4 Creepy and Baffling Implications of the X-Men Films
There's a lot going on in the X-Men film franchise. We got one trilogy that ended on a terrible, fan-souring note, then a second series of movies focusing on the main character of the original trilogy, then a reboot that recast all of the main characters as younger versions of themselves in the 1960s, and now a sequel to that reboot that combines the original cast with the reboot cast while simultaneously confirming that all seven movies are actually part of the same continuity and buying back everything that happened in the Brett Ratner penisburp that was X-Men: The Last Stand.
While Days of Future Past does a good job of connecting all those disparate dots, there are still a fair amount of plot threads left dangling in the wind, along with a litany of unanswered questions and things that are straight up presented to us but never explained (such as "Why the hell are all the files in Peter Dinklage's office kept in a vertical cabinet 5 feet off the ground?"). But what's most disturbing are the storylines implied by the movies, which manage to be deeply unsettling without ever getting a minute of screen time.
Professor X Stole a Young Man's Body and Mutated Him into an Exact Physical Double of Himself (And Is Secretly Addicted to Drugs)
At the end of X-Men: The Last Stand, we see that Professor X has somehow managed to transfer his consciousness into the body of a brain-dead coma patient. So even though we saw him get ripped apart by Jean Grey's series-destroying celestial black magic, we at least got a little relief in knowing that he would live on, albeit in the body of some guy whose family was about to receive some challenging news.
"So our family gets to upgrade from Dale to Patrick Stewart? Sweet, fuck Dale."
Except at some point between The Last Stand and The Wolverine, Professor X somehow managed to completely mutate that man's body into an exact physical double of his former self. He took a middle-aged man, stole his body, and aged him 40 years. And unless that man was paralyzed as well as brain dead, the professor also saw fit to sever his new body's spinal cord for reasons that we will never be able to understand. Maybe he'd grown so used to the wheelchair, he just forgot how to walk.
And it's not like we can chalk that up as a non-canonical scene that was thrown in after the credits for fun. When Days of Future Past begins, Professor X is totally still hairless and in a wheelchair, and nobody addresses it. He successfully assimilated another human being, body and spirit, and this never manages to come up in conversation.
"My God, does this mean Cyclops could have made it back, too?"
"Cy-who?"
Also, at the beginning of The Last Stand we see that Professor X is walking around and totally friends with Erik in 1986, when they go meet Jean Grey as a young girl at her parents' house. So that means he's still secretly juicing on Beast's power-dampening serum from Days of Future Past, operating at half of his psychic ability for the past decade or so just so he can strut around in a pair of dapper trousers. Constantly dosing that miracle drug must be the reason why he went from looking like Lieutenant Dan to Telly Savalas in the span of 13 years. Although Beast himself apparently forgot all about the serum, because by 2014 he's just furry blue Kelsey Grammer 24/7.
Mystique Gets Impregnated by That Weird Red Satan Mutant and Gives Birth to Alan Cumming
At the end of X-Men: First Class, Mystique abandons the X-Men and decides to join Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, which includes the teleporter Azazel, aka Zoot Suit Satan. You may have noticed that this guy looks exactly like a red version of Nightcrawler from X2. They even have the same mutant power. So it stands to reason that this guy and Nightcrawler are related, right?
A murderous creeper with weird orgy friends is totally the type of guy you want raw dogging you.
Well, as some of you comic fans might already know, Mystique is Nightcrawler's mother, which means that, at some point between joining Magneto's A-Team at the end of First Class and plotting to destroy Peter Dinklage in Days of Future Past, she and Zoot Suit Satan had howling, multi-colored Nightcrawler-producing sex.
"I tossed her a Winter's Bone."
And as we know from X2, Nightcrawler grew up in the Berlin circus because he didn't have a family.
So, Mystique got knocked up by Zoot Suit Satan, gave birth to a blue demon baby, and left it in a dumpster somewhere in Germany because she just, like, totally wasn't ready to be a mom yet.
Wolverine Is Dangerously Obsessed With Jean Grey Despite the Fact That They Never Had a Relationship
No one has been more tortured by the death of Jean Grey than Wolverine. Ever since he immediately began hitting on her the second they met in the first X-Men, Wolverine hasn't been able to get her out of his mind. Mystique briefly tries to tempt him by changing into Jean in X2, so we know his doleful devotion is obvious to everyone around him. He even dreams about Jean's lingerie-clad ghost coming to visit him in The Wolverine, only to wake up the next morning with the weepiest erection in history.
"Shit, I need more quarters to wash these sheets. Again."
The thing is, at no point in any of the movies do Wolverine and Jean Grey have a relationship. There's some tension, sure, and they kiss a few times, but she ultimately decides to stay with Cyclops. Jean and Wolverine never get together. At all. He's essentially just a dangerously obsessed guy who has spent the past several movies mourning the fact that he never got to have sex with her while she was alive.
"Alive? No ..."
The rest of the X-Men were probably wondering why Jean Grey's underwear drawer seemed so empty when they cleaned out her room, and the answer is in a shoebox underneath Wolverine's bed.
Magneto Found Time to Father a Child During His Nazi-Slaying Rampage
X-Men: First Class begins with Magneto in 1944 when he's around 11 or 12 years old, imprisoned in a concentration camp and forced to watch Kevin Bacon shoot his mom to death. Then we flash forward to 1962 and see Magneto as a young man in Geneva, Switzerland, knee-deep in a murder-trail of Nazis that he's been on ever since the end of the war. It's clear from the serial-killer meticulousness of the line chart tacked to his fucking wall that he has killed dozens of former Nazi officers and agents to track down Kevin Bacon. There is no question that this has been his life's sole pursuit for the past 17 years.
"It keeps taking me more than six connections to find him."
Now, skip forward 10 years to 1973 in Days of Future Past, where we meet the plucky young Peter (Quicksilver), a silver-haired petty criminal who uses his mutant power of running really fast to break Magneto out of a prison in the Pentagon. As he is escorting Magneto out of jail, he casually says, "So you can control metal? My mom knew a guy who could do that once." And we see Magneto pause, and then give the slightest reaction of recognition. This is a nod to the comic fans in the audience, who know that Quicksilver is Magneto's son.
Now, Quicksilver is obviously in his late teens to early 20s, which would mean that he had to have been conceived sometime in the 1950s. In the comics, Magneto was briefly married to a gypsy woman, and their relationship resulted in Quicksilver. But that's clearly not the case in the movies, because when we see Quicksilver, he's living in a townhouse in New York with his mother, who seems to be American.
"Maybe if your kid had a positive male role model, he wouldn't have such shitty taste."
Which means that teenage Magneto, fresh out of the concentration camp, somehow found his way to America and knocked up some lady in New York before going all the way back to Europe and resuming his blood vengeance quest against the Nazis and Kevin Bacon. Either that or he ran into some American exchange student or a vacationing teenager and sent her back to the states with a belly full of hypersonic mutant bastard. Remember, this is right in the middle of Magneto cutting a gory path of retribution through every Nazi he can locate. There is no way that sexual encounter was anything less than dark and terrifying.
Tom's mutant power was on display when he bought the X-Men trilogy while knowing full well it contained X-Men: The Last Stand. Read his novel Stitches and follow him on Twitter and Tumblr.
