7 Times Jean Grey Was the Worst

Jean Grey is one of the X-Men’s most popular and powerful characters. However, she has also become one of their most contentious members. Jean Grey has been around since X-Men #1 way back in 1963, and she’s done it all. She’s saved the multiverse, gotten married, traveled to about every time period, and come back from the dead more than her fair share of times. In fact, her initial resurrection stands alongside Superman’s return as one of the revivals that erased all meaning death had in comic books. 

All that said, with how long Jean has been around, she’s also done some pretty terrible things, some as bad or worse than her most heroic moments. So let’s take a look at the seven worst things Jean Grey has ever done, because oh boy, are there some doozies here.

7) She Rejected Her Own Daughter

Jean and her daughter Rachel got off to a pretty rocky start. Granted, there is a lot of context here, as Jean has just recently returned from her Phoenix cocoon imprisonment and absorbed the memories of her clone Madelyne Pryor, and Rachel is Jean’s daughter from an alternate, apocalyptic future. There was a lot going on, but it still hurts to see Rachel introduce herself to the mother she never knew, only for Jean to break down crying and screaming that she won’t believe it. The two eventually reconciled, but for a good bit of time Rachel was convinced her mom hated her because of this.

6) She Switched Spider-Man and Wolverine’s Bodies

Unlike its current iteration, Marvel’s first rendition of its Ultimate Universe is rather infamous for making a lot of negative changes to the superhero line-up. One of them being that most of them were just jerks. Case in point with Ultimate Jean Grey, who used her psychic powers to swap Spider-Man’s and Wolverine’s brains because Wolverine was annoying her. She didn’t specifically pick Spider-Man to swap him with Spider-Man, she just sent his mind to the place it wanted to be least. Which not only is this incredibly petty and downright terrible to the person she’s forcing to become Wolverine, it could have easily resulted in a supervillain being given Wolverine’s near-unkillable body. And that’s ignoring how this led to Wolverine trying to make a move on the teenaged Mary Jane during the swap. All this drama and potential trauma, just because she was annoyed Wolverine was hitting on her. Seems like an overreaction.

5) She Outed Iceman

Like most telepaths in the Marvel Universe, Jean Grey has a history of looking into the minds of her close friends and families and seeing things she shouldn’t, usually just because she can. The most egregious example of this is definitely when the time-displaced teenaged Jean of the Young X-Men reads Iceman’s mind and tells him he’s gay. At this point, not even the adult Bobby had come to terms with this part of himself, so the younger version was definitely not ready to deal with this at the time. It all worked out in the end, but Jean definitely overstepped about every boundary by dragging him out of the closet like that.

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4) She Tortured Emma Frost

Jean and Emma have never had the best relationship. Not only did Emma stand as a major X-Men villain for multiple years, including being partly responsible for when the Dark Phoenix was unleashed the first time, she’s also been in a relationship with Cyclops before. Both women love Scott, and Emma always takes what she wants. In New X-Men #139, Jean learned that Emma and Scott were having a “psychic affair,” and Jean didn’t like that at all. She overpowered Emma and rifled through the most intimate, secret parts of the White Queen’s mind. Then she forced Emma to relive her worst memories over and over again, and seemed to enjoy doing it. While Jean’s anger is more than justified, that doesn’t excuse the pretty sadistic torture she put Emma through.

3) She Killed Rogue

The Marvel Noir universe is very different from the mainline one, with most of the superheroes and villains being replaced by hardboiled, or in the X-Men’s case, gangster versions of themselves. In this timeline, discredited psychologist Charles Xaiver recruits multiple sociopathic teenagers for his school and trains them to be criminals. When Jean grew tired of taking orders from Charles and crime lord Magnus, she faked her own death by killing Rogue, who was disguised as Jean. She didn’t need to kill Rogue, she could have found any number of ways to slip away from the life she was living, but she did. Not only that, she killed her longtime friend without remorse or any sign of guilt, and killed a few more people throughout the rest of the story. And that entire time she was pretending to be Rogue. Noir Jean is as cold-blooded as they come.

2) She Eviscerated the Hellfire Club

What’s worse than killing one person? Killing a handful of people. Marvel’s Hellfire Club is a longtime group of enemies for the X-Men, and Jean Grey in particular, given they were the ones responsible for unleashing the Dark Phoenix on the world. In the main universe they’re usually beaten back and forced to either go to jail or disappear for a time, but in the Ultimate Universe it was very different. There, after they attempted to unleash the Phoenix, Jean Grey took all her anger out on the Club. She broke free of their attempted control of her and first stole all of their assets, which she sent to Professor X. After, she taunted them with the knowledge they were now worth nothing as she burned each of them to a crisp. They were villains, but this was sheer execution in a terrible way to go. Definitely not hero behavior.

1) She Carried Out Solar System-Wide Genocide

What’s worse than killing a handful of people? Killing an entire planet’s worth. Easily the darkest, most horrible thing Jean Grey has ever done came when she was the Dark Phoenix and consumed the star of the D’Bari system, causing it to go supernova. The resulting explosion wiped out the only inhabited world in the system, killing trillions of people in one go. The only semblance of a silver lining is that there was only one inhabited planet, otherwise the death toll would have been much, much higher. Without a doubt, genocide is easily the worst thing Jean Grey has done, and that’s not close.

Jean Grey has done a lot of harm over the years, both personal and cosmically. However, through it all, she still fights to do the right thing as an X-Men. But do her heroics make up for her worst moments, or do they make those times seem even worse? Let us know what you think, and any other bad Jean Grey moments, down in the comments!