Headscratchers / X-Men: Days of Future Past

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Politically Correct Shapeshifting

• I can't believe this hasn't been asked yet, but why did Mystique take the form of a woman on that army base? That'd stick out like a sore thumb in most of American history, and she'd carry no authority.
  • She only did that after breaking Havok and the other mutants out of the tent, to escape during the confusion. A lower-ranking female aide would attract much less notice under those circumstances. When she first arrived she appeared as a high-ranking male officer who did have authority.

Why not just have someone else shoot Trask?

• If you shoot Trask, then the Sentinel program is dead. Also, Mystique isn't persecuted and her DNA isn't stolen.
  • Mystique is just a placeholder mutant. If some other mutant kills Trask, then the same thing would happen.
  • Not really. They state fairly flat-out that it was Mystique's shapeshifter power that gave the Sentinels the ability to adapt. Any other mutant would advance the program, yes, but it was explicitly Mystique's DNA that advanced them as far as they did.
  • Because Charles is ridiculously idealistic. His main concern may be about Raven, but he still thinks that the governments of the world should be persuaded to choose not to build the Sentinels instead of mutants just assassinating their inventor. Hank and Logan have too much respect for Charles (present/future) to overrule him on this one. And Erik does intend to kill Trask eventually.
  • The problem is two fold - One, Mystique killing Trask starts the festering antagonism that keeps the Sentinel program alive, along with various other anti-mutants projects and political movements (Mutant Registration Act, etc); And Two - Mystique's unique DNA gives the US government the means to eventually create the doomsday weapon that is the final mark of Sentinel. If you kill Trask without giving them Mystique's DNA, you don't really solve the problem, because the US government still starts pumping money into combating mutants, which will eventually either create a weapon just as bad (Or worse) then the Sentinels, or they capture Mystique at a later date and get what they need anyway. Stopping the assassination all together prevents the bad future, while changing the circumstances of it just pushes the bad future back a decade or two.
  • You're forgetting that Trask already died in the original timeline too. The Sentinels go ahead if he dies. It's shown in the scenes with the government that a lot of people are sceptical towards Trask's ideas. It's not until Raven and Erik's very public fight that they give him the green light - after Raven has already infiltrated a peace summit and attacked several people. We know she had good intentions, but it looks like a terrorist attack to the public. And any attempt on Trask's life when he's preaching his anti-mutant sentiment will look like a terrorist attack too. In order to truly stop him, you'd have to destroy all his research. And the best way to get that done is for the government themselves to shut it down and put him in prison. The situation that results makes it look as though Trask's Sentinels just went rogue and nearly killed a bunch of innocent people. That's enough to discredit him and have all his research shut down.
  • There's also the fact that they already have Raven's DNA by the time Charles can get to her. Trask is merely the guy in charge; there are hundreds of other scientists working on the same program, and they can easily go ahead with the Sentinels if Trask gets killed.

Xavier time travel

• The main reason that Xavier himself isn't sent back is because his mind would be destroyed by traveling that far. Yet later on he does just that and more (he travels FORWARDS in time and then back). Why didn't that destroy his mind?
  • Because he didn't send his mind into his far-past self. He was simply riding the pre-existing connection in Logan's mind.

Kitty's powers

• How is Kitty able to send people's consciousness back in time?
  • It's probably intended to be an extension of her phasing ability. As there's neither a Jean Grey nor Scott Summers by the time of the "Bad Future," it wouldn't have been possible to use Rachel, who performed the same task in the comics. It could work if you consider that she's not phasing through matter, but through time, instead.
  • It's almost certainly an extension of her phasing powers. Only instead of phasing people through objects, she's phasing a person through their past selves, essentially phasing their consciousness between two points through the material between them. Her "ordinary" powers work by phasing her into an object via contact with it, right? Her time power works by phasing a person's mind (not their brain) into their mind via contact with it (i.e. all the points it has existed). This is why the film refers to it as "stretching", because she's phasing Future!Logan into Past!Logan through every instance of Logan between Future and Past. Which, when you consider there are a theoretically infinite number of points between any two instances, explains why a normal person can only go back a few days at most. It also conveniently explains the San Dimas Time and Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory , because the Future! is phased into the Past!, physically integrating with it.
  • Budgetary reasons and star-centered reasons. Ellen Page is relatively hot as a star. No reason not to use her in a movie at this point. As for adding in a new character, they probably just wanted to stick to characters with cool-looking powers and fan demand like Bishop and Blink.
  • The other answer is to connect it to the comics since Kitty was originally the one to be sent back.
  • The other other answer is that bringing in Rachel essentially says that Scott and Jean definitely ship up years prior to the events, so no more Love Triangle subplot with them and Wolvy in future films.
  • That has nothing to do with it. Scott and Jean were both dead for two decades when this movie takes place and they died in The Last Stand, where they were shown to never have had kids. Rachel's existence is straight up impossible; not including her has nothing to do with a Love Triangle subplot.
  • That could be it, but it just bothers me that they didn't just create another mutant for the job. Or have it as an extension of Xavier's powers since his powers are related to the mind anyway. This would make the conversation between himself more justifiable, and also give him some thing to do in the future aside from sit next to Logan.
  • Other than the above-mentioned fandom-pleasing/mythology gag reasons, you can easily handwave it like they do so often in the comics: someone like Sage unlocked the ability for her in the intervening years.
  • To be able to phase would mean being able to understand and control both position and velocity of molecules. Doing that would mean one could, from ones current position, backtrace the position of a molecule at any given point in time. Toss in some current unexplained mysteries of science such as why time has a particularly flow to begin with, and there's your handwave.
  • Kitty in the comics can phase into different planes of existence, explicitly noted as a quantum tunneling effect (she shifts through reality rather than just adjusting her own density). Based on that she could theoretically shift through time as she does through space and use her ability to phase others to achieve the effect she does.
• It's funny but in a way this really isn't much of a headscratcher when you think about it. It actually fits in perfectly with secondary mutation. After all, look at Emma Frost. Wilder of two different powers which have almost nothing to do with one another.
  • And Kitty is supposed to be a Teen Genius in the comics, and she's implied to be so in the films too (she's reading a book on physics in the first, quotes Einstein in the third and is teaching a class in this one). So it's not out of character for Kitty to research and test what her own powers are capable of.

Cosmic Retcon

• At the end of Days of Future Past, we know that X-Men: The Last Stand never happens, which also means neither does The Wolverine, as it was directly driven by the events of X3. Also, Jean Grey is alive and well, which causes problems with the ending of X2: X-Men United. On the other hand, Rogue is still sporting her skunk stripe, which was caused by Magneto's machine in the original film. Not to mention Rogue is at the school at all, as is Wolverine. So that begs the question: What parts of the original trilogy's continuity are still in continuity? Did the events of X-Men and X2 still happen, only in Broad Strokes with a few tweaks such as Jean not dying saving the others in X2? Or is there some other explanation for details like Rogue's hair and both her and Logan still being X-Men? Or should it just be chalked up to the MST3K Mantra?
  • The entire timeline from 1973 onwards is potentially different. It's possible that all 5 movies (the trilogy and the 2 Wolverine films) still happened but with some tweaks, it is also equally possible that nothing resembling any of those movies happened. Too much has changed; instead of a quiet assassination of Trask which changed people's attitudes behind the scenes, there was a massive public spectacle in which a stadium was dropped on the White House and a mutant tried to execute the President on live television. There isn't really any way that a world that experienced that version of events could end up as the world presented in X1 where the mutant issue was only just coming to the forefront of public awareness.
  • I don't think the early revelation of mutants necessarily changes the timing of the Mutant Registration Act that drove the plot of the first film. Mystique saving the president's life probably built much more sympathy for mutants among the general public than they had during X1 originally, but that doesn't mean that Magneto isn't stirring up trouble in the interim. It's clear from Mags's attempt to assassinate Tricky Dick that Logan's efforts hadn't succeeded in turning him aside from his mutant supremacist path (perhaps Hank wasn't entirely wrong: History was to an extent self-correcting, even if the worst parts of the future were averted). Attitudes towards mutants are naturally going to be divided between extreme opposition, full support, and moderates filling the scale in between. It's completely possible that by 2000, Magneto's actions have pushed enough of the moderates to the other side for the Registration Act to be drafted. Now, perhaps in the new timeline the Registration Act is intended to protect mutants as much as it is to keep track of them, but it doesn't make it any less short-sighted, and something that would drive an extremist like Magneto into a more violent response, thus leading to the events of X1.
  • I don't know that there's any evidence that any of the original trilogy are in continuity any more. Yes, the X-Men still end up existing, but that's because Professor X has Cerebro and could still have eventually found them all, albeit in a totally different way than we've seen. Rogue has her skunk stripe, but that could easily have been due to the fact that she's twenty years older in that scene than she was in the original film, and her hair was always going to turn that color, she just wasn't prematurely aged by Magneto's machine. My key evidence for the fact that none of the films happened is the fact that Jean is alive. Even if The Last Stand never occurred, she would still have turned into the Phoenix and had to be killed. But, it IS implied she became the Phoenix due to her exposure to that machine in the first film: therefore, if she didn't undergo her change, that means she didn't get exposed to the machine, and probably means the events at the dam in X2 didn't happen either. There's other things that must have changed, like the situation with Stryker, and the fact that Mystique may not want to work with Magneto like she did in the first trilogy after he tried to kill her, but I think mainly Jean is our strongest evidence that the timeline has been completely rewritten.
  • X1 can easily still be in continuity. Magneto clearly hasn't given up his anti-human bent, and just because mutants may have more public sympathy in the new timeline, doesn't mean that there still won't be people actively prejudiced against them (remember just how long it took the Civil Rights movement to gain success in real life following the Civil War and Reconstruction) and there's 30 years in which something can happen to still lead to the drafting of the Mutant Registration Act, which was the catalyst of the original film's plot. It may not play out the exact same way, but the important background is still potentially there. As for X2, Stryker is still out there, and still has a son who will be revealed to be a mutant and who Charles won't be able to help (he doesn't have Future!Logan to warn him about Jason Stryker in advance; all he had was Logan's memories of these events, and Logan didn't know about Jason). There's nothing to suggest that Stryker lost his position alongside Trask, and if Past!Logan doesn't have Future!Logan's memories (as was implied by the "blip" the first time he saw Stryker), there's no one to warn him about Weapon X. And as for the Phoenix, all we need is some minor change in events that leads to Jean surviving Alkali Lake, in which case she'll have the Professor available to help her control it (also: Xavier got a glimpse of Phoenix!Jean from Logan's memories, so this time around he may be prepared for its emergence after Liberty Island. If Jean is in full control of the Phoenix during X2, she may stop both missiles and prevent the damage to the Blackbird that led to her death in the original timeline). So yes, there's actually quite a few ways that at least the first two films can still happen in Broad Strokes, but some minor change affects the final outcome, all for-want-of-a-nail.
  • The positive public sentiment toward mutants could very easily change Stryker's own sentiment when Jason's powers develop. Without the resentment from Stryker, there will be no resentment back from Jason; without Jason's resentment he will not torment the Strykers with visions and cause Mrs. Styrker to kill herself, thus not sending William over the edge. That alone would invalidate a huge amount of the original timeline, and that's one of the minor butterfly wings. At this point we are just as in the dark about the 50 year history of the new timeline as Wolverine is at the end. Which also effectively makes Wolverine an amnesiac again, even further restoring the status quo :)
  • The success of the Civil Rights campaign certainly didn't change racists' attitudes towards blacks. Likewise, even if the general public sentiment becomes sympathetic towards mutants, it will not change the bigots. Jason driving his mother to suicide may have led Stryker to taking a flying leap off the Slippery Slope, but it's pretty clear from Days and his dialogue in X2 that he was already getting on his sled to start down it even before then.
  • Jean and Scott not being dead has, arguably, the easiest explanation: In the original timeline, her transformation into Phoenix was tied to how Charles had chosen to deal with her incredible powers (sealing them behind a psychic barrier). Depending on how much of Wolverine's memories he had access to, he now knows that's a risky solution before he ever meets her and can take a different tack when the time comes.
  • Bear in mind that we were having the exact same conversation about continuity when First Class was first released, where its many continuity errors made it look as if it was a reboot, not a true prequel (just go and look at its headscratchers page) and it's the same here. It is best to just think of the original films as a different timeline and leave it at that.
  • Right now it is open to interpretation on whether the original trilogy happened at all or if only tweaks occurred to alter their outcome. It gives future writers and Fox time to decide if they want to use the altered timeline to reboot the franchise and not be tied down by the original trilogy or if they want to still keep the original trilogy a part of the franchise and just make small tweaks to make them fit into the new timeline. We can hope by the time X-Men: Apocalypse is released that Fox will give us more information on where the original trilogy stands in the new timeline.
  • It is also incredibly likely that The Wolverine happened Broad-Strokes, as Logan would still have been at Hiroshima in 1945, and Ichiro Yashida would still have wanted Logan's power for his own. He may still have been summoned to Japan, he may still have lost his healing factor for a while, he may still have fallen in love with Mariko, and he may still have defeated Ichiro. The only things in that movie that were dependent on the previous movies was his adamantium skeleton being an obstacle to extracting his bone marrow and all of the emotional stuff about Jean, which could easily be replaced with some other problem.
  • Here is pretty neat theory. It states that the cutoff point is were Shaw (Not existing in the X-men 1 prologue) finding Erik, killing his mom around 5 past nine in the morning, his anguish causing the worlds most brilliant mind-reader Charles (Germany is six hours ahead of New York) to wake up at five past two in the morning), going downstairs to meet Raven, ending up adopting her as his siter. In Universe A (X-men 1-3) he kept on sleeping, she went on her marry way and their interractions in Xmen 1-3 makes sence.
  • The main problem with this hypothesis is that Days itself establishes the critical point of the timeline as being Raven's assassination of Trask. Wolverine was only sent back to this point in time, meaning that everything that happened up to the day that Future!Logan woke up in his past body happens in both timelines. The only way that this could work is if, as in the case of the original Days comic book, the timeline of the original X-Men films, Origins, The Wolverine, and the Bad Future scenes of Days are already part of a different universe from First Class (specifically, the "bad future" of the Days comic is Earth-811 as opposed to the mainstream Earth-616, which had a second point of divergence in which Jean didn't die after manifesting the Phoenix). However all the films are stated to occur in Earth-10005 by Marvel's own reckoning, meaning this is not the case. Therefore there can not be a second point of divergence as suggested above.

