The episode begins with a battle already in progress. The Juggernaut emerges from a building after flinging Cyclops into a car. Logan tries jumping onto Juggie's back, But this is quickly rectified as Juggernaut hurls him into another car. Kurt tries to take off the guy's helmet, but he forgets that he can just teleport away with stuff, so that fails. Bobby freezes Juggernaut's legs, which really should have no effect on him but does. Logan tells Scott to shoot the helmet off, but Scott misses and hits him in the chest.
Then through some smoke, Scott sees an apparition of Jean in a cloud of smoke. This distracts him long enough for Juggernaut to hurl a car at him, which Logan barely saves him from.
Cue the title sequence.
Scott opens his eyes to see Jean standing over him. He reaches up and kisses her, only to realize that it's actually Emma. After some embarrassment, he talks about seeing Jean, but Emma tells him that it was just his imagination. He asks about casualties from the fight, but it was just him and Logan, who already recovered. Oh, and Juggernaut escaped. Scott gets up, and Emma, doing that casual telepathy thing, tells him that he can't blame himself. Scott says that he's not good for the team.
Cut to Scott's room, where he's packed his bag and started to leave. Emma interrupts him, trying to convince him to stay. Scott talks about how he wants to stay on the team, but all he can think about is Jean. And that puts people in danger. So Emma offers to mind-wipe Jean away. Scott initially seems accepting, but then thinks he'll wind up like Logan, wanting to remember something he can't. She simply says that she can make it work and suggests that he let her try.
Cut to the viewpoint of eternal angst: the cliff just outside the mansion. Scott looks out over the water, then joins Emma on the bench. She tells him to relax. Then, after some more stuff about the ocean, she asks him to take her to his first meeting with Jean.
So cue the flashback. A young Scott Summers wakes up in a hospital. The doctor there slowly explains to the scared boy that he was in a plane crash. His brother Alex survived, but not his parents. Scott asks to see his brother, but he's not there, having already been adopted. See, Scott was in a coma for two years.
Back in the present, Scott stops the procedure, asking why they're looking at that. Emma tells him that his mind apparently connected that to Jean. As opposed to the writers just inventing a way for us to see Scott's past. So they go looking around again.
Flashback to an orphanage. Scott's leaving to go somewhere, and bumps into a couple of guys. They start accosting him, but his general attitude of ignoring them only makes them attack him harder. After roughing him up, Scott's powers kick in and shoots one of them. Then Scott clutches his head and his beams fire again, blasting his orphanage. He screams for someone to help him and collapses in the street.
Cut to a blindfolded Scott in a cell. Charles Xavier wheels himself in, and they have a little chat. Charles says that Scott's like Charles was; Scott doesn't agree, thinking that he's a monster. So Charles shows off his telepathy, which oddly does not freak Scott out. Charles talks about the time when his powers were out of control, and he nearly lost his mind due to reading everyone around him. So Charles takes off Scott's blindfold and gives him his visor. Really? He just pulled that out of his ass, some technology that can block a power he's never taken the time to study?
We then fast-forward to Scott in an X-Men uniform. You know, yellow and blue. He's in the Danger Room with a hairless Beast, Angel, and... Bobby? What is he, 14 at this point*? They all use their various abilities to fight off the slicing machines, mass projectors, and other stuff. All except Scott, who quickly gets punked out and leaves the Danger Room to the sound of laughter from the others. Charles is waiting to talk with him, and Scott's pretty defeatist at this point, saying that he's not a hero. So Charles offers to take him somewhere.
Cut to random suburban neighborhood, where they're going to meet a "friend." As they drive along, they run into some floating cars. Um, I'm not sure, but telepathically picking up the neighbor's cars is probably going to impact property values. After the commercial and a quick reminder that this is a flashback, we cut to the Grey residence. There, Scott and Charles meet John Grey and his daughter, Jean. Charles introduces Scott, but Jean is very shy around him.
Apparently, Jean wasn't lifting cars on purpose. Magneto dropped by to talk to her, and now she's frightened and withdrawn. And lifting cars, apparently. While Charles delivers exposition about Magneto, Scott and Jean make eye contact and engage in wordless flirting. When Charles tells John that next time Eric will just take Jean, John just says that Jean will fight him off. Charles suggests letting her come to the mansion. John's against it, but Jean seems to want to go.
Abruptly cut to Magneto effortlessly pulling the Blackbird out of the sky and confronting the X-Men and Charles. We get some exposition informing us that Charles has suppressed some of Jean's power, which Eric is naturally against. He demands to take Jean with him, but the X-Men won't allow it. So they fight.
Magneto pushes Charles out of the line of fire and then forms a tornado of various metal debris. The X-Men try to maneuver through it, but that doesn't go very well. Scott's able to make headway, saving Angel and Beast from a car. And then... Magneto pulls off his visor. *facepalm* Such foresight there, Charles. Make that visor out of metal, and then send Scott against the guy who can move metal. Top notch planning.
Seeing Scott go down, Jean steps forward. Magneto offers her a simple choice: go with him, or he'll kill the X-Men. And clearly Charles isn't the only person who doesn't know what "foresight" is. Magneto's plan for capturing one of the most powerful mutants known is by threatening her friends. Naturally, this only encourages her to fight him. Her telekinesis is able to overcome his magnetic fields to save Scott. But she also (somehow) takes control of Scott's eyes, so that they don't fire all the time. She has him look at Magneto and blast him, knocking his helmet off.
