Being Different Isn’t Always Bad #Gifted #FOX #3weekroundup #recap #review

Being Different Isn’t Always Bad #TheGifted #FOX #3weekroundup #recap #review

All pictures courtesy of FOX and Marvel 

And the reviews for this season’s new shows just keep comin’. Today we are looking at FOX’s new comic book superhero show The Gifted. So, will this comic book drama send-up make us all feel blessed to be in its presents, or should this gift have come with a receipt for easy return? Let’s find out together.

FOX’s The Gifted is one of their first expansions of the X-men brand into the television realm. With last year’s Legion on FX a quasi-success, the execs over at FOX decided they needed to keep expanding their ever-growing X-men universe. But while Marvel Studios properties like Agents of SHIELD, Inhumans and the Defenders spin-offs are all definitely concretely connected to the more expansive cinematic universe and in very defined and deliberate ways (even if the fandom wants more connectivity), The Gifted waffles on where it wants to fit into the X-men film universe. And with the jumbling of the X-men timeline in the films and Hugh Jackman no longer playing Wolverine, maybe it’s a good thing that this show only timidly references the X-men and what happened to them. However, before I start this review in earnest, I would venture to say that the show takes place in some years before the events in the film Logan, meaning that it is not part of the official timeline of the other past X-men films, including the most recent Apocalypse. I know other articles and critics have stated what timeline the studio has implied it is or what they think, but I’m gonna go with the one in Logan. Note: I have not seen Logan but read plenty about it. OK?

Lorna

The Gifted follows one family that meets up with a band of mutant renegades, for lack of a better word. We begin by showing the renegades. A lizard-eyed woman played by Jamie Chung, Blink is fleeing from a detention center where we can only assume that they kept mutants. As she tries escaping from a brigade of police down an alley, we see her powers of transportation. She jumps into a portal and jumps out across the city where the renegades are actively looking for her. Blink has never met these three before yet they know that she is a mutant and want to help her. The group consists of Eclipse the leader—he is a being of pure hot-white light with the skin-cloak of a human; John Proudstar who seems to have some sort of electric power and/or a tracking power that allows him to sense when other mutants are in the vicinity; and Lorna Dane who has a metallic power similar to Magneto’s where she can bend, push and manipulate any metals in her area (Note: After researching the show further, I learned that Lorna is supposed to be Magneto’s daughter). Lorna and Eclipse are dating and it is revealed early on that Lorna is pregnant with his light-goo baby, but this is only after she is captured. See, while trying to rescue Blink, the cops come and surround the place. The group manages to escape out the back but a cop shoots Eclipse to show all of his light about to pour out. Lorna goes all “don’tchu be messin’ wit my man” and tries to kill the cop and his backup. And in a devastating case of when keeping it real goes wrong, she is captured while the others are forced to get away.

Then, we finally catch up with the family. We learn from the offset that in this family of four, the son is being bullied at school. The bullying is so bad that his parents have had to get involved. His father Reed Strucker (played by Stephen Moyer of True Blood fame) is some high-powered attorney who has been dealing intimately with mutant cases for a few years now. Apparently, as we are to understand, something huge and destructive happened with the X-men. They are gone and there was some sort of mutant war that eradicated most of the mutants and killed tons of innocent people. Again, this could be referring to the fight between Magneto’s side and Professor X’s side in X-men: The Last Stand from the first trilogy or something to happen in a future movie, or something in the Days of Future Past timeline, but I’m going with the pre-Logan timeline. Anyway, now people are all rather freaked about mutants and there are a lot more stringent laws and protocols that dictate how mutants are supposed to be dealt with. He’s part of that enforcement but is hardly the bad guy that the trailers and commercials for this show make him out to be. Don’t be fooled!

Eclipse and Reed Strucker

Anyway, Reed is married to Kate Strucker who, for all intents and purposes, is not shown to be much of anything. Even though it is revealed in the second episode that she is a nurse she plays very much like a housewife, and a characterless one at that. The only interaction or dialogue she ever has is concerning the children. She’s, essentially, a Care-bot 5000 who would cease to exist upon her children’s deaths. I would have liked it if we got to see and hear more about how she feels about mutants as a whole. Just the concept of mutants. But maybe this show is too focused to round out the characters as she isn’t the only one who plays a little flat.

Reed threatens the head school guy with a lawsuit if they don’t try doing something about the bullying, but quickly eases back into the caring, goofy dad—the model for what we all want as a father or the man we want to grow to be if we are already into adulthood. He’s stern but kind and tries to be fair. Yet he, like his wife, is fiercely protective of his brood. Such are Mr. and Mrs. Strucker.