Quicksilver on the team

• Why didn't they keep Quicksilver on the team? He would have been very useful in getting Mystique out of the building before she shot Trask without the public finding out about mutants.
  • Simple, really; he's got a Story-Breaker Power and he would have ended the plot far too quickly. In-story, they probably felt that it wasn't right to ask him to get involved any further in something that really had nothing to do with him and could possibly get him killed. Plus, he might well have backed out, anyways; he only helped break Magneto out of prison for a thrill.
  • Frankly, you could also ask the same thing about Alex Summers, considering his control has improved to the point that he no longer needs the suit and he now has military training. I know he was not technically on the new team, but it would have been a pretty simple matter for the script writers to have him meet up with them; otherwise, it seems like a bit of a waste of money getting his actor back for a three minute scene.
  • I think they went to the trouble of showing Havok's survival and escape (after Singer dropped a bridge on everyone from First Class that wasn't in his X1 or X2 casts) for a simple reason: Cyclops is back, and it's intended that he meet his long-lost brother in a future installment. As for why he wasn't called to help out, considering what he and a few others narrowly escaped from, I'm betting he didn't tell anyone where he was going. When the X-Men haven't been a thing in a few years and the government is hunting you to dissect For Science!, you run and don't look back. ... which results in you not learning that the X-Men are back and that it's less "the government" and more "one Mad Scientist who was tossed in jail when they found out he was mad" until X4.
  • Doesn't work, in the movie-verse Havok is Cyclops' father, not brother. As for why he wasn't involved in the plot, he has no means to get in contact with the rest of the team and likely spends the rest of the film getting back into civilian life.
  • Havok's relationship with Cyclops in the Earth-10005 universe has not been officially defined yet, not even by Word of God. That Alex is Scott's father is a popular fan theory, but it's still purely Fanon.
  • You could just explain them being brothers who were born in the 1940s and 1970s respectively by their dad being a Space Pirate and time dilation being involved.
  • "Apocalypse" clearly states that Alex and Scott are brothers, so that settles that.
  • The reason why Quicksilver doesn't stay is because they asked him to help with breaking Erik out, which he does. Asking him to do more would be like Moving the Goalposts. Besides, it's not like they could keep him if they wanted him to stay, anyways. He's so powerful that the only way you could keep him on the team is if he decides that's what he wants to do. He's a teenager with Super-Speed, and until he sees the threat the Sentinels and Magneto pose with his own eyes, all he's really going to care about is dicking around and stealing things.
  • Quicksilver's skillset also wasn't needed anymore, and his "help" might have hurt their cause even more. Charles and Logan's mission after breaking out Erik was to find Mystique and convince her not to shoot Trask and perform a Face–Heel Turn. Quicksilver's no therapist. All he could conceivably do is knock Mystique out and take her far from Trask, but that wouldn't change her mind or sway her from her mission.
  • Perhaps it wouldn't bother Erik, but I doubt that Charles would be willing to place another teenager at risk unless it was 100% necessary. Nothing has turned out well for his prior students: Hank has been living as a hermit for 10 years, Alex and several other young students have been shipped off to fight in Vietnam, Raven chose to ally with Erik and the Brotherhood after Cuba, and Sean was captured and killed by Bolivar Trask (either that or was killed in action in Vietnam and then autopsied by Trask, which isn't much better). Putting yet another teen in serious danger probably isn't something that Charles even wants to consider or think about.
• Ok, let's say they failed to entice Pietro to go on an adventure with giant killer robots, and government conspiracy, because, as everybody knows, teens hate that stuff. Fine. But. What about later? When the Sentinel program began developing and they started killing mutants. Surely, then Pietro would get that proof of the Sentinels' threat. Nothing we've seen about them puts them even close to being able to kill him, so how come the whole conundrum wasn't solved in a millisecond? He could sabotage the production, steal/destroy the schematics, kill/kidnap/threaten people involved, and noone would stop him. How did the Sentinel program survive him?
  • Logan mentioned that Pietro does eventually work with the X-Men.
  • By the time it became obvious what was happening, the whole program would just be too entrenched for one person, no matter how fast, to shut it down. Sure, he could sabotage production facilities — but there's going to be quite a few of them (redundancy is a fairly basic move, especially when you know that dangerous mutants will want to shut you down), and chances are their whereabouts will be concealed. Similarly, the schematics would be backed up multiple times and distributed. He'd have to know where to look just to find the records of where everything was kept. He was probably a huge thorn in the Sentinels' side in the Bad Future, but by the time he realized he was needed, it was too late for him to be more than that.
  • More superficially, maybe Charles just didn't want to put a child in harm's way. The trip to the Pentagon was a desperate measures move. Maybe he just didn't like the idea of taking a teenager halfway across the world. And as others have said, the plan was to appeal to Raven as a brother and convince her not to kill Trask. Quicksilver can't help with that.

JFK's abilities

• Xavier thinks Magneto killed JFK. (How else could the bullet curve?) Magneto says he was trying to save JFK because he was a mutant, and failed. Really? What was his power? Is it related to why he was assassinated?
  • His power isn't important to the story, only that he may or may not have been a mutant. Plus, it's hinted that Mystique is actually responsible for killing him.
  • No, it's not. It's very explicitly stated that Mystique has never killed or attempted to kill anyone before Bolivar Trask, and she had no grief with the President, whatsoever. It's left completely blank whether Kennedy's assassination had anything to do with him being a mutant, but apparently whoever commissioned the murder knew well enough to track down and capture Magneto, who was trying to prevent it.
  • Well, the viral marketing campaign for the movie did strongly imply Mystique was involved, or at least that Magneto thought she was, but I don't know that that would be canon to the film itself. To say she had no beef with Kennedy may not be accurate, though, considering the whole Cuban Missile Crisis thing in the last movie. Nevertheless, there isn't any evidence one way or another as to what really happened that day.
  • Marketing has no bearing on film canon at all. Keep in mind that marketing for a film is generally done with no input from production at all. This is why we get comedies like Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero marketed as straight action films.
  • Mutant or no mutant, JFK would still have been JFK. Perhaps whoever killed him did not even known about him being a mutant, or about the mutant's existence at all.
  • Erik could have been lying. When you think about it his story makes less and less sense. Magneto just happened to learn JFK was a mutant, that someone was planning to kill him, was there to stop it, but got stopped before he could do it. Magneto had reasons to kill JFK for the Cuban Missile Crisis as Raven did.
  • Charles clearly believes he's lying about trying to save him, hence his "You must think me a fool" line.
  • After that line Charles continues saying that Erik always did say that humans would go after the mutants, so that is more a reference to how foolishly optimistic Charles must have appeared to Erik, something he also brings up in his conversation with older!Charles.
  • Well if we assume that Magneto is telling the truth and Kennedy was a mutant I think his powers would have been charisma related, perhaps something to make him supernaturally likeable.
  • If someone were going to kill JFK for being a mutant, it wouldn't matter whether his power was a threat to them or not. Just being a mutant has always been enough for mutant haters.
  • Word of God from screenwriter Simon Kinberg is that he had some form of persuasive telepathy.
  • That line doesn't make a great deal of sense in all honesty. If JFK was a mutant, and it was known enough that Magneto could discover it (but somehow not Charles) then it changes a LOT of the subsequent character rationales. At very least, it would call Bobby Kennedy's assassination into question as well, which the characters don't remark upon. It works best if you just believe Magneto did it as a response to the Navy firing on him in First Class, and chose to lie to Charles for whatever reason because the latter didn't have his mental powers at the moment.
  • There is no reason why Erik would lie about it. This is a character who is practically bursting with self-righteousness. If he killed Kennedy, he would have immediately answered Charles with a speech as to why he had to die for the good of all mutants. It's not like he would gain anything from lying to Charles at this point. No, the only reason he might not tell the truth would be if he did kill Kennedy, but later somehow changed his mind and was ashamed of making the wrong choice.
  • JFK having some form of super endurance would be plausible, considering his heroics after PT-109 was sunk.
  • It's pretty heavily implied to be a lie so that Xavier would be more open to accepting him and bringing him along. He claims to have been trying to deflect the bullet but was stopped but this doesn't make any sense since the bullet is known to have curved mid flight but also still hit its target (how could Erik both deflect the bullet but fail to change it's course?. And to make the point of this, when he goes after Mystique he does the exact thing he claimed he didn't do, curve a bullet to hit his target. Writing wise it's nearly outright admitting that he lied about trying to help earlier.
  • Or it could be an obscure historical in-joke. JFK really did have a medical secret he scrupulously concealed from the public, but it was Addison's Disease, not some secret mutant power. Possibly Magneto and/or Raven uncovered that Kennedy was hiding something related to his health and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
  • JFK faced an extremely uphill road to the presidency, due to his relative inexperience, youth and Catholic background. His considerable charisma is often cited as the main reason he got elected. So it definitely works In-Universe, as to helping affirm Erik's claim that Kennedy had mutant powers of some type. And he did nail Marilyn Monroe at the height of her 200 watt sexiness...

Nothing Metallic

• For some reason, there are mechanisms like elevator and electrical lightings in 1970's that can work without ANY metallic part.
  • Well, they have semi-intelligent armed mechas without any metallic part. An elevator must be an easy thing.
  • Sure. And how did the lights work again? You need electricity for such a things to work. I don't really see non-metallic conductor in 1970's and also, Magneto controls electromagnetism, so he can control electricity too. Movies forgot about this!
  • The movies have simply changed Erik's powers. He controls ferromagnetism, not all magnetism like in the comics. Furthermore, I'd need to look it up to be certain, but I'm pretty sure there all metals that conduct electricity without being magnetic. I know for a fact that ferromagnetism doesn't affect all metal; I think it's only iron, nickel and cobalt, as well as, obviously, any alloy consisting of them.

Quicksilver and Bullets

• How is Quicksilver able to move bullets around with his bare hands? His power is super speed, not stopping time altogether. The bullets should have the same kinetic energy that they always have and bore through his hands just like they would in normal speed, only subjectively slower. It would have made more sense for him to block them with the various kitchen utensils laying around, rather than rearranging them like he was in The Matrix.
  • Bullet's can go through many things, as proven by Mythbusters, so using various kitchen utensils wouldn't have done anything.
  • Handgun bullets can't go through cast iron frying pans, and even lesser impact can be used to direct a bullet away from its path.
  • Peter is moving so fast that time (for him) stands still. He's moving way faster with more energy than a bullet (in fact he has to "slow down" to move them).
  • Average/regular bullet travel almost double the speed of sound, and even the plastic bullets are likely to travel only a bit slower than regular metal bullets so Peter would have to be traveling faster than the speed of sound as a teenager, something he didn't achieve in the comics for a while.
  • You also have to consider that he's not so much moving the bullets as matching their speed and redirecting them. He pushed all of them from their sides, and that requires far less energy that trying to stop them.
  • In any case, grabbing bullets "in the air" and taking them out of people's way is a long standing tradition of comic book speedsters, in both Marvel and DC.
  • This falls under Required Secondary Powers territory. Moving that fast would kill Quicksilver just from friction and inertia. The required secondary power is some form of super durability at least while he is in super speed mode.
  • These being plastic bullets fired from plastic guns, they're probably lighter and at least somewhat slower than conventional bullets anyway. Perhaps the sheer number of guards was to compensate for any reduction in lethality.
  • There's also the possibility that he was simply weaker and less skilled at the time. So he wasn't able to stop it like he could in the present, only re-direct it.
  • If you pay close attention in the scene you see that the bullets actually do keep moving, albeit very slowly. They're notably closer to the team by the time Quicksilver redirects them than at the start. And as said above, he's moving so fast that he's got a lot more kinetic energy than the bullets. Even so, just turning them slightly is extremely easy in his super-speed mode, while completely stopping them would take a lot of effort. Plus, as can easily be seen in the scene itself, he's a showoff.
  • It's a heck of a coincidence that all the bullets are in the air simultaneously, and only inches apart. They would all have had to have been fired within a span of microseconds.
  • They more or less are — there's six bullets in the air and six guards. They just all fired at the same time.

The Final Battle

• Was it really necessary for Kitty to keep Logan under after he was thrown in the Potomac? You could argue that they didn't know he would be out of commission from then until after the turning point, but Xavier clearly reacted to him beginning his fit, with implied recognition. They could have completely avoided the final battle just waking him up then and there!
  • It looked to me that while they knew something was clearly wrong, they weren't sure what it was. Xavier probably had Kitty keep Logan under on the basis that he might still be able to do some good.
  • And in each initial timeline, Kitty never breaks contact on her own. She seems to only wait until they can't wait any longer.
  • I figure it was an alternate timeline, with the best possible outcome being Raven never shot Trask, Logan is the "anchor" to that timeline, it had to be solidified when Logan "snapped back" essentiall, he isn't just pulling himself back, but that whole timeline, snapping back before the crux point would've changed nothing.

The Ending

• What was up with the ending (the 70-s part)?
  • Why is Xavier completely absent during the extraction of Logan?
  • If it wasn't him who found Logan via his powers, then how did they find him at all? I highly doubt anybody would notice him plunging into the river amidst all the chaos.
  • Stryker is Mystique... Why is she even there? Where's the real Stryker at that? Why are the cops just... giving Logan to Stryker? He's a person! What the hell does she want with him?
  • A person who was a mutant present for an attempt on the President's life. Even if he's innocent, the government would want him for questioning and the cops would easily swallow that.
  • I suspect the whole rescuing Logan thing was done by Charles and Mystique together. Basically to save the man that saved them all, both from what happened to him in the fight and from what Stryker would have done to him. And, remember, Stryker was working with Trask, very knowingly, including being there to assist him in selling the tech to the Vietnamese. Real Stryker, in this timeline, is in deep shit.
  • Stryker could, of course, turn evidence on Trask rather than go down with the ship. It's also possible his father was able to exert influence via the CIA to get him off the hook (I seem to be finding mixed information over whether Stryker, Sr. is still alive as of Days.
  • "Trask is arrested for selling military secrets." What? Is it just a scam to discredit him? But what's the point — the Sentinel program was cancelled, anyways. Otherwise what secrets, to whom, why would he?
  • This one makes sense, there was the scene where he pitches the Sentinel Program to the Vietnamese after being rejected by the Senate...
  • But Trask is a businessman, he doesn't work for the government. Why would it be illegal for him to seek funding where he sees fit, if the Senat rejected him?
  • Trask may have been involved with the Government a bit more than we have seen. He was present during the whole "off the record" bit in the Oval Office. The war was over, so they couldn't even claim he was helping the enemy of his country.
  • Selling weapons technology to Communist governments was a big no-no to any and all American corporations at the time, and could have led into charges of treason. The Cold War was still very much a thing at the time.
  • Trask selling weapons at a peace conference is a stupid move in the first place because it'd be a diplomatic scandal if either side shows interest in his ware at the conference site. It's surprising he is even allowed in there. Though it'd be more satisfying if Trask were convicted for unethical experimentation and attempt to kidnap American soldiers who serve in the war.
  • The fact that he made the deal at the peace conference (i.e. the war technically wasn't over yet) means that, yes, they could charge him with selling weapons to an enemy nation if they were inclined to throw the book at him (which they would be, after the fiasco with the Sentinels demo and the above-noted Dirty Communists thing).
  • Why is Charles letting Magneto go? Magneto is a criminal — he attempted an assassination and a coup, committed mass murder (ratings or not, there's no way Sentinels' barrage didn't kill all those people), and is guilty of massive property damage. The same goes for Mystique — I don't think refusing to carry out the assassination absolves you from responsibility, does it?
  • She did save Nixon's life and that of his cabinet despite having every reason to let Magneto kill them
  • Charles has always been an idealist at heart who likes giving his enemies second chances. That just paid off for him, given that he trusted Mystique to do the right thing. Plus, the film repeatedly states the importance of keeping hope. Giving hated enemies second chances is pretty damn hopeful. Call it what you want, but it's perfectly consistent with Charles' character and the themes of the film.
  • He has also seen and heard about his and Magneto's reconciliation in the Bad Future. With Charles' naturally optimistic personality and recent events taking a turn for the good, it shouldn't be surprising that he'd allow Erik to leave (especially if there's a threat to his life) with the hope that they could also reconcile or at least come to a truce in the near or slightly distant future. And the same probably applies to Raven as well, perhaps even moreso because of her recent actions and Charles' desperation to protect his younger sister in any way he can.

Mutants in the Ending

• Are we once again expected to believe that after mutants committed all those violent and destructive crimes, all the tensions are just going to disappear after some other mutants sweet-talked them out of it, but not apprehended the criminals? There's absolutely no way the Sentinel program wasn't carried on, in secret, with Trask's arrest as a cover up story.
  • Trask had tried to sell secrets to foreign enemies, and the spectacular, caught on live television, failure of his Sentinels makes him indirectly responsible for an attempt on the President's life and probably a couple other deaths. While they probably did start up some clandestine solution to future threats, it's perfectly feasible for them to be wary of any solution Trask had to offer.
  • The government could have put more money into alternate anti-mutant programs, like say Weapon X. Who knows how different that program might be in the altered timeline.
  • I guess that's a possible answer, though it seemed to me too that the story is unbelievably naïve to imagine that there wouldn't be more Anti-Mutant Safeguards put in place following the events of the movie. A Mutant Registration Act at the very least would be entirely believable - it wouldn't necessarily have to be sinister (though you could see why Magneto would think so), but all the X-movies have shown that mutants are potentially dangerous and that the only ones capable of dealing with them are other mutants, so keeping an eye on them seems like a damn good idea. Yet no only did the Mutant Registration Act not come to pass, but most people (apparently) forgot mutants existed!
  • There's no reason yet to automatically conclude that the Mutant Registration Act never came up in the new timeline, especially if we work from the assumption that the events of X-Men still occur in Broad Strokes, for which the Registration Act was the catalyst. There's still about 30 years between the ending of Days and the timing of the original film for something (say, Apocalypse) to happen that leads to the drafting of the Registration Act.
  • Another thing to consider is that mutants came out earlier in the new timeline. Even with all the acts of violence in previous Xmen films, things weren't horrible for mutant society, and actually seemed to be improving by Last Stand. Since the timeline was basically accelerated, it's safe to assume that they worked out some kinks in human/mutant relations earlier than last time.
  • On the other hand, we still don't know how Apocalypse's appearance will be affecting the timeline. Given that it's, y'know, Apocalypse, it's entirely plausible his actions will significantly ratchet up tensions between mutants and normal humans in the aftermath.
  • The important thing is that the Sentinels never got created. In that very public battle, it looks as if Trask's Sentinels were attacking the innocent people (he had no idea Erik had put metal into them so he could control them). So that discredits him and has his research shut down. So while the new future probably isn't a utopia, mutants are thankfully not being hunted to extinction by Sentinels anymore.
  • The Goverment does have a Task Force Designed to handle any Major Mutant Problems by the Time of Dark Phoenix.

