Logan's Most Confusing Moments Explained
Logan's here! And so are spoilers! Turn away now if you don't want to be spoiled!
Now that we've finished wiping our tears, and poured out a 40 for our dead canucklehead homie, we can focus on what's really important — shushing the killjoys who insist on nitpicking an awesome movie to death. Despite sporting an exceptionally tight and well-constructed plot, Logan had a bunch of confusing moments that could make a plot-hole hunter salivate. So, while we're not 100% sure of everything, here's a handy-dandy guide for whenever you need to "umm, actually" those supposed holes away:
So Xavier killed ALL the X-Men?
Moments before Xavier became X-seeyalater, he admitted that he knew why he was kept in that giant tank: years earlier, he suffered a massive psychic seizure and accidentally murdered hundreds ... including all his X-Men, except Logan. That's certainly one way to write off a whole mess of characters.
However, a nitpicker might easily ask, "ALL of them?" Seriously, only Logan survived? Isn't Jean Grey supposedly an even more powerful psychic than Charles? Surely she could've survived and overpowered it, at least. And what of everyone else? EVERY X-Men member was there when Xavier's brain went bonkers? NOT A SINGLE ONE was on a mission, visiting with friends, or hitting Taco Bell during the psychic death train? It just sounds ... convenient that they'd all be there when Xavier unleashed the horrendous grey matter kablooie.
Here's your ammo if anyone smugly points this out: Jean Grey, and any other mutie, couldn't have survived because they didn't have any adamantium. Logan and Laura are immune to the effects of the seizure, because of their adamantium bones. It's why everyone else froze around them (and in the casino, probably as someone was just about to hit the jackpot because that's always how it happens), but they could still move, albeit with great effort. Plus, if the X-Men didn't have that seizure-ending serum (which they likely didn't, because this was Charles' first seizure so they'd have no reason to stash any in their medicine cabinet), they'd basically be helpless. And they were, hence the mass death.
As for the "all the X-Men were there? Really?" crowd: remember Logan explaining to Laura that the comics were mostly hokum? It stands to reason then, that while the X-Men did exist, and they did have missions and adventures, they weren't this non-stop, go go go team the comics made them out to be. More likely, they had tons of downtime between missions, like firemen between fires. So if the seizure happened while everyone was just milling about — maybe during a barbeque or something — that makes sense. Charles had one too many sriracha-laced ribs and went crazy. It happens. Beware the sriracha.
Laura can talk, so why was she mute for 80% of the movie?
For a huge chunk of the movie, Laura, the 11-year-old she-Wolvie, the Ellie to Logan's Joel, communicated by ... not communicating. Aside from screams of rage, she was quieter than Link. Then, when alone in the truck with Logan, she started babbling in Spanish, then in English. So she CAN talk, and if you're anything like Logan, you're probably wondering, "well, why didn't she?" It's not like she was only silent toward Logan because she hated him — she also kept her lips sealed around people she liked, like Charles and the farmer's son. There was seemingly no explanation for the silent treatment.
Except ... if you think about it, there totally was. In fact, there were two. One of Laura's powers — the one that makes her even stronger than Logan — is psychic communication. She can't do psionic weaponry like Xavier (yet — there's no way tween X-23 isn't getting a spinoff down the line), but she can communicate. So when she "talked" to Charles, she did it through her mind. And while Charles spoke to her with his mouth, he knew enough not to force her to do the same, because of reason two:
She was traumatized! Kid badass or not, she's still a kid, and she was a tortured, drugged-up prisoner for basically her whole life. Then she escapes, loses touch with her friends, and then her mother figure, Gabriella, meets a grisly end. If that's not PTSD, what is? So she chose not to speak, as some PTSD sufferers are wont to do in certain situations. It's called elective mutism (though Laura took it to an extreme by electing to be mute all the time), and it's a legitimate result of trauma. She only spoke up to Wolvie because literally everyone else she knew was dead and she kind of ... had to. Had Xavier survived becoming X-24's latest kabob, she probably would've just kept on chatting with his brain, grumpy claw-daddy be damned.
How did Laura get bilingual?
Learning a language isn't easy. Learning TWO is even harder, especially when the military complex you've lived in your whole life doesn't actually hold language classes. They just yell at you until you become the X weapon they desire. So how does Laura expertly speak not just English, but Spanish as well? Seriously, nothing she said was broken or mangled in any way. Did she smuggle in Rosetta Stone and study that at night?
Well, probably not (though you never know — prisoners are crafty). More likely, this is a case of Laura being ridiculously smart (psychic powers tend to come bundled with a big 'ol brain) and being one of those people who pick up on languages real fast. Remember, they spoke both English and Spanish at that plant, so it stands to reason she picked both up pretty well, pretty fast. Her Spanish, in particular, was only enhanced by living on the run with Gabriella until Gabby stopped gabbing ... forever.
As for English — the doctors must have spoken to the kids a lot, because all the kids in that North Dakota camp could speak English, and they spoke well. Nobody was reciting Shakespeare or anything, but they could communicate just fine. Kids are craftier than you think (despite their knack for eating booger and flushing keys down the toilet arguing otherwise), and their brains are like sponges, so they pick up on stuff real, real fast. That's almost certainly what happened to Laura to make her more bilingual than we'll ever be.
Why didn't Logan kill Pierce when he had the chance?
Some movies could've wrapped up their plot in minutes, if the hero had any common sense. Logan is, at first glance, one of them. Early on, when the Reavers surround Logan at the smelting plant, he and Laura commence to killing every last one of them ... except Donald Pierce, the smug jackwagon behind this whole "bring Laura back to Transigen" plan. Logan knocks him out and, instead of doing what he clearly does best — STONE-COLD MURDER — he just tells Caliban to dump his body somewhere remote and finish him off.
