Fire Made Flesh
Clones certainly have their uses, don’t they? I for one had my clone write the first draft of this post for me, but had to scrap it all when I realized it was just “why was I made” and “end my suffering” written over and over like this was The Shining or something. But not all clones are complete failures! Take Jean’s clone in “Fire Made Flesh,” the third episode of X-Men ’97. Although it is a bit of a mystery as to which Jean is the real one… I mean, unless you’ve read the comics. They also tipped their hands announcing a Goblin Queen action figure before the show premiered, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Picking up right where we left off, the X-Men are dealing with two Jean Greys–the one we’ve known these past two episodes, and the mystery woman who has all of Jean’s memories, but fragmented. So clearly the new “Jean Doe” is the clone, right? Well… no. Beast reveals that Jean’s bloodwork reveals she’s younger than “Jean Doe,” making her the clone. She understandably rejects this information and the mood isn’t helped when Cyclops doesn’t back her up. Okay, so let’s jump ahead a bit and rename the two Jeans; let’s call the one we’ve been following–who definitely gave birth to Nathan–“Madelyne” and the newly arrived Jean, well, “Jean.” A mysterious voice coming over the baby monitor calls to Madelyne right as Beast discovers that she was cloned by Mister Sinister, a seriously bad dude who has stalked Cyclops and Jean for years, to say nothing of the mental trauma he inflicted on Morph. Madelyne tries to reject Sinister, realizing her purpose was to conceive Nathan, but she can only do so much when she was built to fall under his control. Giving herself an evil magical girl transformation, Maddy announces her intentions to inflict her “inferno” on the X-Men. Elsewhere, several X-Men come face to face with their nightmares: Gambit sees Rogue and Magneto physically melding into each other while professing their love for each other, Roberto faces a monster with his mother’s face calling him a mutant freak, and Morph just sees Sinister. Cyclops and Bishop rush to Madelyne and are attacked by demonic furniture, with Cyclops being chastised by a devilish Professor X (Ross Marquand) and Bishop seeing his sister, Shard (Kimberly Woods). Is she dead in his timeline? I forget. Once the X-Men regroup, the floor beneath them gives way and drops them straight into Hell. Bishop gets supercharged on Scott’s optic blast and destroys the demons attacking them, but soon they’re facing a demonic Master Mold. In comes the real Jean, awake and undoing Maddy’s… reality warping? Illusions? Unclear, all we know for sure is that this is the real Jean because she promptly faints. Madelyne serves some serious cunt, calling herself the Goblin Queen before disappearing with Nathan. With Magneto and Rogue back from… somewhere, Morph explains who Mister Sinister is while revealing he knows where the twisted geneticist is hiding. Speaking of the villain, in his base he monologues that he didn’t want to leave the combination of Scott Summers and Jean Grey’s DNA to chance since the resulting child would have incredible powers. In an effort to make the child invulnerable, Sinister drops Nathan in a vat of goo which will be explained later. Magneto, Cyclops, Bishop, and Morph arrive at Sinister’s hideout and come face to face with Madelyne, who I swear does the Basic Instinct leg uncross. You know the one, but she’s wearing a costume so I presume the lads didn’t see anything beyond a TV-14 rating. She takes out Cyclops and mind controls Morph into attacking Bishop, but Magneto is not holding back against this “brimstone clone.” Seriously good name, well done there. But a clone of Jean Grey still has the powers of Jean Grey, and it’s down to Cyclops to confront his… wife? When did Jean get switched, anyway? Tabling that for now, Wolverine helps the real Jean get her memories back, right in time for her to sense Scott’s in danger. It’s now a psychic battle between the two Jeans, which comes down to Jean reminding Madelyne that she’s a good person finding herself in a truly shitty situation, manipulated by a monster. When that doesn’t go as planned, being reminded that Nathan’s in danger snaps her out of being evil. Maddy and Scott interrupt Sinister’s evil monologuing, but the baby is infected with a techno-organic virus which threatens to kill their child. Beast determines it could take years to cure Nathan–if only we had a way to take him into the future on the chance that there’s a cure there… Oh, hey! Bishop’s time band is fixed and he’s ready to go back to the future! But the band only has enough power for Bishop and the baby, meaning Madelyne and Scott can’t go with him. Scott–who was orphaned and is facing some serious abandonment issues–freaks out, leaving Maddy to say a possibly final goodbye to her son. With that, Bishop and Nathan disappear into the future, their fates unknown… mostly. I’ll get to it. The clone–now calling herself Madelyne Pryor because sure, that’s from the comics so why not–chooses to leave to find her own way. The two Jeans commiserate, realizing they may never know when Sinister switched them. Jean goes to see Scott, and the two stand silently before each other. The end! Or at least for that chapter, as we cut to Storm in a bar running into Forge (Gil Birmingham), who says he wants to help Ororo get her powers back.
