To sum up about 21 minutes of animation, Cyclops in this episode is revealed in this way: an orphaned, isolated introvert with a deadly power he can't turn off, Scott is shunned by the world until Xavier finds him and recruits him to his first class of X-Men. As an X-Man, Scott is completely incompetent and inept, botching routine training simulations and earning the mockery of his fellow misfits. That all changes when they recruit Jean, who completes Scott so fully that he becomes defined by her. When their co-dependent relationship is threatened by Wolverine, Scott lashes out like a cowardly, spoiled brat. Then Jean blows up.
Maybe that's an oversimplification, but not really. I'll get into it later.
The problem with this episode is that one cannot view it in isolation, but as episode 20 of a 26 episode season. That means it is viewed as a trigger to past actions by various characters during the show. In Scott's defense, this episode also paints Logan and even Xavier as being jerks in one way or another in their treatment of him. But Scott takes the jerk cake in this episode. If his obsession with Jean were any more pronounced, he would be a supervillain akin to Mad Hatter or Firefly, as depicted in Bruce Timm's Batman animated series. In fact I would argue Scott is very close to that here; being morbidly obsessed with a woman because of one's own selfish ego fulfillment needs has often been the motivation for many a supervillain in cartoons, and Scott practically straddles that line here.
The episode begins in the present, with the X-Men locked in mortal combat against the Juggernaut, who apparently escaped after their battle to sooth Tilde a few episodes ago. We see more of him and he puts up a much better showing, but I would argue this show's Juggernaut is the least imposing ever put to animation. The show has tried to be unique by not devoting an entire episode to Juggernaut's imposing rampage to build him as an unstoppable threat, since that has been done about three times before. The problem is without that, Juggernaut is little more than The Blob with muscles and a helmet, and that doesn't quite work, either. In the midst of a battle against Juggernaut alongside Frost, Iceman, Wolverine, and Nightcrawler (pretty much the X-Men who probably have the least chance of actually fazing him), Cyclops begins seeing "visions" of Jean during the fight, which distracts him. While he does land an optic blast against Juggernaut, Scott is so distracted that he is nearly crushed by a flung car, which Wolverine has to save him from. When Scott awakens in the medical wing, he is still seeing visions of Jean to the point where he mistakes Frost for her, and passionately makes out with her. Apologizing, Scott refuses, perhaps for the first time, to excuse his behavior on his turmoil, and decides to take Wolverine's advice from episode 12 and hit the road, lest he injure any more of his teammates or muck up any more missions by his afflictions (as Juggernaut escaped).
Emma Frost offers to sort through his memories and remove Jean from them, thus easing his pain. At first appalled at the idea of becoming an emotional amnesiac like Wolverine, Scott ultimately agrees to allow Frost to help him. Sitting at "The Emo Bench" (what I now call that bench at the edge of the Xavier estate where both Scott and Warren have usually sat alone when they wanted to mope and stare at sea gulls), Frost dives into Scott's mind and gets a tour of his life and times, not all of it being pretty.
The first half of it is a very complete view of Cyclops' early life, albeit without the retcons of Mr. Sinister being involved in his orphanage in the past (besides, wouldn't it be called a "group home" by the 90's?). Scott awakens as a child in the hospital, screaming out for his parents and brother. He learns from the doctor that there had been a plane crash in Alaska, and while his younger brother Alex survived, his parents did not. He also learns that he had been in a coma for approximately two years, which I thought was an interesting touch. I suppose one could argue it would explain why Scott in the future would seem immature, as he is literally two years behind men of his age in development. There is no glimpse of Alex and we learn that he had been adopted in that time, while Scott moves onto an orphanage. There, he is a shy awkward youth prone to being picked on by bullies, and one encounter ends with him shoved in the mud and unconsciously triggering his powers, blasting one punk about 50 feet into the porch of the orphanage, before another blast nearly destroys the building itself. There is a part of me that is always bemused in mutant origin stories when a mutant is being bullied by merciless tormentors who then suddenly become whimpering fops the moment it appears their victim is actually a threat to them. Afriad of his powers and deemed a threat to society, Scott winds up blindfolded and handcuffed in a holding cell until Xavier arrives to "adopt" him. Scott begins to trust him when Xavier provides the visor by which Scott can see without firing his blasts (which is never mentioned as being made of ruby quartz).