Mutant Detectors

• Why aren't Trask's mutant detectors mass-produced and widespread? Or at least why aren't some crucial institutions like the Magneto's prison, or President's security equipped with them?
  • The detectors were apparently part of the Sentinel package. They wouldn't get them until after he'd gotten the proper funding.
  • Which is profoundly stupid for someone as apparently brilliant as Trask. You'd think that mutant detectors would've been much easier to push through, then giant killer robots.
  • Besides that, most of the world powers don't believe mutants to be a problem like Trask does.
  • And yet Trask himself doesn't have them installed in his own facilities or on the train that transports his mutant-hunting robots, and he almost never uses the one he carries with him, even after it had already identified a mutant infiltrator once, and he's aching to get his hands on said infiltrator, and he's supposed to be an anti-mutant paranoic. What the hell?
• Trask says that the detectors can pick up a mutant from half a mile away right? So how come it only reacts to Mystique when she is in disguise and doesn't seem to pick up the other 4 mutants (Charles,Erik,Hank and Logan) heading their way until they're in the room?
  • I think he only turned it on right then.
  • If the detector occasionally spits out false positives (perhaps the "identifies latent mutant genes as well as active ones" problem was already showing up), running it all the time in front of people he needs to persuade would risk discrediting the detector tech — and the Sentinels concept that depends on it. He'd leave it turned off unless he felt he needed to take that risk.
  • It appears to be a prototype. What he seems to be asking for is funding from the government so he can mass produce these things.

Plastic Guns

• They already have plastic guns. Awesome. They don't arm people outside his prison with them, or at least order the rearming once they know that Magneto escaped. Whaaaaaa?
  • Because they can't be certain when Magneto's going to show up next, and a rearming like that is going to take a lot of time anyway.
  • Also, someone had to have been re-armed with plastic guns, because Mystique takes one to shoot Magneto with and she was nowhere near his prison.
  • That someone was Stryker, the one person who would be prepared for such an eventuality.
  • Those plastic guns realistically represent probably at least 5 years of R&D into just what Magneto can and can't effect with his powers. At this time they probably don't have any more than the few his guards have at the Pentagon and they are probably prototypes. It takes them over 30 years before they have the capablility to field armies armed entirely with plastic in The Last Stand.

Hearing the fight

• In the Vietnam episode, while Mystique is trouncing the officers inside the tent, did nobody at all hear them fighting from outside? How is that possible?
  • It's a big tent supposedly for quarantine and they right next to an active airfield with helicopters constantly flying around. The noise from outside is going to be incredibly loud and easily drown out the fight.
  • This might be some sort of special secret base but the other troops are probably used to seeing and hearing weird stuff from the mutant team. With the extra secrecy, outside noise and the end of the war they either don't care or know not to ask too many questions. It is quite telling that the mutant soldiers are moved to the plane without much reaction from the other soldiers.
  • There's also helicopters taking off and landing, which would probably mute the noise somewhat.

Blind Washington

• How could no one in Washington see RFK stadium floating through the air?!
  • Um, they did. There were a few scenes of people reacting to the floating stadium, like the kids on the playground and the police chasing it. What you're probably thinking of is why no one at the demonstration reacted, and that's because they were distracted by the killer robots.
• Considering the speed of the floating stadium, there was plenty of time for the military to see it, freak out, and warn the president. (They should have been watching for something like this too, since they knew a metal-controlling mutant had recently busted out of a Pentagon prison.) That thing was making a beeline for the White House; they should have evacuated. The only way the Sentinels could have distracted them would be the scenes were out of order, and they actually started shooting people earlier than it seemed.
  • How do they warn him exactly? No cell phones or internet to rapidly spread the information. Once people saw it flying through the air, it would take at least half an hour for a news crew to get assembled and report on it. By which time, Magneto will have already dropped it on the White House.
    • You're kidding, right? Ever heard of non-cell phones? Or radios, for that matter?

Xavier alive

• Why is Xavier alive in the original timeline if he died in Last Stand... yes, it's implied that he transferred his consciousness to another body, but still how comes he is in his original body?
  • Because the braindead person he moved his consciousness to was none other than his very convenient identical twin brother, who has been in coma since birth because Xavier basically accidentally Mind Raped him in the womb.
  • And he was also paraplegic?
  • He fell down some stairs.
  • Of course he was paraplegic, he was comatose all his life. In Real Life, muscles atrophy. We should be surprised his hands worked.
  • But he had at least a decade to build the muscle back up...
  • I don't understand. What's "Last Stand"?
  • It's strange they didn't go with a simpler explanation: that Xavier just psychically projects the image of his original body over the new one.
  • Or that his paraplegia is a combination of muscle memory and a psychosomatic reaction amplified by his powers. Which would have then made the events in the past more plausible, if his spine had been healed in the interim (Advanced medical science in a world that had DNA scanners by the '70s? Another mutant, offscreen?) and his legs hadn't atrophied, but he still needed Hank's power dampeners to move.

JFK and curved bullet

• Xavier claims that Magneto killed JFK because the bullet curved. Magneto claims that he was trying to bend the bullet away from JFK to save his life. If Magneto is telling the truth, then wouldn't the bullet have missed JFK if he hadn't intervened? And if he started curving the bullet too late, unable to move it far enough to miss JFK, then how would anyone else know that the bullet curved? There wouldn't have been enough evidence to support a curving bullet in that range.
  • Spur of the moment decisions. There's no way for Magneto to have known what the outcome would have been until it had happened, so he couldn't have known if it was going to hit or miss. Chances are it probably would have missed if he hadn't intervened.. or at least hit something non-vital.
  • Magneto is probably lying. Why would he try to derail the bullet from its path, when he can easily make it stop in midair, or even send it back to the sniper?
  • Deflecting a bullet is easier than stopping or reversing it (redirecting energy slightly is always easier than anything else), and we don't know the precise situation. It could have been that a dozen CIA agents were tackling him while he was struggling to stop it, which would have messed up his concentration. There's no way to know for sure, as the only witnesses are him and the CIA, who probably wouldn't have the full story.
  • IRL, several bullets were fired at JFK. Maybe Magneto deflected the first bullet but couldn't stop the others (either from it exceeding his abilities or people intervening and breaking his concentration).
  • In real life, the first bullet missed. The so-called "magic bullet" or "curving bullet" was the second bullet, but it didn't kill JFK. It was the third bullet that hit his head and killed him.
  • Given that Magneto has a tendency to jump to the fatalistic approach, it's possible that he grabbed hold of the bullet too late (out of surprise), immediately tried to turn it back on the shooter (as is his nature), and was grabbed while he was turning it. That would be some fairly improbable timing on all sides, however.
  • IRL the so-called "Magic Bullet" is a myth anyway. The term is used sarcastically by conspiracy theorists who claim that the official reports have a bullet making two or three impossible ninety degree turns mid-flight, thus proving the official report is a lie. This is an erroneous claim, however, because it assumes Connally was sitting directly in front of Kennedy, requiring the bullet to curve to hit them both. Connally, however, was sitting in a 'jumper seat' unique to the presidential limo, and was thus sitting in the middle of the car, diagonal to the president. When taking that into account, the bullet is shown to have travelled in a perfectly normal straight line through the two men. What this means for Magneto taking credit for the bullet curving is unknown. Likely the movie just ignores the reality in favor of continuing to perpetuate the well-known 'magic bullet' myth.
  • Simple explanation: In the X-Men movie timeline, the bullet did curve.
  • I think the idea is that Magneto was surprised by the shooting and didn't react quick enough to stop the bullet from hitting JFK. He was tugging at the bullet during the instant it passed through JFK's body, which caused the bullet to curve. And what do you mean there wouldn't be enough evidence? Obviously they did an autopsy on JFK and they noticed that the bullet must have traveled along a curved path, because organs were damaged along that path. I think the idea is that most people thought this was a random oddity, but Xavier was smart enough to realize that Magneto must have been tugging on the bullet. He assumed that Magneto was trying to guide the bullet to do the most possible damage, but actually Magneto was trying to make the bullet miss JFK entirely but his reaction time was too slow.

Quicksilver's father

• Was this film trying to imply that Magneto was Quicksilver's father? Because I don't know that Magneto is old enough for that.
  • It did. And Magneto is probably around 40 already.
  • In 1944, he was what? 11? 12? So in the 70s, yeah. Early to mid forties at least.
  • The questionable one is Peter's younger sister, who is shown in a scene with her brother. While Peter could have easily been born several years before First Class, his sister appears to be no older than seven or eight-years-old at the most, which places Magneto firmly in jail at the Pentagon at least a few years before her birth. So, probably a half-sister through their mother while Erik is only the father of Peter, who could've been born in Erik's late teens or early twenties.
  • There's a deleted scene where a second sister is mentioned; presumably the younger sister is Polaris, and the unseen sister is Peter's twin.
  • It seems unlikely that the younger sister would be Polaris. In the comics, Polaris and Quicksilver are half-siblings through their father, Magneto (with whom Polaris shares a power set), and, as explained above, Magneto was imprisoned at the time younger sis would have been conceived. If the little girl is Quicksilver's half-sister, it must be on mom's side. While Mom could be a mutant herself (we see no evidence of that, but it's possible), it would be a ludicrous coincidence that she should pass on to her child the same mutant powers as were possessed by her lover of some years before the child was born.
  • Not sure about the comic books, but movie canon as explained in X2 states that the mutant gene is passed through the X-chromosome, so yes, powers come from Mom.
    • Not plausible, if Quicksilver got his powers from Magneto. It's girls who inherit their father's X-chromosome - that's what makes them biologically female - so if that was where the X-gene resides, every daughter of a mutant daddy should be a mutant, and none of their sons would. Conversely, half the children of a mutant mother, sons or daughters, would be mutants. Unless Peter's genetics don't match his apparent gender, his mom must have passed on the trait to him if that's where the X-gene lies.
  • The actual quote you're thinking of.
    Mrs Drake: This is all my fault.
    Pyro: They discovered that males are the one who carry the X-gene and pass it on. So actually it's [your husband]'s fault.
  • Mutant powers aren't necessarily passed on by blood. It all depends on what the X-gene grants in terms of powers. Why is Pietro a super-fast mutant and his twin a Reality Warper when their father simply has control over magnetism? Sure, in some cases you get similar powers from father to son (like Wolverine and Daken), but you can also get instances of mutants fathering or mothering children with wildly different powers(my earlier example of Magneto's children, for example.).
• As for the original point, Apocalypse confirms that Magneto is Quicksilver's father.

Trask's travel speed

• How did Trask get from Paris to the White House so quickly?
  • He's already invented giant killer robots; maybe he invented Concord earlier as well.
  • The only plausible explanation is that he took a flight immediately after the event happened, and got to the White House as soon as he landed. This would give American broadcasters just enough time for themselves to get the video footage for local news channels to report upon. Back then, they didn't have the internet or high speed communications back then, so many stories still didn't get reported until hours after it happened... of course, I'm not taking into account that they probably had the means to just directly record footage as it aired back then too, and I don't remember if the broadcaster was speaking in an American or British accent.
  • More time is actually passing than we realise, because the film cuts to the important events. For example Raven checks herself into a hospital, gets stitched up and recovers. I can't remember the exact order of things, but the peace summit happens in the mid-morning. Raven is in the hospital by the night. And Trask is at the White House the next day. It's the same amount of time it takes for Logan, Hank and Charles to get back to the manor roughly - so it's a little tight but still plausible.

Sabretooth

• Where is Sabretooth in the original 1973? This was back at a time when Wolverine and he were brothers who spent every waking moment together. He didn't think it was a bit odd that Logan vanished without a trace? Also, whilst we are on the subject why not recruit Sabretooth's help? Again, he was a good-ish guy at the time and probably would have helped if asked and, from a story point of view, it would have made a nice link to X1 where he was Magneto's henchman.
  • Creed was already beginning to show the violent tendencies that ultimately drove him and Logan apart at this time, though it is a bit tough to reconcile the beginning of Origins with the setting of this film, considering Creed and Logan were both clearly shown to have fought in Vietnam and were recruited there by Stryker. I think much like X1 and X2 after history was changed, most of Origins should be considered part of continuity in Broad Strokes only, as much of it had been retconned even before Days was released (Xavier walking in the early/mid-80s, Emma Frost as Silver Fox's younger sister, Logan fighting in Normandy during WWII, etc.).
  • The whole point of having Beast's serum let Xavier walk was to clear up that continuity error of Xavier walking in the 80s. In the original timeline he obviously kept taking it until at least 1986 when he recruited Jean, whereas in the new timeline thanks to Logan he stops in 1973. Logan fighting in WW2 Europe has not been retconned at all.
  • Replying to the above, what makes you think Singer cares about those continuity errors when he rather blatantly disregarded the X-Men films he didn't work on (and used this movie to basically undo everything about X-Men: The Last Stand)? It's far more probable that Singer just does not care about the plots of the two movies he wasn't involved in and used the serum to create some character development for Xavier and stop the plot from being over in five minutes, rather than a half-assed effort to explain why Xavier was walking around in two movies he had nothing to do with and no reason to care about, while also doing nothing about the fact that Emma Frost was introduced in Wolverine Origins as a young girl, yet was killed and cut open in the backstory of Days of Future Past. Or that Wolverine has never met Stryker up until Paris after the war in Vietnam ended, yet Stryker recruited him during the conflict in Origins. Even if we accepted that explanation, it falls flat right away as it's explicitly mentioned that the drug instantly starts blocking his powers, so for him to be able to use them to read Jean's mind he would have to be taking them in low dosages, but Days establishes that even at the bare minimum, Xavier can barely move when his powers start to kick in.
  • He wrote all five movies out of continuity, including the two that he directed. This movie explicitly settles numerous continuity errors with previous films. In The Last Stand scene, Jean read Xavier's mind, not the other way around. Emma in Origins is never once said to be Emma Frost. And again, as shown in this movie, Emma Frost was long dead by then, anyways (another example of fixing continuity errors). As for why he would care about cleaning up the plot lines of movies he was not involved in... because he is the showrunner for the franchise going forward and wants to put his house in order. Also, let's not forget that the "Xavier walking in the 80s" continuity error was actually created by First Class, which Singer was the producer of.
  • There's no reason to think that Logan and Victor were joined at the hip or inseparable during their century together. When Logan had his '48 Panhead motorcycle fresh off the line for instance, there's no reason to think Victor also had one.
  • To answer the original question: when Wolverine first awakes in 1973, he is in bed with a woman, so the reason Creed is nowhere in sight is fairly obvious. Then Wolverine immediately drives to X-Mansion and spends several following days flying all over the world with X-Men. Maybe Victor went looking for him but never managed to catch up. As for why not recruiting him, remember that Logan lost his memories about him and nobody else knew that "he was a good-ish guy at the time" in the first place. The only conceivable way to shove Origins into the original continuity that I can come up with though, is by moving the brothers' recruitment to later date and some other conflict that US troops participated in.
  • US troops were in Vietnam till 1975. A 1975 recruitment in Vetnam gives Logan and Victor 4 years with Team X before Logan leaves in 1979, 6 years later in 1985 Logan gets his adamantium and loses his memory he then lives for 15 years as an amnesiac drifter till 2000 when X1 happens. How is any of that "shoving" Origins into the timeline? It all lines up and since we know that things like Gambit's timeline placement (in the '80s) are going to be kept for the next movie, we have to assume this is how it went.
  • As far as Emma in Origins, maybe she was Emma Frost's daughter, which would explain their both having a diamond form.

Quicksilver's Headphones

• Aside from cinematic entertainment, what would be the point in Quicksilver putting headphones on and listening to music? The whole "Time in a Bottle" scene was great for the audience, but the whole scene happened in less than a fraction of a second — not long enough for his music player to even mechanically connect and begin playing music.
  • It's shown that Peter can accelerate other people if he's touching them, so maybe however his powers work also extend their influence to his cassette player when he uses them?
  • Perhaps, but he can move other people because he's using his speed to move external objects that are not part of his being. It's more likely that he would have to directly speed up the player through his own physical input for that to work out.
  • Not only that, it's a cassette, it's analog you can physically speed it up what would stop him from just fast forwarding thus making it normal to him sped up?
  • The boy hacked a Pong cabinet to play at his speed. A tape player wouldn't be much harder.
  • Are you kidding? Cassette players are mechanical devices with moving parts and friction to worry about. Accelerating it to the kind of speed he was at for long enough to play that little snippet of song would likely cause it to burst into flames, or at the very least the tape would snap from the strain.
  • A lot depends on how his powers work. The kitchen scene shows Quicksilver moving normally while everything slows down around him. Also, the fact that he's able to move Magneto at such accelerated speeds without him tearing every ligament and muscle in his legs (as Quicksilver is moving at speeds beyond what would be remotely possible for a normal human's body) and only needing a supporting hand to the back of his neck to protect him from the sudden acceleration suggests it's far more complex than Quicksilver just moving extremely fast, perhaps even some sort of local Time Dilation.
• Were portable cassette players even available in 1973? And if so, what about those tiny earbuds?
  • Yes, earbuds were available then (and going back into the 60s.) The Walkman, however, was not. BUT, according to Word Of God, the backstory they developed was that Quicksilver stole a Sony prototype. Anachronism fixed!
  • What he's wearing actually bears a strong resemblance to the Stereobelt◊, invented by Andreas Pavel in 1972.

