Grace

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Because Damage Control clearly does not care about the value of the life of its supers or about the life of a mutant.

Jean doesn't care about the lives of anyone other than herself and Sara. She's more explicit about this later - about how humans will betray you and cannot be trusted - but the way that she uses anyone to get to Sara, regardless of whether that's Spidey or the Hulk or the Punisher or whoever, shows how little she thinks of other people's lives. Even in her scene with Sara, this is clear. Neither of them value another person's life. It's perfectly fine to jump into another person's head just for funsies, just to get to another person, just to make that person wave at your sister. It's especially clear when Jean controls MJ and kisses Peter - like, there's no consent to anything Jean is having MJ doing, and there seems to be no care about it at all.

Compare also with Frank, who doesn't value the lives of those who he considers his enemies - it's totally fine to kill them, to shoot them.

And that's really the thing, isn't it?

Damage Control doesn't care about the lives of its supers or mutants like Jean because it sees them as the enemy.

Jean doesn't care about human lives because she sees them as an enemy (and I would argue the same goes for Sara).

Peter cares about all lives, enemy or not, which is why that moment where he snaps with the Jean-controlled Scorpion hits so hard. Because in that moment, he doesn't care. And he blames it on his Arachnid DNA, but that isn't it - that's Peter not caring and seeing how far he can go when he stops caring.

And Peter stopping Jean from killing Metsger isn't about whether he deserves it or not. It's about the value of a human life - even an enemy's life - because Metsger doesn't value his enemies' lives and Jean doesn't value her enemies' lives and Frank doesn't value his enemies' lives, but if you make everyone your enemy and don't value any of their lives, then you're just left alone.

I would also argue that Jean knows there's a line there and hasn't crossed it - she absolutely could have killed Metsger immediately, she could have killed him before Peter got in, she wanted Peter to get there and talk her down from killing Metsger, even though she really wants him dead, because that would be a point of no return for her.

can we talk about the phenomanal consistency of jean through the different actors who portrayed her

but like especially with zendaya, who was jean playing out peter's fantasy and pretending to be mj

and especially jon bernthal character switching between jean and frank during the hulk battle

Damage Control, as Metsger tells Peter, is there to learn how to use the super abilities and machinery that "villains" use so that they can adapt them for "heroes" to use.

I will be exchanging the term "villains" here for "monsters" at this point. Which is fine, because iirc, Peter refers to Jean as a monster and not as a villain.

But Peter views his Arachnid DNA as monstrous. That is the point.

Peter's Arachnid DNA is something he lives with that he has figured out how to use for the good of other people - he, Peter, uses the monstrous Spider.

Similar to how Metsger (and Damage Control) intends to learn from and use the abilities of monsters (like Jean) so that they can use those abilities for the good of other people.

We can see Peter's view on his Arachnid DNA as it gets stronger. He doesn't want it to get stronger. He doesn't want to learn how to adapt and use these new abilities. He wants to contain them. To suppress them. He doesn't want to become more monstrous. And we see at the end of the movie that these abilities are not what caused the damage with Scorpion (and the police car) - it's Peter's rage that does this. The Arachnid DNA does not cause the emotions; it's simply another tool in his toolbelt. The Arachnid DNA is not monstrous: Peter is monstrous.

We can also argue that Peter's actions with the Jean-driven Scorpion parallel Jean's actions at the end of the movie, particularly with Metsger. Peter reaches his breaking point and snaps, causing a surge in his mutation, just like Jean does. But I've already discussed the breaking point/surge elsewhere and don't want to jump into it now.

But Metsger's desire to separate the ability from the person - especially when it comes to mutated DNA - is torturous. Peter's attempts to suppress his Arachnid DNA is torturous. Because you can't separate the person from the monster, because the mutation isn't in and of itself monstrous.

Like the Hand in and of itself is villainousmonstrous only because they were in need of a leader. Once a leader stepped in, they adapted to follow his lead.

Peter self-actualizes by realizing this of his own abilities and accepting his monstrous Arachnid DNA - living with it, not suppressing it, not separating it from the person who it belongs to (himself).

