X-Men '97 Season 2 keeps sneaking casting news into the episodes themselves, and the latest one is a fan favorite a full decade overdue for a comeback.
Mild spoilers ahead for the season's second episode!
Psylocke makes her debut in Season 2's second episode (the first three dropped together on Disney+ this week), arriving alongside Cable's team. Her voice? Naoko Mori, the Welsh-Japanese actress best known as Toshiko Sato on Torchwood and Sarah on Absolutely Fabulous. As The Direct spotted, there was no press release and no announcement. The reveal simply plays out in the episode and its credits.
That makes Mori the first actress to play Psylocke anywhere since Olivia Munn suited up in X-Men: Apocalypse back in 2016. And if you remember that era, Munn was one of the most dedicated people on that production. She lobbied hard for the part, trained with katanas for months, and showed up with the psychic blade ready to go.
Then the movie handed her a handful of lines and a henchman role, and that was that. Fans have spent the last decade since arguing the character deserved a real showcase. Now she's finally getting one, but on the small screen and in animation, instead of on the big screen in live action.
For those that don't know her comic history, Psylocke is one of Marvel's strangest and most fascinating cases. Betsy Braddock debuted all the way back in 1976 as the twin sister of Brian Braddock, Captain Britain himself, before Chris Claremont brought her into the X-Men as a telepath.
The version most fans picture, though, is the purple-haired ninja with the psychic knife, a look born from one of the wildest retcons of the era: a 1989 storyline that left Betsy's mind in the body of the assassin Kwannon. That's the Jim Lee-drawn version that defined the 90s, the original animated series era this show grew out of, and it's the design Season 2's promo art has been teasing.
In today's comics the two women have long since been separated, with Betsy carrying the Captain Britain mantle while Kwannon operates as Psylocke. Which of them is X-Men '97 giving us? We'll have to keep tuning in for the answer.
The quiet rollout is also becoming a pattern for this show. This is the same season that recast Kang as Rama-Tut with John de Lancie, also with zero fanfare, in an episode we covered earlier this week. No press tour, no exclusive reveal, just the work showing up in the episodes. As someone who sat through years of casting announcements engineered into week-long news cycles, I find it genuinely refreshing that they're changing things up!
Why does this one matter beyond the trivia? Because a real performance attached to a real actress is the difference between a background cameo and a character Marvel intends to USE.
Psylocke arriving with Cable's squad suggests an actual role in the season's story, and with mutants headed for the movies in a few years, every character the animated side establishes now becomes part of that conversation. We've already seen casting chatter for the film side start to bubble up, and a decade of pent-up Psylocke demand is exactly the kind of thing studio casting departments should notice.
Munn's version never really got a fair shot at the character, which is a shame because I was genuinely excited to see her on the show. I spent years watching her on G4TV's Attack of the Show and I doubt there are many of us gaming or computer nerds that WEREN'T excited to see her on the big screen.
I'm curious what your take is... Is Psylocke finally getting her due in animation? Who should carry her into live action when we finally get an X-Men movie? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!
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