Sentinel Program a Secret for Fifty Years

• How is it that, besides a brief cameo at the beginning of The Last Stand, the characters had never heard of or at least mentioned the Sentinel program before the ending of The Wolverine, when the danger was already imminent? Something as significant as the Sentinels should have come up before that. Days of Future Past shows us that the first Sentinel prototypes were already built and functioning in the 70s, and they were even announced on national TV (although that may have already been a consequence of the altered timeline). Are we supposed to believe that, even though they captured Mystique and experimented with her at the same time they released the first prototypes, they waited over 50 years to release them, especially with the havok Magneto had been causing during all that time?
  • Trask was the brains behind the whole thing... Presumably, with him dead, the project was stalled and it took a long time for other scientists to really figure out the technology necessary for mass deployment of Sentinals.
  • Captured and took samples from, not captured and perfected the process. The implication was that it took them a long time to figure out how to adapt Mystique's abilities for use in Sentinels. Presumably, not unlike the comics, there were other prototype generations...that the X-Men and/or Brotherhood made short work of over the years.
  • I always took the cameo in Last Stand as a sign that the X-Men faced Sentinels in the movie universe, just off-screen. Xavier programing a giant robot in Danger Room session seems really random unless they faced one generation of Sentinels. It probably took 50 years for technology to advance enough for Trask Industries to make the mutant-adapting Sentinels.
  • It's not unreasonable to think that the Sentinel program would be dusted off and put into action after the events of the Last Stand. Think about how much global security and anti terroist operations have increased and changed since 9/11, in the Last Stand Magneto picked the Golden Gate Bridge and used it as a weapon to stage a mutant terroist attack then Jean literally tore Alcatraz Island and everybody on it apart with her mind. Of course things are going to escalate from there.
  • The movie makes it clear that Trask was inspired by the ending of X-Men First Class, where the USA and USSR team up against the mutants, and that he believes that he can unite all of humanity against the mutants and bring about an era of peace. The ending of First Class also contains two other key events: Xavier getting paralyzed, and Xavier and Magneto having their falling out, neither of which had happened yet when they went to recruit Jean Grey during the flashback in Last Stand. So no, they didn't exist in that timeline.

Connection with The Wolverine

• Remember that post-credits scene in The Wolverine? We saw Magneto and Professor X seek Wolverine out in present-day Japan, but Days of Future Past is made up entirely of dystopic future scenes and 1970s scenes. Where do the two films connect?
  • Given that the post-credits scene is set around 2014, and Days is ten years after, they're recruiting Wolverine for the fight that's just about to begin, with the future scenes of Days depicting the end of the conflict.

White House ignorance

• How can the White House not know about mutants when they got Magneto locked up under the Pentagon?
  • Maybe only certain military/CIA people knew about his powers?
  • It's implied that the CIA are the only ones who believe in the existence of mutants anymore. No one else was willing to listen to them.
  • The guy who did not know about Magneto does not have the security clearance to know about him. At that point, mutants and info about mutants are only known by people like Nick Fury or Alexander Pierce; or whoever fits their role in the X-Men universe.
  • It has to be remembered that the president is not supposed to know or do everthing, no man on Earth can, he is supposed to have people around who can quickly give him the information he needs for any given circumstances that may arise... which is exactly what we saw.

Weapon X

• If Weapon X doesn't happen because of Raven retrieving Logan instead of the real Stryker, does that mean he's only going to have the bone claws in the next movie? Because I can't really see them doing that.
  • They have 40+ years of new history to make up. They can pretty much do anything they want.
  • But, for that matter, what WAS she doing there in the first place? She never met Logan — at best, she might have caught a glimpse of him at the summit when she had a lot more important things to watch out for (like the gun Magneto was holding to her face) and she didn't even know he was at the White House event (she even went into the bunker before he was tossed into the river). So a) how did she know he existed and was in the vicinity? b) why did she decide to look him up? c) how did she know WHERE he was, therefore making her join the salvage team? c) why did she impersonate Stryker, of all people, when any authority figure could have sufficed?
  • She's been fighting the mutant cause for years at this point and she's probably heard of Wolverine (and Sabretooth) as part of that cause. Immortal killing machines sound like exactly the sort she'd want to recruit. To an extent, Wolverine being an amnesiac could be to her advantage as she could tell him that he lost his memories thanks to "evil" Homo Sapiens (it would even be true, since Stryker was an anti-mutant fanatic).
  • Considering how the previous scenes ended, she could have been doing it at the request of Charles.
  • In the original timeline, Stryker recruited Logan and Victor in 78/79 and the Weapon X program gave Wolverine his adamantium in 85. These events may all still happen, it just depends on what happened after Logan wakes up from being fished out of the river (with no memory of how he got there).
  • Those numbers can't be right, because Stryker recruited them during the Vietnam war which was long over by 78 (and if you discount Origins, then there is no reason to assume that Logan and Victor were recruited at the same time).
  • X1 is 2000 and Logan has been an amnesiac for 15 years, meaning the final battle of Origins is in 1985. Those events happened 6 years after he left Team X which places the Africa mission in 1979 so those dates are set. US troops were in Vietnam until 75 so I guess we will have to assume a '75 recruitment of Logan/Victor. Presumably, Jason Stryker's powers manifest sometime in the 2 years between Trask's death in '73 and the meeting with Logan/Victor in '75, the stress of which caused Stryker's rapidly aged appearance.

Bonfires

• When trying to hide from the army of mutant-seeking killer robots, is it really a good idea to keep huge bonfires lit outdoors, broadcasting your position for dozens of miles even in the middle of a blizzard? (Yeah, they state that Sentinels always find their prey, but that's no reason to help them find you. Especially when you don't even need said bonfires to see them coming.)
  • The Sentinels are capable of detecting mutant DNA. While we don't have a range on that, it has to be some distance or else it wouldn't be too effective for hunting. They could behind a vault door or they could be in the middle of a park holding up a sign that says "X-Men Picnic", the Sentinels would be able to find them just the same.
  • Trask says his mutant detector in 1973 can detect a mutant from within a half mile. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that the mutant gene detecting technology advanced well beyond that range by the time the future timeline came around. So the sentinels likely knew exactly where the mutants were well before they could see the fire.
  • If there's a significant population of non-mutant people who light their own bonfires, it just makes them a Needle in a Stack of Needles. At most, it limits the number of sites for the Sentinels to investigate, but ordinary sensors for body heat and whatnot probably do that anyway.

Capturing Mystique Alive

• Why does Trask need Mystique alive? All the biological substances he needs to perfect the Sentinels can just as easily be harvested from a dead body.
  • He might wish to run experiments on her to actually SEE her mutation in action and how it actually works in practice.
  • ^ This pretty much. If she's dead then there is nothing to make her body shift it's form, which would make understanding how the process works that much harder. If she's alive you could through various means force her to shift and examine her cells during the process.
  • And if she's dead and her body starts decomposing, he's going to run out of DNA samples pretty quickly. If she's alive, he has a rich source.

Mystique... is even alive?

• The original timeline had Trask Industries capture Mystique, pull samples from places such as her bone marrow and brain tissue, and test her powers to an understanding. So how was she even alive for the events of the first three "present era" movies? They had her restrained and drained, and we're supposed to believe that she escaped, or that they even let her go, when their MO was studying and killing mutants? Several of which had more dangerous powers than hers? It's not like she could have changed form and walked out, since they had their DNA scanners and were testing her for exactly that type of behavior.
  • As Trask states in this movie they need her alive to study her and get the most out of her, so there's no risk of her dying anytime soon as it would have hampered their progress into understanding her mutation (compared to the others who didn't hold the equivalent value). So she either escaped on her own after god knows how many months/years in captivity, using that time to observe patrol routes, weaknesses, and find the perfect opening to escape, or Magneto came for her when he got out of Prison in the original timeline with his Brotherhood.
  • We can assume she escaped or Magneto eventually broke her out. That would account for the strong bond between them in the original trilogy.

Why did they turn down the Sentinel program?

• In the original timeline, a mutant commits a political assasination, and that makes the government realize the threat of the mutants and give the green light to the Sentinel program, which was initially dismissed. And, with the capture of that specific mutant, they found out how to make them really undefeatable, and not just glorified machine guns. In time, this led to the bad future, so Wolverine's mission is to prevent the assasination, as it would prevent both the political concern against the mutant threat and the capture of Raven. They did so, in the end Trask lives... but aren't things a lot worse now? I mean, all that was caused by just an assasination; a terrible but still mundane thing. In the new timeline, there's a number of strange freaks in the street (a blue woman that can chage her appearence, a man who can control metals, a man with claws, a blue werewolf...), all with public and on live television. And that was just the begining: in the climax we had a mutant that moved a whole stadium across Washington DC and hurled it against the White House, who can disarm people at will and turn their weapons against them, who can extract and open the panic room of the White House as easily as if he was opening a beer can, a New Era Speech on live television. And, good or bad, a mutant who can change her appearence and stay undetected next to the president himself. I mean, after witnessing all this, what kind of rank incompetent fools would take down the Sentinel program? Just because of gratitude? What if Magneto or someone else like him attempts something like this again, and there is no "good mutant" around to stop him? The story would have had to end just like the animated series adaptation: Wolverine goes back to the future, and finds out that everything stayed the same. In fact, there was a good way for Raven to prevent the bad future: at that crucial moment, when she had the gun and had to choose to kill or not kill, she could have made an Heroic Sacrifice, commit suicide with that gun, and that's it. They wouldn't be able to study her, the Sentinels would never be so deadly, the bad future would be prevented.
  • There's also the part where the Sentinels were easily turned against humans despite Trask's promises that such a thing was impossible, and that he was discovered to be committing treason by selling secrets to other countries. The Sentinel program is very dead. And as for the mutant/human relations, the fact that one mutant stopped another from assassinating the president and his entire cabinet isn't going to magically fix everything, but it will at least show everyone quite clearly that mutants are people too, who can make their own choices, and thus need to be treated as individuals instead of just one massive enemy bloc. It's hardly going to be easy, but the good future shown at the end is definitely possible.
  • We also have to remember that we don't know what happened between 1973 and 2023. Trask was put in prison for trying to sell his Sentinels to the communists, but that doesn't necessarily mean the Sentinel program won't be started up again in the future. For all we know Trask could have a son who continues his work in the 90s and under a new president the program could be approved because mutants like Magneto caused a lot of trouble. The important thing is to remember is that Trask Industries didn't get their hands on Raven/Mystique. Without her the mutant adapting system that made the Sentinels unstoppable in the original timeline can't happen. Any Sentinels that might appear in the new timeline can be stopped by the X-Men and other mutants.
  • Would an army of giant robots really sound like a good idea if they lack the adaptability that studying Mystique would have granted them and the primary hostile mutant around is Magneto? In the original timeline Magneto was in prison for roughly another decade and Mystique had been captured and Trask's work on adapting the Sentinels would be underway by the time he broke free so there'd be reason to continue the program. In the new timeline? It'd be throwing away money on weapons for a single enemy and your enemy can turn against you with a thought. Remember, Mystique's assassination basically sent a message that Magneto wasn't the only problem, mutants were everywhere and they're dangerous.
  • There's a trope for this.

The Serum

• If they already had a serum that could temporarily take away mutant powers, doesn't that kind of invalidate the entire plot of X3? This is particularly annoying because it was shown to have been invented by, and used on, Hank, who in X3 made a comment about how easy it was for mutants who "don't shed on the carpet." Beyond that, after mutants formed their own subculture, why wasn't this stuff mass-marketed? Sure, they wanted mutants to accept what they were, but if it was temporary there's no reason turning their powers off for a while would be anything more than a convenience. Mutants with natural weapons can get on a plane, if they let themselves be dosed with the serum first. Blob could get a routine medical check-up, with shots and blood work. ROGUE COULD HAVE SEX. Granted, the serum would likely get a bit more controversial with mutants who wanted to look more human, but isn't that their choice?
  • Well, we know why Beast didn't use it. He eventually accepted who he was, including his obviously mutant appearance. As for the rest, it's hard to say. There might be side effects, though the only ones we see in the film are purely psychological (Charles doesn't need the drug, he needs to keep his powers gone). There might be a limited supply — the version Hank used in First Class was based on Mystique's biology, and in the original timeline she wouldn't have been willing to provide more material. Not to mention that while Hank and Charles aren't the type to refuse to allow people access to this drug out of ideology, Magneto is. He might have found a way to prevent it being made (such as by destroying the stockpile and all the notes) when he escaped from prison, however that happened.
  • It doesn't wholly invalidate it, since Hank's serum is temporary and requires constant boosters — not a "cure" and certainly a different set of moral questions. However, one thing to consider: the firmly-back-in-canon-for-the-time-being opening of X-Men: The Last Stand. Charles is clearly using the serum (albeit in more reasonable doses, like Hank), is clearly just reopening the school, and working with Erik. However they get to that point, it seems perfectly in character for Magneto to demand that the serum be scrapped (or to do it himself) as a condition of helping run the school (or as an action taken on the way out, which I'm betting would be tied to Mystique's captivity).
  • I have to question the notion that the opening of The Last Stand is canon, since as we saw in this movie that the absolute second Xavier starts to get his powers back, he needs to be carried around.
  • Xavier didn't use his powers in The Last Stand scene, that was Jean reading his mind not the other way around. He did use them during the Origins scene however. In this movie though he is shown to be able to use some of his powers while still hobbling around as he began withdrawal.
  • It's also safe to say that the Charles of the erased timeline, who was still (at least occasionally) using the serum at the time of the X3 opening, would have learned to better handle it's effects. After all, we know that he would eventually give up his isolation, re-start the school, and become the wise mentor-figure even without Logan's and Future-Charles' encouragement
• Another question: Didn't Professor X say the serum affected his DNA? That seems like the kind of thing that would take a bit longer to correct or go back to normal.
  • Don't think too hard about Marvel's idea of genetics. Just...don't.
  • That said, though, it's possible that the serum is some kind of transcription inhibitor that degrades over time. That wouldn't be modifying the DNA, just preventing it from being 'read', and back in the 70s it's unlikely they'd know the difference.
• Why is the major selling point here mutation suppression when this serum can CURE SPINAL DAMAGE? It's a benefit to mutants and humans alike. Just forgetting about this treatment didn't only affect mutant society, but left countless cripples to the mercy of inferior medical treatments.
  • The serum doesn't necessarily cure spinal damage. The handwave, IIRC, was that Charles could walk due to the serum "normalizing" his body and somehow reversing the damage temporarily.
  • Which, y'know, still means that it would reverse other people's spinal damage temporarily. The best explanation would be that the serum, based on Raven's genetics, only works by interacting with the mutant gene, meaning it has no effect on humans.
  • In the movie it appears that Xavier is using more of the serum to keep out all the voices. He's taking more then he needs to if he just wanted to walk. This is why Beast can transition during stress. So in the Last Stand opening, he may be taking just enough to have walk but have his powers. But the cost being his powers aren't as strong. Either he just stops using it or maybe becomes immune to it. Another downside to the serum(if it never loses it's effectiveness" is you gotta keep taking it. What if Rogue missed an injection one day? If it does lose effectiveness then it's not a solution at all. This is also assuming it truly doesn't have addictive side effects. Beast described it as keeping him level. It may alter brain chemistry as well and again not be a solution.
  • And Hank isn't at the school any more in the original trilogy, so maybe he's the only one with the formula and they just learned to do without it.
• Simplest explanation? Hank eventually realizes that the serum has some ugly long-term side effects, like plenty of real-life drugs do.

Live rounds?

