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At the end of X-Men: Days of Future Past, Drowned Logan is retrieved from the river by Stryker and a rescue crew.
We see Stryker's eyes shift colour, but not to the red/yellow of Mystique.
Who is this? Is this person a mutant, or is someone else impersonating him?
The color is off in the 3D version. It is indeed Mystique rescuing Logan by pretending to be Stryker.
"Stryker's" eyes clearly flash yellow - the same as Mystique's in previous films, and even Days of Future Past.
In this interview, Simon Kinberg 100% confirms that it is Mystique impersonating Stryker.
Stryker is a character that keeps reappearing in the franchise, perhaps because he’s one of the only identifiable bad guys the X-Men have encountered. And then, in the final beats of the film, it turns out he’s Mystique — the ultimate “WTF.” Will that payoff in the future?
We really wanted to do something subtle with Stryker in this movie. We wanted it to be the beginning of the origin of him. He’s in the shadows most of this film. In some ways, Stryker was included in order to trigger something for Wolverine. How would it impact Wolverine, going back in time and seeing this guy who is going to manipulate him in the future. That was just interesting. Stryker’s been interesting in the books and the Brian Cox version was fantastic. But the last moment in the movie with the Mystique reveal… there’s for sure more to that. As we follow the characters in to X-Men: Apocalypse, we have to address that and make it a real thing.
The film's director, Simon Kinsberg has explicitly confirmed that it's Mystique at the end, impersonating Stryer;
Q. WHY IS MYSTIQUE PLAYING STRYKER AT THE END OF THE FILM?
Kinsberg : “I wanted Wolverine to end up with Stryker at the end of the film, but when we got down the line on that, it felt like such a downer ending, and there wasn’t any ripple in time. It was the same – the location where Stryker grabbed Logan was different, but Logan’s fate was very much the same. I felt like we hadn’t made enough of a ripple.
“So from there we thought about who else it could be. I was thinking of having other people on the boat – he could be fished out by Charles and Hank – but we set this thing up where Mystique is masquerading as a military character saving mutants from going into some sort of experimental programme in Saigon early on, so there’s a really nice symmetry there at the end.”
And in this interview with ScifiNow
It’s a neat little handwave, because there’s still loads of things we don’t know – like how Logan ended up in the Weapon-X project and got his Adamantium skeleton if he was being led away by Mystique-as-Stryker and not Stryker himself.
