Spoilers for Jean’s return, Inferno and the Phoenix aftermath through the end of the Muir Island Saga. Nothing beyond that point.

Spoilers for Jean’s return, Inferno and the Phoenix aftermath through the end of the Muir Island Saga. Nothing beyond that point. Now, I wasn’t too happy when I found out that Phoenix had actually been a different entity and the original Jean Grey was still under the water in a cocoon. I’d just spent all that time with the story. Jean becoming Phoenix, everything with Scott, the Hellfire Club, the moon, the funeral. Then the explanation becomes that the Phoenix Force copied her and lived that part of her life while the original Jean was healing in Jamaica Bay. I get how it brings Jean back. I still don’t really like what it does to the story I’d already read. For me, it creates a separation right in the middle of everything that made it so powerful. That explanation comes with her return in Avengers #263 and Fantastic Four #286, leading into X-Factor. Phoenix had taken Jean’s form, memories and part of her essence. It believed itself to be Jean. So there is a connection there, but the Jean who returns hasn’t physically lived through those years with the X-Men. Then Madelyne Pryor makes it even more complicated. Scott meets somebody who looks just like Jean, marries her and has a child with her. Jean comes back, and suddenly there’s this whole other life that Scott has already built. By Inferno, we find out Madelyne is a clone of Jean created by Mister Sinister. The Phoenix fragment carrying what it took from Jean tried to return to her after the death on the moon. Jean rejected it, and it reached Madelyne instead, giving her life. So the clone and the Phoenix story were connected all along within that explanation. And just to keep the names straight, Madelyne is the Goblin Queen. Those aren’t two different women. Jean, the Phoenix duplicate and Madelyne are the three lives that get tangled together here. The Black Queen from the Hellfire Club was another role in the earlier Phoenix story, not an additional Jean Grey. Inferno brings that mess right back onto Jean. When Madelyne dies, Jean accepts the Phoenix fragment and ends up with both Phoenix’s and Madelyne’s memories and personalities inside her. She has her own life, the life Phoenix lived as her, and the life Madelyne lived with Scott and their son all running together. To me, that feels like the story trying to put back some of the connection that the cocoon explanation took away. I’m not saying I know what everybody writing it was thinking. That’s just how it reads to me. They separated Jean from Phoenix, and then brought the experience back into her instead of leaving it completely outside her. It doesn’t settle immediately, either. Those personalities keep causing problems afterward. In X-Factor #50, during Judgment War, Jean finally gets free of their competing personalities. She still has the memories. So by where I’m reading now, she remembers those lives without having Madelyne and Phoenix constantly fighting to be the one in control. Rachel is another part of this, but her becoming Phoenix happened before Inferno. She’s Scott and Jean’s daughter from an alternate future, carrying the history of a world that went horribly wrong. She takes up the Phoenix name and power, and by this point she’s with Excalibur. It isn’t as simple as Jean losing Phoenix at the end of Inferno and handing it straight over to Rachel. That’s where I’m leaving the explanation for now. I’m still reading, and I don’t want to drag later answers into the part I’ve actually reached. Even with the parts I wasn’t happy with, I’m still a huge fan of the whole storyline. I can love Phoenix and Dark Phoenix and still wish they’d handled some of the aftermath differently. I wanted to put all of this together because, once you follow it through Jean, Madelyne, Inferno and Rachel, you realize how much of the X-Men is still dealing with what happened back on that shuttle.