The episode opens with snowy, likely Canadian, mountains. We see a guy being dropped off by a helicopter. The guy, wearing a ski-mask and various other "agent"-style gear, repels down a wall to a cabin. We then... get epilepsy. The scene flashes to various disconnected images of things. A man coming out of the cabin while the agent guy watches. Then it cuts to the man being shocked. Then to the man face down, while the agent stands over the body, the man's daughter watching and calling for her father. Then we see the agent turn around and... it's Wolverine!
If this were a comic book, there'd be a good chance Logan straight-up murdered someone. But this is a kid's show, so odds of this just being Superdickery are... let's just say pretty good.
Cut to Logan in the white, formless void. Charles is with him. Apparently, Logan's unearthed some memories, and he asks what he has done with a semi-horrified look on his face.
Cue the title sequence.
Logan asks Charles to look in his mind again to find the memories. Charles says that it will take time, that putting the fragments back together will require effort. Logan wants him to do more, but Charles points out that he has a real job to do now: lead the X-Men. Charles implores him to focus on what's happening now, not what happened back then. Logan seems to agree.
I say "seems to" because, after a cameo shot of Scott and of Emma looking at Scott, Logan asks Emma to dig around in his brain for memories. After a bit of awkwardness, she detects that Charles had already been in his head, so she assumes he couldn't do it. Logan corrects her: that he wouldn't do it. Right, because he wanted you to focus on your actual fucking job. Of course, Emma agrees to do it.
Cut to a bit of girl bonding between Rogue and Domino, as they ridicule the sleeping Blob. We then see Quicksilver watch them furtively, then go wake Blob up to apparently guard the door. Or something, it's hard to make out exactly what he says. Anyway, Domino invites her to do some target practice, but Rogue just says that if she needs to shoot someone, she'll steal Domino's powers. Which are... what, exactly? Anyway, after Domino sexily walks away, Rogue goes through a door and watches Blob on guard duty.
She uses a gigantic hole on the wall to spy on Quicksilver's conversation with... Magneto! What a shock! Quicksilver's complaining to his father about how he should have earned respect by now, but now he's being asked to do the impossible. Eric takes this to mean he can't do it. Quicksilver disagrees, but says that after they do it, he wants to come back to Genosha. Eric takes it under advisement. Quicksilver walks out, still not noticing the massive hole in the wall that's big enough to show most of Rogue's face.
Well, that was getting dangerously close to something meaningful happening, so cut to Logan and Emma. She probes his mind, unearthing a sequence of clips of things happening. Logan is attacked by an energy version of the man from before. We get some repeats of what we saw before, and eventually Emma breaks contact, understanding why the memories concern him.
Emma tells him that, to find out what the memories mean, he needs to find the cabin. Logan doesn't know where that is, but Emma says that it was at the base of two mountains. Oh, that narrows it down, thanks Emma.
Cut to some actual X-Men. Kitty, Bobby, and Hank are in the library. They get to screw around for a few seconds before Logan comes in to do what he does best: put the focus on himself. Apparently, the plan is to actually look for pictures of the two mountains, on the off chance that they will find a picture taken from the exact vantage point Logan saw them from. And this plan works. In fact, the third hit on Google Image Search for "twin mountain" is exactly what he's looking for.
Cut to Logan in the mountains on his bike. Yep, even after Charles told him how important it was to keep leading the X-Men, to focus on the present rather than the past, he still went off on his own.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
As he drives in the snow on his bike*, we see a metal camera pop up and watch him pass, the universal cliché for "you're being watched". Despite enhanced senses, Logan notices none of the cameras that spot him. We then cut to a photo of him on some computer, searching a database of faces until he's recognized. We then see some guys in labcoats calling for "Dr. Cornelius."
We then see a corpulent red-headed man in a labcoat run to a machine to holo-communicate with a skinny man. The red-head tells him that "Weapon X" has been spotted. The skinny guy seems unconcerned, but the red-head firmly suggests killing him. That's off the table, since he's too "valuable" for that. Capture is likewise off the table, since he can't be contained. So if he can't be captured... how exactly is he "valuable" to you?
