We begin in the future, where Charles and the mutants are running from a pack of wolf-like Sentinels. Charles gets knocked down, but Bishop steps in to absorb a shot for Charles and fling it back at the Sentinel. Domino tries to stall them for a bit, but she's not very lucky. They break into a building and barricade the door. They wait in silence for a bit, until Sarah wonders if they gave the Sentinels the slip. Good job; now they're breaking in.
We get reaction shots of them looking at the Wolfinel, looking terrified as it stands erect. Then it deploys three claws out of the backs of its hands. Right, because nothing in this series is scary unless it's Wolverine or a rip-off of him.
Cue the title sequence.
Cut to the present, where there's a foggy bay patrolled by MRD guards protecting a coastal facility. Logan, Kitty, and Forge rise up out of the water and Kitty phases them in. This is a Sentinel factory. Forge starts spouting some technobabble until he finds the "positronic processor." The group moves in.
Logan takes out a guy, while Kitty and Forge repel down the wall. Forge starts hacking, while Kitty gets Logan to explain why they're not attacking the place gun's blazing. Logan says that to stop them, they need to find out what they're up to. Wow, Logan exercising forethought? Maybe he really is growing into this leadership thing after... oh wait, the previously-on segment reminded us that this was Xavier's plan.
Forge ran into a problem with the encryption, but Logan just tells him to download whatever they can to crack it later. He then tells Kitty to get Forge out if things don't go well. And then he takes out another guard in patrol, but this exposes himself to the rest of the guards. They open fire and naturally hit absolutely nothing. Meanwhile Kitty phases Forge through the ground, which doesn't impact his electronics one bit.
We get a standard action scene of Logan beating up grunts and cutting their weapons. Meanwhile, Trask goes and activates a half-finished Sentinel. It manages to actually hit him and one-shot him. Trask wants Logan taken for study.
That segues us back to the future, where the Loginels are attacking the Future X-Men. The X-Men attack, doing pretty much nothing. Bishop runs over to a Loginel and grabs it. Red energy comes out of his body, covering the Loginel and... well, it falls over. For some reason, even though his energy didn't appear to be actually doing anything.
Charles points out the similarities with Logan, and then the Loginel starts regenerating. I have no idea why they're surprised by this, especially when we've seen Sentinels taking on mutant powers before now. Anyway, they start running down a hallway, trying to slow the many Loginels that are chasing them. But then they run into a vast desert.
Bishop calls it the titular "Badlands," and nobody goes there. Well, until now, as the Future X-Men run into the desert, but the Loginels don't follow. Bishop turns around and says that they won't follow. Good job again, because Master Mold issues an override, and the Loginels enter the desert.
After a commercial break, we see a blue energy pillar in the distance, which the X-Men are running to. It fires lightning into the desert sand, which somehow conducts it into some of the Loginels, killing one of them. The electricity also shorts out Xavier's exoskeleton, so he falls over. The other provide cover, but Domino's guns fall out of her hands. The lightning seems to be specific, as all of the Loginels are brought down by it.
After a bit of grousing, the Loginel parts start flying off into the desert, along with Domino's guns. Then Charles's exoskeleton starts to fly away, taking him with it. The others try to stop him, but to no avail. So they follow after him.
And now, back to the present. Kitty throws Forge into an MRD van for his protection, then goes back in to get Logan. Of course, MRD guards see her doing this, because she didn't bother to check around the van to see if anyone was looking. Meanwhile, Logan's being scanned by Trask. He finds Logan's adamantium skeleton, saying that he thought Logan's invincibility came from a mutant ability. Oh, and there's some camera watching him. For some reason. Trask is interested in his regenerative powers, and he says that they'll win the war by teaching machines how to fight like mutants.
Kitty's roaming the facility when some guards bring Forge to Trask. He tells them to lock Forge up, though that should be standard procedure when finding a random guy on a closed facility. Of course, this bit of nonsense is here so that Kitty can see how much of a failure she is at doing what she's told.
Kitty rescues Logan, and they banter a bit about what she was ordered to do. And now they go after Forge. Rescuing him is... surprisingly trivial: Kitty just phases in and pulls him out.
And now back to something interesting: the future. Charles is hanging upside down in a metallic garbage dump. He unlocks his exoskeleton and falls to the ground. We see a familiar shadow moving around nearby, wearing a distinctive headdress. The shadow steps forward as we cut to commercial, and reveal that it's... Lorna. Wearing Magneto's helmet and robes. Oh, and high-heels.
She calls herself Polaris now. They argue for a bit about how Charles felt about Eric. Charles considered him a friend, though they disagreed about how to handle the mutant/human situation. Lorna clearly has bought into her father's viewpoint, as she lays the blame on the apocalypse at the feet of the humans. Then she attacks Charles, wraps him up and prepares to kill him. But she's shot in the back by Bishop.
Lorna then starts deconstructing parts of her citadel to build a zombie Sentinel. Why nobody shot her or otherwise attacked while she was doing this is unclear. Anyway, it starts attacking them, forcing the four others to run, leaving him next to Lorna. The others keep attacking it with various things, none of which does much. It takes the tactical genius of Charles to point out that they need to take out Lorna.