• Why did Trask load the Sentinels' weapons with live rounds for what was supposed to be just a display?
  • They were still production models, display or not. As well, they may have intended on a live demonstration and they didn't get that far.
  • Perhaps he had the intention to reveal some captive mutants at a later point, to show how the Sentinels would locate and kill them, without any risk for huge number of people invited. But then the real fight started, and the demonstration plans were screwed.
  • I doubt even Tricky Dicky would have someone publically executed iln front of the White House as part of a product demonstration.
  • Or perhaps Magneto loaded them with live rounds as part of his hijacking.
  • No OSHA Compliance was is full effect? OSHA had just been founded 2 years earlier, so it's somewhat clear that safety was just becoming a priority in people's minds, so were still functioning on an idea of common sense: "No one is going to turn these on, so why not load them up?". I'd imagine if you were showcasing a fighter jet back then, you would have it loaded up with missiles and the like to show how badass it was, and no one would complain about how unsafe it was to have live ammunition on the jet.
  • Trask is Properly Paranoid. He has already had an attempt on his life in a very public place, and he has every reason to believe it would happen again. Which it does.
  • RoboCop (1987) hadn't been released yet, so Trask and co. wouldn't have been able to learn from the first 10 minutes of that film.

Restrain him.

• Why did no one, including Wolverine himself, think that restraining him during the procedure might be a good idea. Considering that every person who has ever shared a bed with him has narrowly avoided being sleep stabbed and this is likely to be much worse than any war flashback dream.
  • It probably never occurred to them since Kitty has never had to use her power to this extent before.
  • But it should have, that's the point. Wolverine nearly sleep-stabbed Kayla so many times that she knew to get the hell out the bed if he started getting ansy. He sleep stabbed Rogue, which would have been fatal if she didn't absorb his healing. He nearly sleep-stabbed Mariko in the face and he did unkowningly sleep-stab Dream Jean, who was a figment of his own imagination. Kitty clearly knows that it will be intensely painful for him because she tells him so; presumably, this is also the reason why she previously used Bishop, who had his high resilience and energy absorbing powers. Wolverine has indestructible adamantium claws that come out reflexively when he is in pain and turned what may have otherwise been a minor cut into a fatal injury for Kitty, which jeopardized the mission even if the Sentinels didn't find them. Then, you have Magneto, who didn't immobilize him straight away but let him flail about for a few seconds and stab Kitty before acting. They were all holding the Idiot Ball on this one.
  • If anyone can be overconfident around Wolverine, it's Kitty.
  • The bigger question is, why did Magneto wait until he slashed Kitty to restrain him? Once it was clear that he was thrashing around and his claws were out, he should have restrained him then and there.
  • Perhaps Magneto, unfamiliar with the whole procedure, hesitated to interfere with Logan's body, in the fear that it might wake him up. He only did when he saw that it was unavoidable.

Charles' powers returning

• Charles' powers start returning at one point because he's off his med schedule. He immediately starts complaining about the voices. Except that he's in the mansion, and there's only two people for miles around. Are the thoughts of two people really giving him that much trouble?
  • Charles is the most powerful telepath in the world. He can easily hear the voices of his neighbours and possibly the local town/city, even with his current level of experience.
  • Saying that there's just 2 people for miles around is a bit exaggerated. The Mansion is not in the middle of the desert.
  • Given how messed-up some of Wolverine's memories are, just having him around would be unsettling enough for an already emotionally unstable Charles.
  • Not to mention that it's implied Charles was able to hear dying mutants as far away as Vietnam, leading up to taking the serum.

The Worst of the Worst

• Sentinels started hunting down humans with the potential for the X gene or pass it on is what made humans help the mutants fight them, which resulted in the Sentinels killing them as well. Wolverine explains only the worst of the worst human-kind are now in charge or left untouched by the Sentinels. Do those humans have control over the Sentinels and use them to hunt down mutants and humans with potential X gene or are the Sentinels independent from them and following their program to its logical extent?
  • Perhaps a combination of the two. It's doubtful the Sentinels are intelligent enough to build more of themselves, and if you look closely you can see humans on the turrets that dot the flying transports that carry the robots. But when they're released, they're probably just following their programming.
  • I got the impression that the Sentinels now act independently and are self-replicating. Not truly sentient, but impossible for outsiders to control. While the humans in charge just go along with the flow, spouting ideology that fits the Sentinels' actions and helping with the infrastructure to let the Sentinels keep doing what they do.
  • Do the sentinels need to be self-replicating? It's not as if they need replacements. Unlike comic book Sentinels, the Conservation of Ninjutsu does not work here.
  • We do see Sentinels destroyed. Blink gets a few with various Portal Cuts, and Magneto thins the swarm by using the jet as a bomb. Unless the government immediately cranked out a couple million the second they perfected the Adaptive Ability, they would have had to make more both to make up for losses and to get up to those numbers in the first place. But again, they don't need to be self-replicating. That's the point of Logan explaining that there are still humans supporting them; to explain any plotholes like "Where do new Sentinels come from now that they've declared war on pretty much the entire human race?"

Magneto and The Payback

• The song came out in 1973 so at the absolute most a couple of months before the events of the movie. Magneto has been in that underground cell for the last 10 years, how does he know about it well enough to quote from it?
  • Maybe the guards decided to Pet the Dog and found some way to broadcast music into his cell to keep him from getting too bored? If he's that collected after 10 years completely alone, he had to have something occupying his time.
  • Not necessarily Pet the Dog; music has been known to be used as sensory torture. Though all and all, it seems that Mags is getting treated reasonably well as far as isolation imprisonment goes, so he may get books and magazines from time to time, as well. Maybe as rewards for allowing his powers to be tested?
  • I doubt they tested his powers, by virtue of him still being in the prison.
  • James Brown was a mutant. Duh!

How long were they in China?

• Wolverine spent several days in 1973- does that mean Kitty was holding her hands around his head for several days without a break? Or was it more of Year Inside, Hour Outside kind of thing?
  • She had her hands around her head for several days, I think.
  • Presuambly Xavier's contribution to the mission was to telepathically help Kitty through the discomfort.
  • The Year Inside, Hour Outside trope seems more plausible. Professor X told Wolverine that Bishop is usually sent back in time a few days to warn the X-Men of a sentinel attack. We saw Kitty send Bishop back in time to warn the others of the Moscow attack, and the timeline changed within a matter of seconds. Kitty said past and present would continue to coexist until the person wakes up, but she didn't say they would coexist in real time. She probably had her hands around Wolverine's head for several hours if anything.
  • The wound Wolverine causes to Kitty also suggests time passes at different rates. Bobby talks about it like she's losing blood at a dangerous rate, but after more than 24 hours have passed in the past, she's still doing fine.
  • Whenever Kitty sends Bishop back, he is literally two seconds away from his destination. They travel as a group. Every time Bishop goes back, he would just suddenly blurt out "Sentinels are coming Thursday, let's get out of here" and time would be changed in a minute at most. Wolverine had to find everyone and stop the Bad Future, so Kitty would have to keep him under much longer.
  • Not sure that Year Inside, Hour Outside applies though, since Wolverine's fits appeared to take place in real time.
  • It's possible they were actually in China for a couple of days, and it just took the Sentinels that long to find them. The fact that we only see outside the temple when it's night muddies the issue a little.

Breaking Magneto Out

• Magneto and Charles of the future insisted that Wolverine would need BOTH of them to change the future, but Erik was absolutely NO help at all during this movie. Why did they break him out of jail at all? The only thing he did to actually help the mission was swipe away the guards, when Charles could have just taken everyone down telepathically had he spent the time he spent breaking Erik out of jail recovering instead. Erik just jeopardized the mission the whole time, so why were both him and Charles required again?
  • Future!Charles knew that Past!Charles wouldn't have his power, so they never would have gotten to Mystique if not for Magneto. They're essentially having Wolverine work with assets they know will be there.
  • Except that they did get to Mystique just fine without Magneto. They knew where she was going to be, they walked in right in time to keep her from being captured — without Erik there, Charles could likely have persuaded her to come back to the Mansion, long enough for the two of them to talk. Erik wasn't actually helpful at any point.
  • Did you miss the part where Magneto disabled all the guards? They wouldn't have walked in anywhere without his power.
  • Wolverine would have been just as capable as Magneto of taking out the guards. Or they could have found another way in. Or, heck, talked Peter Maximoff into disrupting the Paris Peace Conference for shits and giggles. Having Magneto disable the guards was far from their only way into the building.
  • "Ma'am, do you mind if we bring your son to France for a potentially dangerous mission?" I'm just come right out with a "nope" to that option. As for Wolverine doing it, he's not in top form here, and his methods are far less effective or quick than Magneto's. Best case scenario, the summit gets canceled because some crazy guy is attacking the guards and Mystique gets to take out Trask some other time. Magneto can take out the guards instantly, non-lethally, and keep them from alerting anyone else. So yeah, they did need Mangeto to get the job done. The point was to stop Mystique when they knew she'd be in this place at this time.
  • It was an immensely critical mission, and Wolverine knew that. Are you honestly trying to say that without Magneto, the three of them wouldn't have been able to find a way into the building? Yes, security would have been increased for the Conference, but I have a hard time believing that they couldn't have thought of something. Magneto made it a lot easier, but he wasn't their only option.
  • Considering that they talk about changing the past, not about how did the past actually transpired, Xavier and Magneto have no way of knowing in advance and for certain what would happen if the butterflies of doom are released. Future Magneto knows that he was jailed in the Pentagon when all this happened. What if he was free? Being already a full hero, and knowing first hand of the bad future, he would think of himself that he would behave and be up to the circumstances. But Magneto from the past is not quite the same man, he was still a Well-Intentioned Extremist and the bad future was for him just an hypothetical scenario. In short: they did not know if Magneto would be a reliable help, they suspected so, but failed. Fortunately, somehow (there are other threads to discuss that) their failure on that point did not doom the whole attempt to change history for good.
  • It's an immensely critical mission that is on the clock and dependent on one very specific event. Wolverine does not have the time to go around trying to formulate a plan to get past security. Future Magento and Charles pointed him in the direction of assets he would have immediate access to. They're already running a gamble. It'd be stupid to go "my past self might screw it up so just wing it" when their entire future hinges on that.
  • As regards timing: They had time to plan an extraction from the freaking Pentagon, even though that mostly boiled down to 'let Quicksilver handle most of it'. That aside, they also had time to drive to D.C. and then fly to Paris — they could have planned a way into the hotel while they were travelling. The psychological blind spots make sense, though.
• The next question is, how did Magneto not make matters worse? Mystique would have only killed a single scientist. Mags—already a known terrorist believed to have assassinated Kennedy—escaped from prison, DROPPED RFK STADIUM around the White House for no reason other than a demonstration of his powers, endangered the current US President and countless others by commandeering the Sentinels, and declared mutant supremacy on live TV while he committed these flamboyant acts.
  • Magneto is a mutant terrorist. An admittedly extremely powerful one, but nonetheless a terrorist. The point was to keep an "us vs. them" situation from forming, which Mystique prevented.
  • Magneto utterly discredited the Sentinel program, thus fixing the main problem in the future. Mystique showed that some mutants were willing to die to protect humans, and as she just saved the president's life, that buys them some talking space for reasonable mutants like Charles and Hank to do the whole we are not your enemy spiel. There are still going to be issues, because a mutant terrorist did just assault the White House, but they're going to be more controllable.
  • Arguably, he does the opposite. At first it looks like he's discrediting it, but then he walks into the arena and claims responsibility, showing that he is the one controlling them.
  • Here's a thought: maybe old Magneto secretly knew what his younger self would do, and thought it was the best way. He convinces Logan/Charles that young!him needed to be released, under the pretense of teamwork, when he planned all along to have young!him go rogue.
  • He doesn't have his helmet, therefore Charles can read his mind and call him out. He might just have forgotten how extreme he once was.
  • You assume future!Charles would care. If it averts the super Sentinel future then letting younger Magneto go on a rampage is the lesser of two evils and an acceptable one.
  • What are they possibly going to talk about with Xavier, who'd just let a mass murderer go? At best they will dismiss him as a clueless and childishly naive optimist he is, at worst see the whole thing as a charade meant to ingratiate Xavier with the government and control it. Anyway, Magneto being at large easily outweighs any touching and noble acts some other mutants might've shown. It may not be "us vs. them", but it's "us vs. him, and who knows how many more like him might emerge at any moment, and what, are you expecting us to just rely an the good will of some random mutants to protect us?" No. Way. And since they can no longer hope to contain him (thank you, Pietro) - they will go lethal. Failure of Sentinels doesn't mean a thing - they'll just would work to rectify it, because that's what people do. It wouldn't take long to find out how Magneto highjacked the robots, after all. Trask's exposure and imprisonment doesn't mean a damn thing either - they will either work with him under the rug or use his designs without him. Indeed, I'd say Magneto exacebrated things and ensured the Bad Future.
  • Not necessarily. Earlier it was said that Xavier and Raven's actions might not be enough to change public opinion; however it would be enough to at the very least say "not all mutants are evil, we have to be approached as unique individuals rather than as some monolithic blok." It's a small teensy step in the right direction and a lot can happen in 50 years
  • There is a possible explanation: good mutants have been drafted. If they are so powerful but they are "good", then they are allowed to mind their own business and study history with professor Logan at the Xavier School of Witchcraft and Wizardry; but under strict government surveillance and forced to stop Magneto or other evil mutants when they try to attack. Either that, or go to a special designed jail like Magneto. After all, Logan saw that the mansion is back, but nothing was said about its political status.
  • The problem in the future is not that humans made Sentinels and hated mutants, it's that they made Sentinels with Mystique's DNA which were unstoppable. Imagine the non adapting version of the Sentinels up against the new timeline's full roster of X-Men. They would barely register as a threat.
  • Xavier and Magneto thought that their past selves working together could talk Raven down from killing Trask. Xavier most likely thought Raven might not listen to his past self alone considering the tension between them in First Class. Magneto had sway over Mystique. They both underestimated how extreme Erick was in the past. Xavier probably thought that despite everything Magneto did in the past he would never try to kill Raven/Mystique. As for Magneto's actions not making things worse they probably will have some serious repercussions for the new set of X-Men movies. X-Men: Apocalypse is confirmed to set in the 80s. Chances are we will see how Xavier and X-Men help build the bridge between mutants and humans first hand and see how the good future was created.
  • I think the most important point is the following: The one event that was responsible for the Bad Future was not the killing of Trask. It was the capture of Raven. At the end of Days, all they had were a sentinel prototype and a drop of her blood, which Trask realized was not enough to adapt her abilities. This adaption was what originally led to the unstoppable sentinels. In the 50 years between Raven stopping Erik from killing Nixon and Logan's consciousness waking up at the Mansion, a shitload of conflict might have happened. Maybe there actually was an all-out war between the government and mutants at some point. But since Raven was not captured in the new timeline, the sentinels, if they even existed, were just huge robots that could be defeated. And by 2023, there is at least a temporary peace so the school can be operational again.
• On a related note, why would they deliberately put Magneto in the non-metal prison, and not think ahead and put his helmet in a similar one?
  • ...that logic makes no sense, why would they put his metal helmet in a non-metal prison, when the metal controlling mutant is locked up without any metal nearby? There is literally no reason to put his helmet in a non-metal prison, because if Magneto is free, he could just walk in and take it with ease, which is what happens.
  • That helmet's sole purpose is to keep Erik save from telepaths. It's not like it would even make a difference for the government if he has it or not.
  • The government probably doesn't even know the helmet does anything. They may have thought it was part and parcel of Magneto being a Fashion-Victim Villain.
• I thought that was covered in this bit where they say they need him in the first place. That, although it didn't work out that way (and may have even ended up making things worse), they initially thought that just them going to Paris wouldn't be enough, that they needed Erik to help them convince Raven to stop trying to kill Trask.
  Charles: Let's just say for the sake of...the sake, that I choose to believe you...that I choose to help you. Raven won't listen to me. Her heart and soul belong to someone else now.
  Logan: I know. That's why we're gonna need Magneto, too.
• How could Magneto's actions make anything worse? He was already a known mutant terrorist who was imprisoned for killing a powerful political figure. Him trying it a second time changes nothing. They can point at magneto and go 'that mutant is a threat', what Mystique's original assassination did was allow them to point at ALL mutants and claim 'any mutant is a threat'. In the current timeline, a known terrorist attempted another act of terror, a mutant woman chose not only to not help him but actively work against him and they're left with the impression there's other mutants working to protect humanity (Mystique was talking outloud to Charles so the government people would have known something was up). Mutants are actually in a better place right now than in the original timeline, especially since Magneto is now missing his Hyper-Competent Sidekick and Charles is back in action a decade earlier.