We then meet the optimistic and young "first class" of recruits, Beast (hairless), Angel (with smaller wings than his adult form, which was a nice character design touch) and Iceman (in his "snow" form). Cyclops is added to their midst and they all engage in a training simulation in the Danger Room, where Cyclops is clearly the weakest link, botching it up and being completely incompetant, earning the laughter of his fellow students. Wanting to throw in the towl, Xavier convinces Scott that he has a use yet, as he introduces him to the Grey family, whose daughter is levitating all the cars in her neighborhood via her controllable telekenesis. Xavier learns from her parents that she was disturbed by a visit from his "colleague" Erik, who has now become Magneto and beginning his war on humanity. A shy introvert herself, she starts to loosen up around the shier, more introverted Cyclops. She completes the "first class" and as Frost notes, completes Scott as he attaches to her strongly. But even that is not enough. In a battle against Magneto, who wishes to claim Jean for his Brotherhood, Magneto overwhelms the male X-Man and threatens a visor-less Cyclops with being crushed by a van if Jean does not surrender. Magneto feels that Xavier is limiting her by not allowing Jean to harness all of her true power at once; Xavier feels Magneto sees her only as a weapon, not a person. From the ending of the episode, part of me feels that while Xavier was right in a way, Magneto's warning that blocking out Jean's powers so much clearly had a downside.
Despite the fact that Magneto is clearly standing about 5 feet from Cyclops, and is talking loudly, and there is no humanly way he could miss if he just lifted his head and opened his eyes, Scott is too scared and inept to do that. He needs Jean to psychically lead him by the hand and tell him what to do, which she does. Managing to rival Magneto's mastery of the car, she helps block Scott's power long enough for him to blast Magneto, making their co-dependence set. Jean "took his pain away" as Frost puts it. All good things can't last forever, and Frost soon sees that the cog that messed up the machine of Scott's life was Wolverine.
Wolverine's introduction to the X-Men in some ways is more akin to the films than EVOLUTION surely was. The X-Men are already adults and a fully functioning team when the wayward biker berserker is introduced to the team. Time passes quickly for Scott's memories, and it can be tough estimating people's ages and how long these periods are supposed to last. Iceman as of this season is 18; in the comics he was 14 when recruited, and was their youngest member until Kitty Pryde was recruited at age 13 at a later point. We could probably squeeze Bobby in the First Class as being about 13 himself and that period without Wolverine was perhaps about 5 years, making most of the founding class besides Iceman about 23-24 years of age, with Beast being maybe 25. I suppose this works, the only problem being that most of these characters seem to look and sound older than their early to mid 20's. Granted, gauging age in animation often can be hard; distinguishing between infants, children, teenagers, adults, middled age and old age is easy, but those subtle years in between can be tough. In the 1990's X-MEN cartoon, Nightcrawler in his two appearances once claimed to be 25 years old; he certainly looked and sounded older. At any rate, that is one of those nitpick details that is fun to debate but doesn't really help or hinder the crux of the episode.
Logan immediately makes an impression and is instantly disrespectful and dismissive of Scott as he pursues Jean, who is appears fascinated by Logan but also apparently not directly returning his romantic overtures, nor his disregard for Cyclops in her life. It is at this point, though, that the episode begins to splinter from it's combined revelations about Cyclops. For the first time in his young life having a competitor for Jean's effections, Scott handles it very poorly, starting a fight with Logan. Logan refuses to fight back "over a girl" and Scott literally BLASTS HIM IN THE BACK as he was turning to leave; a cowardly, dishonorable, and unheroic gesture. It becomes even more so when Jean rushes between them and angrilly tells Scott that Wolverine wasn't fighting back because he had literally promised Jean that he wouldn't. As such, even when Logan is being his jerkiest, he still is a man of honor, while Cyclops has none. Taken in isolation, this is bad enough, but then think about all those times in the show, after Hindsight and that year of no X-Men, where Cyclops has blasted Wolverine when he was angered or for any reason; Logan could be said to STILL be honoring the vow he made to Jean, while Cyclops, who now would know it, exploits it for a cheap shot when he is rattled enough by his rival. That's not sympathetic at all. And it all goes downhill from there, just wait for it.
We then get to the point of the pilot where the mysterious explosion seems to claim both Jean and Xavier. Naturally with this extra revelation we learn that Scott was apologizing to Jean for being a possessive jerk, and Jean was naturally noting that he needed to apologize for Logan for such cheap shots in that fight against him. They wisely don't show the "blown kiss" to Logan, because it still leaves the hint that Jean was "interested", even if not enough to ditch Scott for Logan at the moment. The revelation at the end is that Jean herself caused the explosion by transforming into a "phoenix"; why is unknown. It could have been the stress of the situation, combined with years of "bottling" her potential by Xavier, finally burst like a dam from the pressure. While Xavier was found comatose in Genosha for a year, Jean has yet to be found. The audience knows she has awakened, with total amnesia.