Apparently Magneto didn't expect her to be so powerful. Charles points out that this is her suppressed power level; her actual power level would have likely crushed him under a bus. This fact doesn't deter Eric's interest in her. Meanwhile, Jean gives Scott his visor back, and as they move in for a kiss...
Emma breaks off the contact. Odd moment for doing that; almost as if she didn't want to see/feel it. She says that everything that happened to him before didn't matter anymore, now that Scott had Jean. But then something happened. And in answer to my question from a few episodes back, yes, there is something worse in all of X-Men than Samurai Logan in Japan.
Jean/Logan.
Flashback to one night when Logan shows up on his bike. He's greeted by Charles and Scott, but Jean is peeking at him through the window. He asks after Jean, making Scott mutely angry. Then he hands Scott his keys and tells him to park the bike.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.
Cut to Logan meeting Jean. He starts being very creepy with her, asking about having her do some work on his mind. She casually blows him off, eventually moving him out of her way. Logan takes it well, until Scott appears, telling him that he should leave. Well, that was... a bit much. Logan realizes that he's her boyfriend and decides that he's not going anywhere. And he plays on Scott's obvious insecurities by saying that she can do better.
Back in the present, Emma starts saying that Jean was intrigued by the mysterious, dangerous Logan. How could she know that, unless she's just guessing based on Scott's impression of the situation? Scott thinks that it was all one-sided from Logan, that she was just nice to him. Emma figures that Scott confronted him. Well... you might say that.
Flashback to Scott blasting Logan into a tree.
Ah, wacky fun.
Logan gets up, but says he's not going to fight Scott over Jean. Right, Logan walking away from a fight. So Scott shoots him in the back while he's walking away. Jean naturally interrupts the beatdown, telling Scott to stop attacking. She then says that Logan wouldn't fight him because she told him not to. Um... why? If you thought Scott was going to attack him, why didn't you make Scott promise not to fight Logan?
Such a healthy relationship these two have. I'm sure it will last forever.
Cut to the next day, presumably. It's the day of the explosion, so we get to see things from a different perspective. Scott apologizes to Jean, but she tells him to apologize to Logan. Speak the devil's name, and he shall appear; Logan shows up. Only this time, there's no Jean blowing Logan a kiss; she just points him out to Scott. Though this is Scott's mind, so he may have just erased that memory. Too bad I can't do the same.
After this, Charles starts his headache, and Jean joins in, and then the explosion happens.
Back in the present, Scott pulls away for a moment. Emma announces that she's ready to excise Jean from Scott's mind, but he tells her to show him the explosion again, that they missed something. So they go back and Emma pauses at the moment of the explosion. And they see the cause of the explosion.
Phoenix.
Remarks
Well, that was something. I'm not sure how to analyze this episode.
It's a character focused episode on Scott, but also there are a few semi-subtle bits with Emma. How insistent she was that he stay, to the point where she suggested removing the memories of Jean. The way she basically invented Jean/Logan (from Jean's point of view), perhaps to drive a wedge between them. And I'd wager that she didn't strictly need this trip down memory lane in order to cut out Jean's memories.
I can't say I much like what they turned Scott into though. Up until now, we could assume that Scott was at one time a level-headed, strong leader for the team. After all, that's why Logan went to Scott when he was trying to reform the team, right? But this episode shows that this was wrong. He was never confident, strong, collected, or much of anything. Until Jean came into his life. Once she was gone, he reverted essentially to what he had always been.
And while that marks him as co-dependent and needy, I'd be willing to let that slide. Where the episode really drops the ball is that it doesn't show us anything between the time Scott and Jean hook up and Logan's arrival. We don't see what Scott was like when he actually was in control, when he had Jean at his side. Basically, the Scott we see in the flashbacks is as we see him in the present. We never see the phase where he was a good leader for the team. Not even in a montage.
The episode only shows us the most negative aspects of Scott. We see him go from the picked-on, low-confidence kid to a guy willing to attack someone for hitting on his girlfriend. We kinda need that middle ground of Scott Summers in his prime in order to make this a proper tragedy. As it stands, he's just a picked-on loner who finally got a girl, and then lost his shit the moment anything threatened what little he'd carved out for himself. Not exactly a Shakespearian tragedy, is it?
This episode is about Scott and Emma, but Jean is also on display here. And she's... oddly characterized. When we first see her, she's shy and withdrawn. We see her fight Magneto to save Scott, manifesting powers that I'm sure she's never had to use before. And then we see her as a much more confident person, able to handle dealing with Logan quite easily with no hint of her shyness. I know that lots of time passed between scenes, but it seems like such a major characterization turnaround.
This is a character-focused episode, but the revelation at the end is really the plot setup for the finale. We'll have more to discuss with regard to Phoenix later. However, there is one point I'd like to bring up.
In the very first episode, Hank was very clear about something: Xavier was the center of the explosion. Now, all of a sudden, Jean caused it. What, did Phoenix attack Xavier and somehow didn't annihilate him?
