Trauma is a powerful thing, it seems.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, Logan ran off to Japan. Feeling extremely angry and like he’d lost
his purpose, Logan ran off to Japan to live and work at a monastery he’d stayed
at sometime in the path. He found peace in construction and living a slower
life. This peace was ruined by the Silver Samurai and his gang extorting the
villagers for protection money. Logan felt extremely conflicted about getting
involved as he liked the inner peace that he’d achieved working at the monastery
but ultimately decided that protecting people is his purpose, so he won’t resist
the urge to fight anymore. He dueled and defeated Silver Samurai, saving the
village and ultimately kissing a girl he spoke with three times. He ended up
returning to the X-Men with Jubilee, who’d come to find him. Enough Recapping.
Let’s get to it, shall we?
I should note before we begin that
this story canonically takes place before the last episode “Lotus and the
Steel.” “Weapon X, Lies and Video Tape” first premiered on June 11th
1995, and “Lotus and the Steel” premiered on February 3rd of 1996.
No idea why they’re put in this order after the fact, shows are screwy like
that.
We open on a snowy forest
landscape. Logan is fighting Sabretooth in a cabin. Sabretooth isn’t in his
costume for once and is instead in flannel which feels so weird to me. There’s
a woman with them, she’s Silver Fox, who tells Logan that Sabretooth is crazy
before passing out. Sabretooth sticks his finger in a celebration cake they’d hand
and licks it clean, sarcastically asking Logan if he can’t take care of his
woman. Logan charges him before we pull out and learn this is all a nightmare
he’s having. Logan is in reality completely strapped down to a bed in the
medical bay as Scott, Jean and Hank watch Charles try to get control of the
situation. We learn that Charles had put mental blocks in place to help Logan
deal with these nightmares but they’ve seemed to have all broken. Charles gets
hit with psychic feedback that knocks him out and Logan breaks free. Scott
tries to reach out to stop his friend, but he sees Sabretooth and tries to
slice him. Jean psychically shoves Scott out of the way. Logan runs off, Beast
going after him with Jean asking him to stop him but be careful. Beast can’t
reach him in time, though, and Logan drives off in his jeep.
Sometime later, Jean enters Logan’s
room and looks though a collection of photos he has. They seem to be of all the
women he’s loved in recent years, we see the Scott-removed picture of Jean, one
of Yuriko aka Lady Deathstrike before her claws, Heather Hudson (wife of Vindicator
of Alpha Flight), and one of him and Silver Fox who we just saw in his
nightmare. Hank walks by and Jean calls him over. She reveals that she’d that
postcard to Logan two weeks ago when it came in the mail, which is right when
he started to have his breakdown. She’s sure that’s what triggered it, she’d
seen Silver Fox in Logan’s mind earlier, and notes that there are coordinates
written on the back. Hank agrees that Logan is probably headed that way, to
southern Canada. She asks Hank to go after him, to which he agrees.
Logan reaches the coordinates,
which appears to be… shockingly, a government facility. He breaks in and walks
into the facility through the giant hole in the wall… which, ya know, he put in
it. He finds the laboratory where they’d bonded the adamantium to his skeleton.
He has a flashback to the process, where he’d been stuck in a tube and hand the
liquid metal injected into his body while Professor Hudson (not named here but
that’s his name) observed. Logan woke up mid-procedure and broke free. He tried
to gut Hudson, but the coward escaped. Logan is brought out of his flashback by
Hank, who he also tries to gut because he’s in a berserk frenzy. Hank dodges a
stab from Logan, who hits a computer and shocks himself instead. This snaps him
out of the delusion and Hank tries to talk to Logan. He’s not sure why he’s like
this but he’s sure that this facility has the answer. Hank, not willing to
leave Logan behind, helps him break further into the facility. They find the
helmet that Logan wore during the procedure and Logan starts to have another
attack. He remembers running all but naked through the frozen wilderness to an
army base. He goes inside and shoots several dummies as part of his training protocol.
