After the title sequence, we open on the Xavier Institute logo. We get some establishing shots of the various children playing around. Cut to Kitty and Colossus in the danger room, running. A steel wall pops up in front of them; Kitty of course phases through it. Peter doesn't smash through it. Then an advancing wall appears. Peter doesn't simply get out of the way, thus causing him to be pinned between the two.
Kitty heaps condescension on this: "Admit it Peter; you're being schooled by a girl." And feminism marches on...
Fortunately, Karma heard Kitty's nonsense, so she gets grabbed by a tentacle and lifted up. Meanwhile Colossus remembers that he has super-strength and breaks free. Colossus, not paying attention to Karma, sends condescension back at her, though at least he's tasteful enough not to use a sexist remark.
Cut to Kurt, also in the Danger Room, dodging laser blasts. When Kitty asks for help, Kurt points out that she can just phase through the tentacle. She says that it would cause her to fall on her face. Though the emphasis of this line seems to suggest that Kitty's being prissy about not falling on her pretty face and not the fact that a fall from that hight would likely cause severe injuries. Therefore, Kurt then tells her to get herself out and ports away.
So, 2 minutes in and the only likeable character is Colossus*. Who is quickly picked up by a magnet. Why he didn't revert to his non-steel form is, like so much of this scene, not explained. Kurt gloats, not realizing that today is Karma day, so he gets affixed to the ceiling with some kind of glue. Why he doesn't teleport away is, guess what, not explained.
A bunch of guns appear and take aim at them. They look at the control booth and see... Wolverine waving at them. He's nice enough to exposit that he's leaving and this was his goodbye gift. OK. Then he walks out, leaving them bound and such.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Cut to the front of the mansion, where we see Logan leaving. Oh, the episode's over? No, not so much. He overhears a conversation between Scott and Jean, where Jean tells Scott to apologize to Logan for something. Then, seeing Logan, she blows him a kiss.
I think I threw up in my mouth a bit.
Cut to Logan's motorcycle. Beast is nearby reading, and they chat for a bit about Rogue. Apparently, she doesn't want him to go, so Logan goes to talk to her. This conversation tells us that Logan goes away a lot, and Rogue says that the place doesn't feel like home when he's not around. Um, OK. Of the people at the school, it seems that Logan is the only one she feels is like family. But since he doesn't see that, she runs away from him.
Naturally, our hero doesn't follow. Instead he goes to see the professor. But then Xavier starts groaning in pain, as does Jean. There's a bright flash of light and...
Cut to Logan waking up elsewhere. A caption helpfully tells us that one year passed since then, so this wasn't just some horrible nightmare.
He sees some campers driving by, and he waves at a girl in one of them. After they pass, he gets on his bike and drives to an intersection. There's an explosion in the direction of the campers, but Logan heads the other way. We get some shots of him looking at his rearview and such, letting us know that he's not really going to leave these people.
Cut to a train crash. One of the R Vs was caught in it and somehow was not entirely demolished. Random biracial couple's daughter is still in the RV. When the father goes to get her, the ground between him and the RV explodes, stopping him. I don't know how ground explodes, but there's certainly nothing else in the shot between him and the RV. So either the ground exploded or the RV did.
Logan appears. Wow, what a shock; I totally thought he was going to leave these people to their fate. He goes in to save the girl, but in an actual twist, it explodes. We're left with the lingering hope that this will be the first 26-episode series that kills the title character in the first 7 minutes of the first episode, but no such luck. Workers dig Logan out, and he somehow shielded the girl. Even though there's clearly not enough room between himself and the steel he's lying on for her.
Yeah, the animation's kinda spotty in the pilot.
When the father decides to help Logan, his neighbors are somewhat hesitant due to the fact that he's a mutant. Though it's notable that it's the white guy who calls the "MRD" in, since they were looking for a mutant with knives in his hands. At that, the father decides to pack Logan into their RV and take him with them.
As Logan starts to wake up, we get a flashback to what happened immediately after the bright flash of light from before. Or at least, what Logan remembers of it. He gets up in the ruins of the mansion. He sees Scott calling out to Jean, who's not there. He sees Storm looking at a crater, where the twisted remains of the Professor's wheelchair is. Of the Professor, there is no sign.
Logan wakes up and almost stabs the girl. She is somehow not scared at all, despite having razor-sharp knives an inch from her face. She exposites that they're at her home now, then informs us that mutants aren't welcome at hospitals. After the girl leaves, Logan sees her mother dealing with phone calls from the neighbors about their house guest. Then he hears helicopters.
Armed men with "MRD" on their arms break down the door. Wow, even SWAT has to at least announce their presence before they come in and wreck your shit. I guess they don't bother with pesky things like warrants and the Constitution when dealing with mutants. When they don't find Logan, they ask the family about the mutant, but the father doesn't say anything. So they're arrested for aiding a fugitive mutant. Which at least is actually a crime (not the mutant part).
