away thinking about Piotr’s choice long after the credits rolled, which is more than I can say for most of the action-forward episodes this season has offered. This one earns 8 out of 10, a strong hour hobbled only by an underused death and a script juggling one too many balls at once.

Did Colossus’s arc land for you the way it did for me, or did the trial subplot overstay its welcome? Share your verdict in the comments.