The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 11: meMento
And they had a decent run too of relatively decent episodes. Oh well. This episode of The Gifted was supposed to be the huge turning point of some of the characters as they take more drastic measures in response to the recent events -- the attack on the Purifers, and the (off-screen) release of all the mutant prisoners in prisons all over the US. And... and not a whole lot of those made much sense, particularly due to how everyone on Team Underground was fully rah-rah-no-killing mode, and everyone on Team Inner Cricle was completely on board the fact that they needed to make sacrifices for the greater good. It's sort of like the final season of Game of Thrones, except this season didn't even have the excuse of "too little episodes to develop the characters".
Polaris finally ends up realizing that the Inner Circle is evil, but it's not employing Twist or the slaughter of random innocent humans or getting her to blow up an airplane or the release of multiple psychopaths into the world or even sending out Fade to attack the Underground. No, it's because Reva... has employed a trio of mutants that are involved in a certain ship slaughter which we've never heard of before this episode. And that's like super evil, for some reason. And that's super bad, and Andy's super-excited that he gets to hang out with a bunch of dudes whose ability is... with three people, they can teleport, heat up and blow up a chair? I know this is a TV budget, but honestly, when it's three people and their combined ability is to blow a chair, and we don't even hear their names, it's pretty obvious that these guys are kind of fodder.
But instead of taking it up to Reva or the Stepford Smiler Sisters, even to just tell them to keep an eye on the ship-killer crew, Polaris immediately zips off to sob to Marcos and ask for the Underground's help. I dunno... Lorna's change of heart really felt like it needed more of an incentive, or, alternatively, for it to have happened a bit earlier. For what it's worth, working with Marcos in the previous episode might've been the actual trigger, and this is just an excuse? Her apologizing to Marcos, apologizing and begging for help simultaneously, is definitely well-done.
Meanwhile, both the show and Marcos himself takes note of just how kind of emotionally abusive this all is, not to mention the whole "hide our kid" thing, and he... sort of flirts with that one lady Morlock they rescued way earlier in the season? I completely forgot she exists. It's there.
Oh, and Blink and Marcos end up basically asking the Morlocks for help, and they sort of get a non-committal intel from them or something? They end up following that lead and see Reva and the leader of the Purifiers meeting and exchanging manila envelopes. Also, Evangeline the X-Men lawyer call in Thunderbird and basically gathers all members of the Mutant Resistance, and apparently there are other resistance cells.
The Struckers sort of revert back to being kind of boring, I'm sorry to say. The focus of this episode is Lauren, sort of, who... is obsessed with this random music box from earlier in the season, and... gets flashbacks to Andreas Strucker from a couple generations in the past? She ends up developing her powers and instead of just making force-shields, she can now make slicey-dicey force circle-blades, or something? The story bit of the racist landlord calling in the cops to shake them down, and then Caitlin deciding to essentially weaponize Lauren as a distraction to get the cops away is sort of treated by Reed and the show as basically giving into the temptation of abusing their powers, but honestly... it's not like Lauren's actually hurting anyone. And while the show plays up Lauren giving in to EEEEEVIL, all she did was protect her family (non-lethally) and threaten an asshat landlord. Which was more stupid than evil -- just pretend nothing is wrong, or move out of that apartment!
And I'm not sure about the logistics of the show. Are they staying with Thunderbird, Blink and Eclipse? Are they not? Why are they not, if they aren't? And if they are, was that apartment really the only one they could find? I dunno. The whole thing feels contrived, and that's before the whole bizarre ancestor-dream nonsense... and Lauren randomly knows German? I'm not sure if she knew before, or if this is just plot contrivance. Seeing the rest of the episode, it could be the latter.
Jace Turner, sadly, also gets a fuck-ton of screentime, and after committing fully into being an evil "MUTANTS ARE EEEVIL AND THEY LIED TO ME" mentality, he and his buddy Ted end up beating down the doors at a shelter or an orphanage or something, and basically act all evil and shit. And then Jace gets lectured by a black kid about how racism is bad, while Jace's buddy Ted shoots the mist-making mutant kid... and then a clearly conflicted Jace covers for Ted when the police arrives... and then he's glorified as a good citizen by bad-mass-media-man Benedict Ryan, which he feels guilty about... but then his ex-wife calls him and tells him she's coming over to his point of view? That last bit... really makes no sense. I dunno. Nothing about this sequence really makes sense from a character development standpoint other than the fact that Jace Turner's a bit of a shitbag. And frankly, I've stopped giving a shit about whether Jace's sympathetic or not around halfway through season one, I just wished the show would commit.
Like, I honestly get what they're trying to do, they're trying to set up a conflict, at last, between the Underground, the Inner Circle and the Purifiers, but the Purifiers have been such a cartoonishly poorly-written flat set of villains that I genuinely don't care about them, and the main characters involved have been relatively steadfast in their convictions that their sudden 'conflict' felt rushed and not at all earned.
No comments:
Post a Comment