It’s such an interesting choice to overtly say that Jean and Madelyne don’t know when they were switched. Like, could the entire run of of the X-Men animated series have been Maddy? Which one married Scott? Which one was the Phoenix? All we know for sure is that Madelyne was pregnant with Nathan, but that just accounts for the last year. This is absolutely going to make things painfully awkward between Scott and Jean, to say nothing about Scott and Madelyne, or hell, even Jean and Madelyne. Too bad Wolverine didn’t swoop in to grab the extra Jean, right?
Madelyne Pryor in the comics has a weird and complex history, but I’ll try to condense it down to the Cliff’s notes. After Jean died on the moon in Uncanny X-Men #137 (1980), Scott left the team. While in Alaska he met Madelyne in Uncanny X-Men #168 (1983), shocked by her resemblance to Jean. The two became close, but the ghost of Jean hung over their relationship. But that was waved away in Uncanny X-Men #175 (1983)–the same issue where Scott and Maddy get married–when it’s revealed that the evil illusionist Mastermind had been messing with the couple. See, back in The Dark Phoenix Saga (1980), Jean severely punished him for messing with her mind and years later he wanted revenge. It’s heavily implied that Maddy’s resemblance to Jean was because of these illusions… until Marvel executives demanded that Jean Grey be brought back from the dead just in time for the new X-Men spinoff, X-Factor (1986 – 1998), which was going to reunite the original five X-Men, Scott and Jean included. It was even revealed that Jean and Phoenix were two separate entities! Because of this new series–and the executive mandate–Scott abandoned his wife and baby (who we know as Nathan but was unnamed for a shocking long time) to team up with his ex-girlfriend. Madelyne understandably didn’t take this well, which wasn’t helped when Mister Sinister swooped in and revealed she was a clone of Jean, made to give birth to Nathan. Throw in some demonic influence and Maddy became the Goblin Queen, ushering in an Inferno (1988 – 1989) upon New York City. In the end Madelyne dies and Jean gets all the memories from her and from the Phoenix, and together she and Scott raise Nathan together.
Okay, so… Nathan Christopher Charles Summers has a weird and complex history. Jumping off from the preceding paragraph, Nathan was a happy baby, demonstrating telekinetic and telepathic abilities well before puberty, until Apocalypse infected him with a techno-organic virus that threatened to kill him. In comes Sister Askani, a woman from thousands of years in the future who said she maybe could cure the baby and that he would be the future’s savior, but wouldn’t be able to bring him back. This led to X-Factor #68 (1991) where Cyclops reluctantly gave up his son, and then… that’s all I’m ready to say for now. Nathan obviously has more history than that, but I’ll save it for when another character shows up. Hey, look! It’s yet another instance of me talking around episode 5! For those playing the game at home, take a drink.
Oh, right, before this gets too long, Morph’s transformations of note this time include Spiral, the six-armed minion of Mojo (who we’ll see next episode), and Magik, Colossus’s little sister who was raised in Limbo. Sure enough, when Morph is controlled by the Goblin Queen he transforms into Magik’s demonic persona, the Darkchylde. Yes, it’s actually spelled like that. Comics are dumb, okay?
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