Last month, we saw the first screenshots of Omar Sy as the characters Lucas Bishop in the upcoming X-Men: Days of Future Past, a character described as a time-traveling refugee from a dystopian future. This week, leaked script pages from the film -- and what they might mean for Bishop -- pushed the character back in the headlines. So who is this guy exactly? While the big screen version may not exactly mirror the character's comic book history, we went digging in our longboxes for some critical back (or future) story on the chronologically displaced X-cop. Strap in, because this one's a doozy.
To understand Bishop as he appears in the comics, it's important to have some understanding of the Marvel Multiverse. See, the X-Men are all about time-travel paradoxes, which has resulted in a number of fractured, apocalyptic (and Apocalyptic) timelines that diverge at various critical points from the main "real" continuity, which is known as Earth-616. The horrifying Days of Future Past timeline where mutant are enslaved is another, Earth-811. Bishop's point of origin is different still: the late 21st century of Earth-1191, or the Forever Yesterday timeline.
Forever Yesterday is a continuity nightmare, but all you really need to know going in is that it's an alternate future in which Sentinels have taken over North America: kind of like Days of Future Past, but instead of jumping straight into the genocide, the Forever Yesterday Sentinels indelibly branded mutants (see: the M over Bishop's eye), then locked them up in the "mutant relocation camps" until they were eventually overthrown by a mutant-led rebellion.
He's got one of the most superficially useful mutant powers in the Marvel landscape -- absorbing and redirecting energy blasts -- but, as a character introduced in the early 1990s he's better known for carrying implausibly huge guns. He and and his sister Shard (who would later do some time-travel of her own, get killed and brought back as a sentient solid-light hologram, but you know what? I don't think we're going to go there today) grew up in and out of the camps. In the post-Sentinel future, he's an officer in a mutant police forced called the Xavier Special Enforcers, because in Forever Yesterday, the X-Men are everyone's favorite dead superheroes.
In the line of duty, Bishop chased a dangerous fugitive into the distant past of 1991, and found himself fighting side by side with his heroes, the X-Men -- on the eve of an incident that in his timeline had lead to their destruction at the hands of a traitor. Since the event had been poorly chronicled, however, he wasn't sure who the traitor was.
Since then, Bishop spent a lot of time as a cautionary tale about the dangers of time travel: over and over, he's tried to "fix" the timeline, and over and over, he's been hamstrung by misunderstandings of the past-to-him, future-to-us events that he believes lead to the lousy world in which he was raised. Most recently, this led Bishop to spend over a year chasing Cable -- another chronologically displaced character with an unbelievably complicated backstory -- through time in a dubiously-guided attempt to murder a baby, during which he managed to generate thousands of corpses worth of collateral damage.
There are a few different ways X-Men: Days of Future Past could incorporate Bishop, but based on the images we've seen so far and statements from director Bryan Singer and actor Omar Sy, it seems most likely that they'll be merging the Days of Future Past and Forever Yesterday timelines, a narrative streamlining that also took place in both the original X-Men cartoon from the 1990s and the later *Wolverine and the X-Men *animated series. That, in turn, opens the door to another intriguing possibilities: the event that overthrew the Sentinels in the Forever Yesterday timeline was called the Summers Rebellion, and depending on how much of that chronology makes its way into Days of Future Past, it might provide an avenue for the eventual return of Cyclops. Also known as Scott Summers, the mutant hero seemed to meet his end in X-Men: The Last Stand. But if we've learned anything from superhero comics, it's no one stays dead forever.
