The Gifted S01E05 Review: Daddy's Home

The Gifted, Season 1, Episode 5: boXed in

I genuinely forgot to post this episode review, which I finished on Wednesday. Whoops. So anyway, it's another great episode for the Gifted, in no small part for the obvious but effective way to properly humanize Jace, the lead FBI agent that's been hounding our heroes for the past 4 episodes. Jace's been consistently well-acted as a stiff government agent that wants things to happen 'for the greater good', both racist and sympathetic (thanks to losing his daughter, checking the 'tragic backstory' box), but also reasonable enough to cut deals with Polaris and Reed, and that lack of cartoonish evilness is something that Inhumans' Maximus is lacking. (I'm sort of obliged to compare the X-Men show to the Inhumans show, am I not?) 

We get a pretty effective flashback to how Jace lost his daughter in the ''7/15" event (which no doubt is supposed to be an allegory to the real-life 9/11) and we get to see pretty effectively the horror mounting as a mutant protest ends up having flashy powers explode in the sky, before an explosion rips out and claims Jace's daughter's life. It initially seems like a cheap attempt to garner sympathy for Jace, and hardly tells us nothing we don't already know from Jace's own monologues, but in addition to proving the whole 'mutant powers are, y'know, sometimes pretty fucking scary' plot point, it also ends up being important near the end when Dreamer being pulled out of Jace's mind earlier than she wants to ends up Jace having his mind end up fucked, and he goes home to his wife at the end of the day thinking that his daughter's still alive and waiting for him, and the punch of unintentional grief that the mutants cause him is amazingly delivered by the actor. Definitely a well-done moment. It's a far more subtle in-episode foreshadowing than the Pulse stuff last week, for sure. 

Meanwhile, the main plot of the episode is more 'things happen', as we try to work with the fallout of having our heroes escape from the prison car, but the characterization done for the reunion of Polaris and Marcos, as well as Reed and his family, is well-done. Polaris and Eclipse's meeting in the car, talking about how they're "going to have a weird kid", as well as the cool combo-move of using a rearview mirror to reflect Eclipse's light beams to destroy a Sentinel Drone, is well done. 

(Polaris wants to name her child 'Aurora', which I know is a member of Alpha Flight, but is completely removed from Polaris and the non-existent-in-the-comics Eclipse's counterpart, Sunspot. As far as I know, anyway)

Polaris, meanwhile, gets a bit of a darker show in this episode. She single-handedly whacks around Jace's roadblock around, and kidnaps Jace in order to take him hostage and interrogate him, with the aid of the mind-reading Dreamer. Polaris gets a lot of great visual effects this episode, between the abrupt flinging of a cop into the van as the doors slam shut, or choking Jace with a metal rod, or impaling a cop car with two dozen floating metal rods... Dreamer's ability isn't exact mental manipulation, however, and the fact that tear gas was being lobbed their way and that she doesn't exactly have much time, they end up having to retreat without much to go on other than a logo and a drawing of a building. Oh, and fucking up Jace's mind something fierce. Really like Polaris this episode, and how different her methods are with her boyfriend, as far as how far they should go with prisoners. 

Blink, seeing just what Dreamer can do, confronts her and ends up extracting the confession that, yes, Dreamer did fuck with Blink's mind. She does offer to fix it, but Blink is understandably outraged and tells Dreamer to fuck off. I'm glad that it wasn't kept as a secret for much longer. 

Reed, meanwhile, finds himself under heavy scrutiny when the bartender from the past few episodes, who's named Fade as the episode tells me, exposes Reed's past deed of (nearly) betraying the Mutant Underground. It's very understandable for both sides, of course, and I'm honestly not surprised that Fade doesn't hold Reed (who already worked as a mutant prosecutor in the past) in particularly high regard. I felt that the Reed subplot this episode is the weakest, and it mostly hinges on the will-he-won't-he-betray-Reed moment for Fade. It was a bit of a necessary moment, but I really feel that it could've been done better. Reed being way too effective in reading the police callsigns also seem to be a bit too forced, but logical enough, so I won't nitpick too much.

Caitlin and her kids, meanwhile, perform impromptu bullet removal surgery on Trader. (I'm honestly confused why the show has two mutants with invisibility powers, but I guess Fade's instant-invisibility and Trader's more of a chameleon?) Which isn't terribly interesting -- we get to see Lauren use her force bubbles to stop an artery from bleeding out, but Andy ends up being not used at all beyond being a blood donor. Also, so many mutants and no one has a cauterizing power? We also get more scenes of Shatter and Sage -- do like how these less-important characters are slowly introduced to use over the series.