Sarah pulls off one of her growths to throw, but Domino decides they need a luckier throw. Her's misses initially but improbably bounces until it knocks the helmet off. Thus giving Charles the chance to shut her mind down.
He then casually decides to walk into her mind and take a look around. He sees Genosha being consumed by fire from the sea... somehow. We see some cameo shots of previously seen mutants about to burn.
Magneto looks out from his citadel at the destruction of his paradise, and Lorna approaches him wondering what's going on. He simply says that it shouldn't have happened, that he failed everyone. And then he tells her to hide in the sublevels. He takes off his helmet and cloak, putting them on her. She refuses to go alone, wanting him to come with her. Seeing that she won't leave, he realizes what he must do, as a father. He kindly tells her that he loves her, then drops her down a hole just before the flames consume him.
Lorna, still in the past, rises up from rubble and finds Genosha in ruins, not even with the ocean around it. And she collapses in anguish.
Back in the future, Lorna talks about Magneto's dream of turning the world into a Genosha-esque paradise. Charles tells her that they're trying to use a temporal paradox to reshape reality so that the apocalypse never happened, which she doesn't buy is possible for obvious reasons. Charles talks about how they're still fighting for mutants, and she needs to let them leave to continue that fight. So she does, giving him his exoskeleton back.
Now walking, Charles reminds her that her father's dream still lives within her, and he leaves her Magneto's helmet. And the X-Men walk off into the distance.
Cut to the Future X-Men being carried by the zombie Sentinel across the desert. It stops suddenly, because everyone seems to have failed to notice the line of Sentinels and Loginels a hundred feet in front of them. Just as a Loginel is about to attack, a magnetic wave makes short work of the Sentinels, because Master Mold apparently didn't think to try to make them impervious to the primary enemy her minions were intended to face. Lorna flies away.
Bishop points out that she would have been useful to have around, but Xavier disagrees, saying that she's not a fighter. Magneto only wanted her to see the dream, not the war it took to build it.
Well, we couldn't end on that poetic note because it doesn't involve Logan. So we cut back to the present, where Charles says that Logan's capture led to the creation of the Loginals. Sure why not. Charles is concerned that Sentinel adaptation is what will cause them to lose the war, but Logan says the usual empty nonsense about how he won't let it happen.
Remarks
The first half of this episode was pretty terrible. It was padded heavily, with Kitty's subplot doing nothing more than eat up screen-time. It tells us little about her as a character, save that she's stupid in not bothering to check an area she stashed the vitally important Forge in. The stuff with the Loginels was kind of silly, especially since it didn't seem to tie into the second half of the episode much at all. And why wouldn't Master Mold build other Sentinels with regeneration; why just the beast forms?
But once they encounter Lorna, things become much better. The build-up to the reveal is quite good, even starting with the lightning from the desert. It looks like it could be anything, and the lightning itself is a pretty good red herring on the reveal. The silhouette shots are good too, as it shows off her much more feminine neckline despite still wearing the large helm and cloak.
Lorna's characterization works, for a one-shot like her. She's a tragic figure, a woman raised to be innocent, yet was forced to watch everything she loved and believed in burned to ashes. She's been living ever sense on pain and hate, lashing out at anything around her. And she has to be brought back to reason.
The only real downside to this is that she never really found a purpose. They just leave her there. They could have turned it into a refuge for the resistance, since she could provide protection from the Sentinels. She could have still refused to directly help (thus preserving the drama of Sentinel fights), while allowing them to have a relatively safe haven. And then Master Mold unleashes the plastic Sentinels in the season finale, thus destroying the haven.
But no, she just disappears for most of the series.
Overall, this episode really feels like a good episode smashed into a bad one. The two plots don't interact at all. And bringing Lorna down could have been handled so much better if there was more time. Not just the simple "remove her helmet and we win" kind of thing it was. I wanted to see Charles have to talk her down, find a way to fight through twenty years of pain and anger. Or even better, have some of the others do it, since they were nothing more than their powers this episode.
I'm also confused as to what this episode is trying to say about past/future contact. OK, Charles believes that because Logan was captured in the past, the Sentinels can replicate his powers. OK, but... that doesn't make sense. Why did it take 20 years to replicate them? After all, we've never seen the Loginels before, and Bishop backs that up. They're pretty effective, what with being able to survive many injuries and all. So obviously Master Mold didn't have them until recently.
The best you could say is that she's working off of old data, rather than having the real thing right in front of her. Even so... it's rather convenient that they show up now, in the same episode that Logan's captured. The juxtaposition makes it seem like history was directly changed by this event. That Charles sending Logan to find this info, which led to him being captured, is what caused the Loginels to spring into existence. But if that's the case, then why didn't Bishop remember them? Unless being near Charles means that all of them are somehow existing outside of time-space, so changes to the timeline don't affect them.
The temporal mechanics of this show is confused and nonsensical. And unlike Doctor Who, you don't even get a good television show out of it for your trouble.