Chronology of Events

• A nitpicky complaint, but one that's worth mentioning: as the film is ostensibly a sequel to the prior X-trilogy, as well as First Class (at least, up until the timeline changes), it has several issues it can't reconcile (and were only done because of Rule of Cool:
  • Raven was captured after assassinating Trask, and was experimented on/had her DNA used to create more powerful Sentinels. Yet, she must have presumably escaped sometime in the interim between her capture in 1973 and the first X-Men - Future Past seems to suggest that she was gone for good after she was caught. Likewise, it's shown in the film that Stryker is the one that tasers/subdues her, yet in X2, she doesn't seem to care much about him and never references the fact that he was part of Trask's team.
  • It doesn't at all suggest she was "gone for good" after her capture in '73. Wolverine specificallys states that Trask "wasn't the last person she killed".
  • Compounded with the events of First Class, it seems difficult to believe that the government wouldn't know about mutants by the 21st century when there was not only a major diplomatic incident in Cuba, but (prior to the point where Hank, Logan and Erik intervene, thus beginning their changes to the timeline) Trask went to Congress himself and tried to rally their support for the Sentinel program.
  • They knew about Mutants, but they were incredibly rare at the time and there were only two points in time where they had a major impact on the global stage, both happened over a decade before with nothing else suggesting that mutants were worth taking seriously or rather worth the millions Trask was after. That there is officially a mutant squad in Vietnam shows the Government knows, but also shows they were being kept hush hush.
  • There wasn't "officially a mutant squad." There were a handful of privates who happened to be Mutants who were sequestered away from the others with a BS excuse that they were in quarantine until Trask could come and collect them.
  • There's a caucasian Trask in 1973, and an African-American Trask during the events of Last Stand (and, as Logan's memories showed, Last Stand occurred in his timeline prior to the change).
  • The popular consensus is that Singer doesn't care for the things that happened in the franchise that he wasn't apart of and only acknowledges those works in Broad Strokes. In universe, people with the same name, and not related/distant blood relatives does happen. It is extremely likely that the Trask in "Last Stand" is a completely different individual from Bolivar Trask.
  • The government knows about mutants but the general public does not. The opening scenes of the first movie are debating about whether or not the Registration Act should be passed - forcing all mutants to out themselves. This information has all been kept secret from the public until now, but the government are well aware of it. With information becoming much easier to share around in the 90s, they've been growing aware of the mutants even more. For all they knew, the initial mutants could have just been one-offs. At the point the first film starts, they've found out that there is a mutant population. As for Raven, it's only said that she was experimented on. It seems as if this film is implying those experiments and the resulting trauma are what turned her from the kind-hearted Raven we saw in First Class to the ruthless and cold killer in the original trilogy.

Magneto's Imprisonment

• Why wasn't Magneto executed instead of imprisoned? They seem quite convinced that he murdered the president, which should be more than enough grounds for the death penalty, particularly in that the crime took place in Texas. Just because they can restrain him doesn't mean they should in this case, as they must have some idea of how bad it would be if he managed to escape. I understand keeping him alive for a bit for research purposes (if those are even possible) but wouldn't ten years be enough time for them to decide they need to put him down?
  • Considering that most of the government seems to be trying very hard to pretend mutants don't exist (even Nixon doesn't appear to know anything about these people until Trask tells him), it's likely that the CIA couldn't prove anything to anyone. They were able to get him imprisoned, and keep metal away from him, but that's stretching their political good will.
  • You can bet that someone up the power ladder doesn't want to let go of the idea that his power can at some point be weaponized.
  • And perhaps they were worried that he would have powerful friends who would retaliate if they executed him? Emma Frost showed herself to be quite the threat, and she could still have been at large when he was captured. So the imprisonment is a compromise - they keep him locked up for his crimes but they don't go too far so as not to antagonise any other mutants.

Stealing the uniform

• When Quicksilver helps break Erik out, he steals a guard's uniform. Trouble is, the guard in question is covered in a veritable cocoon of duct-tape at the time.
  • Super-speed. He steals the uniform at the same time he's taping the guard up. It wouldn't be that hard.

Non-lethal Takedown of Trask

• Why didn't Mystique, with her no-kill policy, try to first deal with Trask in a non-lethal way? She had material about his experiments, why didn't she try publishing them in a newspaper? It's the middle of the Watergate scandal, not like she would have thought you can't bring people down that way.
  • The mutants who were killed in those experiments were people she knew, not some random bunch of people. It was plausible to believe that Trask would lawyer up and blame most of the responsibility on his employees.
  • She also knew Trask was responsible for the deaths of many of her friends, so killing him would have felt justified to her.
  • It also begs the question of "who would have cared"; mutants were little more than a myth to the public until the Paris conference, and putting the autopsy photos of a more obvious mutant like Azazel in the papers would at best be considered a hoax, and at worst could have caused the opposite of the intended effect today, much less in the '70s. Not to mention that revealing mutants (even dead ones) to the public would have proven Trask right about their existence and inspired exactly the kind of mass paranoia that got Trask's Sentinels off the ground! This would be in no small part why Mystique took it upon herself to kill him, since from her perspective, only Magneto cared (and he couldn't exactly help much when she started).
  • Also worth noting that Azazel is known to the CIA as being a terrorist and responsible for the deaths of CIA during an attack at the facility, and Azazel and Angel were probably seen breaking out Emma Frost, who was a known associate of Shaw, and who confirmed to other CIA agents that she is working with Shaw and the goal is WW3. Mystique revealing their deaths would essentially prompt the CIA to release a statement to the tune of "yeah, those guys shot at our floating nuclear stash in Cuba and killed our people, does anyone have a problem with us shooting back? Anyone? No? Congratulations, Mr Trask, the contract is yours, mutants confirmed to support nuclear anihilation, fire at will."

Sentinel transport

• How did Magneto know where, when and how the Sentinels would be transported?
  • He got the schedule from the film reel.
  • Well, Trask Industries is a publicly known company — finding their factory or warehouses shouldn't be too hard for a man who hunted war criminals for what seems to be a goodly chunk of his adult life. From there, it's a matter of getting into an office and reading a shipping manifest...also not too hard for a man of the skills Magneto was established to have.
  • ...this one's a joke, right? He's AT Trask Industries when they're shipped out, hiding as a worker. There's plenty of ways he could have gotten the train schedule and route.

Controlling Prototype Sentinels

• Bolivar Trask says his prototype Sentinels are made of "space-age polymers" with no metal in them. So how was Magneto able to control them?
  • He laced them with metal prior to the demonstration. That was the whole point of the train hijacking scene.
  • The bigger issue is the manner in which he controlled them; he was giving them verbal commands and they were obeying him. The implication seems to be that he managed to reprogram them instead of simply puppeteering them with the laced metal.
  • He wasn't giving them verbal commands. He was talking to it because it was there (the same way people might talk to a car or a dog), but all he did was turn it's head in the right direction and turn it on and let its programming do the rest. For the rest of their scenes he is clearly controlling them using his powers.
  • There was even a scene showing Beast using his serum to disguise his mutant status from one of the Sentinels and as soon as he does, it targets Magneto who tears it apart. So yeah, Magneto didn't reprogram the Sentinels, he just used them as puppets.

Quicksilver and plates.

• In the kitchen scene, Quicksilver throws a couple of plates at a guard. Based on how slowly the bullets move and how quickly the plates seem to move, the plates are going faster than the bullets. So did the guard survive?
  • Because speed is only part of what makes a bullet deadly, and all of the parts together stop the plate from being lethal. It's larger so the impact is going to be spread out over a larger area, it's fragile so it's going to break up on impact, and it's not designed to penetrate anything compared to bullets and as a slower example arrows. At the speed they were thrown it would be more than throwing it at regular speeds (an annoyance but more to fear from the broke glass) but not enough to be lethal.
  • Well, you can see at which speed the plate hits him once time speeds up again (for the audience). It probably wasn't lethal, but some medical attention wouldn't hurt. It hit him full-force in the face, shattered, and sent him flying back against the microwave. He is likely to have cranial injuries, cuts in the face, a concussion and rib or spinal injuries. There is a reason none of the guards are moving once Peter is finished.

Wolverine aging

• How has Wolverine suddenly reached the point where his hair is greying at the temples in the future? He's been physically an adult for almost a century without his appearance showing signs of aging, and nobody else in the future scenes looks significantly older in comparison to the last time we saw them chronologically. Admittedly, this was also in the original comics storyline, but at least then there wasn't a set timeline of Wolverine's past life plus the time difference there was about twenty years.
  • Perhaps the Sentinels found a way to counter his power and subject him to Rapid Aging. The others liberated him soon enough, but not before he took part of the attack. And now, he's stuck in his age as before, but in an older age.
  • Or stress is starting to gray his hair.
  • However, he still looks that way in the new good future.
  • A decade of particularly difficult students in his class.
  • Wolverine isn't immortal, he ages slower than everyone else but still ages, and several stories have shown him in the future as an old man. Presumably his biological age had finally hit the point where his hair started to grey after a hundred something years.
  • Days of Future Past- good timeline or bad- is a direct prequel to "Logan". So it would make sense that he's starting to gray in Days when in Logan he looks old.

Blink and combat

• Why doesn't Blink make more effective use of her powers? Sure, she kicks some serious ass in the future, but that's kinda a relative term here. She only portal cuts one Sentinel by accident, but it looks like the most practical thing that could permanently hurt them. Why doesn't she turn that curb stomp cushion into a curb stomp battle and start opening portals inside these monsters, instead of bouncing around like Chell?
  • Because they'd eventually just adapt around it.
  • But even if there was a way to adapt to quantum bisections, it should still be an option. If they succeed, everything is reset. If not, they're dead. There doesn't seem to be any reason to worry about adaptation after Kitty gets her power upgrade. Maybe it's just more important to distract them?
  • They adapt to Sunspot, Iceman, and Colossus pretty quickly, which doesn't stop those mutants from trying. It's possible that they team as a whole is more effective with Blink throwing other mutants around and redirecting attacks than they would be if she were to fight directly.
  • What reason do we have to believe she can open a portal inside someone? Her portals always required her to shoot the purple portal energy at the location ( or at least one location ). Simplest explanation would be "trying to open a portal at or over someone just causes them to immediately be moved right through it". As for portal cuts, it seemed like the speed of action was the limiting factor; she couldn't open and close a portal in a split second, and it didn't take long at all for someone to move through a portal.
  • We don't even know if Blink can cause Portal Cut deliberately. She did it once because she was impaled through the portal, which killed her before it was completely closed.
• Why do X-Men use her for combat at all instead of teleporting themselves to, say, the middle of desert? It's unlikely a Sentinel patrol just hanged somewhere with no living soul for thousand of miles. Is her teleportation limited by what we are shown in the movie instead of comic Blink's near unlimited distance?
  • Yes. Keep in mind that you're thinking of Exiles!Blink right now rather than the original 616!Blink, whose control over her powers was so poor she ended up killing herself with them.
  • The fights with the Sentinels are not fights to win, but fights to delay them as much as possible so Kitty can send someone back in time. Blink keeps her distance as much as she can, because once the Sentinels adapt to her powers then it's all over. She carefully ensures ways for the others to attack and then keep their distance.
  • And maybe the portal cuts are something she doesn't know about yet. Maybe it just happens by fluke in some of the timelines, but because time keeps getting rewound she doesn't remember it. Bishop spends most of the battles under so he's not going to be able to tell her what she did in a different timeline.

Base camp for a journey into the past

• Why do the X-Men choose to set up at the Chinese temple to send Logan's mind into the past? Its a fixed location relatively near to Sentinel activity... and they have a large aircraft on hand, with more than enough room inside to set up Kitty and Logan. Stay on the plane, and the Sentinels shouldn't be any more capable of finding them than they clearly were before (ie, not, since Xavier and Magneto were still free).
  • We don't how Xavier's group was avoiding detection, but it's doubtful they would be on that plane 24/7. It's also a lot harder to defend a plane than it is to defend a secure location like the temple. Once the Sentinels detected them, and they surely would have sooner or later, one lucky hit would put the plane down. Also, everywhere is near Sentinel activity. They've basically conquered Earth.
  • Perhaps Kitty's powers needed a stationary location to keep the process. She might need a lot of focus by her, and the shaking of a plane would have made it impossible.
  • The temple is in a remote area, and Sentinels are likely to be closer to densely populated zones. So even though they will inevitably find them eventually, a temple in the mountains is a remote enough place for them to take a while to get there. And I'd say that a moving plane is an even bigger risk. It's all too easy for the Sentinels to surround it and shoot it out of the sky once they detect there are mutants on board. The temple allows the others to hold them off for as much time as possible - something they can't do if they're flying through the air. Storm, Erik and Charles (and possibly Blink and Sunspot too) might manage, but it's not ideal.

Healing Magneto

• Mystique shoots Magneto in the neck, but seconds later, he is fine and still able to talk. Um...what?
  • It was just a flesh wound.
  • The vocal cords are closer to the centre with the throat, not at the very edge of the neck.

Humans capturing Magneto and his mutants

• In First Class, Azazel, Emma Frost, Angel, and the other evil mutants gave the X-men a hard time. Are we to believe Magneto and his mutants were taken down so easily by 1970s humans? I know the real reason is that the actors were unable to return, but come on. They were pretty powerful in First Class.
  • They gave the X-Men a hard time at their very first outing with no real experience working as a team. And despite that they all lost rather decisively to the X-Men in their first proper fight. They also only captured Magneto, who is the most powerful but is not invulnerable and can be taken down with a bit of prep work (namely fighting somewhere with very little metal). With him out of the way first all you need to take down the others is a Sniper Rifle and range. And you can't say they were taken down easily when we don't see how it happened.
  • Who says that humans can not defeat and capture a group of people with super powers? Humans Are Warriors, after all. A stronger enemy is not an invincible enemy, and true warriors find the way to overcome the disadvantages and defeat stronger enemies.
  • This might fall under WMG, but perhaps Azazel was taken out by a sniper? Kinda hard to dodge something when you don't know it's coming after all.
  • One thing to note about Emma in particular is that she's incredibly cocky. It's possible the humans caught her off guard when she underestimated them. It probably didn't all happen at once, but rather they each fell over a number of years. Eleven years separate the two movies.

Which was the point when history changed?

• According to their explanation, as long as Wolverine is subjected to the strange procedure, the future and the modified past would run concurrently. The moment when Wolverine wakes up is when those changes in the past are "confirmed" and their present is retconned as a result of the new past. Still, that doesn't seem to be the way it actually worked: the moment when Mystique dropped the gun seems to be the moment when the past was changed. That doesn't seem to make much sense. Yes, that action changed history, but actually all actions change history somehow since the very moment when Wolverine arrives to the past and goes after Xavier instead of doing whatever he would have done after having sex. Did Kitty released Wolverine at that point, and confirmed the changes? But she could not know what was going on, Wolverine himself did not know, he was drowning very far away. In fact, he played no part at that scene: it was all Magneto, Xavier and Mystique. Wolverine had already made his part. Unlike the original assasination, his actions already placed Magneto and Xavier in the chesstable (instead of having one jailed in the Pentagon and the other indulged in self-pity back at the Mansion). With Magneto and his mutant supremacy schemes in there, Mystique could save the life of the president, and with Xavier to appeal to her good side, Mystique could give up the assassination before it was too late. So, if Wolverine was awaken when Bobby proposed so, history would have been fixed anyway. Or perhaps Kitty let Wolverine wake up at the very last moment, and just hoped for the best to happen, without any certainty of it working?
  • That last is the way I read it. Watsonian explanation: They could have woken Wolverine up earlier and things would have turned out fine, but there was no way they could have known that, so they had to keep the connection going for as long as possible just in case there was any way future-Wolvie could still help alter the timeline for the better. Doylist explanation: if they'd woken Wolvie up earlier and he (and the audience) had seen that the timeline turned out all shiny and happy, it would ruin the suspense, so he had to stay in the past for long enough for the film's climax to happen. Showing the denouement before the climax is bad story structure.
  • Logan didn't know that the critical changes had already occurred, and neither did Kitty. They were both keeping him under/awake for as long as possible, on the basis that more time in the past = greater probability of change.
  • The moment Kitty woke Logan up had nothing to do with what was happening in the past at this point, and everything to do with what was happening in the future. She woke him up when the sentinels fired at her, because this is the furthest point they can possibly wait. Yes, from a narrative point of view we NOW know that Logan probably wasn't necessary anymore after he had convinced Charles, or rather served as a conduit to let future-Charles convince himself. But that was sort of the point - Logan spent the whole movie being fairly useless in what he usually does (fighting people) and imperative in what he usually doesn't do (moral support). As for the original question, that is easily answered: The divergence of the timeline starts when Logan wakes up in that woman's bed, and ends (i.e. is "locked it") when Kitty wakes him up, which, in terms of actions in the past, is a few seconds after Raven drops the gun.

