Season 1 of the fantastic X-Men ’97 animated series is slowly drawing to its conclusions, and it proved to be every bit as good as the original X-Men: The Animated Series, if not better. It was most certainly a win Marvel desperately needed amidst all the poor performance of its recent releases, proving that there’s still hunger for superhero narratives — just not ones coming from Disney’s production kitchen.
During the broadcast of the initial episodes of Season 1, we spared no effort in speculating what might await us at the end and who the Big Bad might be. Mr. Sinister was, most certainly, one of the candidates, and so was the iconic Apocalypse, whose arrival was speculated based on the mere mention of the Techno-Organic Virus. Sinister proved to be a mere pawn in the game of the more powerful, and while Apocalypse’s arrival still isn’t excluded, the recent episodes revealed Bastion as Season 1’s Big Bad.
Bastion was first revealed in Episode 7, titled “Bright Eyes,” leaving viewers with more questions than answers about who exactly the mysterious villain is. Fortunately, we’re not completely oblivious as to who Bastion really is; quite the contrary. Bastion is actually a well-established character from the comics and has been a thorn in the side of the X-Men for quite some time. Here’s an interesting tidbit: the character first appeared in 1996’s comic X-Men #52 as one of the main antagonists. This provides us more context to the meaning of the show’s name — describing the exact era of comics it’s adapting.
Please note that the following might contain some spoilers regarding future episodes of X-Men ’97, so continue reading at your own discretion.
The question “Who is Bastion?” is perhaps better framed as “what” exactly is Bastion. The viewership has already surmised that the character isn’t actually human, despite looking like one. Bastion began his life as Sebastion Gilberti, an amnesiac taken in by a woman named Rose Gilberti, who had adopted him as a surrogate son.
At some point in time, Bastion began to hear about America’s mutant problem and fell in with anti-mutant groups, like the Friends of Humanity. After a while, his prime directives reawakened (we promise this is going to make more sense soon), and he began assembling the international anti-mutant strike force known as Operation: Zero Tolerance (OZT). OZT’s purpose was to rebuild and improve the Sentinel Program and create Prime Sentinels: Sentinel-human sleeper agents that can take on any unsuspected mutants in their vicinity.
After Professor X voluntarily turned himself in (which is something we might be witnessing soon in the new animated series), Bastion put OZT into full effect, using Prime Sentinels to capture several other X-Men members. OZT was subsequently shut down by the government, and Bastion was apprehended and remanded into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody, from which he escaped and returned to the OZT facility. There, he came into contact with the Master Mold unit (a massive Sentinel progenitor), which he used to create the Prime Sentinels.
Upon contact, Bastion absorbed the energy of the Master Mold unit and transformed into Nimrod: a super-powerful Sentinel unit from the future. The transformation unlocked Bastion’s memories and revealed that Bastion originally began his existence as a version of Nimrod, who was posing as a human in a true Prime Sentinel manner when he unearthed a Master Mold module. Upon contact, Master Mold’s programming began co-opting Nimrod’s, and shortly after, the Nimrod-version of Bastion with Master Mold programming was blasted through Siege Perilous by X-Men.
Siege Perilous is a pan-dimensional portal that judges those who pass through and reincarnates them into new life based on the qualities of their previous life. X-Men tossing Nimrod into Siege Perilous is what completely merged Master Mold and Nimrod into a single entity (currently known as Bastion) with no memory of his past. He was subsequently found by Rose Gilberti, and the origin story comes full circle.
There are several things to unpack here. The recently released episodes already saw the emergence of Prime Sentinels, the appearance of Bastion, the revelation that Xavier is alive, and Xavier’s return to Earth, all of which play nicely into the whole story about the OZT, the revived Sentinel program, and Bastion’s origin story. However, we can’t say for sure just how much of the comics the upcoming episodes will adapt and what creative liberties X-Men ’97 might take in said adaptation efforts.
From what we know from the comics, Bastion was later used to summon the Technarchy, who originally introduced the Techno-Organic Virus to Earth. This virus will subsequently be used by Sinister to infect Nathan Summers (as already seen in the series), who will pass it on to Apocalypse. Apocalypse will subsequently make Sinister and set in motion a series of events to infect Nathan Summers in the future so that the latter can travel into the past and deliver the virus back to Apocalypse. Time travel is always a mouthful.
The introduction of Bastion as this season’s Big Bad certainly opens the door to some interesting storylines from the comics, but we’re still left wondering which of those stories will be adapted into X-Men ’97. We know one thing for sure: Bastion is a major antagonist in the X-Men comics and one that has caused the X-Men a great deal of grief and pain: something that the upcoming episodes of X-Men ’97 are very likely to fully explore.