The Gifted S02E01 Review: House of M

The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 1: eMergence

Oh, hey, The Gifted is a thing! I nearly forgot about this series, honestly, and it's second season is... it honestly feels like more of the same. The first season stumbled through its way without being particularly great or particularly bad, sort of this middling ground in the huge glut of new superhero shows. The thing about The Gifted that doesn't really make a lot of people have any sort of excitement is that it focuses on X-Men third-stringers instead of huge fan-favourites like the Flash or the Teen Titans or Luke Cage or Daredevil. It's sort of hard to get excited for  that, and I'm a big X-Men fan myself.

And it's... it's a pretty damn strange way to open this second season. The cold open, following on the splintering of the Mutant Underground, is pretty promising, even if the sight of the Stepford Cuckoos' sponsor, Reeva (one of the new main characters played by Grace Byers) gunning down all of the other members of the Hellfire Club's Inner Circle.

And then we cut to six months after the first season where... Polaris is really pregnant and is about to give birth to her baby, and that's the entire crux of this episode. Polaris needs to give birth, and she's trapped in her own dilemma and (honestly, well-founded) paranoia that Reeva and the Stepford Sisters are going to prioritize her life instead of her baby's. She has some neat little "surrogate sister" bits with Andy Strucker, who's grown up a fair bit and has fancy white hair, but the entire plot of Polaris giving birth kind of ends up with this huge bit of her powers causing power surges in the city and making metal objects go haywire... but the birth ends up going smoothly and we can say hello to baby Dawn. Who, as far as I can tell, is an original character for this show.

Of course, I did spend the entire episode wondering if they'll explain why they didn't just get Lorna to do a C-section, which would've been a lot cheaper and they don't have to deal with the whole "mutant contraction causing mass devastation" thing.

But as adorable as a new baby is, it's nowhere as exciting as the show thinks it is, and so much of the episode taken up by it isn't the smartest writing move. It's an interesting bit to make the Hellfire Club actually sympathetic, though, when the Stepford Sisters actually give Polaris a vision of mutants ruling the world with her daughter beside her, an actually motivating vision instead of a sinister "mwa-ha-ha control-your-mind" deal.


Meanwhile, we get Sentinel raids cracking down on mutants and killing the parents of a pair of mutant girls, and the Sentinel goons chasing down mutants end up causing our good guys to show up in a rescue operation. It's... it's a neat bit, to be fair. We show off Lauren's improved control over her bubbles, and Blink and Thunderbird are a thing now apparently... but then the show just sort of grinds to a halt as it ends up returning to the same problem that plagued the first season -- in that the Strucker family just isn't as interesting as the show thinks they are. Sure, they were great as a "audience surrogate" bit in the first season as a family who's thrown into turmoil when they realize that their kids are mutants, but on the other hand, the sheer amount of screentime that Caitlin Reed takes up this episode is just... way, way too much.

It doesn't help that Caitlin is driven by a one-track mind to rescue Andy, who Lauren points out "isn't kidnapped", but left on his own will. Caitlin ends up hanging out with Eclipse, who wants to find Polaris as well... and the two go on this wacky side-quest to find quirky hacker-mutant Wire, and I just continue to roll my eyes at Caitlin's attempted "I got this" swagger. It's... it's not delivered particularly well, and she's honestly one of the less-interesting characters in an ensemble cast, so devoting so much screentime in a plot that ultimately goes nowhere is a bit egregious to me. For all their researcch and Caitlin's insistence that Lauren's dream means that Andy is close, all  of it kind of goes nowhere when Polaris giving birth causes the whole goddamn city's electrical grid to spasm.

Meanwhile, Reed's arm is just spasming with dormant mutant powers, and I'm genuinely unsure if this happened last season or if it's something new this episode. The whole Mutant Underground subplot leads to everyone driving to hunt down where Polaris is giving birth ends up cut short when Polaris's powers stopped fluctuating after baby Dawn is born, and it's... it's huh.

Overall, though, again, while it's not actively bad, the second season premiere for The Gifted ended up feeling more puzzling than anything in that this certainly isn't the sort of plot threads that I should really be highlighted in order to excite an audience. Throw in some sub-par lines of dialogue and the viewing experience isn't the most pleasant that it could have been. It's not a bad episode per-se, and certainly entertaining... but we'll see if subsequent episodes will do better.