Spider-Man: Brand New Day's Deleted Hospital Scene and My Theory on Jean Grey's Role in Secret Wars

Peter Parker almost died in a Spider-Man: Brand New Day deleted scene, and I think the way Jean Grey kept him alive tells us what could happen in Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars. With the movie now on digital, a behind the scenes featurette shows what seems to be a removed scene from Peter's intake into the emergency room after Frank Castle's gunshot wound, and it points to what I think is Jean Grey's most understated and important mutant power.

There's an interesting detail in the way Tom Holland plays this scene that no one is talking about. It connects with the Claire Temple deleted scene we also heard about, but more than that, it reveals what I think is Jean Grey's most understated and important mutant power as we look ahead to her return in Secret Wars and in Marvel Studios' X-Men.

Jean Grey's psychic CPR kept Peter Parker breathing

Spider-Man: Brand New Day reaches its emotional climax as Peter allows Jean Grey into his mind, and the two connect as two people who'd lost someone. As they connect, we hear the line, "Just because we've lost someone, it doesn't mean we have to do this alone." Then there's a creepy effect where his Spidey sense kicks in. We hear the same chime sound effect that plays every time his tingle comes, and he sees into the darkness that now fills this mental projection of his old bedroom, which stretches on and on with a dolly zoom effect.

This shot has always creeped me out because Peter is looking directly into death in this moment. It looks rather like the shadowy void that Yelena Belova faced in Thunderbolts, cast by the Sentry's Void form to send Yelena and most of New York into a realm of shame. We never really got an answer to whether Peter was caught in that shame realm when the events of Thunderbolts unfolded. I think this one shot might have answered that question: this room he finds himself in is where Sentry put him.

Then Peter steps in front of the bullet Frank Castle fired at Jean Grey to break her psychic control over New York City, which seemed to be doing some major damage to millions of people. At first Peter says he's okay, but he collapses, and as blood pools under him, Jean focuses her attention and the room behind her warbles. That's the same breathing and warbling we see on the other side of the montage as Peter regains consciousness in his hospital bed. Right there, we see the exact moment Jean releases her concentration and no longer has to breathe for Peter because his circulatory system is now stable. Frank later describes it as her "using her magic voodoo to keep you alive."

The cut hospital scene and Rosario Dawson's Claire Temple

In the same scene, Peter freaks out over the fact that he's maskless, and Frank tells him not to worry because he's got him covered. Now that the movie's on digital, we can see what Frank was referring to. Peter's journey in this movie is about learning that he can't do this alone, and the featurette shows what seems to be that removed emergency room moment.

The clip was brought to us by a Twitter account that previously posted about parts of the movie that were removed, including an interaction with Rosario Dawson's Claire Temple. That account wrote that the scene was shot during the hospital sequence, with Peter waking up in his hospital gown with his mask on and bumping into Claire looking at an X-ray, and the two having a short, cute interaction. In a follow up tweet, the account added: "There was also another scene where the doctors are ripping open his suit, but leave his mask on."

Looking at the version of the shot now, it looks like they also took his mask off, which makes me wonder where that interaction with Claire would have happened. Rosario Dawson gave her side of the story at GalaxyCon last summer: "I even shot the scene in the new Spider-Man movie, but I got cut out." She said it still means her character is somewhere in that same universe, which she really loves, and that she hopes she gets to be Claire again.

Jean Grey may have been the one in control during Peter's surgery

This behind the scenes clip confirms that Peter would have had his suit cut open down the middle. Poor guy, he had to hand stitch that suit, and he doesn't seem to be making that much money to afford a new one. His mask would have been removed during surgery, and it seems like he would have been semiconscious, since he was breathing rapidly.

But now we know this was actually Jean Grey's consciousness in that moment, and Peter probably wouldn't have remembered any part of the surgery, because earlier in the film MJ claimed to have no memory at all of when Jean was possessing her. It also might suggest that it would have been Jean who met Claire Temple during that deleted scene, if she really was controlling Peter the whole time.

