The Gifted S01E06 Review: School for Gifted Children

The Gifted, Season 1, Episode 6: got your siX

Not a particularly exciting episode of the Gifted, really, mostly because this episode really feels more like a filler between all the previous events and the explosive finale that's to come. There's scant little that isn't already shown to us in previous episodes. It's just 'we gotta get this plot device thing!' (this time around, it's hard drives, which is a lot less easy to get invested in as saving Polaris and Reed) with a subplot about how the kids can make a difference because they're awesome mutant kids and not regular kids. 

There's literally not that much to talk about here, because so many ends up feeling like padding. Blink leaves the Mutant Underground because she finally gets into an argument with Thunderbird about the whole memory-insertion thing, and that's literally the only real thing that happens here that feels to be of significance. Add that to Mama Strucker reverting back to 'you silly mutants, you should act like normal people!' mode and telling Polaris to not teach the kids to properly use their abilities to do battle? Like, shit, after all she's been through in the last five episodes, it's more of a necessity than Polaris being battle-hungry. In particular, Polaris isn't actually depicted as being a drill sergeant nasty type of trainer, she gets a little prissy and gives a speech to that one illusion kid that makes jokes in her training session. I dunno. I'm sure the show's going through a bit of trying to show the two extremes and would lead to some callback to the Xavier School as a balance between education and child-soldier rearing, but for the life of me I'm not sure I buy it, especially with so many other characters showing and emphasizing the whole life-and-death knife hanging over their head.

There's some Reed/Andy bonding moments during their hard drive strike run which is... okay, I guess. It's not particularly bad, but it's not something that they needed to devote so much time to. Polaris ends up bringing Lauren and her new pushy-boyfriend-wannabe Wes to create a huge diversion and a truck ramp to save Reed, Eclipse and Andy, but again, it's nothing we haven't seen much before. Agent Jace ends up not really having much to do after the huge deal given to his fucked-up memory last episode, basically his subplot this week is just him getting back to work.

So yeah. Easily the weakest episode of the Gifted by far.