'X-Men '97' Finally Gave Jubilee A Perfect Hero Moment Fans Will Love
X-Men ‘97 (2024) Season 2 has already delivered more than a few great moments for its characters with its first three episodes. But the standout so far has been seeing Jubilee hold her own against a group of guards in a mutant-holding ship.
Set to Veruca Salt’s “Volcano Girls,” it’s one of the best fights in Marvel Animation and really proves why fireworks powers are cool and shouldn’t be laughed at. But beyond giving Jubilee her time to shine, it also shows us how much she’s changed since we first saw her in 1992 and what we can expect going forward.
Jubilee Finally Gets Her Moment In ‘X-Men ‘97’
With Jubilee joining X-Force but still questioning their methods, she’s ultimately left to be captured by X-Factor and held against her will in a cell among other mutants. However, by appealing to Polaris, she gets her chance to escape and helps the other mutants as well.
Cornered by guards, she puts on her headphones and proceeds to fight the guards one by one with only her fireworks shining a light. It’s reminiscent of the hallway fight from The Batman (2022) but with much more of a punk edge that highlights how much Jubilee loves her job.
While this isn’t a one-take fight, we see her get creative with her powers, with one ability calling back to an earlier episode in Season 1. She manages to hold back X-Factor and calls her team, helping the mutants escape as well as herself with an epic fireworks show. For the entirety of the episode, everyone older than her doubted Jubilee, and she proved them wrong without changing who she is.
Jubilee Was Never Taken Seriously In The Past
Ever since she appeared in the first episode of X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-1997), Jubilee has never been taken seriously. Granted, she was a kid in those early years, but she’s matured so much more since then and gained more control of her abilities.
She had many episodes centered around her, but never any that genuinely celebrated who she was behind her cool glasses and bubblegum bubbles. What we saw was a young woman who knew how to take serious situations and bring them down to her level, not to diminish them but to control them.
It’s fun to see that this is what we get when Jubilee is given her time to shine, and it makes you want even more. A lot of X-Men ‘97 centers around evolution and growth, and Jubilee has embraced this change faster than any other character on the show. But she’s also deserved it most because she was always treated as the character the kids would like most.
Even though that’s a given, it doesn’t mean that’s all she should be, and she has her own skills worth seeing. The only problem is that we don’t know if it will happen again any time soon, but we do know that when we see her again, she won’t be the same kid.
Jubilee Is No Longer A Kid After Her Epic Fight In ‘X-Men ‘97’ Season 2
For as great as her fight scene was, and it was awesome, it also meant a major change in her character. For the entire episode, we saw her morals challenged as she was never going to murder, and she definitely wasn’t going to abandon anyone, even if it was for the greater good.
Rather than stooping to the level of Cable, Archangel or X-Factor, Jubilee proved to everyone that being a hero isn’t outdated. She took on her opponents and won, got a hold of her team using the training they gave her, and freed captured mutants without breaking a sweat.
Jubilee proved that she wasn’t a kid anymore and that she deserved respect. Just because she was quiet and didn’t take things seriously on the outside didn’t make her incompetent. Instead, she’s the most resourceful of them all and could easily defeat anyone just because they don’t see her as a threat.
X-Men ‘97 Season 2 has proven that it’s a show that understands its characters, and giving Jubilee her hero moment is all the proof you need to believe that. Now, it’s only a matter of time before characters like Beast or Morph get theirs.