Azazel's Fate

• How on Earth did Trask manage to CAPTURE Azazel, let alone kill the man? This is the same guy who took down a CIA base, basically by himself, so I have no doubt he couldn't have handled some of Trask's thugs. Even if they tricked him or drugged him, when Mystique goes through his file, his eyes are shown as being open and he looks to be in pain so it stands to reason that, at one point, when Trask was experimenting on him, he was conscious so it stands to reason that he could have teleported himself out of there.
  • Humans Are Warriors. Mere humans can defeat any monster, no matter which power they have, if they go Crazy-Prepared to the fight.
  • Presumably using whatever method Stryker would later go on to use to capture Nightcrawler.
  • So it makes two impossible captures instead of one.
  • The folder Mystique was going through was labeled "autopsy reports" so he was dead at the time the photo was taken.
  • There's no evidence Trask experimented on live mutants before late 1972. Erik's breakdown on the plane suggests that Azazel and the other died before he was arrested, which means 1963, which means the most likely scenario is that they were killed in action and Trask only got the bodies.
    • It is precisely for killing Azazel, Emma, Angel, and presumably Riptide that Mystique seeks revenge on Trask (aside from her reaction to the autopsies, she says she "saw too many friends die" and "only wants the man who murdered them"), and had they died nine years before Trask started experimenting on mutants, their bodies would have decayed to bones or dust by now.
  • If I recall correctly, the files that Mystique found were labeled with something like "Weapons tests", implying that Trask Industries had been doing some lethal testing.
  • Apocalypse clarifies this — using electrical fields can disrupt certain powers, including Kurt's teleportation, similar to how shielding like the helmet and the interior of Shaw's sub blocked telepathy. Presumably that's how they captured Azazel.
  • They could have drugged him, gassed him, encased him in an area from which he could not safely teleport out without seeing where he'd end up, or simply captured his comrades and forced him to surrender. Azazel's capture would be problematic, but by no means impossible to accomplish.

Future Magneto not warning Wolverine about himself

• Shouldn't old Magneto know how his younger self think? Even in the older movies he wasn't much of a team player. He double-crossed them in X2. He should have anticipated his every move. After all, they are the same guy. Why didn't he tell Wolverine to keep a close eye on young Eric?
  • He did at least realize (albeit too late) when he said to Xavier "I totally don't trust our younger selves". I guess it just slipped his mind before, the guy is (at the very least) in his late ninties at this point.
  • Maybe the older Magneto knew perfectly well what his younger self would do, and actually counted on him succeeding. That talk about "peace" was just pretending, because he knew that he wouldn't convince others to get him out of jail in the past otherwise.
  • That's pretty much impossible since he doesn't have his helmet at all in the future meaning that the second he lies Xavier would know about it and call him out. It's easier to assume that after five decades he's changed significantly enough that he can't recognise just how different he was back then.
  • I don't think it's a situation anyone can predict. For one thing, they're not really the same guy - decades of events and character development have made them very different people. And most people can't even be certain how they themselves would react in an unexpected situation, let alone how they would have reacted many years ago.
  • Well, consider this: without Wolverine breaking him out, we don't know when Magneto left. During the decades, he probably thought and re-thought his philosophies countless times. Magneto in the future genuinely would not remember his past self's mindset during the breakout.

Remembering the events

• In the beginning of the movie, Kitty tells Wolverine that he will be the only one to remember what happened. At the end of the movie, Xavier and Wolverine both remember what happened. Wouldn't Beast also remember? He was there with Wolverine, if he was told that present day Wolverine was back from the past wouldn't he know what they were referring to?
  • Wolverine is the only one who remembers the original timeline, with the super-Sentinels and everything. Beast, Magneto, Mystique, and Xavier all remember Logan coming to warn them of a dangerous future they needed to avert. They don't remember the original timeline. Beast didn't mention anything about it at the end because, to him, this is just another day Logan is waking up a little later than he should. Xavier acts the same way; it's not until Wolverine mentions needing a history lesson that he realizes this is that Wolverine.
  • OP here - thank you for clearing that up!! Makes much more sense now.

Canonicity of Viral Marketing Sites

• In the movie, Professor X says Trask's murder was the first time Mystique has ever killed anyone. On the Bent Bullet website, it was implied by circumstantial evidence as well as Magento's testimony that Mystique killed JFK in revenge for the deaths of Azazel and Angel by a division of the CIA. Why would Mystique kill a fellow mutant, especially since JFK didn't sanction their deaths? Also, it was implied on the site the Hellfire Club mutants were killed by that same CIA division and not Trask Industries like the movie said. The 25 Moments website said that Beast was killed by an angry mob of humans. How could someone as strong as Beast be so easily overpowered by normal humans?
  • I think the key word in there is 'mob'. Beast is stronger than a human, he's not stronger than twenty of them.
  • As for Mystique, movie canon trumps marketing, which is often done with minimal input from production (see the spoiler of the destruction of Enterprise in the trailers for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which the producers intended to come as a surprise, or movies like Hudson Hawk and Last Action Hero which are clearly comedies but marketed as action films, etc). If the film says Trask was Mystique's first kill, then regardless of what the marketing websites claim, Trask was Mystique's first kill.

Simpler plan?

• It seems like the real divergence that makes the Bad Future is not Mystique killing Trask, but rather Mystique getting captured and experimented upon. But wouldn't it be easier to return to the past and simply sabotage whatever research resulted from that incident? Or alternatively, go back to a point before Charles had lost his telepathy and have him convince Trask to go off and be a farmer or something? It was almost sheer luck their intervention led to a situation where Trask's treason was outed, discrediting him. The heroes ran the real risk that, in leaving him alive, he simply would have adapted his sentinels in a different direction to the same result.
  • It's not just Mystique being captured and experimented on. Her assassination of Trask is what convinced the government to proceed with the Sentinels in the first place. All capturing her did was enable them to create the advanced types we see in the future. Had she been able to escape after killing Trask the government would have still approved the program in response to the assassination.
  • Yes, but the ones without Mystique's enhancements were no match for the X-Men. It was only with the adaptation tech that they posed an extinction threat.
  • That may be true, but it's incredibly short-sighted to automatically assume that the 2023 Sentinels would be no more of a danger than the 1973 prototypes. We may not have gotten the Nimrod-style sentinels, but who knows what other types of advances could have developed in that 50 year interim that would have made them no less of a threat.

Does Master Mold exist in this universe?

• If you going to have Sentinels in this movie, why not include the big guy himself? Would the idea of a self aware robot going rogue be cartoonish for the movie? Ultron is appearing in Avengers 2, so Master Mold could be possible in the future. It makes me wonder who is controlling the sentinels in 2023 if the humans are slaves.
  • It's simply too much information to cram into a movie already full of characters who don't get enough attention. Plus whilst I'm not going to claim to be the biggest comic book guru out there I still know a lot and I have no idea who you're talking about right now, Bastion and Nimrod would be more relevant in the Sentinel plots than him.
  • Master Mold was a super-computer created by Trask in the shape of a giant Sentinel robot. At the time, he was the mother of all sentinels who betrayed his creator. He is in the popular 90s X-men series.
  • He may have been in the popular 90s X-men series, but that doesn't mean that he is popular enough to be the Sentinel-related villain. Bastion or Nimrod would have a better claim to that title.
  • Just for the record, Master Mold was the main villain at the very fist comic book adventure that featured the sentinels, at those Jack Kirby days when the team used blue and yellow suits, Beast did not have any fur, and Wolverine did not exist yet. See here
  • Also, for the record, Bastion was a combination of Nimrod and Master Mold.

Wolverine's claws

• In The Wolverine, Logan loses his adamantium claws and regrows bone claws. In this movie, in the future, why does he have adamantium claws again?
  • He's now on good terms with Magneto, who can manipulate metal without difficulty. He probably found some more adamantium and Magneto bonded it to his claws.
  • But the above explanation just beggars another question: if Magneto re-coated Wolverine's claws with the adamantium, did he stop there, or re-coat the rest of his skeletal structure as well? Because the original process of injecting the liquid metal into Logan's system was an unbelievably painful procedure, and even with Magneto's skill (and presumed, if sketchy concern for Wolverine's discomfort), would Wolverine willingly go through that ordeal again, even for the obvious benefits?
  • He doesn't have to re-coat his entire skeleton. In The Wolverine, he only loses the claws.

Beast time travel skepticism

• When Beast questions if changing the timeline is even possible, Wolverine couldn't mention that Bishop and the crew do it all the time and it works out great?
  • If anything, Bishop and the others changing the timeline all the time should make Wolverine question whether that actually helps. The group has to keep doing it because the Sentinels keep finding and killing them, so it would really seem like they are only delaying the inevitable. Since Beast's comparison was a river current being disturbed but then correcting itself so in spite of one alternation, the main course is irreversible, which sounds smilier to Bishop's case. And even if that wasn't the case, Bishop only changes a few days at best, Wolverine has to change several decades, so Beast's point could be considered valid by Wolverine.
  • Kitty says she can't send anyone back that far, and Wolverine is the first one to ever be sent back years. So they literally don't know if it will work or could work.

Where does Mystique's body mass goes when she shifts?

• It is probably a case of heightism that I only just thought about it because I saw Peter Dinklage transform into Jennifer Lawrence, and I apologise for that, but that is one hell of a lot of physical matter that just dissapeared / was created out of thin air. What the hell?
  • The only reasonable explanation is that her Peter Dinklage form was very dense and had anyone cause to lift her up or weigh her when disguised would instantly know something was wrong.
  • It's not the first time it's happened in the series, either — in The Last Stand, a fully adult Mystique shapeshifts into a little girl. And to paraphrase Odysseus, it's not heightism to say that a dwarf has less body mass than a full-grown adult woman. It's just observable fact.
  • One word: clothing. Clothing, and the previously mentioned density-shifting.

Mystique's powers?

• I was under the impression that Mystique could only copy people's appearances, not abilities. But the whole Sentinel program relies on the idea that she can do the latter, but not necessarily the former.
  • It's not that Mystique could do it — it's that the nature of her power allowed Trask's people to extrapolate and find the "source" of mutation's powers.
  • I think that knowing the genetic underpinnings was never the point. What they were doing was examining the mechanism of each power and reverse-engineering a mechanical version that could be used by the Sentinels. I'm guessing that initially, each Sentinel could only support 1 or 2 individual "powers". The significance of Mystique is that they built a technological equivalent of her shapeshifting into the later models, which allowed them to rapidly reconfigure and utilise a broader range of abilities. This way, armour plating turns into insulating rubber then into heat-proof shielding; grappling arm turns into blade arm then into plasma cannon. Each power is inspired by a different mutant, but only Mystique's power allows Sentinels to use ALL of them.

Why not go further back?

• Just convince teenage Trask to be a cop. Why enter a time where he is already a grown man with evil intentions? Wolverine could turn Trask's life around, making him a mutant lover. Just imagine turning famous serial killers into a good human beings by traveling to the past where they are kids.
  • The further back you go, the more you change. They also probably have no idea where and when they can find Trask before that point. They can't exactly look him up on Wikipedia anymore. Also, there are physical requirements to being a police officer, so it's unlikely he'd be even close to qualifying. Time travel is always tricky, so going further back risks incredibly wild consequences.
  • If you could send Xavier back in time to that time to do that, fine. But do you truly expect Wolverine to be able to make a villain have a Heel Realization? He had a lot of problems doing this with Xavier, who was already a hero and just having a bad time. Also, remember that Trask is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, he is really convinced that he's doing the right thing with his program.
• Forget the whole Heel–Face Turn concept for Trask. Focus on Professor X. Wolverine meets him in 1973, when Charles can neither read his mind (to confirm his story about time-travel) nor use Cerebro (to easily locate Mystique). This is because Charles doesn't have his powers in 1973. Fine, then. Send him back farther, to a time period when Charles did have his powers. As a bonus, you'd have several years to persuade Mystique not to kill Trask.
• Also I believe Kitty saying something about sending Logan to 1973 was pushing her abilities already. She might not have been able too.
• Keep in mind that she could only send back Wolverine, and he would appear where ever Wolverine was in that time period. If the opening to Origins is still canon, Wolverine was spending most of the 1960's fighting in Vietnam. Since he only has days to find people and change the future before Sentinels kick in the door, starting him halfway around the world from the people he needs to influence might actually make things more difficult.

Mystigue shooting Magneto

• So Mystique's plan was to disguise herself as President Nixon in order to get close to Magneto, then shoot him with a plastic gun, but how was that plan going to work without the Sentinel distracting him that she couldn't have anticipated? Magneto already had a pistol pointed at her, and she would've been gunned down before she even came close to drawing her own.
  • She's still a resourceful woman. Any distraction would have helped; that one was fine, but if there was no sentinel, she would have made up another one on the fly. Plus, there are other security guards behind, who may easily do something stupid and gave her the distraction she needs.
  • If all else failed, she could simply change back — even if Magneto is willing to kill her earlier, the surprise of realizing it's her and not the president will give her a couple seconds to act before he can react.

Biometrics

• Why is the fingerprint scanner in Trask's office situated at normal height for someone like Mystique? It would probably be difficult/uncomfortable for him to have to stretch out his hand over his head. Of course, maybe he isn't the only one who has access to it, but still, it's his office. Another issue I have (which can probably be explained away with all the other weirdness about mutant powers and such) is, how does Mystique duplicate fingerprints? I had always assumed that she observes people, and then transforms into them based on what she's seen/heard. But I don't know how she could look at someone's hands and replicate their fingerprints exactly.
  • "His office" is not "his house". It does not belong to him, it belongs to whichever institution he's working for, and which has appointed him at whatever role he has. But some day, for whatever reason, Trask may be sent somewhere else (or fired, or resign, or die, etc.), or the office distribution may be rearranged, and someone else will work at that specific office. That's why most people are not usually allowed to modify the architecture of their office. As for fingerprints... mutant powers!
  • Isn't the company called Trask Industries, so I'm assuming that Trask is the owner.
    • Well, there's the theory that regardless of his actor's height Trask is a perfectly average sized man (or perhaps only a little short). No one in the film comments on his height in any way, and Peter Dinklage has gone on record saying that one of his life's goals is "not playing a dwarf." Perhaps though an easier answer is that Trask knew he would have employees going into the vault to fetch him documents so he placed the scanner at a height easier for them to reach.
  • Mystique apparently doesn't shapeshift by doing her best impression — all indications is she turns into a complete physical match of a person — remember in the first movie she fools a retinal scanner by shifting into Professor X.

"A darker course"

• When discussing Kitty's injuries, the Professor says waking Wolverine up would "set the future on a darker course". Mutantkind's facing certain death, the world's a burnt out wreck, and there's nothing but the absolute worst of humanity. How the hell could it get any darker?!
  • Because if anti-mutant sentiment gets kicked into high gear a few decades earlier, then it's quite possible that no mutant with a time-travel ability would ever be born, meaning there would be no way to avert. Sure, it's possible if he failed then the new timeline could just try again, but that's not something you want to bet on.
  • Nobody alive at all. Or, you know, Apocalypse.

The future should have changed the moment Trask's assassination was foiled

• Shouldn't the future have changed? Why did it happen so late?
  • As long as Kitty is holding on Wolverine, the dark future and the changed past run concurrently, even if the future is no longer the result of that past. It is when she releases him that the changes are "committed" and the future disappears, being replaced by the new one. Otherwise, the past changed at the very moment when Wolverine left to look for Xavier, instead of doing whatever he would have done after having sex with that girl.
  • The real question is why she couldn't release him as soon as Magneto tossed him away. From that point on all he does is lie at the bottom of a lake, meaning the same events would have played out with his mind recalled to the 2020s.
  • Because she had no idea what was going on on his end. All she knew was that she needed to keep him in the past as long as possible for him to affect the greatest change. She didn't know about him getting stuck at the bottom of the lake for the climax.
  • To be fair, Xavier was monitoring what Wolverine was experiencing in the past, and could have told Kitty about him getting stuck at the bottom of a lake. But everything he would be able to see in the past was from Wolverine's perspective; he doesn't see what happens after Wolverine gets thrown into the lake. He was probably giving Wolverine a chance to find a way to escape before Kitty dropped the connection so they would be absolutely sure events played out in an optimal fashion. Had they managed to repel the Sentinels a bit longer, Xavier would have probably recommended keeping Wolverine connected to make sure their plan worked, but when the Sentinels broke through, Kitty had no other option than to let go.
  • Xavier wasn't monitoring what was going on inside Wolverine's head. His past self rode the connection and reached out to his future self's mind.

Was Kitty standing next to Wolverine for days?

• I assume they gave her a bucket to urinate in, fed her, and gave her water, but what about sleep?
  • How many days have it been? Two days with no sleep is clearly possible, if you try it and have a good reason to stay awake. Besides, someone that lives in that world must be used to enduring difficult things.
  • Xavier can probably also help using his powers.

