The Gifted S01E01 Review: Mutants

The Gifted, Season  1, Episode 1: eXposed

Last week, I watched and reviewed the pilot for the Inhumans, the MCU's newest forway into TV. The Inhumans and the X-Men have been compared to each other multiple times, with accusations of the Inhumans being built up as a 'poor man's X-Men' despite the two being created in the comics at around the same time. The X-Men just happened to be more popular, getting cartoons and movies made out of them. The premise behind both series is pretty familiar, really. Both Inhumans and the mutants in X-Men are a race of beings, each with a unique power, and they struggle to find their place in the world. Both Inhumans and X-Men feature 'normal' people who wake up one day and realize that they have access to a terrible power. They both tend to fight shady human military organizations. They both have a secret society led by a particularly powerful mutant/Inhuman, and the core themes explored is co-existence versus mutant/Inhuman supremacy, and acceptance of yourself. 

I'm not particularly leaning either way prior to these TV shows, but god damn, looking at the pilot for Fox's the Gifted, it rubs salt into the wound that Marvel's Inhumans have opened. Not only did the Gifted serve as a far more cohesive and interesting pilot to a series, with actual good acting and a great setup for a story that's underway, it also goes through telling the backstory of the show in, again, a far more cohesive fashion than Inhumans did. The characters are relatable even though they go through one of the most basic X-Men stories out there -- a kid at school, being bullied, unleashes so much power it causes destruction, putting the kid (and his family) on the run.

Unlike the two-episode premiere to Inhumans, I felt that I connected with the characters in the Gifted, be it the Strucker family, whose father works as a lawyer against mutants, and the brother-sister pair of Laura and Andy who are discovering their powers for the first time in a world where mutants are arrested and treated like criminals; or the Mutant Underground. We don't know much about Polaris, Thunderbird, Blink and Eclipse, but what little we see of them paint them as likable characters. Unlike the stilted acting and dry-infodump writing in Inhumans,

So, the Gifted doesn't really do anything new if we're being honest about it, not the way that the trippy mindfuck of a show that Gifted's older sibling Legion was. but it does the basic story and embraces just what makes X-Men, well, X-Men that it's hard not to get invested with these new characters we're seeing.

So I think I'll just break it down and talk about the characters that are at the core of the story, and surprisingly, I felt that I was the most invested not with the cool mutants with their cool codenames, but with the family at the center of it all. Andy and Lauren Strucker are siblings, both of them having mutant powers. Lauren can create these funky bubbles of condensed air -- well, forcefields, basically. She discovers her powers three years ago, but has kept it hidden due to the fact that their father, Reed, is one of the lawyers that goes around apprehending mutants. Things go absolutely haywire, though, when her little brother Andy gets beaten up by a bunch of bullies, and in the stress of the situation (that's a pretty harrowing scene of bullying, as well) he unleashes a gigantic blast of force that fucks up the school.

And the Strucker kids come out to their mother, and I felt that it's a very well-written scene, as is Caitlin Strucker telling her husband over the phone that their kids aren't the victims of a mutant attack, but the mutants themselves. Reed Strucker's desperation as he abandons his entire career to basically ensure a safe future for his two mutant children is also very well-developed, and, yes, it's nothing particularly new or engaging, especially to longtime X-Men fans, but it's still thrilling to see it nonetheless.

While all this is going on, we follow a pair of three mutants -- Polaris, Thunderbird and Eclipse -- as they rescue another mutant escaping from the police, Blink. They're the Mutant Underground, and they are being hounded like, well, illegal immigrants or something. Except that they have powers. They don't use codenames (other than a couple of mentions to Lorna's alter ego, Polaris) and use their real names, is fine. Clarice (Blink) is the new girl, the one who we follow in her POV as she discovers this strange Mutant Underground. We know she's spunky and a survivor, and generally pretty likable. Blink is one of the most visually amazing mutants in Days of Future's Past thanks to her fancy purple portals, and I for one am particularly happy that the visual effects still look as amazing as they do here. We also get a pretty cool demonstration of how horrible her portal powers can malfunction if not done right, first when it 'ate' part of a police car, and then later when she cuts off that poor dog's toy.

Lorna (Polaris) is a bit of a hothead. She's easily the most powerful member of the Underground team, having magnetic powers, and the sight of her throwing around police cars with a flick of her fingers is amazing. She's also the most hotheaded, charging in to brutally whack a police officer against a wall when they could've made a clean escape. Lorna gets arrested during the opening scene, leading her to meet Reed Strucker (the scene of her flexing her powers and showing that she could kill Reed any time she chooses to is well-shot) and she's going to be the badass in distress that the Underground and the Strucker family are going to try and rescue. I know of Polaris' parentage from the comics, and maybe they'll do a little sneak-in similar to what they did with Legion? We'll see.

John (Thunderbird) and Marcos (Eclipse) kind of blur a bit together to me as those two guys. Marcos gets a bit of a chance to show his personality by revealing that he's apparently the father to Lorna's child, and the one that interacts with Reed the most (John just bails him out from his problems), but the show kind of treats them as the face of the Mutant Underground -- a bunch of cool guys that are escaping the Sentinel Program and helping mutants get out of places where they're being hunted down. Marcos is easily the character with the most flashy powers out of the main four, and I do mean flashy. He makes strobe lights, and can concentrate them into beams of laser-light to shoot down Sentinel robots. John's powers are like tracking or something.

They basically get together, and the episode ends with a cliffhanger the cast being separated, with half of them being at the mercy of the whirly-dirly octopus-crab drones of doom that Sentinel Services unleashed upon them. It's a pretty neat action scene as well.

Overall, while I honestly would've rather liked an X-Men TV show that actually focuses on an incarnation of the A-game mutants, this one does do a fair bit to fit the X-shaped hole in my heart as far as a live-action adaptation of mutants goes. We'll see if it actually manages to branch out into something new, however, or if it's just a retelling of the same old X-Men story but with roles transplanted to more obscure characters. The premiere does get a bit of a leeway for doing all the tablesetting and stuff, so I'm interested to see if we'll be getting any more good stuff come next week.


Marvel Easter Eggs Corner:

• Stan Lee cameo! It's a pretty underwhelming one, to be honest, with him just being a dude that walks out of the bar and the camera focuses on him for like a second. 
• While the timing of just where the Gifted fits in Fox's X-Men movies continuity-wise, and it's kinda said that they're going to steer clear of trying to root Gifted (or Legion) in any specific timeframe, it's clear that it takes place in a X-Men universe. The X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants are referenced as having either gone underground or wiped out prior to the events of this series, which might mean that this takes place in the post-apocalyptic Logan timeline or when the school disbanded during the 'bad' timeline in Days of Future's Past.
• The Sentinel Services are, of course, a reference to the Sentinels, longtime giant purple robot enemies of the X-Men.
• "Mutie", which Andy says and Lauren admonishes, is a common slur for the mutants from the comics.
• Marcos's phone's ringtone is the 90's X-Men cartoon theme song.
• Not going to do character-origin moments for the characters involved here like I tend to do for the DC stuff for the simple reason that I don't think I'm all that qualified for that.