This was clearly a failure, as Pierce recovers, overpowers Caliban, kidnaps him, and uses him to find Logan and friends. This begs the question: why didn't Logan kill him the first time? He was knocked out, all his soldiers were down, and Logan clearly has no issue with blood on his claws. One snikt to the skull and BOOM — dead. Drive to North Dakota peacefully, roll credits, hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
This one, you can almost give to the nitpickers. He absolutely should've killed him right then and there, and we know the real reason he didn't: if he didn't, there'd be no movie. So he sent caliban to do it remotely, and then Caliban failed, because plot. But think about it from Logan's perspective: that's Transigen's Chief of Security. If he killed him there, and then drive off because they had to move move move yesterday, somebody was bound to investigate, see Pierce's body, see the now-abandoned plant, connect the dots, and declare all-out war on Logan and Charles. Grunt soldiers are one thing — they're expected to die — but not the big bosses. So in that sense, it made sense to have Calido the killing elsewhere while Logan collected Xavier and Laura to split ASAP.
But mostly, they did it because who wants to pay ten bucks to watch a 20-minute movie that ends on Step 4 of the Hero's Journey? Not us, and probably not you.
If adamantium to the brain can kill Logan, why didn't anybody try this beforehand?
It's established throughout Logan that adamantium to the brain can kill Wolvie, and so he keeps an adamantium bullet around, in case he finally decides to blow his head off. This doesn't happen — Laura uses the bullet to shoot X-24's brain to bits — but it does make one wonder how Logan lasted this long, with this weakness. Remember, Logan's been adamantium-laced Wolverine for decades — so in all that time, not a single villain (many of whom are geniuses and scientists and doctors) ever noticed this and decided, "well, shucks, let's just shoot the dadgum critter?" (Some genius scientist-doctors talk like Yosemite Sam, don't judge).
Here's how we see it: Logan is old. He's dying. His healing factor isn't what it used to be. Very likely, he could've survived an adamantium bullet to the head decades ago, because he was young(ish) and virile. But not anymore — dude's damn near 200 years old. We all gotta break down eventually.
"But wait," your nitpicky friend whom you want to punch insists. "What of X-24? He's young and virile, right? And he didn't survive the bullet, so probably Logan prime couldn't either, right?" Ehh, not quite, Reader's Annoying Friend. See, Logan's healing factor was natural and thus, virtually flawless. X-24 was created in a lab — a human creation. And, as anyone who's dealt with Windows 10 can tell you, human creations screw up all the time. Most likely, 24's healing factor was strong — dude got impaled once and survived, after all — but not strong enough to survive the bullet.
Where did Laura learn to drive?
Logan can't drive after awhile, because his adamantium skeleton is poisoning him and he just got shot full of holes, so it's time to rest. Laura takes over and ... drives perfectly, for hundreds of miles, until they reach North Dakota. How in the holy hell did she do that, you ask? She's 11, and she'd been stuck inside a factory most all her life — she couldn't even cut her teeth on a battered old Cruisin' USA machine at the local Chuck E. Cheese. So how did she become an expert driver, when most people of driving age have no clue what they're doing? (Evidence: any road in America, at any time of day.)
While the movie never explicitly explains it (Logan asks and she just starts ranting in Spanish about North Dakota), we think we know the answer: she's a smart little cookie! Laura is a badass, serious, kid, and is clearly in tune with her environment. It stands to reason that she was watching how Logan drove and took mental notes, just in case. Plus, unlike most kids driving for the first time, she had no adult stressing her out with bellows of "hit the brakes! Hit the brakes! OH GOD YOU'RE GONNA KILL US BOTH!", so she could easily concentrate enough to focus on the road.
It's not like driving's conceptually that difficult — hit the brake, hit the gas, steer, punch the radio if it plays Limp Bizkit — and the road she was on was pretty deserted, so she just ... did it. Like the badass she is. Now, if she had flown a PLANE without training, that would be ridiculous. But since she didn't, it is the nitpicker who is the ridiculous one.
Why THOSE coordinates? Did the comics put them there for a reason?
Gabriella hires Logan to take her and Laura to North Dakota, using coordinates for "Eden" that she found in an X-Men comic. As it turns out, there WAS something at those coordinates, despite Logan's insistence there wasn't. It wasn't Eden, per se, but rather a cabin full of kids — but at least it wasn't just a bunch of trees and
That begs the question: why use THOSE coordinates? Who wrote these comics, anyway? Was it some secret mutant benefactor? Did whomever write it also build the cabin? Why didn't the movie answer these questions? We were already sitting there for two-and-a-half hours — we could handle five more minutes of exposition.
And hey — for all we know, the inevitable X-23 spinoff will shed some light on this issue. For now, all we can do is counter nitpickdom with our very best guess: there was no secret benefactor. The comics were written by whatever that universe's version of Marvel is, and they basically wrote X-Men comics the way we write "based on true events" movies: take a nugget of truth, and embellish and fictionalize until you've got a property all your own. As for the coordinates, they basically picked coordinates because whoever drew the thing needed coordinates. So, they looked at a map, found coordinates near Canada, and ran with it. Gabriella, being a true believer in the X-Men, saw these coordinates and gambled that Eden was actually there. Then the kids, when they got to those coordinates and realized there was naught but an abandoned cabin, they made the most optimistic decision they possibly could: "There's no Eden? Screw it, we'll make our OWN Eden!"
And they did. Because kids are badass, unlike your nitpicky plot-hole obsessed friend who we really hope you've punched by now. They deserve it.