Anyway, the skinny guy decides to find out what Logan knows before taking action, so they call up Sabertooth. Of course; no Wolverine-centric story would be complete without him showing up.
BTW, which one of these guys was Cornelius? The show was kinda ambiguous about that.
Cut to Rogue, who has apparently come to the mansion. She asks for Logan, but gets Beast instead. She continues to ask for Logan because... he has his name in the title. When Hank won't tell her where he is, she fashions her own response: that he took off without telling anyone where he was going or when he'd be back. And she sounds very hurt when she says that. When Beast suggests that she leave a message with him, she walks off, telling Beast not to trust him. Good job Logan; I hope whatever Quicksilver was up to wasn't something that needed to be stopped.
Cut back to Logan. He walks around, then gets a flashback to him being briefed about his mission. He's to take out some mutant who absorbs and redirects kinetic energy. So... Bishop then. Did they just run out of mutant powers and have to double up on some? Back in the present, Logan sees the cabin as well as a bit of the rope he used to repel down in the past. This sparks another flashback, where we see him repelling down the cliff to the cabin. In the present, Logan decides to use his claws to climb down.
He gets to the ruins of a barn and sees three claw marks like his. Then he turns to the cabin itself, where we get yet another flashback. The man, Chris Nord, emerges from the cabin and tells his daughter to stay in the cabin. Logan looks in the house and sees Nord's young daughter. Logan then calls back to base to inform them of this, but they already know. Logan actually asks them why they didn't tell him, and they point out that she isn't the one he's to kill.
Back in the present, Logan looks through the now broken window. He hears a horse ride up behind him, so he turns and bears his claws. It's Christy* Nord on horseback, now all grown up. She seems just as surprised to see Logan as he is to see her. But after a quick flashback informing us again that this is the daughter, she decides to earthbend at him, smashing his face with a boulder. Then she turns the rock into sand and has it envelope and crush him, while she says how much she's waited for this.
Cut to inside the cabin, where Logan is trapped in rock while Chirsty looks on menacingly. She asks him one question, "why?" When he truthfully says that he doesn't know, this just pisses her off, so she smothers him for a bit. She again demands to know why he did it, but he says that he only remembers coming for the man, not why he was ordered to. Before she can react to that, she gets sniped with a tranquilizer dart and falls unconscious. Sabertooth appears to collect Wolverine's stone form.
Sabertooth taunts Logan a bit. After a commercial break, he hurls Logan through the window, which... breaks the rock trapping him. Sabertooth taunts him some more, in particular about his lost memory. When he calls Logan "Weapon X," he punches Logan so hard it causes him to flashback. Logan is arguing with his commander over the radio, complaining about making the girl an orphan. Murder is A-OK; it's only bad when the victim is a parent.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Anyway, Logan's arguing so loudly that the Chris Nord hears everything. Some secret agent he is. So he goes to his anvil and hits it with his hammer a bunch to gain some kinetic energy. He then uses it to fling the anvil into Logan, through the side of the barn. Logan easily throws the anvil aside* and staggers to his feet. Logan tries to call the guy off, but he isn't having any of it as he charges Logan with his hammer. He hits Logan with the hammer, then throws Logan into the barn.
Back in the present, Logan's being beaten around by Sabertooth. Logan tries to cut Sabertooth, but since this is a cartoon, Sabertooth has adamantium bracers to prevent that sort of thing. Again, he knocks Logan into a flashback. Nord walks into the now burning body and picks up Logan, telling him to stay away from his family. Logan agrees, then Nord gets shot in the back by Sabertooth. The gun is some kind of energy weapon; it eventually puts Nord down.
Back in the present, again, Logan asks why Sabertooth did it, for some reason. He responds with the obvious: he was sent because Logan wouldn't do it. They fight for a bit before we get another flashback... to Logan and Sabertooth fighting. Logan eventually knocks him out and runs back into the barn for Nord. This sets up the Superdickery, where his daughter catches him standing over the unconscious body of Nord. Then the building collapses. And even though she was clearly outside the barn in one shot, it still falls fully on top of her.
