Doomsday theory: does Days of Future Past explain Cyclops?

Ahead of Avengers: Doomsday, many of us looked to Avengers: Endgame for the plot threads the Russo brothers would pick up in the fifth Avengers film. My argument was that X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), starring Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, is just as important to revisit. It was the last time we saw all of the original Fox era X-Men actors, including James Marsden as Cyclops, alive and well in Earth-10005 before their return in Doomsday.

It was also the last great movie with X-Men in the title, and it had its own time travel triggered multiversal crossover. That crossover could explain the X-Men's role in Doomsday, and it was already referenced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness through one line: "Just because someone stumbles and loses their way doesn't mean they're lost forever." I think something in Days of Future Past could explain what's going on with Cyclops in the Avengers: Doomsday teaser.

How Days of Future Past linked two eras of Fox's X-Men

When Days of Future Past arrived, there were two historical eras of X-Men within the Fox franchise. There were the X-Men of the first three films, from 2000, 2003 and 2006, which spun off a separate Wolverine solo series. Then there was the reboot, 2011's X-Men: First Class, which explored many of these characters when they were younger in the 1960s.

Days of Future Past linked both time periods with a time travel story. In what was then the near future of 2023, mutants are hunted and imprisoned by shapeshifting, power absorbing Sentinels. The X-Men send Wolverine back in time through consciousness displacement, transporting his mind into his younger body in 1973. There he meets the X-Men of that era and works to stop Mystique from assassinating Bolivar Trask, the inventor of Sentinel technology. That assassination would have triggered the dystopian timeline the future X-Men were living in.

There are many complications along the way, including Quicksilver, but the X-Men ultimately succeed in stopping Mystique and Magneto from killing President Richard Nixon. That warps the whole history of the universe in a very specific way.

The revised 2024 timeline brought Cyclops and Jean Grey back to life

When Wolverine wakes up in a retconned future of 2024, all of the major X-Men are alive and well at the mansion. That includes Scott Summers and Jean Grey, characters who had died in X-Men: The Last Stand, and technically, in Jean's case, before that in X2. The ending even suggested that the controversial backstory Wolverine goes through in 2009's X-Men Origins: Wolverine was erased. If Jean was alive and in that condition, it also suggests X2 either did not happen or ended differently, without her drowning and going into the dormant state as the Phoenix.

This is the future era of the adult X-Men we were left with ever since. Cyclops had a cool new eyepiece. Hank McCoy's Beast was walking around cracking jokes about Logan oversleeping. Charles had a hover chair. Magneto and Mystique were probably alive somewhere, and Brian Cox's Stryker was probably still out there planning his next attack.

Yes, 2017's Logan did imply a terrible fate befell the X-Men five years later, in 2029. Maybe those psionic seizures were triggered by Charles trying to work through this anomaly. Either way, we could imagine the X-Men got five good years of adventures that looked something like X-Men: The Animated Series from the '90s. It's this era that we were all assuming Doomsday would pull the X-Men back from. That's also cool because Alan Cumming's Nightcrawler was set to be there, and we get to imagine a timeline where that character didn't disappear from the team between the second and third movies.

Charles Xavier's memory of two timelines could be the incursion

The epilogue also set Logan and Charles up with a secret history. Logan remembered it fully, while Charles only had some strange memories of it. That may come from the trippy moment when young Charles read Logan's time displaced mind and telepathically talked to his older self in the future. I think that was hinted at by Charles's mysterious response to Logan: "I think the history I know is a little different."

My takeaway from that moment was that this older Charles remembers being his younger James McAvoy self and visiting his older Patrick Stewart form in the alternate dystopian timeline. That could be why it was so important to bring back the "lost forever" line in Multiverse of Madness, because it came from that universe breaking crossover moment between the two Charleses.

That moment could have been the incursion that broke this reality, an incursion that lives on only in the mind of Professor Charles Xavier, the same Charles we saw in the Doomsday teaser. Everything that breaks that reality could come from his psionic mind. Maybe when he plugs into Cerebro, it creates a multiversal mind virus that infects all of the mutants in this reality. Either way, the Days of Future Past epilogue was so filled with mystery and promise that it felt right.

Endgame's time travel rules and Doctor Doom's case against the Avengers

Wolverine giving his friends an impossibly perfect epilogue also feels like the temporal loophole Steve Rogers and the other Avengers exploited in Endgame. I do think the theme Doomsday will explore is the line Tony Stark uttered before Endgame's final battle: "If you mess with time, it tends to mess back."

There's also the Ancient One warning Bruce Banner about the consequences of meddling with time and not properly returning the Infinity Stones to their place. She tells him that removing one of the stones splits the flow of time, and that while this may benefit his reality, her new branch reality would be overrun without its chief weapon against the forces of darkness.