Logan has switched into his X-Men uniform... for some reason. And he decides to attack. As is expected for cartoon versions of Wolverine, his claws are reserved for enemy weapons and machines, not human flesh. After taking out some soldiers, he tries to reach the helicopter before it gets away with the family, but fails.
Logan is temporarily captured by a net and some gas, but he breaks free under the cover of the gas. The soldiers, rather than shooting the dangerous mutant, run for their other helicopter. So Logan throws their gas grenade back at them, which causes the chopper to crash. And of course, it crashes into the douchebag neighbor's RV. Man, this episode really loves Karma.
Cut to the MRD prison, where the family was taken. A guy in the shadows asks the family about Logan, but they say that they don't know anything about him. When the girl says that he's not dangerous, the shadow guy steps out of the shadows and insists that he is. And he even has the three scars on his face to prove it.
Oh, ominous.
Cut to Logan going back to the mansion. It clearly looks like the victim of an explosion. Logan detects a scent and jumps down an elevator shaft. He traces it back to the source: Beast, who's looking at something with a microscope.
They talk about the incident. Hank's been busy investigating. He knows that the explosion was centered on Xavier's position, but he can't identify the explosive itself. It wasn't anything normal, so they rule out the MRD or Magneto.
Logan informs Hank about the family's arrest, which shocks him. Apparently, the MRD hasn't been arresting non-mutants before. So Logan cajoles Hank into helping him break them out.
Cut to... a random advertisement. No really, they show an electronic billboard of an ad. This is actually plot-relevant, since it's an ad for Genosha, a haven for mutants that Magneto set up. It even has Maggy's picture inviting mutants to come to his island paradise.
Cut to an MRD truck, which Logan hijacks after some MRD personnel are stupid. Their plan is to have Hank be a "captured mutant" and Logan to bring him in. This works, though some playacting by Beast helps get them past the security faster. When some MRD people go to the back to extricate the prisoner, they find Hank there, unable to put on his handcuffs. So they draw their guns.
Hank tries to talk the guards down, saying he's a pacifist. But that's really just a distraction as Logan swoops in to take them both out.
Cut to the father of the family being taken out of the cell and put into a torture device. Apparently, it assaults the senses in some way. When the father doesn't give up the information, the scarred guy from before turns it on.
Cut to Hank as he runs into a guard. He tries his pacifism shtick again, which doesn't work. I don't know why he bothered; it's an anti-mutant guard in a prison facility for mutants. He does the same for some technicians he finds somewhere, which is borderline condescending. Logan shows up, and they find the prison level.
Cut back to the family, as the father is thrown back in after his session. The scarred guy then suggests that he's going to interrogate the daughter next. Cue Logan, who takes out the guards and knocks out the scarred guy. Then Logan puts him in his own torture device and leaves him there.
They turn this into a full-fledged jail-break by releasing all the mutants. Right, because none of those mutants did anything wrong. They all escape in a chopper.
We gets some action from the non-Wolverine segment as cameos by Boom-Boom and Pyro take out a hanger. Then we see a mutant I've never seen, an apparently Arabic woman wearing a full burqa named Dust, turn into animate sand and take out one of the jets by clogging its engines.
Cut to Logan leaving the family. In an attempt at book-ending, the girl asks him not to leave. Logan says that he needs to go home. And so he does.
Cut back to the underground parts of the institute. After scaring Logan, Hank informs us that those mutants left. They talk about the coming war, and so Logan says that they need the X-Men.
Cue the end credits.
Remarks
The title sequence to this series tells us a lot about the series as a whole. We see each of the X-Men, of course. What's interesting is that they're always fighting people. Not the Brotherhood. Not Magneto. Humans, with Sentinel backup. And that's generally true of the series: the focus is primarily on Mutants vs. Humans.
Overall, this was an OK episode and a decent introduction. It establishes much of what needs to be established. It sets up the primary mystery of the series (technically just season 1, but there was no season 2): what happened at the institute. It sets up the MRD and the general sentiment around mutants very well. It establishes the title character and what's going on with him. It also hints nicely about Magneto's paradise of Genosha, which we will see later.
Though why they needed to call it "Part 1" is not apparent. While the next two episodes do flow from the decision at the end to re-form the X-Men, it's not like the X-Men are fully formed after Part 3. Several characters used in the main shot of the title sequence don't rejoin the team until later. The three episodes don't really meld together into a single 3-part story; they're just 3 semi-connected episodes.
If you could take all of my fears about a series called Wolverine and the X-Men, and condense them down into a single 3 minute block of animation, you would get the Logan part of the episode's first act. It's all about Logan. Who are Scott and Jean talking about? Logan (yes, I know that this is plot-relevant later). Who is Beast is waiting to see? Logan. But the dialog with Rogue is what really hurt. It's Logan who she sees as family, and only Logan. He's the only one who matters to her.
I almost shut off the stream right then and there. See, it's not the presence of Wolverine that I can't stand. It's not that the show's about him. It's when characters exist solely to gush over him at the expense of other characters that I hate.
But aside from that ball of agony, it was a decent start.
