Former X-Men ’97 head writer Beau DeMayo breaks silence to talk about that incredible latest episode

[This post contains spoilers for “Remember It,” the fifth episode of X-Men ’97.]

The sudden departure of Beau DeMayo, the former showrunner, head writer, and chief creative architect of Disney revival project X-Men ’97, has cast a strange shadow over the critically acclaimed animated series in the weeks since it first launched. The fact is that DeMayo’s work on the series (fast-moving, emotionally intelligent, deeply reverential to both the fun and the angst of mutant life) is not only so good that Disney is reportedly holding on to his scripts for its already announced second season, despite whatever unnamed tensions and conflicts led to him “parting ways” with the company right before the series was released—but also so personal, and pointed, that his absence from the critical conversation surrounding it has been especially notable. Now, though, that silence has been broken—and while DeMayo isn’t addressing his departure from the series, he was willing to get on social media this week to talk about the motivations and ideas behind “Remember It,” the show’s stand-out fifth episode, and one of the most affecting episodes of television of 2024 to date.

Like most of X-Men ’97, “Remember It” is diverse in the comic book reference pool it’s pulling its stories from. But its primary inspiration is pretty obviously Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s “E Is For Extinction”—the initial run on Morrison’s celebrated New X-Men, in which the island state of Genosha is destroyed in a devastating Sentinel attack. Joyful until it isn’t, DeMayo’s version of the story lingers in the country long enough to make it clear, exactly, what the coming death robots will take from its people: A homeland where peace and safety are so abundant that its people have the luxury of taking the right to live for granted, for once.

It’s one of the weird ironies of comics publishing that Morrison’s story of a massive, reality-shifting terrorist attack was published immediately before September, 2001, and not in its aftermath; in his letter, published on Twitter, DeMayo draws direct parallels between the destruction of Genosha and 9/11, citing the ways American culture and tolerance seemed to curdle in the aftermath of the attacks. We don’t want to put words in DeMayo’s mouth, so we’ll just post the letter here, but suffice it to say that when he writes that “Remember It” was “the centerpiece” of his idea to build something new out of his experiences with the original X-Men cartoon, it’s easy to believe.

Up until this week, X-Men ’97 was mostly willing to play nice with its “What if that Saturday morning cartoon you loved as a kid came back?” conceit. (Did you see that episode where Jubilee gets trapped in a video game by interdimensional entertainment executive Mojo? Delightful silliness, with just a dollop of heart.) “Remember It” drops that mask, though: It’s raw, gorgeous, heartbreaking, an X-Men cartoon for modern minds and grown-up hearts. It remains extremely bizarre that a creator so clearly in tune with his own show is now operating at this weird remove from it, but for now, we’ll take what we can get.