If that's the rule that comes back to haunt the Avengers, it could be the natural law Doctor Doom holds Steve Rogers accountable for, blaming him for creating an incursion by violating it. And if the Fox era X-Men are returning from where we last saw them in Days of Future Past, doesn't it logically follow that Wolverine's timeline shenanigans could also be part of what causes the incursion, through Charles or some other means? That could be part of why Doctor Doom attacks the X-Mansion with those Sentinels.

The young mutant scavenger was never confirmed to be Nate Grey

I've previously theorized that the reason Cyclops seems to be in such emotional agony as he fights hopelessly against the Sentinels in the Doomsday teaser is that he could be fighting for his son, Nathan Summers, aka Cable, or maybe his daughter Rachel Summers, though I was less confident on that one at the time. Either way, it would be some kid harmed or threatened by Doctor Doom, which would link this teaser to the other three teasers.

There's a detail in Days of Future Past that some people online have speculated about for years, and it needs clarifying. In the film's opening minutes, mutants in the dystopian future are imprisoned with M scars branded on their faces and power inhibiting implants on the backs of their necks. We see a young mutant scavenger with a particular hairstyle rummaging around a mutant mass grave, uncovering an X sigil from the dirt and ash, before a Sentinel vaporizes him. The same kid shows up at the end as the first young mutant Logan sees when he wakes up, meaning that in the revised timeline he found his way to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

There's a misattributed factoid that this kid was confirmed to be Nate Grey. Nate Grey is the son of Scott Summers and Jean Grey, genetically engineered by Mr. Sinister, and a variant of Nathan Summers. Cable was the offspring of Scott and Madelyne Pryor, Mr. Sinister's clone of Jean, and Nate Grey, or X-Man, and Cable have an interesting relationship where they suffer in the vicinity of each other, but they're from different timelines. IMDb trivia, AI powered Google search results and unsourced blogs from 10 years ago claim, without attribution, that screenwriter Simon Kinberg said this kid was Nate Grey. There is no record of him saying that anywhere.

There's only one photo you can find of the actor credited as Young Mutant Scavenger, and in it he has a haircut that does look rather like Nate Grey's hairstyle in the comics. I think the rumor came from that. My guess is it might have been a stage name and he's not in the industry anymore. It's possible an editor in 2014 or 2015 asked Kinberg, or thought they heard him agree to a fan theory at a junket or convention panel, but every other time that's happened in the past 15 years, a source was linked. What I think happened is that so many background students in these films were confirmed as mutants like Mirage, Jubilee and the Stepford Cuckoos that someone saw this kid's haircut, thought of Nate Grey, and the theory became fact over time.

Simon Kinberg's first draft had Rachel Summers send Wolverine back

Here's what is true. In Kinberg's first draft of the script, a character from this family tree was part of the story in place of Kitty Pryde: Rachel Summers. In a Q&A podcast from June 2014, Kinberg said: "Rachel was in the first draft of the script for this. In fact, it was Rachel that sent Wolverine back in the first draft of my script."

He explained that he had Storm in a complicated relationship with Rachel because she was the orphan of Jean and Scott, both Storm's friends and both dead. Kinberg said he would have had to introduce Scott and Jean to the audience even though they weren't in the scene, and that it "just seemed more complicated than it was worth for a movie that already had a lot of drama and a lot of complication."

In the comics, Rachel inherited a version of the Phoenix Force from her mother and has the kind of powers that could transport someone's mind back into a younger version of their body. She comes from an alternate future Earth, Earth-811, seen in the Days of Future Past storyline from Uncanny X-Men #141, where things played out differently and her parents lived. That isn't the case in the movie's dystopian timeline, so it's unclear where that Rachel would have come from. I think the original draft included her because they wanted to more closely reflect the comic storyline, where she is a big part of it.

Is Cyclops fighting for Rachel Summers in the Avengers: Doomsday teaser?

Either way, I think this is solid evidence that in the revised timeline at the end of Days of Future Past, Scott and Jean, now alive again, could have had a daughter named Rachel. If that's the timeline Doomsday picks up, it could just as easily be that daughter Scott is fighting for in the teaser.

I think Cable could have set up some madness, with Josh Brolin's version of Cable coexisting in the same universe as Thanos. But Rachel Summers has a closer relationship with Franklin Richards, and we know there's a future for that kid as one of Doctor Doom's other targets. So it comes down to what kind of agony James Marsden is giving off: a girl dad, a boy dad, or a dad avenging two kids?

Days of Future Past is just as important as Endgame when it comes to the plot of Doomsday. There is evidence that Rachel Summers could exist in Earth-10005, and it could be Rachel who is Doom's target.