The Gifted, Season 2, Episode 14: calaMity
So yeah, the poor Morlocks get massacred, which is... sort of a sad, recurring theme with the Morlocks. In the comics in particular, the Morlocks as a group ended up being more of a character than any individual Morlock character, and when one of the first Claremont-era X-Men crossover started off, it promised multiple mutant deaths in the "Mutant Massacre" arc... in practice, it's the poor Morlock society that ended up decimated. And it seems we're getting an equivalent storyline here.
And this is the plotline for this particular episode's storyline. The opening scenes makes it clear that a while back, Reeva Page recruited Benedict Ryan in order to basically be her little puppet on the human side to manipulate the human/mutant narrative however she chooses to. The flashback of how she found him as a washout radio host is probably unnecessary, but she ends up sending Ryan to tell his Purifiers to attack the Morlock hideout, regardless of the amount of casualties on either side of the party.
And for the most part, this is the main plot of the episode. We get to see a bunch of random Morlock mutants show off their powers. We've got Iris, who ends up casting illusions to confuse and slow down the Purifiers as they wander around the same couple of corridors. We've got Membrane, who is this huge white lizard-man who uses the mucus from his hands to give them a live camera update on what the Purifiers are doing. We get to see that one mutant dude (Mason?) who turns into a weird mist-thing and starts picking off Purifier mooks one by one. And it's mostly a whole-episode action scene as the Purifiers realize what the Morlocks are doing, and get past these undeveloped but sympathetic Morlocks while Blink tries her best to create portals and get the civilians out into an alley where Team Mutant Underground are ready to ferry them to a scrapyard.
Blink ends up getting the spotlight in this episode, being the literal conduit between the Mutant Underground and the Morlocks in more ways than one, advocating finding help from her allies the moment the Purifiers arrive, and her quick thinking and jump to action ended up allowing the evacuation to begin way earlier than it would've otherwise begun if they had listened to Erg. The moments she has with Thunderbird, while short, is a whole lot more emotional than anything the two of them had in any previous scene in the series. And, of course, while Erg and the rest of the combatants fight and get picked off one by one by the asshole Purifiers, Blink ends up ferrying most of the Morlock civilians out. A neat, great way for them to utilize Erg's powers too, even if the other Morlocks are kinda dumb for actually peeking out of their cover instead of just letting Erg take out the other Purifiers. I guess they aren't trained combatants.
Also, I do like that Erg's original plan -- to flood the tunnels -- is basically something that the villainous Mikhail Rasputin did in the Uncanny X-Men series, in yet another example of a story where a large amount of the Morlocks get killed.
Of course, Blink and Erg end up going on to try and save one little kid who got separated from the others, and in the process of this, Jace Turner manages to shoot Blink in the back several times, causing her to fall down on the sewers as her portal collapses, separating her from Thunderbird, Erg and the rest of her allies. I'm not 100% sure she's dead, but that's definitely a pretty well-done last stand for sure, and I'm pretty sure she's my favourite out of the main Mutant Underground characters, so... yeah, kinda sucks.
The only real piss-off thing in this episode is Jace Turner, who the episode still tries to spin as a character who is totally conflicted and shit, holding a mutant teddy bear and having a sad face or whatever, but honestly at this point I just really want him to get shot in the head. Kudos for them for making such a hatable character, I guess.
On the Inner Circle side of things, it's... it's mostly the B-plot this time around, with Reeva launching an investigation on Max, the missing member of the ship-killer crew. And... Lorna continues to be the dumbest double-agent ever, being so obviously "I AM PANICKING PLEASE DON'T SUSPECT ME" in every single one of her scenes, and honestly, Reeva, the Frost Sisters and the rest of the ship-killers are kind of dumb for not realizing that. Poor Sage ends up being confronted by Reeva, who is disappointed that someone she trusted so implicitly has betrayed her, and we get a genuinely fun detail that the technology-oriented Sage's mind is "just ones and zeroes" to the Cuckoos. Sage ends up getting killed for it, which Andy tells Lorna is a tone that is way too cheery. There's also a couple of B-points like Caitlin drumming up the courage to slam through a police roadblock, and more talk about the creepy dreams that Lauren has been having, but those are honestly just there to remind us that they exist more than anything, and is fully in the background.
Overall, while, again, perhaps too late to save the season, it's a pretty huge "event" episode to set up a neat climax, and unlike the previous "event" of the prison outbreaks or the murder of all the X-Men-allied mutant leaders, this is a plot-relevant event that actually feels like it hits close to the center of characters we do like. I'd be content if it was just the Morlock community being overrun and some of Erg's buddies getting killed (I'm frankly surprised Erg and Glow made it out alive) but to kill of Blink too is something I genuinely did not see coming.
No comments:
Post a Comment