Best + Worst Coupling within the series?

Cyclops and Jean Grey, I felt, didn't have the development that it did in the comics. They just tossed them together and said they were a couple, but you really don't see much between them. It seems like they were paired together just for the sake of it.


Yeah, the writers fell into the same trap the X-Men movies fell into - they didn't flesh out the relationship between Cyclops & Jean, which was once considered the golden couple of the X-universe, which made it hard to feel like Cyclops lost someone important to him. This was just one of many instances where the writers took the mythos for granted and just expected the audience to know that Cyclops & Jean were a long standing couple in the comics and that such knowledge would carry the subplot, and it doesn't work. The two impressions one comes away from that awful "Breakdown" ep are 1) Cyclops is a cowardly psychotic misfit who isn't worthy of either Jean or Emma Frost and/or 2) Cyclops is henpecked to a woman who obviously doesn't love him or care about him & he is too stupid to see that Emma would be a better companion for him.

More flashbacks of Jean, possibly from the POV of other characters would have helped flesh her out more, and so would not having her wake up with a lame bout of amnesia. And of course, not treating Cyclops as the Frank Burns to Wolverine's Hawkeye Pierce would have helped. By comparison, even the not so fleshed out "bond" between Storm & Angel showed more chemistry. Even the occasional interactions between Iceman & Kitty Pryde showed more chemistry.

Funny how Nightcrawler was in some ways the flip-side of Cyclops in this show. Where Cyclops was an epic fail, Nightcrawler was an epic win, and by extension so his relationship was a win.