We begin with a replaying of the fight from Thieves' Gambit, where Logan jumps in on Trask and his flunky. This is doubly confusing since we just saw this scene in the one-minute recap at the top of the episode. Anyway, this is a memory, which we discover when a different Logan and Charles Xavier come walking through talking about picking at Logan's memories. Logan showed Charles this to show him a file on something called "Master Mold."
Charles doesn't know anything about it, since historical records after the apocalypse are rather spotty. So he tells Logan to head back to Trask's place to find out about it, while Chuck will look around in the future.
Cut to... the future. Charles gets out of Cerebro and starts collecting some books. Then a laser beam cuts through the ceiling. It carves a square out of the ceiling and metal hands pull it away to reveal a giant Sentinel robot.
Cue the title sequence.
Chuck dodges a series of grabby tentacles, and he leaves the mansion. However, another Sentinel pops up and he gets ensnared. Other Sentinels appear and dig Cerebro out of the mansion, flying off with it.
Cut back to the past. The X-Men have assembled to invade the Trask facility. Scott asks Logan if he has a plan. Please, Scott, it's Logan; he doesn't even know what a plan is. This time, Logan detects a distinct lack of people, saying that he should smell a lot more people than he does. Forge chimes in to give the episode some Komedy!, and Logan remarks, "The future's gotta be easier than this." Yeah, that post-apoclyptic future, where Sentinels hunt mutants and the world is almost dead.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Cut to the future, where Xavier and Cerebro are being brought to some kind of central mutant holding facility. Xavier is left in the yard while Cerebro is taken inside the complex. Then we see the guy with three facial scars telling Xavier to get ready to be collared. For some reason, the episode sees fit to show us that the collars turn off mutant powers by having some random flame-haired (literally) mutant be collared. Then we see another mutant fire an energy blast at him, who blocks it with a shield and then fires a beam back to knock the guy out. And he then gets collared.
The scarred guy then says that he's telekinetic, so he should be taken inside. Um, I don't know when "telekinesis" became "fires energy blasts from his hands," but OK. A Sentinel carries him off.
The guy then turns to Charles. Of course, since Charles is a telepath, this doesn't exactly go well. The collar is placed on him, but before the guy can turn it on, Charles convinces him otherwise. We also learn that his name is Colonel Moss. After a little more convincing, Moss walks away.
A mutant who's wearing her skeleton on the outside asks him how he did that, but Charles is needlessly circumspect. We instead need a random scary black mutant to tell her that Charles is a telepath. The black guy introduces himself as Bishop, saying that Wolverine told him about Charles.
It turns out Logan gathered together a new band of X-Men post-apocalypse. But he was captured at some point, which they took to mean that he's definitely dead. Hmm... title character captured off screen and no verifiable body, with a well-known healing factor. Odds of Logan actually being dead in the future are... wait, this can't be right. -400%? What does that mean, that he not only isn't dead but has replicated himself?
Anyway, the mutants exposit that the Sentinels keep the mutants alive for some reason. They take mutants into the main complex, and they're never heard from again. Bishop says that they're breaking everyone out. He and some of his team were captured as part of the plan. Charles points out how dangerous that is, but Bishop says that they've got some luck. And Domino shows up, thus finally telling us what her powers are. Apparently, she's lucky enough to survive the apocalypse.
Cut back to the past. Kitty distracts some guards while Bobby freezes them. Scott knocks down the door, per his idiom in this show. Oh, and the building is empty, which for some reason surprises everyone. Despite that scene earlier with Logan being concerned about the lack of people scent. And despite the fact that if your secret base is found out by your enemy, standard procedure is to move it somewhere else.
Well, we cut back to the future, were something is actually being accomplished. The exoskeleton lady isn't sure about Xavier's story of time-traveling telepathy and such, but he's able to prove that at least he is Charles Xavier. He then says that he has to get inside the building to get Cerebro back. After all, it's a mutant tracking system, and if the Sentinels can figure out how to use it, mutants will be unable to hide from the Sentinels.
Exoskeleton girl, named Sarah, is rather pissed about this, saying it's Charles's fault for not destroying it*. Chuck points out that it's how he time travels, but Sarah doesn't care about that and storms off. Bishop decides to take Charles inside, but Domino thinks it's foolish. Bishop reminds her that it's "Professor X, the guy that Wolverine listens to." Yes, because what Logan thinks is all that matters. Domino relents.
Cut to Xavier's meat puppet, Colonel Moss, escorting Bishop and Charles inside the tower. Charles has Moss look for Cerebro, and he finds it. But he also finds a living mutant, the one from earlier in the episode.
