The Gifted S02E07 Review: Child Psychopath

The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 7: no Mercy

I guess I'll start getting somewhat caught up on The Gifted, a show that just... sort of fell off the track for me. I just stopped watching the show at one point, and ended up just... well, not watching it until the season's ended for a while. I tried booting up this episode last night and, well... yeah, there are many reasons why The Gifted's second season doesn't catch my heart the way many other superheroes do. And it's not the lack of "big name" superheroes either, because if done right, random nobodies in the superhero world can certainly carry a show on their own. But this episode really ends up selling what's problematic with The Gifted, which is repetitive plot threads and "character moments" that honestly feel identical to things I've seen before earlier in the season. Throw in the fact that the show really doesn't know how to juggle its cast, and I remember why I ended up just dropping this show.

Half the episode is spent dealing with Reed Strucker and his newly-found and hard-to-control disintegration powers. And I haven't watched this show in a while, but even then I definitely know that it's a storyline that I was sick of, and I genuinely just did not give a crap about anything the Struckers have to say in this episode. Likewise, we get even more "clues" to the Strucker family storyline and... and can I just say that I really don't care? Because I really don't they've not made the Struckers mystery that much interesting that they had to be extended so far into the second season. The Mutant Underground dudes in general are just sort of lounging around, that when Blink calls out Thunderbird and Eclipse for literally having nothing better to do but question her allegiance to the Morlocks, she makes a very good point -- what the fuck are the Underground even doing at this point? The Morlocks are being a haven separated from most people, while the Inner Circle, while clearly brutal, at least are trying to help mutants. The Underground are just sort of pussyfooting around everything and at this point the only leg up they have over the other two groups is the thin line of "oh, we don't kill humans." And even then, as shown later on in this episode, it's not like most members of the Inner Circle go around merrily blowing up buildings or anything. Honestly, Blink is probably best served just cutting off her ties and joining the Morlocks. Hell, as Blink herself notes, Marcos really doesn't have a leg to stand on with his nonsensical drug cartel allegiance.

The Turner/Purifier storyline also doesn't really work out for me.We get more scenes of Turner being hesitant but "seeing the point" of joining this clearly too-radical-for-him group, being shut out by his wife (good!) and ends up being sweet-talked into appearing on a show lead by Purifier head honcho Benedict Ryan.

The Inner Circle storyline is perhaps the most interesting part of this episode (read: the only interesting part), and it's... it's basically a huge heist to send a message and get some information. It's something that's been built up for a while now, and it's... woefully anti-climactic. It's still cool to see the scene of slow-motion walking into the building as the Inner Circle dudes walk like they're in a music video, but ultimately the actual heist, for all the buildup, feels pitifully mundane. The show tries to talk it up by having Reeva be romantically involved with some random dude that she uses to gain access to the system -- and there's certainly a neat "was this ever real?" sentiment going on, but we've already established that Reeva is cruel but not mustache-twirling "mwa-ha-ha-kill-everyone". It's at least something new and the added random backstory definitely makes Reeva far more interesting than the muddled bunch over at the Mutant Underground.

Very weird, though, that they need Reeva to go through all this to seduce that random dude when they have access to the Stepford Cuckoo sisters with their mind-control powers. That seemed pretty impractical, and an obvious narrative shortsightedness to inject some drama.

Of course, while Reeva, Polaris and the Cuckoos promise that no one will be harmed if they cooperate, Rebecca clearly has different plans. She keeps questioning everyone why they let racist comments slide, and when one dude takes things too far, Rebecca refuses to listen to the other Inner Circle people telling her to "let it slide, we got to escape", and Rebecca rips apart every single person in that room with her CGI inside-out powers.

It's definitely a powerful, if obviously telegraphed, ending. The episode itself was mostly just all-right, particularly the Inner Circle parts. The show's making members of the Inner Circle way too likable, though, while the Mutant Underground and the Struckers are just being genuinely bland and uninteresting. I'm willing to finish the second season, but I'm genuinely not sure if it'll be a good watch.