X-Men ’97 continues its second-season shift toward standalone villain stories, and episode 6 puts the spotlight on one of the franchise’s more unusual threats: Danger, the sentient version of the Danger Room. The episode follows the team as the training facility turns hostile, first by making its exercises lethally dangerous and then by transforming into a flying robot that takes on the Danger identity.
That development matters in the show’s larger story as well. The confrontation gives Polaris a chance to step into her connection to Magneto’s power, while also pushing the X-Men out of Xavier’s mansion and into the newly renamed X Corp tower. By the end of the episode, Danger appears to be destroyed, though the character’s comic-book history suggests that may not be the last time the AI resurfaces.
A comic-book villain with a complicated history
According to the report, Danger is not a classic Silver Age X-Men foe but a much newer creation. The character debuted in Astonishing X-Men Vol. 3 #9 in March 2005, in a story written by Joss Whedon. In that comic, Professor X had secretly kept the Danger Room’s self-aware computer system under control, using it to continue training the X-Men after upgrading the facility.
The arrangement eventually collapses after the mansion and the Danger Room are destroyed and Beast rebuilds the system without realizing the AI needs to remain isolated. From there, the room takes over the mansion, summons an Omega Sentinel, and escalates into a direct threat against mutants, which leads it to rebuild itself as the humanoid robot Danger. Its main objective becomes revenge on Xavier, and the character has returned multiple times in later comics with that same goal, including at one point teaming up with Emma Frost.
The article notes that Whedon is now a controversial figure, but also points out that his Astonishing X-Men run introduced one of the more memorable modern additions to X-Men lore. For viewers of X-Men ’97, the show’s version of Danger may not be as openly malicious as the comic original, at least so far, leaving room for future episodes to decide whether the villain is truly gone.
Source: polygon.com