Which tells us what Damage Control's purpose is - it serves as the other route Peter can go down. He can be Damage Control, or he can be Jean. And he spends most of the movie as Damage Control (particularly when he is working for/with Damage Control). Peter becomes like Jean when he works for/with Jean.

The movie is the war between Damage Control and Jean, but it's also the war inside Peter between which version of himself he's going to be.

And Metsger gets away because that temptation to fall back into the pattern of using the ability and not accepting the whole will always be there - which is why Bruce, with his Inhibitor, no longer as Professor Bruce, which we know he can be and did and learned during Endgame, exists and has to exist in that sense. Because that's what Bruce in this movie has chosen - and it's a reversal, a stumbling back into old patterns, that shows another option of what Peter can become (and does for part of the movie).

Like.

Y'all.

(And I think it's important that mutation as used in Bruce and Peter's discussion covers any form of super DNA - whether that's a mutant, like Jean, or combined DNA, like Peter, or gamma radiation, like Bruce. This is how I will be using the term throughout this post, even though normally it would apply specifically to mutants.)

But the more important thought that keeps coming up for me is when Evie tells Peter that his mutating Arachnid DNA is reacting to grief or trauma (and also his loneliness) and how Peter's mutation's sudden surge - and its cause - is a foreshadowing of Jean's mutation doing the same thing at the end of the movie.

Most of the time when we see Jean Grey, it's past that initial trauma point that brought her mutation to life. In the comics, this happened when she was really young: she saw her best friend get hit with a car and mentally connected with her while said best friend died. This is what brought on her telepathy etc.

When we see Jean introduced in BND, it is before this trauma point, although we wouldn't necessarily believe that. We see a Jean whose powers haven't fully awakened. Maybe her powers (and Sara's) initially awakened over the grief/trauma of whatever threw them in the foster system in the first place - we know that their mother abandoned them due to said powers, so maybe whatever happened to their dad caused it. Maybe not - mutations are weird, and we don't know a lot about them or how they'll function in the MCU.

The Jean we see through most of the movie is lonely, the same way as Peter is, but she never considers herself truly alone. Once she finds Sara, she won't be alone anymore.

The Jean we see at the beginning of the movie is angry and desperate and trying to find her sister and is stretching her mutation to its limit to do so. And we can argue that Peter is also stretching his mutation to its limit by being Spider-Man full time for the past four years, with no break, constantly going and going and going.

But Jean hasn't hit that breaking point.

That breaking point is the combined grief of finding out exactly what happened to her sister and how her sister died while going through the trauma of forced, tortuous use of her mutant abilities at a greater speed than even her sister could live through.

And when Jean breaks, her mutation surges. Just like Peter's did. But where Peter fights the surge, Jean accepts it and incorporates it.* Peter's surge in mutation isn't there to hurt him - it's to help him at his breaking point, when he is too overwhelmed by everything and needs the extra surge. It isn't monstrous. It's as much a part of him as everything else is.

I think it's interesting that Bruce hasn't been able to maintain Professor Hulk - that the version of him that Jean specifically brings out is Professor Hulk, which is when Bruce and his monstrous Hulk side cohabit and live in peace with each other - because Jean as a foil to Peter is very much about accepting the whole of your super ability (where Peter's journey is also about accepting the whole of your self - not just the "monstrous" but also a person's dependence on people, which also is not Jean's struggle - Jean knows she depends on her sister and her sister depends on her, that's why she's fighting so hard to find her). And you could argue that Peter sees the risks he causes the people he loves as monstrous - by being Spider-Man and keeping Ned and MJ around, he's being selfish, because they could (and are) hurt - and that's something Jean forces him to confront with MJ. And hiding MJ and distancing himself from Ned are also that trying to fight that monster - but that part of him is also important, that monstrous thing is also who he is, and it isn't monstrous in the slightest.

Sorry - this may be incoherent rambling because the more I think about it, the more it untangles and the bigger the metaphor gets.

Anyway.