Why Did Mystique Replace Stryker In The End?
Mystique’s not fond of powerful men, but she sure does love filling their shoes. As she did at the end of X-Men, the character’s story in Days of Future Past ends with her doubling for a high-ranking mutant hater in the American government, this time in the form of Maj. William Stryker. “Mystyker” is last seen pulling the ‘73 version of Wolverine out of the Potomac River after he was impaled with metal bars and flung there by Magneto, but her plans for Logan beyond saving him from a watery doom are unknown.
What happens next might depend on a couple of things. Is Stryker dead, and does Mystique plan on fulfilling his plans for Weapon X and giving Wolverine his adamantium skeleton? It’s hard to say, and one might be actually very surprised to learn, if true, that maybe there is no plan, and Singer just thought it would be a cool way to end the movie.
At least maybe we can agree that this movie retcons X-Men Origins: Wolverine out of canonical existence. In Origins, Stryker finds Wolverine and Sabretooth in Vietnam in 1975 and recruits them to Weapon X, but in DOFP Wolverine is stateside, not in the army, and Sabretooth is nowhere to be seen. It’s also worth noting that Emma Frost is in Origins, and that was retconned out nicely with First Class. So if the X-Men producers are on a campaign to erase the not-so-good movies out of proverbial existence, X-Men: The Last Stand included (given a couple of key cameos), I don’t think anyone’s going to complain.
Heck, maybe Ryan Reynolds will finally get that Deadpool movie he’s always wanted.