Stryker and the escaped mutants

• So Stryker failed to stop the plane from leaving with the escaping mutants, but couldn't he have just gone to air traffic control and ordered the plane to turn around, or figured out the plane's itinerary and have the mutants arrested upon landing?
  • Trask just had his Sentinel program shot down by Congress, and Stryker is not part of the regular military. Whatever influence they had in the military to get the mutants in the first place was probably already stretched pretty thin. Any attempt to get the helicopter to turn around, or to intercept them on a military transport once they got back, was probably met with either 'Who exactly are you to be giving me orders,' 'How dare you feed me this mutant bullshit,' or 'I don't care what they are, their soldiers and their going home.'
  • Did you not notice Stryker wearing a U.S. Army uniform◊ and insignia◊ throughout the film? He's very clearly wearing Airborne insignia, which is indeed part of the regular military. So while he may be on a special assignment, he's still military. The only question is whether he actually has the rank to stop the plane or have the passengers detained on arrival.
  • Perhaps I should clarify - He's not part of the regular military chain of command. As an officer detached to a private corporation (Something that does happen in real life, though not exactly how it's portrayed in the movie), Stryker has about as much pull as a private when it comes to anything that has to do with actual military operations. Anything he request from an actual commanding officer, even ones he outranks, is treated exactly as that - a request. And since the mutants did get away, we can presume all the generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, and sergeants he attempted to get to help him merrily ignored him.

Xavier's recovery in the original timeline

• In the new timeline, Xavier recovers from his Heroic BSoD after Wolverine travels back in time and subsequently enables Xavier to talk to his future self. How did Xavier recover in the original timeline, without the intervention of his future self?
  • The old fashioned way. After some years of self-pity. Or perhaps learning to sing "Hakuna Matata".
  • And once the Vietnam War ended, perhaps some of the other students returned and convinced him to re-open the school? He did still have Hank there as emotional support. Perhaps Charles would have been easily convinced by the sight of several scared children looking for safety?

Rogue's hair

• In the original timeline, a strip of Rogue's hair turned white after her contact with Magneto's machine in X-Men 1. It's still appears to be white in the new timeline by her cameo at the end of Days of Future Past. Didn't Logan change all the events when he went back in time, thus she would never have had contact with the machine and never causing her hair to turn white?
  • I think the standing theory is that some events in the original timeline do happen again in the new timeline, just not in quite the same way. For example, something still leads Magneto into his Liberty Island assault, where he uses Rogue to power the machine. Perhaps a form of the Mutant Registration Act is still floated, only instead of being triggered by the sudden and recent emergence of mutants it's instead driven by a succession of crises involving powerful mutants like Apocalypse. I'm pretty sure Word of God has even suggested that this will be the case.
  • Or perhaps she simply dyed her hair, because she's a teenager, and it's cool.
  • The bit at the end is still 2023, so she's at least in her late 30s.

Kitty's development of time travelling skills

• If memory serves correctly, Kitty's time travel method rewrites her memory of events when she breaks the connection. So how does she master the skill in the first place? It seems like every time she would try it, she would end up in a timeline where she never had to send someone back, and thus not remember how she did it in the first place. The person sent back would know that she had the ability to send them back but not necessarily how it worked, so how would she master the skill to the point where she could concievably send someone back decades?
  • Kitty probably did several "no change" time travelling to practice, i.e. sending Iceman back a few hours and eventually days but having him do what he would have done anyway, until she eventually reached her 2 week a month max limit before she would start turning the brains of the people she's sending into mush.
  • She always sends Bishop back. It's not said in the film, but one of Bishop's Boring Yet Practical abilities in the comics is to know exactly when and where he is at any given time. So as part of the experiment, Bishop could also know how she does it - since if it's always him then that's how she keeps track. Bishop would always be able to tell her the exact date and place of where he was when he was sent back.
  • With Kitty being a scientist, it's likely she'd make notes for Bishop to memorise if she was experimenting. He could go into the past and give her the relevant information. Hell for all we know, she could have discovered her time travel powers just from Bishop suddenly telling her that her future self knew how to do it.

Why did Magneto try to shoot Mystique in Paris?

• Yes he wanted to kill her to prevent the government from building super adapting Sentinels. However when Mystique ambushes him later in an airport, he tells her that it would be pointless to kill her now, they've already scraped up her blood from the gunshot wound from the sidewalk, so they already have her DNA and can build the super robots. He seems to be unaware that Trask needs Mystique's entire body to study and that her blood is insufficient. So why did he try to shoot her in a public location in the first place? It's his fault that her blood spilled on the ground for the government to collect! If he was intent on killing her to prevent the government from studying her DNA, why didn't he just help Charles and Logan rescue her and kill her later when he could get her alone in a private location where he could dispose of the body? She trusted him at that point, it wouldn't have been hard to kill her if he'd just had a little patience.
  • Mags at this time is demonstrably running on passion and anger, and many of his decisions in First Class and Days were made in the heat of the moment. He hasn't learned patience yet, and he's a long way from the much more careful planning he exhibits in the original film trilogy (and even then, he made some rash decisions, IE his refusal to believe his device killed Kelly). He made a snap judgment in that moment to kill Mystique and didn't think through the consequences.

Blink's portals

• In the initial scene, why didn't she just warp Bishop and Kitty into the room? I would assume that she could only create portals in areas where she could see, much like Stick Sean from Slush Invaders....
  • If you watch her, she creates the portals by apparently "throwing" some kind of energy. So yes, it appears she needs some line of sight.
  • Except she portals Magneto into the chamber with the Professor near the end, so she only needs line of sight on her end. As long as she knows the location, she can send people anywhere.

Future Magneto's Change of Heart

• Why does the Magneto of the future seem to subscribe to Charles' views? From on point of view Magneto was absolutely right! A war came and the mutant race got wiped out because of it. If Charles hadn't gotten in his way all those years, the mutants might have won instead.
  • Because it wasn't just mutants who were being killed by the Sentinels. It was also the normal humans who stood up for them, or carried the X-Gene and therefore could give birth to mutants, and who knows how many others that may not have had anything to do with mutants at all. Because Magneto saw that a war between humans and mutants would in the end destroy everyone. Even had Magneto been better prepared there was very little he could have done against the Mk.X Sentinels, particularly in the sheer numbers in which they were produced. Magneto may have been right in his predictions that a war was coming, but once it came he realized that Charles was right all along: peace was the only way for the human race — normal and mutant alike — could survive.
  • Added to that, he has direct knowledge that the reason the Sentinels came about is directly and explicitly because of his attitude and the actions that result from it. Humanity wants the Sentinels because of things like trying to start a nuclear war, or hurling hundreds of missiles at American soldiers, or shapeshifting assassins killing political and economic figures. Erik realizes Charles' path was the right one because he's now seen the direct result of his own.
  • I don't buy it. Magneto has always had a Never My Fault attitude towards human-mutant relations, so it'd be far more in character to blame the X-Men for not allowing him to win the war before the Sentinels were ever invented. Plus, his philosophy was never "no human will ever care for their mutant child or friend" but rather "humans are able and, under the right circumstances, willing to exterminate or subjugate us, so we should exterminate or subjugate them first," and from that perspective, he was right. That said, he didn't have much of a choice but to team up with the X-Men once the sentinels were deployed, and he could have been only faking agreeing with Charles and hoping he wouldn't read his mind, or perhaps being around the X-Men, and presumably their brief human allies, changed him eventually.
  • He really hasn't. And this takes place after, presumably, a lot of character growth has happened. Remember that in the original story, Magneto was an ally to the future surviving mutants, and that was written before he had been given sympathetic motives like being a Holocaust survivor.

Related to the above: NOT helping younger Magneto have a change of heart

• When presented with undeniable evidence that the vast majority of non-mutants would actually fight and die on the side of mutants during a war of extermination, the older Magneto readily accepted that Xavier's ideals, not his, were right all along. But once they get the occasion to inspire the same change of heart in the younger Magneto, the future X-Men firmly grab the Idiot Ball. Knowing just how fiery the younger Magneto's anti-human feelings are, they decide inform him that yes, a war to exterminate mutants has happened... but they somehow decide not to inform him of the part where most of the non-mutant population opposed the extermination of mutants and paid the price for it. What the hell, guys? Are you trying to turn him into an even worse Knight Templar on purpose?
  • Who says they didn't and Eric didn't particularly care? A hardened revolutionary like him is not going to anti-climactically lay down all grievances because of sappy story from the future that he has not experienced first hand. What Wolverine saw was humans laying down there lives to defend helpless mutants. What Eric imagines is a bunch of arrogant humans getting what was coming to them for inventing a weapon to literally wipe out his race, and then only intervening in the genocide when their death machines turned on them or the people THEY cared about. Wow I'm sure Eric is just going to cry me a river.

Erik's end plan

• If Erik was already in control of the 70s Sentinel prototypes (by putting metal in them), why didn't he just stop his demonstration of power after making the Sentinels shoot into the crowd, causing mass hysteria? Why bother bringing a stadium to the White House and making a speech when, had he just shot someone using a Sentinel, people would have deemed them unsafe and discredited Trask. Even if Mystique had saved Nixon and his cabinet, that could in no way guarantee mutant acceptance in the same way an anonymous strike using mutant-targeted weapons could.
  • Erik's ploy seemed to be more about sending a message, both to humans and mutants throughout the world, that mutants weren't going to cower away from humanity's new weapons, and that mutants should come out of the shadows and join him. He wanted a theatrical and grandiose moment, and he got one. Anonymously directing the Sentinels to misfire wouldn't have sent the message he intended, and by that point in the story he was too emotionally fueled to consider the consequences of declaring a revolution against non-mutants.
  • If he had just had the Sentinels shoot into the crowd and not revealed himself, Trask could have easily spun it as, "Well, the people they shot must have really been mutants! See, my tech works!" which doesn't solve the problem.

How does Quicksilver's speed work?

• Either he has the power to slow down everything, or he is a fast thinking speedster. As soon as he start moving, does the world around him slow down? That famous scene where he saves Xavier, Eric, and Wolverine, did all of that happened in real time? I'm guessing he is a fast thinker who can think of 100 things in less of a second.
  • According to the wiki, he has the ability to travel at supersonic speeds, and his perception is accelerated as well; it's likely that when he starts moving in the scene you mention, it's showing what things look like from his perspective.

Why was Erik in prison for ten years?

• Later in the film, he manages to lift an entire baseball stadium into the air; depending on where he was standing and the size of the field, it's totally possible for him to be 100 meters away from some parts of the stadium. The courtyard of the Pentagon is... also 100 meters wide. Even if he's underground, there are undoubtedly pipes running underground for the sprinkler system, the sewage system, etc. The stadium is so huge that he could probably reach much further if he was aiming at a smaller target, and he really doesn't need very much to escape with, given his power. Why does he not escape himself between 1963 and 1973?
  • He's also surrounded by dozens of armed guards with plastic guns and bullets that he can't defend himself against, and doing anything with the pipes would alert them faster than he could do anything. There's one right outside his room, for instance. Also, he doesn't have his helmet and he doesn't know that Xavier and Cerebro are out of the picture — for all he knows, Charles will shut him down before he can get anywhere.
  • He may not have had any kind of plan or specific agenda to pursue for after escaping, or at least one that was really all time sensitive. That, and/or he was really repentant, or at least regretful for his actions (or the consequences of them), as he failed to prevent (or maybe even caused) the death of the mutant president. At any rate, Erik really didn't come off as all that eager to escape; he was been held against his will, yes, but unlike his older counterpart in X2: X-Men United, he seemed to have been treated well, as opposed to the frequent brutality he suffered at the hands of William Stryker and his goons.

Mystique and Erik

• Likewise, why doesn't Mystique try to rescue him at all? There's no evidence that they had any kind of fight or disagreement in the original timeline, and in the original timeline she broke him out after she killed Trask, anyway. What took her so long?
  • She might not have had the resources or knowledge to do it, and she was focused on Trask. She had a one-track mind.
  • Does she know where he is? Don't Wolverine and co only know because future Erik told them where he was?

Why does Wolverine not even bother with an alibi?

• Pretty minor point, but when Wolverine wakes up next to the mob boss's daughter, why does he tell the gangsters straight up exactly what is happening? Did he really think they would believe he's from the future? He could have come up with a million different lies (hung over, on drugs, etc.) for why he doesn't remember what's going on.
  • It's a little fuzzy just how much Logan actually remembers of his full past, but it's pretty easy to surmise that that confrontation didn't end much differently than we see — i.e., with Logan kicking the shit out of and/or killing the goons. So if he remembered that, he probably figured either he could make them back off, or he'd be killing them in two minutes anyway, so it didn't matter what he told them.
  • Or he just straight up doesn't care.
  • Yeah, the guys who barge into the room are pretty clearly intending to at the very least beat up, if not just kill, Logan from the second they see him, so the original confrontation probably ended much the same way.

Where is Deadpool?

• I know this might be a stupid question, but where's Deadpool? Seeing that he knows of both timelines (Past and Future), he should've been somewhere in there. After all, he is a mutant (albeit one created), and the Sentinels should've hunted him too.
  • Because the Deadpool we saw in his movie was still a result of the changes made to history when Logan traveled back to 1973. Just because he's aware of both timelines, doesn't mean he exists in both.
  • Exactly. He'll never admit it, but the Deadpool we saw in his movie is most likely the son of the man who originally became Barakapool (who also presumably met a "Mrs. Reynolds" one day). He was never born in the original timeline, and knowing about both of them is simple part of his fourth-wall abilities.

Just hire a human to kill Trask

• Why didn't Mystique shape-shift into a human and hire a human assassin to eliminate Trask? She could have been The Woman Behindthe Man. That way, mutants won't be blamed for his murder, just some random sniper and his "mysterious boss".
  • Because that would require Mystique to be thinking clearly, when the film establishes that she's driven by anger over what Trask did and is most definitely not. She may have even been delivering a deliberate statement.
  • And Mystique is not expecting to be caught and imprisoned once she kills him. And she doesn't know the consequences of what she's about to do. That's kind of the reason they're trying to stop her in the first place.

Blink's first death

• This is a bit hard to explain, but during the opening fight Blink opens a portal between herself and a Sentinel, dividing the room in two. The Sentinel steps into the portal and gets sent away, then immediately turns back and punches through it. Except his arm reappears on Blink's side of the room, impaling her. Shouldn't his arm have been teleported to the side of the room the Sentinel originally came from? This just violates the direction of travel the portal seems to be operating with.

Aren't the Sentinels supposed to have no master?

• The danger of the Sentinels is that they're prepared to wipe out humanity, because mutants are a breed of humanity. So why are they still taking orders despite having caused a worldwide holocaust?
  • It's not that they're prepared to wipe out humanity. It goes like this: They're initially designed to wipe out mutants. Then, the detection is refined so that it includes wiping out humans who have the mutant gene and can pass it on, but don't necessarily express it, and those humans are added to the list. Some other humans object to this, so they're on the list, too. This leaves those humans who don't have and can't pass on the mutant gene, and who don't mind that all the other non-gene-bearing humans are being exterminated, as safe and in charge.
  • The Sentinels are not seen as going beyond their programming anywhere in the film. But that's only part of their danger; their main trouble is being a tool for genocide and oppression, something that dooms all of mankind and not just mutantkind. As a fleet of killer robots they were so terrible a creation that time travel needed to be done to neutralize them. It looks like their creators - the described "worst of humanity" - just let them run amok rather than try to shut them down, contributing to the dystopian future seen.

Riptide's fate

• This may be less of a headscratcher and more straightforward Fridge Logic as the answer to the initial question is easy to guess, but Riptide is not seen or even mentioned in this film or any others after First Class. The most logical explanation to his absence is the same reason Angel, Azazel, Emma, and Banshee are absent, as otherwise it is likely that he would try to avenge Azazel and his other fallen comrades alongside Mystique, where she and Magneto are the sole survivors of the Brotherhood, and the only ones to appear in the original trilogy. But this also raises the question as to why Magneto does not mention him alongside the others on the plane.

Forgot to mumble?

• When Quicksilver ducts tapes that Pentagon guard in the elevator to sneak into the building, the guard can't scream because of his tape gag, but why doesn't he try? If he mumbled, chances are that the other guards would have heard him and be alerted that something was wrong.

Why run?

• During the opening fight scene, Kitty and Bishop have to reach a safe room in order to change the past, so they run off while the other X-Men stay behind to distract the Sentinels. Though the sequence fulfills its purpose of introducing each character and showcasing their powers, it makes little sense from a logical perspective, as Blink could have instantly teleported the two heroes to the safe room, enabling them to enact their plan much more quickly.

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