If there’s one thing the X-Men love, it’s getting caught up in time-travel shenanigans. Dating back to the formative 1981 comic storyline Days of Future Past by Chris Claremont, science-fiction tropes like alternate timelines and temporal displacement have been a mainstay of the franchise. X-Men ’97 season 2 is no exception.
Season 1 ended with the X-Men getting split up and transported through time by an unknown force, with half the team stuck in the ancient past and the other in the distant future — and both eras suspiciously coinciding with crucial moments in the life of the iconic mutant supervillain Apocalypse. Season 2 picks up shortly afterward, with episode 1 focused on the 40th Century, where Jean Gray, Cyclops, Wolverine, and Morph team up with a group of rebels known as the Askani to end Apocalypse’s tyrannical rule.
The leader of the Askani, who calls herself Mother Askani, is one of the most mysterious characters in X-Men ’97 season 2 so far. Even though much is revealed about her by the end of the three-part premiere, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about her true identity and purpose in the Marvel multiverse. It’s possible we’ll learn more later this season, but in the meantime, for any impatient X-Men fans, a few answers likely lie in the original comics — and in the article below.
Major spoilers ahead for X-Men ’97 episodes 1-3.
Who is Mother Askani in X-Men ’97 season 2?
Mother Askani shows up almost immediately when the X-Men arrive in the apocalyptic 40th Century. Voiced by Gates McFadden (Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation), she’s a wizened leader of the rebellion who wears a cloak that conceals most of her face. Her powers are also unspecified, though she seems to have a mix of telekinesis and telepathy similar to Jean Grey (including a possible connection to the Phoenix Force).
It’s later revealed that Mother Askani is the one responsible for bringing the X-Men into the future (and the past). Sensing that they were about to die in the season 1 finale, she saved their lives and transported them to two key moments where they might help defeat Apocalypse once and for all.
By the end of the episode, Apocalypse is defeated and flees to the 1990s. Mother Askani sends the X-Men after him with some help from Nathan Summers, aka Cable.
That’s pretty much all we know about the character so far, but if you’re familiar with the comics, you already know the truth about Mother Askani, and where X-Men ’97 may be headed next.
Spoilers ahead for 40 years of X-Men comics, and maybe the rest of X-Men ’97 season 2.
Mother Askani’s true identity in X-Men ’97, explained
Let’s cut to the chase: Mother Askani is actually Rachel Summers, Cyclops and Jean Grey’s superpowered daughter from the apocalyptic alternate reality introduced in Days of Future Past.
Rachel Summers first appears in the 1981 comic The Uncanny X-Men #141 by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, though her identity as X-Men royalty wasn’t revealed until later. In Rachel’s reality (known as Earth-811), a political assassination ramps up anti-mutant efforts, which ultimately backfires for both mutants and humans when it leads to the Sentinels taking over North America. In this timeline, Rachel ends up in a mutant concentration camp where she meets various X-Men including Wolverine, Magneto, and Kitty Pryde.
Eventually, Rachel uses her powers to send Kitty to the past to undo the assassination and change the future (in the movie Days of Future Past, it’s Wolverine who goes back in time instead). But even though the plan works, her future doesn’t change. Instead, it becomes a branching timeline of the multiverse.
So Rachel does the only sensible thing: She travels back in time and joins the X-Men. After spending a while in the present as a member of various teams, she winds up displaced in the timestream yet again, leaping forward 2000 years into a future where Apocalypse has conquered the planet. So she does the only sensible thing, again: start a rebellion.
Rachel/Mother Askani eventually brings her “brother” Nathan Summers/Cable into the future to help in the fight against Apocalypse and makes a clone backup just in case. She also brings Scott and Jean’s consciousnesses into the future where they enter into other host bodies and spend a decade raising their son. Eventually, this plotline ends. Rachel and Scott return to their own timelines, while Cable beats Apocalypse and then travels even further into the future to save his sister “Rachel.”
This all resolved by the year 2000 (in our own IRL timeline), and since then, Rachel Summers has mostly existed in the X-Men’s present timeline. She’s joined various teams and played a role in various comic book arcs since as recently as 2020.
We doubt X-Men ’97 season 2 will make it all the way to the year 2020, but based on Mother Askani’s comic book history, it seems likely she’ll be revealed as Rachel Summers and transported back to the 1990s by the time the season finale has aired.