Hang on a sec, let me get ready. 

nana na na na,

nana na na na…. 

Yeah, I have some opinions. 

I’ve always felt that there was a fundamental ambivalence about what Madelyn Pryor was supposed to be for: is she the impetus for Scott Summers to mature and start a new life outside the X-Men as a husband and a father (which if so is really complicated by having her be an identical twin of Jean, because it starts their relationship off on such a fragile foundation), or she she supposed to be part of some grand conspiracy (whether that’s the Dark Phoenix and Mastermind or Mr. Sinister and cloning or Hell invading NYC)? 

Yes, the bigger problem was Busiek coming up with the clone loophole for Jean Grey’s death-because-of-genocide thing, but Claremont’s hardly innocent here – her being an identical twin was always going to get people talking about clones and whatnot, likewise all of his shenanigans about Jean dying and Madelyn being reborn at the exact same second was way too obvious a phoenix metaphor. If Madelyn was going to be Cyclops’ cosmic consolation prize and nothing else – which is a bit creepy, when you think about it – just have her be a different woman! I mean, Lee Forrester is pretty awesome and X-Men artists don’t have a hard time drawing her as distinctly different…

But the biggest mistake, IMO, was having Scott react to Jean’s rebirth by leaving his wife and baby to chase after Jean and pal around with his old school chums in X-Factor – leaving aside whatever you think about Claremont’s ideas about characters needing to age out of the X-Men, on a personal level, that’s some profoundly unheroic behavior. Pretty much everyone from Claremont on down has said after the fact that they didn’t think this through, although I would argue that there were ways to turn into the skid if you weren’t set on the idea of Scott coming out of this ok – after all, Jason was a hero, and look what happened to his first marriage…

On the other hand, as convoluted as it was – and it definitely it could have used a few less moving parts – Inferno was a hell of a way to resolve the tangle, an ambitious as hell decision to turn everything up to 11 and just guitar solo your problem away. (Even if it did involve Madelyn Pryor getting hit with every single gendered stereotype – woman scorned, evil witch, why’s she killing her baby again?, etc. etc. – imaginable.)

But if we could do it over again…

I think the main thing I’d do is to not start from a position that Scott and Jean Are Fated To Be Together. Jean dying, whether she comes back as a clone or what, should be a big line in the sand when it comes to their relationship – he saw her die in front of him, there’s the legacy of the Phoenix and the Dark Phoenix that will always be between them, things could never be the same. So maybe Scott doesn’t leave his wife and kid. Maybe Jean Grey gets to move on and have relationships outside the guys she went to a boarding school with when she was a teenager, and maybe she gets to explore rather than repress huge parts of her personality that she never could while Xavier was keeping a psychic bomb confined in her skull. 

Another thing I’d do: embrace consequences. Rather than just trying to kill the hypotenuse so you can have Scott, Jean, and Nathan as a “normal” nuclear family (because it’s not a normal family, time travel and cloning creeps back in, and that’s how you get Cables), why not have Scott lose his shot at happiness with Jean as a way of signalling that maybe what he did to Madelyn and Nathan wasn’t ok? Or maybe Madelyn just takes her son with her, rather than going through the whole Madea plot, because he’s her son and Scott abandoned them (now I’m getting Hamilton and Les Mis scrambled in my brain)? 

Or at the very least, how ‘bout everyone has an awkward but open conversation about the dysfunctional dynamics off the Summers-Grey-Pryor clan? Maybe puppets are needed to get across that Jean is kind of interested in trying out BDSM and might not want to become a surrogate mom right now, Scott, or to get Alex to open up about why he keeps becoming romantically interested in manipulative women who remind him of his brother’s ex, or why Scott develops commitment issues around powerful women and then goes off looking for women who resemble his mother-

no, please, use the puppets not the mutant powers…