Mewtwo: The Clone, the Lab, and Pokemon's First Ethical Question
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There is a burned-out mansion on Cinnabar Island, a small volcanic island off the southern coast of Kanto. Most trainers walk past it on their way to the Gym. The ones who go inside find something that changes how they read the rest of the game. Scattered through the wreckage are journal entries. Those journals tell you everything the Pokédex does not.
Mewtwo was not discovered. It was engineered. And the facility that built it paid for that decision with its existence.
A city built on fire
Cinnabar Island sits at the foot of a volcano, which gives the island much of its identity. Its slogan in the original games is "The Fiery Town of Burning Desire." By the time of the Johto-era games, that slogan has changed to something grimmer: "The Ravaged Town of the Past." A volcanic eruption in the year between the two generations decimated nearly everything. The Gym was relocated. The Pokémon Mansion was destroyed. The Cinnabar Lab was destroyed. What the volcano finished, the events in those journals had already started.
The journals scattered throughout the Pokémon Mansion describe two things: the discovery of Mew, and the creation of Mewtwo. The mansion itself got its name because a famous Pokémon researcher once lived there. By the time a player arrives in the original games, it is already decrepit and burned. The fire came before the volcano.
What the scientists built
Mewtwo is a clone. Its body was engineered using recombinant DNA derived from Mew, the Pokémon now understood as the last universal common ancestor of all other Pokémon species. Mewtwo shares some of Mew's physical characteristics, including certain embryonic features, but its body structure is significantly larger as a result of that recombinant process. Its tail, notably, resembles an umbilical cord. Its design also carries characteristics of a grey alien and a salamander layered over that cat-like base.
One of the Pokémon Mansion journals records a birthday: February 6. That same journal implies the clone was carried in a host organism, just as real-world cloning works, though other depictions across the series show Mewtwo being grown in laboratory equipment. The two accounts are not fully reconciled in canon. What is not ambiguous is what happened next.
The lab's first failure
Mewtwo escaped. The journals make this clear. It did not leave quietly. The Pokémon Mansion was destroyed on the way out. The Cinnabar Lab, which a Pokémon Report found in Silph Co. confirms was responsible for Mewtwo's creation, also met its end before the volcano ever erupted. The scientists built something that outlasted every safeguard they put around it.
This is what makes the Pokémon Mansion significant as a location. It is not just a dungeon the player navigates to find a key for the Gym. It is a crime scene. The player is reading the record of what went wrong, in the handwriting of the people who did it.
The question baked into the name
The name Mewtwo may be a combination of Mew and two, or of mutant and two. Both readings hold meaning. It is the second thing in a sequence that began with Mew. It is also defined from birth by what was done to it rather than by anything it chose. Mewtwo comes before Mew in the Pokédex despite being created from Mew's modified DNA, a small structural irony that mirrors the larger one: the copy precedes the original in the official record.
Mew's own name may combine mutant or mutation with new, possibly touching on the Japanese myō, meaning wonderful or exquisite. Mew is the source. Mewtwo is what the source became when human ambition was applied to it. Even though Mewtwo is a clone of Mew, a Mythical Pokémon, Mewtwo is classified as a Legendary Pokémon, a distinction the games draw without fully explaining.
What the design carries
Shigeki Morimoto designed Mew, and he has stated that Mew's design was actually based on Mewtwo. The design was made simpler than Mewtwo in order to take up less space on the cartridge. Mewtwo, in other words, came first visually. Mew was the streamlined version built afterward. The original design was the weapon. The source came second.
Mew's earliest design in Pokémon Red and Green resembled a vertebrate embryo, with a large head and small body. It was later revised to be more mammalian while retaining embryonic features. Mewtwo's Mega Mewtwo Y form returns to something similar: much like Mew, it carries the characteristics of a vertebrate embryo. The two Pokémon keep pulling toward the same origin point even across forms and generations.
The cards that carry the weight
Mewtwo VSTAR's alternate art and the Mewtwo ex from the 151 set both render that history in full color. The weight behind those illustrations is the same weight the Pokémon Mansion journals carry: this is a being that should not exist by any ordinary logic, and yet here it is. Mew VMAX and Mew ex sit alongside them as the quiet original, the creature whose DNA started everything and who has no memory of what was done in its name.
The lab is gone. The mansion is ash. The journals are still there for anyone who looks. Some questions in Pokémon do not get answered. They just get preserved in the wreckage.