The shuttle flight is the place where Jean’s story becomes impossible to separate from Phoenix, but Jean’s decision comes first. She puts herself in danger trying to get the oth…

The shuttle flight is the place where Jean’s story becomes impossible to separate from Phoenix, but Jean’s decision comes first. She puts herself in danger trying to get the others back to Earth. The radiation is killing her, and she keeps trying to save the people travelling with her. By the point I’m at in the comics, the explanation is that the Phoenix Force creates a duplicate using Jean’s form and part of her consciousness, while her own body is protected in a healing cocoon beneath Jamaica Bay. The figure who emerges as Phoenix is the one who goes on with the X-Men. That’s important because simply calling it a power upgrade skips the explanation the books eventually give us. The team doesn’t know all of that when it happens. They believe Jean has survived, and they try to understand what she has become. Scott’s reactions, her friendships and the growing concern around her all happen with that understanding. Phoenix then becomes involved in something as enormous as the M’Kraan Crystal crisis. The scale has gone far beyond the kinds of threats those first students were facing at the school. But underneath the cosmic imagery is that original decision on the shuttle. Before the cocoon, the new costume or the firebird, Jean is trying to bring her friends home. That part of what happened still belongs to her.