When a small yet growing number of the population are gaining superpowers once they hit puberty, with certain abilities making some of these people a danger to those around them, what do you do? Apparently, you build giant robots designed to hunt and kill these abominations called “mutants”.
I’ve never understood why the humans of the Marvel Universe believe these robots or Sentinels are the key to dealing with mutants. Almost every time, the Sentinels end up being just as dangerous to the humans who built them as they are to the mutants they’re programmed to eradicate.
One example is Bastion, the main villain from season 1 of X-Men ’97. His existence set off a chain of events that nearly wiped out all of mankind. To understand where I’m coming from, we have to revisit a 1995 episode of X-Men: The Animated Series, and a time-traveling robot called Nimrod.
Nimrod, The Most Dangerous Sentinel Ever Built
Nimrod isn’t your typical Sentinel stomping through city streets.
He’s an advanced Sentinel from an alternate version of New York in the year 2055. What sets Nimrod apart is he can analyze and adapt to nearly any mutant power in real time. His shapeshifting abilities are so advanced he can disguise himself as a human. He can also repair himself, travel through time, is super strong and is nearly invulnerable. Nimrod represents the future of Nimrod technology.
He appears twice in X-Men: The Animated Series. The first time, he follows Bishop back through time during season 1’s “Days of Future Past” storyline. The second time happens in season 4’s “One Man’s Worth,” where Master Mold sends Nimrod back to 1959 to kill a young Charles Xavier before he can form the X-Men.
Bishop, along with alternate versions of Wolverine and Storm, travel back to stop Nimrod. They succeed in saving Xavier and restoring the timeline. Nimrod is destroyed but his remains survived. A fragment of his technology infected a college janitor who happened to be nearby that day. That janitor would later have a son named Sebastion Gilberti.
The world would come to know him as Bastion.
The Virus That Wore a Human Face
As a child, Sebastion discovered he could communicate with machines, which made him feel like an outcast. He couldn’t explain it and he didn’t understand what it meant. He just knew he was different in a way that made him feel isolated from the people around him.
Charles Xavier assumed he was a mutant and offered Sebastion a place in his X-Men, but Sebastion’s mother rejected Xavier’s offer due to her dislike of mutants. Despite loving her son, her anti-mutant ideology probably influenced how Sebastion saw himself, along with fueling a hatred towards mutants.
When the X-Men destroyed Master Mold, the AI-powered supercomputer designed to create Sentinels, it uploaded itself to create a new being: Bastion. Now he wasn’t just a human born with Sentinel code. He was a full-fledged human-machine hybrid. As Jean Grey later discovers, Bastion is a descendant of every Sentinel, from Master Mold to Nimrod, evolved into something more threatening than his predecessors.
How Bastion Nearly Destroyed the World
Determined to eliminate mutantkind, Bastion laid out multiple plans that culminated into a much larger initiative: Operation Zero Tolerance (OZT).
He secretly orchestrated a massacre that killed thousands of mutants on Genosha, a safe-haven for mutantkind. He kidnapped Magneto, who everyone thought was killed in the attack, and kept him prisoner.
Allying himself with Mister Sinister, Bastion used his Sentinel technology to transform countless humans into partial machines called Prime Sentinels. These human subjects (some were converted against their will) were injected with a Techno-Organic Virus turned them into sleeper agents that would only activate if they detected a mutant threat.
Just as Bastion sicced his Prime Sentinels on mutantkind, Valerie Cooper betrayed him by freeing Magneto, who then unleashed a global EMP that threatened to kill all life on Earth. After Jean Grey used the Phoenix Force to revert the Prime Sentinels back to being baseline humans, Bastion integrated the Techno-Organic Virus into himself. Now a juggernaut with wings, Bastion came up with a new plan: drop Magento’s space station Asteroid M onto Earth to wipe out mutants and humans.
In response to the threat the asteroid posed, President Robert Kelly activated the Magneto Protocols by ordering the launch of two missiles to destroy the asteroid. This did not stop the asteroid. Instead, the missiles destroyed Asteroid M’s gravitational core and sent it plummeting towards Earth.
Thankfully, the X-Men were able to save the planet but they were sent to different periods in time. Meanwhile, Bastion was either disintegrated in the destruction of Asteroid M or was sucked into the singularity powering the asteroid. In other words, we have no idea if Bastion is still alive or not.
Sentinels Always Come for Humans, Too
The point I’m trying to make about Bastion is that humans’ hatred towards mutants makes them blind to the fact that the Sentinels do not work.
They are not, in the long term, a reliable solution to the “mutant threat”. Some alternate timelines have shown Sentinels enslaving humankind along with the mutants. The reasons range from believing that all of humanity needs to be under their control to protect them from mutants, or to force humans to create more Sentinels.
In the original 1990s cartoon, the Sentinel program spirals out of control almost every time it’s activated. Master Mold turns on Bolivar Trask, his own creator. The “Days of Future Past” timeline shows a world where Sentinels control everyone, including humans. When a machine is built to neutralize threats, of course it’s not going to stop at mutants. It will eventually decide that humans, too, are a potential threat that needs to be addressed.
That’s probably a side effect of fearing and hating what you don’t understand. The more you fear or hate something, your ability to think critically goes out the window.
All five seasons of X-Men: The Animated Series and season 1 of X-Men ’97 are available to stream on Disney+. Season 2 of X-Men ’97 premieres on July 1, 2026.