From this point, even without having read some more synopsis' than I should have, we can tell the show will be doing the Dark Phoenix thing; with Frost in the cast, the fact that the Hellfire Club may show up at some point is almost a no-brainer. The only problem with this is that the Dark Phoenix only has emotional weight if you got to know and care about Jean as a normal character under her normal self for a while before seeing her become corrupted by her own power. In the 90's series, we had about two seasons and change to get there. Even in X-MEN EVOLUTION, which had a tease of this with an episode where Jean's powers flared out of control due to the stress of Scott and Duncan Matthews competing for her affections, that still gave us a season and change beforehand (and the show didn't even hint at the full Phoenix stuff until the series finale, where it may have happened in a theoretical Season 5, had there been one). This show expects you to care enough about Jean after one episode to have such a shift in her character have emotional weight, and I don't think they succeeded. This show's writers/producers has often sought "shortcuts"; ditching building up the fundamentals of the X-Men that you "already know" to dive into the action, presuming the audience has much knowledge of the characters while being free to change it for their benefits, as this show is their own interpretation. These shortcuts have consequences. One can only react to Pheonix from Scott's perspective, and maybe some of the other X-Men, but not from Jean's herself. It may be intentional, but it may not be wise. Still, it was an effective cliffhanger.
But now comes the rough part, taking this episode together as a whole and in context. The show's writers and producers frequently miss the forest for the trees, and expect their audience to do so, but I usually don't. As with any show about some 35-45 year old comic book characters, every incarnation is open to interpretation and all that. One can take various angles that have been written about the characters and run with it. For Cyclops, the writers of this show have chosen to fulfill every assumption that many in the audience have about Scott, in that he is, in so many words, a needy, teachers pet *****e. Cyclops in this show has NEVER been a good leader; hell, he was a barely competent X-Man until Jean came along. While Jean was shy and introverted herself, but alongside the emotionally crippled Scott, she was practically an extrovert and came out of her shell a bit. Scott needed Jean, and Xavier, to coddle him and hold his hand with every bump in the road or inconvenience, to give him "gold stars" and whatnot. In some ways this matches Joss Whedon's assessment of Scott in his ASTONISHING X-MEN run, in that Whedon wrote Scott as being a generic X-Man with virtually no will or confidence who would have left the team had Xavier not given him the "merit badge" of leadership that he never had to actually earn, and whenever he tried, he lost. In this show, one wonders if Scott ever was truly a leader at all, or was simply assumed to be one because Xavier invested so much into him.
Then Wolverine comes along, and what has happened? He has done what Cyclops never could; reformed the team without either of them in a commanding position and, through thick and thin, through triumph and tragedy, even without changing his own nature to randomly break out into the open road after having a nightmare or two, held the team together. Logan is selfless when he has to be, and cares for the good of the team, and the ideal of Xavier's message. Wolverine IS Mr. X-Man as he was in the start of the pilot, embodying everything that the school is about deep in his heart, which Scott is obviously unable and unwilling to do, because he is too caught up in his own needs. Without Jean or Xavier to coddle his ego, Scott retreated and allowed the X-Men to disband, and needed to be pulled by the hair for most of his early missions, and would have left at least Storm to die otherwise. Scott's desperate attachment to Jean to fulfill his own emotional turmoil and lack of esteem is so strong that he is willing to place the X-Men in danger, whether by losing focus during a fight with Juggernaut or in picking a fight with Mr. Sinister that the X-Men ultimately must rescue him from. While Wolverine has Xavier's emotional support, he was able to reassemble the team without it, and has led the team without it on rare occasion as well. Cyclops never has, and never will. At least that is the impression one gets of Cyclops after this revealing episode. In W&TXM, when Logan rips into Scott for being a "teacher's pet" or being a weak willed chump in so many words, unlike in other shows, Logan is absolutely correct; when Logan dismisses Scott as being "not good enough" for Jean, he is right there, too. This may indeed be different than other X-Men cartoons, but is it better? Is it truly a triumph to actually write Cyclops as being the dick that many dismiss him as? It is a triumph for Logan to actually be right that Jean is basically just waiting for him, and Scott is just a step in the way for her?
Some may dismiss this and go, "oh, the comics wrote Scott like this a few times, too". The comics always have runs that are not the best to emulate. Barely 15 years ago, Spider-Man was written as a bitter, near psychotic who called himself "The Spider" and literally slapped his wife MJ, leaving her cowering on the floor. In some ways this bit was even immortalized in film in SPIDER-MAN 3. But would you ever see a cartoon that proudly wrote Spider-Man as being willing and able to smack his girlfriends when he gets frustrated enough? Hell no! Most see that story as a mistaken blip in another wise stable and well written character, and dismiss it completely. Choosing to interpret a character from their worst possible perspective does not a good character make.
