X-Men ’97 Season 2 Underused its Most Versatile Mutant

This article contains spoilers for X-Men ’97 season 2 episode 9.

How many is too many X-Men? That’s the eternal question for the creators of X-Men ’97 and its predecessor, X-Men: The Animated Series. Even when that first series began in 1992, Marvel had enough mutants to fill five monthly comic books, and yet the show narrowed the list down to seven regulars. Across two seasons, X-Men ’97 has taken advantage of a public more conversant in superheroes to not only fill out its main roster, but to include two side teams, X-Force and X-Factor, and countless deep cuts in crowd scenes.

Yet, as much fun as it is to see big setpieces built around Gambit and Jubilee, as cool as it is to see Glob Herman and Dust get some screen time, X-Men ’97 still only has a handful of 30-minute episodes each season. They have to be judicious about who gets attention, and how they use it. All of which makes the appearance of Jamie Madrox the Multiple Man in the season 2 finale “Survival of the Fittest” disappointing. There must be more X-Men ’97 can do with its most versatile mutant, even on an overcrowded stage.

As a member of the government-sponsored team X-Factor, Madrox has been a constant presence throughout season 2 of X-Men ’97. Under the leadership of Cyclops’s brother Havok, X-Factor has been tracking down mutants. Even if good intentions drive their actions (an echo of the original team’s comic book motivations), X-Factor often clashes with X-Force and, in the finale, with the X-Men.

Those clashes lead to the scenes in “Survival of the Fittest” in which Madrox and his teammates fight against Gambit. Along with X-Force’s Cable, X-Factor is convinced that Gambit remains infected by Apocalypse and thus poses a threat. Gambit makes short work of Madrox’s teammates Wolfsbane, a teenager who can transform onto a wolf, and Strong Guy, who transforms kinetic energy into muscle mass. But Multiple Man gives the ragin’ cajun pause, creating numerous duplicates (or “dupes”) of himself to overwhelm Gambit. Yet, in the end, Gambit charges enough cards and knocks the dupes together, forcing Madrox to revert to a single person.

The fight scene isn’t terrible, at least from Gambit’s end. It may not match his heroics in the season 1 stand out “Remember Me,” nor even of Jubilee’s firecracker blast in the season 2 X-Force-focused episode “A Force to Be Reckoned With.” But it still lets Gambit flip around, charging up items and decking enemies with his staff. He comes off looking really cool, while Multiple Man looks like he has the power of making dummies for Gambit to knock over.

And that’s an utter waste. Granted, it took over 15 years for Marvel to figure out what to do with him after his first appearance in 1974’s Giant-Size Fantastic Four #4. During most of that time, Madrox worked as a lab assistant for scientist Moira MacTaggert on Muir Island, creating duplicates to better do tasks around the room. However, when writer Peter David took over X-Factor with issue #71 in 1991, the multitudes of Multiple Man became clear. It’s not just that David wrote Madrox as an unrepentant prankster, who used his powers and an unopenable jar of mayonnaise to trick his teammates. It’s also that the team’s first adventure involved fighting a rogue dupe who had aligned with Mister Sinister.

Over the years, David came back to Madrox again and again, making him the chief character in the revival X-Factor series from the 2000s. A rich, and often unpleasant series, X-Factor cast Madrox as a noir detective, someone who sent dupes around the world to gather knowledge, but who also refused to learn about himself. Madrox’s ability to create dupes allowed David to dabble with different genres, letting him redefine Madrox as a person as different aspects of his personality moved to the forefront of different dupes.

In the 2018 Multiple Man miniseries, Matthew Rosenberg and Andy MacDonald took Madrox’s powers into the multiverse. In his attempt to stop dying—something that happens a lot in X-Men comics—Madrox ends up altering reality, to the point that every person in the Marvel Universe is a duplicate of Madrox: Deadpool, Cable, Hulk? They’re all Madrox.

Obviously, X-Men ’97 doesn’t have the space or the time to make its most popular characters into variants or Madrox, or to even become a murder mystery show. But it does have space to do more with a guy whose power is to make copies of himself. That sort of thing should be a dream for an animator, giving inspiration for at least a cool fight sequence (like those enjoyed by Nightcrawler this season) if not a big set piece. He certainly deserves to be more than a punching bag generator for other, more popular characters. Surely, there’s room for a guy who can fill a room by himself, even in a show as crowded as X-Men ’97.

X-Men ’97 season 2 is now streaming on Disney+.