Jean Grey Is a Villain in Brand New Day. What Is Marvel's Redemption Plan?

Jean Grey has done some genuinely unforgivable things in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the question I keep asking myself is what exactly Marvel's plan is for a character whose actions were this bad when her story needs us to keep loving and rooting for her. Jean isn't as bad as Thanos, Ultron, or even Kingpin, but the difference is that those characters are supposed to be villains. Jean is supposed to be a hero. She's supposed to be an X-Man, and that is what makes what happened in Brand New Day so complicated.

Jean Grey's Mission of Revenge Turns Deadly for Everyone in Her Way

In Brand New Day, Jean Grey is on a mission of revenge, but also a mission to find her sister, who was kidnapped by the DODC years earlier. Jean is desperate to find her, and anyone who gets in her way becomes an obstacle. That includes the DODC, the Punisher, Spider-Man, and unfortunately a lot of innocent civilians. Then at the end of the movie, she just goes off, seemingly unpunished.

This became such a big point of conflict for fans that writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers actually had to address it, because Jean is going to be part of the MCU going forward and seems positioned to be one of the anchors of the X-Men and ultimately a hero.

Erik Sommers Defends Jean's Body Count, and I Push Back

When asked if he had any worries about putting a lot of bad stuff on a character who eventually will need to be redeemed, Sommers said this: "I think technically she's not responsible for any deaths, but you come away with the impression certainly that she's caused a lot of destruction and mayhem. Even if you're going to have a villain who is really redeemed at the end or goes through transformation, you have to start them off in a place where they are formidable."

I understand the logic here. If Jean is going to have a redemption arc, Marvel needs to establish that she is a legitimate threat at first. But I have a problem with how far they took it, because Jean kills or seriously harms or puts multiple people in critical health throughout this movie. The taxi scene is especially jarring. She takes control of a person, that person is struck by a vehicle, and the movie just moves on. Now, after the fact, the writers are telling us that technically she didn't kill anybody.

Here Is Everything Jean Does, and Wanda Has Arguably Only Done One of These Things

I keep comparing Jean to Wanda, and I will get to why in a minute, but here is the list of what Jean actually does in Brand New Day.

• She inhabits and possesses multiple people.
• She possesses the Hulk, forcing Bruce to Hulk out, something he has spent years learning to control because he doesn't want to hurt people.
• She nearly gets a child killed by a tank.
• She possesses MJ and kisses Peter while pretending to be MJ, which creates a really bad kind of gravity around consent. This isn't unique to Marvel either. Wonder Woman 1984 has its own weird, incredibly bad consent problem when Diana sleeps with a man whose body is being inhabited by someone else, and the movie just moves past it.
• She then goes on to try to kill MJ.
• She drives a military tank through a city.
• She hijacks a helicopter and takes control of the man flying it.

What makes all of this more damning is that almost every one of these situations could have ended with someone dead. The only reason any of these people survive is because Peter is fast enough or lucky enough to intervene. You can argue Jean didn't directly murder anyone, but you can't argue that she wasn't willing to put innocent people in situations where death was a very real possibility. And there's the part of Jean's story we didn't see at all. Between her sister being kidnapped and the moment we meet her, what did Jean do? If this is what she's willing to do when Peter Parker is standing in her way, what happened to the people who got in her way before him?

What Are Marvel's Options for Redeeming Jean Grey?

I'm not here to gripe about Jean's body count. I want to understand what Marvel actually plans to do with a character who, right now, feels very unredeemable, given that the writers have already told us Jean has a future as a hero in the MCU. Marvel has a few options. They can erase her responsibility altogether, or tell us that Jean wasn't really herself and the circumstances made her do it. They could make Jean evil, treating this as the beginning of a larger villain story the X-Men eventually have to bring down. Or she has to acknowledge what she did, live with the consequences, and earn her way into being a hero.

I think the last option is the most interesting, not because I suddenly think Jean should be forgiven, but because forgiveness doesn't equal redemption. If Marvel really wants Jean Grey to become an X-Man, I think we can root for her, but she has to reckon with what she did before they can ask us to move on.

Sadie Sink Says Jean Has Been Hurt, and Hurting Others Is All She Knows

In her first interview after Brand New Day, Sadie Sink explained that giving Jean a backstory was especially important because of what she did. She described Jean as very flawed, but said she doesn't think Jean is someone who actually wants to hurt people. Instead, Jean herself has been hurt, and hurting others is all she knows. Sink went further, saying what makes the X-Men compelling is that they're incredibly flawed and may have done bad things, and those flaws can make them more complex heroes.