Cut to the mutant strapped to a chair with electrodes on his head. A Sentinel walks over and pushes a button, causing the mutant to glow green. Then the Sentinel goes to a cube and uses the green energy to lift it. Xavier tells us the obvious: that the Sentinels are using mutants to replicate their powers and "evolve".
Bishop starts talking about Master Mold, so Charles asks what that is. Bishop exposites that Master Mold is the Sentinel leader responsible for the Sentinel uprising. Meanwhile, something in Colonel Moss's head has finally recognized external tampering and shuts off those pesky human components. Which only begs the question of why they kept them around in the first place. Moss tries to shoot Charles, but Bishop grabs the blast and throws it back at him.
A Sentinel appears. Bishop absorbs its energy blasts and redirects them. Meanwhile Charles goes to break out the mutant. Bishop and the Sentinel fight for a bit, but the machine eventually realizes that energy beams suck and decides to go with something else: slamming Bishop through several walls. This doesn't work, and it ends with Bishop using his body to channel electricity into the machine.
Cut to outside the facility, where some of Bishop's people are preparing to attack. They mistake the building's power fluctuations as the signal to begin. We see the Sentinels converge on the central building. Meanwhile, the collars all pop off... somehow. Domino calls this lucky, despite the fact that her powers were suppressed until those collars popped off. One of the guys teleports in to deliver some weapons.
Cut back inside, where Xavier is trying to help the telekinetic mutant. He needs time to rest, but a pair of Sentinels show up. When they fire, he manages to erect a shield to stop them. Before the Sentinels can try their chest blasters, Bishop one-shots them.
Cut to a door, that is promptly blasted open by Bishop. They see an odd version of Cerebro that's conveniently much smaller. When Xavier tries to get them to take it somewhere, the wall explodes and a giant Sentinel hand reaches in to grab Charles.
Cut to outside, where Domino is dual-wielding energy rifles and has felled a large Sentinel. We then are treated to a minute of random, mostly unnamed mutants fighting giant robots. Something important happens when Domino spots the Sentinel that's carrying Charles. She gets close enough and then shoots its wrist, which makes Charles fall. Luckily for him, the telekinetic is there and catches him, while carrying Cerebro. Bishop saves them from the Sentinel's attack and sends it back at the robot.
After a bit more action, in which Charles saves Sarah from a Sentinel, the various mutants run for the hills, with the now miniaturized Cerebro in tow.
Cut back to the past for more pointlessness. Charles tells Logan and Beast to keep looking for Trask and Master Mold, that it's important for the coming apocalypse. Well, enough of that, so we cut back to the future, where Xavier gives the final words, saying that the X-Men are there to keep things from getting worse, in the past or future.
Well, not quite final. We see a Sentinel reporting in on Charles. A female voice states that he was recognized as Charles Xavier, a telepath, and he is to be captured alive. And we see that the female voice belongs to a very feminine looking robot. No doubt the Master Mold.
Remarks
I'm kind of ambivalent on this episode. On the one hand, it's fairly decent. It had some good action, it's semi-plot relevant, and we get to spend some time without Logan. All pluses in my book.
On the other hand... this episode is over one third of the way through the series, and it introduces us to many new characters. Xavier has been nothing more than a head that gave orders; now he's a character. Bishop and Sarah get screentime, and Domino's back too. Again, that's a lot of new characters to be introducing all at once.
This future stuff is more or less its own series. It has its own characters and its own storytelling style. It's primary purpose within the series is to send messages back for the present-day X-Men to deal with. The problem is that it has its own characters and storyline going on. You basically have 2 X-Men teams that the series bounces between.
There will be two more of these episodes that focus solely on the future X-Men. And that's not counting the 3-part season finale that constantly switches back and forth between them (even though the whole point of the present X-Men is to destroy that future by making it better and thus all that work will be irrelevant). These 3 total episodes could have been used for some Kitty or Bobby character development. They could have explored Emma's past. They could have done some things with Storm. Or any of the other X-Men that got the short end of the character development stick in this show.
These future episodes aren't bad, per-se. The problem is that they're taking up valuable time with even more characters in an already character overloaded show. We get a lot of mutant cameos, but mutant cameos aren't what the show should be about. It's just poor storyline structuring and an inefficient use of time.
As a side note, what exactly was up with the pointless X-Men scenes in this episode? OK, I know I was complaining about the lack of X-Men earlier, but having them be worthless, throwaway cameos in their own show isn't exactly an improvement. Why even have them there at all? If they're going to have this Future X-Men plot, then they're going to have to develop these characters as best they can. And that means not wasting precious time on scenes with people who aren't doing anything. And if they want to keep the X-Men and Wolverine in the show, they shouldn't have an episode about some other team.
Doing both at the same time hurts both of them.