Logan climbs out of the rubble carrying her. He then goes digging through the rubble looking for Nord with his claws, which is a great way to accidentally kill him. Fortunately for Nord, Logan doesn't find him.
Back in the present*, Sabertooth says that Logan cared more about the girl than himself, Logan's partner. Logan demands to know who they were working for, but Sabertooth says that the only reason he's alive is because he doesn't know. Then Sabertooth just pulls his energy gun from off screen and shoots him.
Then, Christy appears and earthbends him. She makes a horizontal avalanche, pushing him off a cliff. I guess she overheard the conversation. Except... there wasn't much of a conversation. It was mostly told via flashback, which she's not exactly privy to. Anyway, she and Logan seem to make up.
Cut to Logan returning to the mansion. He actually thanks Emma for her help, and Emma suggests coming to her next time instead of Charles. Hank appears, then informs Logan about Rogue's visit. Logan tells him not to trust Rogue. That's what she said, Hank tells him.
Cut to Sabertooth talking with the skinny guy from before. He tells the guy that Logan is starting to remember, but currently knows nothing about them. The guy delivers the cliche villain dialog. You know, "he'll have to be dealt with" and "I'll expect your report within the hour." Sabertooth walks out of the holo-projector and talks to "Maverick," aka the not dead Chris Nord. He informs Nord that they'll be looking at his daughter, and he didn't know he had one. Which makes Sabertooth's comment... kinda self-defeating, since now Nord knows he has a daughter and that you're going after her.
Remarks
This is an odd episode. Structure-wise, it tries to analogize Rogue with Christy Nord, but that doesn't really work. They have completely different relationships with Logan, and the only real similarity between them is that they're both young women who are attached to Logan in some way. So it's sort of a half-hearted theme.
The incessant use of flashbacks make watching the episode somewhat tiresome. A single flashback, or maybe two, would have been fine. But having 4-5 that constantly breaks up the action really screws with the pacing of the various scenes.
If the first episode of the show was my greatest fear with how other characters react to Logan, this episode was my biggest fear about Logan-centric episodes. And it's another of my reasons for hating the character.
Logan episodes are always, always about some facet of his oh so mysterious past. They love nothing more than to hold forth about things that happened to him long ago. None of these things matter one bit to the overall season-long arc.
But why is this a problem? Because it's Logan's past, so nobody else gets to participate. In Thieves' Gambit, at least it was Logan and somebody else, and Gambit shows up again in a plot-relevant episode. In Wolverine vs. The Hulk, it was the friggin' Hulk; even if we don't know the particulars about this series's version, it's still the Hulk. But in this episode? It's Logan, alone. Oh sure, he interacts with people. But he doesn't have a partner or sidekick. It's just him, and it's solely about his past.
You can see this in how short this episode is with other characters. The episode is structured to try to analogize Christy with Rogue in their adversarial relationship with Logan. But Christy doesn't really have a relationship with him; she only knows that he killed her father. And Rogue's relationship is never explored; we're simply told that they had one. Christy only gets about 6-7 lines in the entire episode. And Rogue's screen-time is very brief as well; she talks to Domino and Hank, but that's about it.
This episode is about how Logan deals with his past. It's not about Rogue or Christy; they're just bit players in the story of Wolverine's life.
This problem is compounded by the needs of a kid's show. As previously stated, if this were in a comic book, or even the film series, he'd have been the killer. That would have then allowed him to confront what he had done in his past. Christy would have had to make a character decision of whether or not to claim revenge for her father. And so forth.
But we're in a kid's show, so that isn't possible. The problem this creates is that the main point of Logan's past is that it's something he has to overcome. That he has done terrible things, that he feels remorse for what he discovers that he did. These are things he needs to atone for.
That kind of thing falls apart when he hasn't actually done anything bad. In order for Logan's past to be dark and tragic, he has to have actually done terrible things. Not just been ordered to do it, but actually carried out those orders. That didn't happen. And the lack of him actually having been a bad guy once weakens the overall concept.
