X-Men ’97 To Give Fan Favorite X-Factor Character a Bigger Role in Season 2

One of the great pleasures of the original X-Men animated series was the way it more or less faithfully translated the comics to the screen. The character designs mimicked Jim Lee‘s dynamic art style, and Marvel epics such as the Dark Phoenix Saga, The Mutant Massacre, and Days of Future Past came to Saturday morning TV audiences with Chris Claremont’s dense plotting more or less in-tact. At the same time, the downside of this approach meant that some things needed to be trimmed to translate decades of comic book storytelling into a handful of seasons, leaving some important characters on the sidelines.

The continuation show, X-Men ’97, started to address this problem in its first season by bringing founding New Mutant Roberto Da Costa a.k.a. Sunspot into the fold. If the first poster for season 2 is any indication, the series will continue that tradition by giving Lorna Dane, the mutant known as Polaris more attention.

Polaris isn’t entirely new to viewers of the animated series. She popped up in the season 3 episode “Cold Comfort” as the girlfriend of Iceman Bobby Drake and a member of the government-sponsored mutant team X-Factor. That episode deftly combined the stories around Lorna’s first appearance in 1968’s X-Men #49, written by Arnold Drake and penciled by Don Heck and Werner Roth, with the early days of her time in X-Factor, as rebooted by Peter David and Larry Stroman. But Lorna has a richer, more complicated history that will lead to some great moments in X-Men ’97.

As seen in “Cold Comfort,” Lorna is a green-haried mutant with magnetism powers. She initially hides those powers (and her green hair), but eventually embraces them to become a member of the X-Men. Although she first dates Iceman, she soon bonds with Cyclops’s brother Alex Summers, a.k.a. Havok, and the two leave the team together to pursue graduate studies. Eventually, they make their way back to the team, but Polaris is quickly possessed by the incorporeal mutant Malice, who turns her into a cruel supervillain. The team fights to save her, but fails to do so before having to fake their death and hide out in the Australian outback for several years.

Eventually, Havok and the X-Men are able to free Polaris from Malice’s grasp and she rejoins the team, only for Alex to leave to rebuild the mutant island of Genosha. However, when Professor X and Cyclops recruit Havok to lead the new X-Factor, he and Polaris reunite once more.

Again, much of that appears in “Cold Comfort,” but Polaris’s story has gone on since then, in a way that will certainly inform X-Men ’97. While Alex was presumed dead (really in another reality and dating a nurse named Annie, a truly terrible storyline), Polaris learned what many have all wondered: that she is, in fact, the biological daughter of Magneto. Seeking to build that connection, she goes with Magneto to help him govern Genosha, but when an Omega Sentinel destroys the island and kills her father, Polaris becomes darker and crueler.

The destruction of Genosha was adapted into season 1 of X-Men ’97, which means that season 2 will likely pick up Lorna’s story there. While there will certainly be some exploration of how she carries her father’s complicated legacy, season one also ended by setting up a different version of X-Factor, as Bishop and Forge go off to find the time-displaced X-Men. Given that Lorna’s wearing her X-Factor uniform in the poster, we’ll likely see her join them, especially since she was in a variation of that line-up in the comics.

However X-Men ’97 plans to integrate Polaris, the comics have provided the writers with enough material to craft a complicated character, one who deserves to stand alongside the likes of Rogue, Wolverine, and Magneto.

X-Men ’97 season 2 arrives on Disney+ in mid-2026.