The Gifted S02E03 Review: Jaundice

The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 3: coMplications

A bit of an interesting episode. The whole cliffhanger of the previous episode ends up being laughably mundane. Or, well, as mundane as a sick mutant baby can be. I'm not sure if it's kinda clever or just narmy, but apparently Baby Dawn is down with jaundice. Mutant jaundice. And because of comic science hullaballoo, the only way to cure said mutant-jaundice is with Papa Marcos' light powers. Okay, then. I'll buy that, and the episode actually goes into portraying Marcos' understandable anger, fear and general panic about the safety of his child pretty damn well.

And it does give the show a neat, quick way to explore how the two different mutant groups finally meeting with each other would be. The Stepford sisters basically kidnap a half-drunk Marcos, calm him down and get him to be all serious with the fact that the problem involves his child, and we get to see both Andy and Lorna sort of have to deal with possibly confronting Marcos.

Of course, Marcos ends up getting a cute moment with the baby, a brief argument with Polaris (who's dead-set on staying honestly even before the Stepford Sisters's hallucinations), but Marcos freaks out anyway and starts shooting light lasers all over the place until Reeva knocks him out.

(Reeva's weird "camera shakes all around a screaming actress's face" effect just looks dumb, by the way. Sorry.)

The question is, of course, why the Inner Circle let Marcos go at all instead of killing him (hey, Reeva was ready to murder Andy for not being honest about a phone call) or keeping him prisoner. It's a bit weird and inconsistent, especially after the show trying to shove down our throats how completely eeeeevil the members of the Hellfire Club is and how once you're inside you're never getting out.

I'm also not a big fan of the random backstory with Marcos having his own daddy issues. Really? A man who's separated from the love of his life and his newborn daughter can't be desperate to be with said daughter without needed to have some deeply-rooted racism-driven daddy issues? That felt kind of ridiculous, honestly, although at least the show does play it with tact.


The Thunderbird/Blink subplot in this episode is honestly not bad either. I've always been a bit of a fan of the Morlock community from the X-Men comics, being this group of impoverished mutants who live in the sewers, wanting to be free and live in their own community, rejecting both Magneto's desire to conquer the world and establish Homo superior as the lords of Earth as well as Xavier's attempts to create an uneasy tolerance. Honestly, I've been describing The Gifted as a stealth Morlock show. Anyway, Blink and Thunderbird end up going into the Morlock sewer society, and while we only see a bit of it and a majority of the scene is devoted to them trying to find their way out of the holographic sewer walls, we do get a neat bit of Thunderbird pouring his heart out about his lack of faith in himself, which is neat. Blink also gets to... strike a deal with Morlock leader Erg to... spy on the surface world? That doesn't sound so bad. Again, it's mostly world-building, I think, though I really wished they had done more with the Morlocks other than showing some dudes in hoodies toting guns.

The Struckers storyline... yeah, it's kind of played out at this point. Reed's disintegration powers kick in at the worst time, which is while he's driving a god damn car and holding the steering wheel. Reed and Lauren get a bit of an honesty bit, where Lauren reveals that she has been afraid of revealing her powers specifically because of an incident where Reed had promised to "protect her from them". It's simple, but at least it's unobtrusive and nowhere as loud as the previous two episodes. Maybe it's because Caitlin's left out almost entirely of the episode this time around.

Taking Caitlin's place as a loud, obnoxious character, though, is Jace Turner's subplot. I apparently blocked out a lot of his scenes while reviewing the previous episode, though, because they apparently show him trying to actively hide his obsession with hunting down mutants, coming down to a head to him screaming his head off and trying to get the police to hunt down those damn dirty mutants. Honestly, I genuinely feel like Jace as a character is really played out and he's falling dangerously close to pre-character-retool Gotham's Barbara Kean levels of irritation.

Anyway, still a flawed episode, but one that I did find pretty enjoyable.