TV REVIEW: X-Men (5.7) – Old Soldiers

First Things First…

This episode originally aired as Episode 5.11.

I’m excited for Cap! I don’t think there have been any crossovers with other Marvel characters beyond the X-titles throughout the series, just Easter eggs. So this could be really cool. But my optimism is tempered by the fact that Season 5 has been more hit-or-miss than the rest. Still, it’s a cool idea to pair Captain America with Wolverine, considering they’re both old AF. I don’t know if we’re going to find out that they worked together in the past, before Cap’s deep freeze and Wolverine’s Weapon X days, but it could make sense.

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2 Things I Like

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2. Double Agent

“Thanks to your failed rescue, my father worked behind enemy lines for the rest of the war, sabotaging their research. He delayed completion of their V2 rockets. He helped stop their atomic bomb. In his own way, he helped us win the war.”

Justine Cocteau

It was a pretty good plan, sending Logan and Captain America in to rescue Professor Cocteau—then having him betray them—to make his defection to the Nazis look more convincing. Red Skull even said he doubted Cocteau’s loyalty, so this ruse was probably necessary for him to do his sabotaging on behalf of the Allies.

1. Team-up for the Ages

“But I’m more than just a soldier, Logan. This costume makes me a living symbol of everything we’re fighting for. A symbol of pride, of hope.”

Captain America

While it’s not quite as exciting as it would be in the MCU, it’s Wolverine (well, I guess he’s still just Logan here) and Captain America fighting side by side against Nazis, trying to take down Red Skull!

Plus, Cap is such a badass—even if there is some inherent corniness to him, like in his quote above—that Logan actually likes working with him from the start.

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2 Things I’m Mixed On

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2. Claws

“You know, these things ain’t half bad.”

Logan

When Logan first pulls fake claws out of his bag to scale the mountain, I couldn’t help but think it was lame. I mean, what are the odds a guy who would go on to have claws just like that—only stronger—grafted onto his skeleton would’ve been the one person to use a pair like that years earlier.

But I have to give it a pass—at least to some degree—because you wouldn’t get the full joy of watching Wolverine and Captain America fight side by side if he didn’t have his claws.

1. Wolverine’s Bitterness

“It’s been over 50 years, and all I can think about is getting back at your father.”

Logan

I think one of the challenges in writing a character like Wolverine must be that he’s so old, we have to assume he has multiple lifetime’s worth of experiences. There’s no way—in a TV series like this or in the comics—we could know about all of them, or that writers could plant the seeds for all of them early on so they could pay them off later. So I realize it’s unreasonable for me to feel shortchanged by this story just because it’s predicated on Wolverine hanging onto decades of anger and bitterness over a perceived betrayal, yet he’s never mentioned anything about it before.

That said, I still had a hard time connecting to this story for exactly that reason. I mean, at this point I’ve watched more than 70 episodes of this series, and nothing about this ever came up. But now, all of a sudden, Wolverine is furious about this incident that happened 50 years earlier, that he’s never talked about.

At the start of the episode, before he’s learned the truth about Cocteau’s allegiance, he’s standing at Cocteau’s grave and says…

“Guys like him were worth 1,000 of you, old man. Real red-blooded heroes. How dare you kick it before I could get my hands on you. You cheated me, old man! Cheated me of vengeance! Cheated me of justice! It ain’t fair. You stole the joy of Paris from me forever.”

With that much resentment in his heart for such a long time, it’s crazy to think it never would’ve come up before.

Not having any seeds planted for this prior doesn’t make it a bad story. But how much cooler would it have been if we’d already been aware that Wolverine had been betrayed by an ally during WWII, and that it really messed with him, and now we’re finally getting to find out about it?

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2 Things I Don’t Like

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2. Is Justine on the Wolverine Diet?

I’m not sure if she looks exactly the same at the end of the episode as she does in the flashback, but she certainly doesn’t look 50 years older.

Unless she’s secretly a mutant with similar characteristics as Wolverine, this doesn’t make any sense to me.

1. Setting off the Alarm

When does Cocteau set off the alarm? I watched him the whole time he’s on screen, from the moment Logan and Cap infiltrate his lab. It’s like they forgot to show it. I didn’t see an opportunity for him to do it behind their backs, and Logan knocks him unconscious for a few minutes, too.