Hudson appears behind him and shocks him to get him to stop, saying the
programming is going well and to increase the intensity for Logan. Hank pulls
him out of this one and asks what he saw. They find Logan’s old Lotus, the car
from his picture with Silver Fox and he says her name for the first time. He has
a flashback to driving with her in that car to their cabin, and him carving
their names in a heart on the Cabin door. Then Sabretooth attacks, and the
memory plays out like before, though this time Sabretooth is in full costume.
Logan freaks out and rips the steering wheel from the lotus. Sabretooth himself
then walks in, complaining about this, saying that he doesn’t know why Logan
drew him out here when he could have killed him stateside. The two fight, both
accusing the other of luring them out here before they have a combined
flashback.
We see Logan, Creed, Silver Fox and
a fourth guy named Maverick in combat gear. They steal a canister of C-Synth
before they’re attacked by Omega Red. Logan and Creed run through the door, but
Omega Red cuts the other two off. Creed shoots the door lock, trapping their
team with Omega Red but letting them escape. Logan calls him a traitor and
Creed calls him a coward. Their fight is interrupted by Maverick and Silver Fox,
both who are alive. We get a brief info dumb, all four of them are having
intense nightmares and visions, they’re only going to get worse until they find
the source, and they know this brainwashing procedure was called Talos. Silver
Fox opens a door and reveals their past.
Inside are studio sets, hollow
facades of buildings and locations. Logan sees one of a hardware store and has
a vision of himself getting kidnapped out in front of it. He screams in rage, saying
that’s not how it happened and demanding to know what’s going on. Sabretooth
laughs at him for his weakness, until he sees his own set and flashes back to
when he was a boy and his violent father, Jebediah Creed beat him for being a Mutant.
He starts sobbing and begging his Pa to not hurt him anymore and swearing he’ll
be good. Maverick has his own flashback and screams for Creed to stop, we don’t
see what he saw. Logan insists that this isn’t right and asking why it seems
like all their memories are terrible. He goes to a sobbing Fox and sees the cabin
they both remember. Logan asks her what is going on. Hank calls all their
attention to a big screen, saying he’d found the records of what happened here.
Time stamp says this was all done twentyish years ago in 1973. He plays Hudson’s
presentation. We learn that the four of them were taken for experimentation and
Hudson used drugs and simulations to induce trauma responses in these subjects.
Why? To condition them to react to certain stimuli, ‘activating them’ as
sleeper soldiers who then can kill their targets before being deactivated and
returned to civilian life. They were flooded with false memories to induce the
trauma response, Hudson callously noting that the process works best with scenarios
based on real events. Creed says that all their memories are fake, and why don’t
they hunt this scientist down and give HIM some trauma. Hank pulls up another video.
This one reveal that Hudson had noticed that Sabretooth and Wolverine have
similar healing powers and have decided to use that. They took Logan and bonded
adamantium to his skeleton using Yuriko’s father’s adamantium bonding process,
with the intention of doing the same to Sabretooth if the process was
successful. Sabretooth points out he could have had metal bones too if Logan
hadn’t flipped out, and Logan says he should thank him. The video shows Logan’s
escape, and the other three running off right after.
Fox reveals she’s seen all of the
facility already save one room that’s hidden behind a door she can’t cut into,
which is why she called up Logan and Creed. It’s made of adamantium and isn’t
easy to damage. There’s a four paneled DNA lock, and she deduces that the four
of them need to use it to get inside. They all touch their palms to the
scanners despite Hank’s protests, who points out the obvious ‘why would they
hid something behind a door only the four of them can open.’ Once they’re
inside, a video from Hudson played. He reveals that this was all planned for. He
says the four of them learning the truth about their memories and the
conditioning has endangered whatever plans he’s working on and that they must
be eliminated. Opening the door activated a robot hunter named Talos that will
disable, capture, and take them all in for reprogramming. Hank tries to get the
door open while the other four fight Talos. The robot is made of adamantium as
well, so he’s tough as hell. Maverick scanned Talos and found it’s power sources
is deep in it’s body, they’ll need to bury a termite grenade inside to destroy
it. Logan rushes in and breaks a hole in Talos back before he’s thrown off.
