'Wolverine: The Long Night' Clarifies Its Timeline and Logan's Backstory
With only three episodes of Wolverine: The Long Night left, we still haven’t actually “met” Logan himself in the present tense. But in one pivotal scene recounted from the perspective of local fisherman, we learn a lot more about where Wolverine has been throughout the years.
Spoilers follow for Wolverine: The Long Night Episode 7.
We hear an extended sequence during which some wolves attack the local fisherman named Sherman. Just before they can kill him, Logan shows up and fend them off. “Thought he was a frickin’ Wendigo,” Sherman said when recounting the story to Agent Marshall. While Sherman recuperated in the hospital, Logan paid him a visit mainly to make sure he stayed quiet about what Logan could do, and it’s during that exchange that we hear much more about what Logan’s been up to before this point and why he’s trying to help people in Burns, Alaska.
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.
“I’m sick of it … sick of the hurting when I could be helping,” Logan grumbles to Sherman. Saving people is how Logan atones for all the bad things he’s done, and he goes on to list some of them:
“In Afghanistan outside Kabul, there was a girl who died because of me. She got caught up in the crossfire while I was working my way through this warlord’s compound room-by-room leaving behind body after body after body. In Burma, in Bago, I was supposed to kill everybody at this banquet, but it turned out to be everybody at the hotel more or less. In Pyongyang there was a prison camp.”
We’ve known since early in The Long Night that Logan was most recently in New Orleans with somebody named Maureen and that he’s on the run from the Weapon X program. It sounds like his origins in this podcast series look remarkably similar to what we saw in the 2009 movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine, except updated for a more contemporary context. He was running over black ops missions for the Weapon X program, but was he alone?
Sounds like Wolverine in 'The Long Night' seems pretty similar to the character from 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine'.
Rather than have Logan born in the 1800s and fight through the Civil War and both World Wars before moving on to the likes of Vietnam, his wartime efforts in The Long Night instead take him to more buzzworthy locations like Afghanistan, Burma, and North Korea.
We ought to take this as confirmation that something drastic happened to make him lose his memory. In the comics, this happens as a result of the procedure that bonded adamantium to his bones. By all accounts, Logan does seem to have the adamantium in The Long Night, which places him sometime after that surgery and before he meets up with the X-Men.
For people that have only seen the movies, this places The Long Night after Origins and before X-Men (2000), which is more or less where it’s always seemed like.
Despite all this, it still seems like the podcast exists in a world blissfully unaware that mutants exist, which could mean that Logan is an anomaly long before the X-Gene activates in mutants around the world or that Burns is remote enough that mutants don’t make headlines all that often.
Logan's been getting into barfights for decades, and before that it was black ops missions.
It’s worth also noting that Logan’s still engaging in some guerilla warfare to take down the Langrocks’ drug smuggling operation. At the end of this episode, Agent Pierce goes to the Yukon Terrace Trailer Park and finds everything ablaze with “dozens of men ripped to pieces.”
With only three episodes left, we’re bound to see the seemingly disparate mysteries in Wolverine: The Long Night wrap up into one solved mystery, but until then, we’re left to wonder exactly what Logan is up to and how he’ll get out of this mess.
New episodes of Wolverine: The Long Night are released every Monday on Stitcher Premium.