I don't disagree with that. The X-Men have never been interesting because they're perfect people. They're interesting because they're emotionally complicated people forced to figure out how to live with their powers. But here's where I think Marvel has a big problem: understanding why someone does something terrible is not the same as forgiving them for doing it. Jean can be hurt, Jean can be traumatized, and we can understand all of that while also still saying what she did was wrong.

This could simply be the beginning of a new era of violent, morally complicated hero origin stories, kind of like what Netflix's Defenders shows did. Brand New Day was a great movie, and Marvel could just be asking us to focus on the good in Jean rather than the bad. But maybe Jean's journey isn't about getting everyone to forgive her. You can forgive someone and still acknowledge they did wrong, and still fail to get forgiveness from people you've hurt while choosing to become a better person anyway.

X-Men '97 already spent time dealing with whether someone who has done terrible things can still be worthy of redemption. Nightcrawler gets into the idea that we've all done dark things, and being a hero doesn't mean you've never made terrible choices. Jean wouldn't be the first X-Man to wrestle with a darker part of herself, and throughout the comics plenty of these characters have been heroes, villains, or some weird combination of the two.

Why I Keep Comparing Jean to Wanda Maximoff

Wanda is probably the best example of someone who controlled hundreds of people, caused an enormous amount of harm in the MCU, and, like Jean, has been physically and emotionally punished over and over again. Both are young women who came into their powers without knowing how to control them, and both let anger and grief push those powers into dangerous places. But there is one major difference: everyone knows what Wanda did. No one knows what Jean did.

I don't think we should assume Marvel is going to do anything similar to Wanda's ending with Jean. If anything, Marvel is probably aware of how many people felt unsatisfied by Wanda's exit, and I don't think that irritation is simply because Wanda was a fan favorite. For me, the problem is that after WandaVision, Multiverse of Madness didn't really feel like a continuation of Wanda's story. I actually love what Wanda was doing in that movie, her unfiltered chaos, her selfishness, her spiral trying to get back to something that never really existed. But we never got a resolution with the relationship she destroyed, and we never saw Wanda reckon with the people she hurt. Turning to an object as the explanation for everything she did wasn't satisfying, and I think that's part of why Wanda's story didn't feel complete, which is why Marvel might take that into consideration with Jean's story.

Marvel Has Already Forgiven Loki, Tony Stark, the Punisher, and US Agent

If we're going to talk about whether Jean deserves to be a hero after doing terrible things, we also have to acknowledge Marvel has already forgiven some pretty terrible people. Loki destroyed New York. Tony Stark was literally a weapons dealer. The Punisher has done some pretty questionable things. US Agent is now a new Avenger. These are all characters we're supposed to root for, and we do, maybe not US Agent as much, but the rest we absolutely do. So why does Jean seem to be getting such a high bar?

It's also interesting that we're often more comfortable with male characters having done horrific things before becoming heroes than we are with female characters in the MCU. Marvel has never required its heroes to be perfect. We don't need Loki to undo the Battle of New York or Tony to make all the weapons disappear. His urge to protect the world after his war days is what dooms everyone over and over again. What we need is to see that they've changed, and maybe that's the standard Jean should be met with.

Jean Grey Has Already Been a Villain, in X-Men The Last Stand

Let's be real: Jean has been a villain in movies before. In X-Men: The Last Stand, Jean becomes the Phoenix, loses control of her powers, kills Charles, kills Cyclops, and is the single biggest threat in that movie, and yet she didn't permanently become the villain. Marvel doesn't have to invent a new rule for Jean being both incredibly dangerous and still worthy of being a hero. They've been doing this with Jean for a while now.

Honestly, I don't think the answer is making us forget what happened in Brand New Day, and I don't think Jean needs to suddenly become evil either. The most interesting thing Marvel could do is let Jean live with it. Let her know what she did was wrong, and let the people she hurt have complicated feelings about it. Let some people forgive her, and let others never forgive her at all, because forgiveness isn't the same thing as redemption. Jean doesn't need everyone to say it's okay. She needs to prove over time that she understands why it wasn't okay, and that she's going to make different choices. Jean has already shown us what happens when she loses control. Now I just want to see what happens when she learns how to live with it.

Do you think Jean Grey is redeemable, or do you think she's beyond saving?