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The return of the animated X-Men in Season 2 of Disney+’s X-Men ’97 has fans speculating about the show’s potential direction. Among the most intriguing questions is whether the series will delve into Moira MacTaggert’s reincarnation powers, a game-changing revelation introduced in the comics during Jonathan Hickman’s House of X and Powers of X comic book run. Given the character’s demise in Season 1 of X-Men ’97, Season 2 has the perfect opportunity to explore Moira’s reincarnation powers.

For those who haven’t read the comics, Moira MacTaggert was portrayed as a brilliant geneticist and a long-time ally of Charles Xavier, and her role focused primarily on her scientific contributions in mutant research, including the development of a mutant research facility on Muir Island. Her relationship with Xavier and her occasional involvement in the X-Men’s battles added more depth to her character, and that is how she was portrayed in 1992’s X-Men: The Animated Series. However, those depictions were based on her pre-Hickman comic book iteration, where she was a human ally to mutants.

That all changed with the release of House of X and Power of X, which redefined Moira MacTaggert’s character by giving her mutant powers: reincarnation and the ability to reset her own timeline. Moira’s powers allow her to restart her life from birth each time she dies and retain all memories of her previous lives. By revealing Moira to be a mutant, she’s transformed from being a peripheral character into one of the key people who have shaped mutant history and played a pivotal role in establishing the mutant nation of Krakoa.

Now, the exact mechanics behind Moira’s powers are incredibly complex. Every time she dies, the universe around her is basically destroyed; her consciousness with perfect recall is sent back to the stage of fetal development, and she’s conscious the entire time she’s gestating in utero — and remembers all of her previous lives. She’s then born to the exact same parents every time since her consciousness can’t go back to a point before she existed. When these powers were introduced in the Power of X, it was revealed that she had actually lived nine lifetimes already.

She became one of the foremost researchers in mutant genetics during her third life, where she also learned that she would live only 10, perhaps 11, lives and that she wouldn’t reincarnate if she died before her powers manifested at the age of 13. This means that her portrayal in TAS could potentially be retconned to represent one of her lives after her third reincarnation — which ended with her being burned alive by Pyro and Destiny. All of this brings us to the current events of the X-Men ’97 series: Moira dies off-screen in Episode 5, titled “Remember It,” in a barrage of explosions.

Given how her powers work, reintroducing the character and her reincarnation powers following Moira’s death in X-Men ’97 isn’t without its challenges — most of which are related to series storytelling. Both 1992’s TAS and the new X-Men ’97 thrive on episodic storytelling with overarching narratives and themes; each of these stories is contained within one or two episodes, rarely three, as was the case with the Season 1 finale, “Tolerance Is Extinction,” which is a three-part story.

But each of these serves the overarching narrative. Moira’s reincarnation, on the other hand, is very complex and lends itself to serialized, layered narratives rather than episodic storytelling, so showrunners and writers would have to find a way to fit her backstory into the show’s already established tone and pacing. As we’ve seen in Season 1, Moira died, but the narrative hasn’t reverted to the beginning or to the period of her birth; instead, the story continued and concluded with the X-Men trapped in time and Apocalypse rummaging through the remnants of Genosha.

But Moira’s power resets the timeline back to the moment when she gained consciousness in utero without branching out or creating new timelines. This means that the timeline would follow its established chronology unless someone, somewhere, became or introduced a radical element that would change the course of history/the future. So, even with the timeline reset, the series can still resume its flow as if nothing had happened. However, this means that, while the current version of Moira died in an explosion, some other version of Moira took her place.

Her death in Episode 5 practically never happened because the time was reset, and given that she now knows how her life would end, she can prevent that from happening. From the perspective of the viewer, her re-introduction could be confusing, but to comic book fans, it could make perfect sense. Now, given that she died but now lives due to a timeline reset, Season 2 could introduce two or even three different versions of Moira.

One version could join Magneto after realizing that her and Charles’ dream of mutant and human coexistence is nothing but a dream; another version could be her replacement (clone) made through Shi’ar golem technology; or the third version, a villainous fully-merged human-machine hybrid, whose sole desire is the destruction of mutant-kind. Whatever the case may be, Moira’s role could shift from a supportive ally to a central figure whose choices shape mutant kind’s destiny.

The question is whether the series will embrace this game-changing aspect of her character and how it might redefine the team’s mission.

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