Did Jean Grey erase Peter Parker's face from the doctors' memories?

So do the doctors who operated on Peter now know what his face looks like? Was keeping his appearance a secret just a matter of doctor patient confidentiality, keeping Peter's medical privacy under HIPAA standards? Is keeping Spidey's secret just New Yorker code, like the passengers on the train in 2004's Spider-Man 2? Or maybe Jean used her psychic powers to erase Peter Parker's appearance from their memory.

Later, when Peter walks out of the crowd, it seems like those are the same surgeons and doctors reacting along with everyone else, and they don't really seem to be keeping any secret about this anonymous patient who happened to walk out of the crowd at that moment. That's why I think Jean Grey has a kind of resistance to memory altering magic. She can control what people remember, and she can withstand other types of magic that try to control what people remember.

It's like she has a kind of immunity to Doctor Strange's memory spell, the one Wong warned about, which of course allowed Peter to accidentally cause an incursion event that brought several people from across the multiverse into Earth 616 for a time.

Why Sadie Sink's Jean Grey skips Doomsday but returns for Secret Wars

I was expecting some obvious answer in Brand New Day as to why Sadie Sink would play Jean Grey in this movie, then not appear in Avengers: Doomsday, but come back in Avengers: Secret Wars. It's kind of odd for a homegrown Earth 616 mutant, a future front person for the Mutant Saga and the star of the Marvel Studios X-Men movie coming in 2028, to be given such an important role in the multiverse crossover event that precedes it, Battleworld in Secret Wars. But based on this small detail at the end of Brand New Day, I think I figured it out: Jean Grey can psychically withstand magical memory wipes.

I think I owe everyone a fuller breakdown of Jonathan Hickman's Secret Wars comic and how the Russos and Marvel Studios might adapt it, but doing that here might fully spoil Doomsday and Secret Wars, so I want to save it for later. Still, whenever critics doubt Doomsday and Secret Wars' capacity to top Endgame, I want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them to just read this Hickman story. You don't even know how small it can make Endgame feel by comparison.

One thing I will say is that God Emperor Doom's control over Battleworld depends on him resetting the memories of all its occupants. Basically, they wake up one day on that planet believing they've always lived this way, in a totally normal, crazy world where Doom is their literal god. There's only a smattering of people on Reed Richards' life raft who aren't affected. Down on the surface, Doom basically steals Reed's family and makes them his own, replacing Reed as husband to Sue Storm and father to Franklin and Valeria. On a recent podcast I posed this theory in a rather crass way, but this creepy reclaiming of Sue Storm by Victor von Doom is what I was referring to.

Doom could complete Thanos's mission, and Jean Grey could wake everyone up

I think this is what the Russos plan to do as Doomsday hands off to Secret Wars, because it's one of the most disturbing, evil and shocking things Doctor Doom is famous for in that storyline. I think they're going to frame it as Doom completing the mission the scariest version of Thanos outlined in Avengers: Endgame: "I will shred this universe down to its last atom and then create a new one teeming with life that knows not what it has lost, but only what it has been given."

In the Russos' interview with Empire about the scenes shown after the Endgame encore, Joe Russo ended with a cryptic tease: "I will say this, there are clues in Endgame, things that are said that will pay off in Doomsday." Last week I speculated about what those lines could be, but I'm increasingly looking at that Thanos line, about a new world that doesn't know what it has lost, with no one to tell them it was actually born out of blood.

That's why I think Sadie Sink's Jean Grey will be crucial to the plot of Secret Wars. She will be someone there to tell them it was born out of blood. She'll find herself in this new world, but because of her psychic abilities, she'll remember the old world, or rather the multiple worlds that were lost, and be there to try to wake everyone up and help them remember.

So is Jean Grey's ability to keep gunshot victims' hearts beating and lungs working valuable? Obviously. But when a villain plans to gaslight a post Doomsday world into thinking he was always their god, a mutant who can unlock parts of our brains is very much a gray matter.

Do you think Jean Grey's control over memory could be the key to her role in Avengers: Secret Wars?