The Gifted S02E12 Review: Mind Battles

The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 12: hoMe

More plot developments that seem like huge things, but they sort of just end up happening mostly off-screen, while the actual cast sort of just... exist? I dunno. This time around, it's the assassination of Evangeline Whedon and every other leader of the Mutant Underground, and... and it's bizarre, considering what non-entities Evangeline and the other supposed leaders have been. They're treating this like some huge, monumental event, but I genuinely forgot Evangeline exists until the final scene of the previous episode, so it's not a huge revelation that I particularly cared about. It's sort of similar to the whole "release all the mutants in prison!" bit earlier in this season, but other than some vague news reports, we don't even see much of the outcome of unleashing a couple hundred powerful and likely vengeful superhumans into society.

The biggest saving grace of this episode is perhaps Blink -- she hasn't been the most well-developed character in the show, alternating from just being one of the titular main characters of the Underground, or a love interest, or just a pleasant person to be around (the role she's been filling for the past couple of episodes), but the added flashback to how her foster sister died, as well as her more jaded world-view compared to Thunderbird's one-track mind of "RAH RAH RESISTANCE FIGHT RAH RAH" honestly is genuinely refreshing. Like, is it cowardice to run and hide and save your life to survive? Is it cowardice for Erg to basically let the humans have their world while he and the rest of the Morlocks just keep their head down and live in the sewers peacefully instead of fighting a bloody, losing battle?

Blink calls out Thunderbird on just how stupid his vaunted "bravery" is, and how bravery sometimes ends up just leading people to their straight-up deaths, how dying isn't bravery but foolery, and it's amazingly done. It doesn't hurt that I've been consistently frustrated with how flat and bland Thunderbird as a character has been throughout the series. The show makes Blink's progression from being a reluctant ally to the Underground to finally leaving with Erg to join the Morlocks because of her own world-view (and thankfully not because of a stupid love-triangle) be pretty dang well-done.

Unfortunately, that's about the only real bit of praise I can give to this episode, because... I dunno. The rest of the episode just felt kinda flat. The whole gathering of the Underground leaders felt a bit bizarrely detached from everything that's going on, the Thunderbird/Erg conflict felt artificial, and Erg's insistence that Evangeline isn't the squeaky-white paragon of morals because she's low-key threatening to expose the Morlocks to the world if Erg doesn't help out ends up being kind of a dud of a plotline because Evangeline just sort of dies off-screen.

Meanwhile, Lauren and Andy continue to have weird dream battles while the ghost-memory of Andreas Strucker talk about how Fenris is apparently "the light and the dark" and they have to fight each other for dominance or something? Andy gets sweet-talked by the Cuckoo Sisters to basically "rescue" his entire family by allowing the Cuckoos to mentally prod Lauren into thinking in the way of the Inner Circle, because of some random leaps of logic that they'll be safer with the Inner Circle (to be fair, that excuse's probably accurate). Okay? It feels just contrived and bizarre.

Meanwhile, Lauren spends the entire episode bonding with Caitlin on this utterly wacky and honestly kind of pointless side-quest to meet that one brother from the first season and try to dig up some information, and it feels genuinely pointless, other than to have the both of them ambushed and show off Lauren's newfound ability to create Kienzans and blow up police cars. Also, did they just leave Caitlin's confused brother to the mercy of the police? We never get any answer to this. Meanwhile meanwhile, Reed finds the music box? Or something? And get bizarre flashbacks? There's a lot of characters pretending they're doing something but ultimately amounting to nothing. Like Lorna's kinda-pointless arc of trying to figure out what the shipkiller crew was assigned to do, only for her bad-flirting to end up accomplishing nothing, really.

Overall, kind of a messy episode. It's more of a setup to sort of emphasis how screwed the Underground is, but I've always viewed the Underground as kind of already in a pretty bad spot ever since the season started, and now we just take away a bunch of allies that the show never really acknowledges 90% of the time, so... eh? Also apparently the Inner Circle has agents in the government and likely the Purifiers or something? I dunno.