What is Generations?   I partly know the answer, I guess.  It’s a series of one-shots in which “legacy” versions of characters meet earlier versions of themselves, and it’s meant to set up new directions, or something along those lines.  But as a story, what is it?  Does it even have a plot?

If you’re not following the wider series (I’m not), and you’re buying this simply because it’s effectively a Jean Grey special (I am), then the set-up here is curious to say the least.  The recap page has some cryptic stuff about “the Vanishing Point”, but what actually happens is that the present-day Jean Grey (the time travelling teenager) randomly finds herself in Claremont/Byrne X-Men during the period when Jean Grey was holidaying in Europe while she thought the X-Men were dead.  And then at the end of the issue she goes home.

There’s no explanation of why she’s there and nobody seems especially interested, herself included.  There’s not even a suggestion of where you might care to look for the answer if you did care.  Perhaps the thinking is that if you care then you’ll buy all the other Generations books anyway; and if you don’t care, well, you don’t care.   Suffice to say that if you’re in the latter category, this issue is not attempting to move you over to the former.

Here’s the thing.  The anticipation of Jean confronting a returning Phoenix is already the central focus of the Jean Grey solo series, written by Dennis Hopeless.  So if she’s going to meet an earlier version of Phoenix, then yes, you’ve got some dramatic material to work with – but it feels like something that ought to be happening in Jean Grey itself, or not at all.  You’d expect that at least Hopeless would be writing it, but this issue is by Cullen Bunn.  At least he’s one of her regular writers, in the team book, but he’s not the one driving this particular story.

Still, Bunn does acknowledge everything that’s happening in Jean Grey – there wouldn’t be much of a story if he didn’t, after all – and there’s apparently meant to be some sort of connection, since the issue ends with a “next issue” page promoting Jean Grey #8.  That issue doesn’t come out until October, so maybe things are going to dovetail somewhere.

So.  We’re in the late 70s X-Men sand Jean is on holiday.  In a sense, this is quite heavy on the continuity, since it’s pinned to a specific point in X-Men history.  It also tries to make use of the plot of the Dark Phoenix Saga, and the fact that Jean is just about to start being corrupted by Mastermind, leading to her mental breakdown and Dark Phoenix.  The key points of that plot are explained, but I’m not entirely sure how much weight it’d carry if you didn’t know the original.  That comes with the territory if you’re going to lean on classic stories from nearly 40 years ago, though.  Oh, and because Jean’s on holiday, she also spends a lot of the issue in a bikini, which I suppose is vaguely faithful to the original, but feels more than a little gratuitous.

Loosely, then, this is young Jean meeting Phoenix, but also meeting her older self at the same time.  The story  glosses over the convoluted issue of whether this version of Phoenix is really Jean, and simply nails its colours to “yes she is”.  There are some stories from the 1980s, circa “Inferno”, which justify this approach; they claim that the Phoenix Force didn’t just copy Jean’s body but also took a part of her soul to serve as a personality for it.  After the Dark Phoenix Saga, that portion of Jean’s soul tries to return to Jean’s body, gets rejected, and ends up animating a dormant Jean Grey clone, who becomes Madelyne Pryor.  This was supposed to walk the tightrope between preserving the legitimacy of the original stories by claiming that the important decisions were still the ones Jean would have taken, while exonerating Jean herself of any responsibility for genocide.  It’s all a complicated mess and I can see why this story would prefer not to get into the mechanics.

The bigger problem is that the older Jean feels like a cypher here.  This isn’t the fault of the art; RB Silva sells the age difference nicely, and does a solid job of humanising Phoenix while kicking into trad Marvel cosmic mode in the final act.  But Jean/Phoenix doesn’t act in any way that’s easy to identify with.  She seems remarkably unperturbed by the strange girl who wants to ask questions about the Phoenix force.  In fairness, this may be partly intentional.  Bunn seems to be playing up the angle that even before Jean is actively corrupted by Mastermind, she’s still operating on a cosmic stage where she’s becoming detached from the everyday world.  But that sits awkwardly with the idea that she’s also trying to deal with the loss of the X-Men; and having her jaunt off to suddenly fight Galactus on the other side of the galaxy is out of line with how she was being portrayed in X-Men during this period.

Casting about for some sort of ending which doesn’t derail anyone’s story, the issue ends with Uatu turning up and telling Jean that she needs to decide whether to tell Phoenix about Mastermind, Dark Phoenix and so on.  Jean decides not to, and Uatu makes a hand-waving speech about how Jean has taken control of her own destiny simply by making a decision at all.  This isn’t very satisfying; if Jean is just worried about the butterfly effect then we’re dealing with time travel ethics tropes that have nothing much to do with reality.  If she’s concerned that telling Phoenix might make matters worse, it’s hard to see how.

It’s passably diverting, it looks nice, but I have no real idea what the point is.  It’s certainly working hard to look as if there’s a point, but it falls short of actually convincing me.  There ought to be something thematic to work with here – after all, young Jean’s whole deal is that she fears that being forewarned won’t save her from the original Jean’s fate.  But it feels more like a story which is trying to pass off a non-event as a climax.