Talos drawing an axe triggers Sabretooth’s trauma response, but he attacks the
temporary vision of his father rather than run from it. There’s a brief scuffle
with everyone that ends with Maverick getting a thermite grenade in Talos back
and blowing him to hell.
Hank breaks the lock on the door.
Before they can leave, Talos activates their trauma response causing all four
of the test subjects to drop to the ground and scream in pain. It also
activates a secondary Talos unit to capture them. Hank grabs a truck and puts
everyone on it. He distracts the second Talos using Maverick’s explosives
before driving off. They escape the facility, Hank saying the explosions will draw
attention to the facility. He goes to prep the mini-jet and let’s Logan say
goodbye to his comrades. He and Maverick have a cordial goodbye, Sabretooth
just kind of walks off and that’s really the best thing he could do, but Logan
tries to talk to Fox. He insists that while a they now know some of what they remember
is fake, there were parts that were real. They both remember him carving
their names in the door of the cabin, the cabin in the facility didn’t have
names, so that must be part of what really happened. Fox says that maybe that
is true, but that was also a lifetime ago. She says goodbye and takes her jet
away. Hank and Logan talk, Logan saying he’d come here for answers but
officially knows less now than he did before. Hank says he doesn’t have easy
answers but suggest Logan rely on the memories he knows are true, like of their
time together as X-Men. Logan agrees to that. As they board the jet, we see that
a nearby tree has Logan and Silver Fox carved into it, but Logan doesn’t see
it. That’s a sad way to end it…
Overall, a solid episode that I
think easily could have been a two-parter. Just extend out Logan’s search for
the facility a little, or show more of Sabretooth’s part of the story, what he
was doing when he started having the visions, and cut it right when Maverick
and Silver Fox break up their fight. Pick up part two with them seeing the sets
and fill out the story with more of Maverick and Silver Fox so we can get a
better sense of who they are. For example, what their powers are! Maverick can
absorb kinetic energy, and Silver Fox is another character with a healing
factor. Maverick has also been written with a Healing factor, but in him it’s
an artificial power. You might think that there are a lot of healing factors in
one spot, but they were selected and experimented on for a military program, so
that makes sense to me. Obviously, the military wants self-recovering soldiers
SOOOO bad. I like this idea that each of these guys have multiple traumatic
pasts programmed into their minds, as it’s a handy explanation for any retcons
to their pasts. Was Logan a soldier? A drifter? An immortal from the 1700s? He
could be all or none depending on who’s writing him, and it’s not contradicted
by the text! That’s part of what makes this story fun, as it both fills in a
part of Logan’s past, while further obscuring anything that could come before
the Weapon X program. It effectively makes being the Weapon X all Logan ever
was, since he has no idea which of his traumatic pasts is the real one. For a
longform story like a comic or TV show, this is a godsend for a writer.
Infinite possibilities. My only complaint really is they under utilized
Maverick and Silver Fox. The only reason I don’t include Sabretooth in that is
due to the fact we’ve seen him before so don’t need much more about him to fill
in the gaps. He’s a big bully that loves ragging on how small and weak Logan is
compared to him to make himself feel better for all the times he’s lost to
Logan. Boom done. But who is Maverick? A man with an odd accent and an armored
suit? That’s it? Nothing about what he's been doing or where he’s been? Same
with Silver Fox? How’d she find the facility? Did her programming start kicking
in early for some reason? All these ideas could have been explored at least a
little with more time. As to Doctor Hudson… they could have just revealed his
name. That’s my one note. Making him nameless in the episodes might make him
seem a little more mysterious but it makes summarizing this stuff a lot harder,
all I’m saying. So, ya, fun story. Next time it’s a Christmas episode in July,
fitting. Have a good night!
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/135193566/
Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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