Then we have the daughter who, I’m guessing, is the eldest though I’m very unsure about that as they look and play the exact same age to me (about 15). That’s neither here nor there. The daughter is Lauren Strucker who is shown as the assumed All-American girl-next-door type who has a modicum of popularity (people know her but she’s probably not this year’s prom queen) and a boyfriend which gives her added social capital. I’d like to tell you more about how she plays into the normal teen dynamic but they only spend about ten minutes of showtime (if that) in high school. Both she and her brother are thrust out of that world and into the full adult world before the end of the episode. Lauren is a mutant who has had her powers for at least three years (preteens, maybe longer) and never bothered to tell her parents. In the first episode, I’m not even sure she had told her brother before his incident. Her power has something to do with pushing and/or perception. I still couldn’t tell as she can make things move with her mind but she can also leave this weird bubble-glass looking anomaly in front of people so that they can’t walk forward any further. It’s very undefined.

Lauren’s brother Andy is the one being bullied. Your typical wiry, mop-headed wallflower, Andy fields the barbs of three large jock bullies at high school. While he seems to want to be protective of his sister as the brother, she is more protective of him. Wow! It’s strange that I’m actually struggling to write his bio as I thought it would flow easy like his sister’s did, but outside of him having been bullied there’s nothing all that amazing or noteworthy about his character. We don’t know if he’s a nerd, a gamer, a computer geek, or just a loser with no discernible talent before getting his powers. We do know that he isn’t as popular as his sister and that’s about it. He sneaks out with his sister (his sister is out legitimately) to go to the school dance. There, he sees the bullies who take him into the locker room shower and spray him with ice-cold water.

And then he starts to scream.

His screams nearly bring down the entire gym just a few feet away. The screams bend the metal showerheads, burst the tiles and send the bullies flying back into the lockers. His sister intuitively knows that it’s her brother and runs to him to calm him down. They escape back home but with the bullies having not been knocked unconscious and left able to see the whole bizarre event, it doesn’t take long for the police to show up at the Strucker family house. Those special guidelines for mutants kick in and the kids must go with them. Mama Strucker refuses, they push her to the ground and the kids get pissed. Lauren reveals her powers to her mother and they barely escape after the police get held up by Lauren’s weird bubble-glass power. They have to call Papa Strucker to tell him that the kids are mutants and he’s all like, “Lady-dude, whaaaaaat!” Mind blown.

Meanwhile, before the whole school incident, Reed was in the prison where they are keeping Lorna. The standard hard plastic case just like with Magneto, he informs her of her pregnancy as even she didn’t know and she loses it. On the other end, Blink tells her new homies at the Mutants Underground HQ that she can’t teleport into Eclipse’s girl’s cell because if she tried to use her powers to go somewhere that she hadn’t previously seen, it could be disastrous and end up slicing her in half or something like that. And then Eclipse gets a call from Reed. On the run with his family, Reed is willing to leave the country to go somewhere with laxer mutant laws like Mexico but needs help in figuring out how to hide, duck and dodge the cops until they can make it to the border. He is willing to trade whatever favors he can with the Mutants Underground leader to help get the guy’s baby mama (oh yeah, Reed reveals it to Eclipse) out of prison before she pops.

So papa Strucker and Eclipse have an agreement. His family is going to go with the Underground Mutants network to get them to safety while he stays behind and works whatever magic he can to get Lorna out of prison. But before they can get to the hideout, they are ambushed by a bunch of cops led by Jace Turner. I’m not really sure if he’s a detective or what, but I do know that he works on the special services mutant containment team and deals with these “freaks” on a regular basis. He and his people corner the family and here, both I and the show will jump back to mention that Eclipse left the mutant HQ without telling his bro that he was leaving, and forcing Blink to keep his departure a secret. Only after Blink tells Proudstar do they leave and, serendipitously meet the family and Eclipse right when the cops have both sides of the street blocked. Where’d they come from? Don’t know. How do they expect to escape the cops on foot? Also a mystery. But we let it go in favor of a cool action scene.

Instead of hopping out of their cars and giving chase, the cops undo this strange briefcase thing. In it, it has the tentacle robots from The Matrix, and I was like, “Wow! How the hell did FOX get permission to use the tentacle robots from The Matrix trilogy on their show?” These things puff their tentacles out into a ball and roll across the floor to chase after the family and mutants. And you’re thinkin’ “This seems like a job for Blink’s teleportation port-hole powers.” So, she creates a portal but struggles to keep it open and we are cemented with the idea that she is very new to her powers, which begs the question of how old she is supposed to be as, up until now, we’ve really only seen the majority of mutants realizing they had these powers in their teens, not generally well into adulthood, but I digress.

Blink opens a portal, everyone but Reed jumps through. Andy does his weird yelling smash-power thing and stays just long enough in the building with his father to see Reed get shot in the lower back.

Episode two starts with the end of the portal jump again. Everyone is freaking out for their own reason. The family is going crazy because they just saw Reed go down with a bullet and don’t know if he survived as he is still in that abandoned warehouse where the police would be coming to get him shortly. But Eclipse and Proudstar are freaking because Blink passes out and convulses a little as she can’t handle what just happened. She had never done a jump that far before. She traveled miles and held the portal for everyone to go through. They have to get her back to the HQ where they find that something more ailing is wrong with her as she has lost consciousness and is randomly creating portals. She creates a portal in the middle of the road somewhere that sees a truck try to swerve to hit it and the entire rear of the pickup cut off in the portal and came sliding through to the mutants and family’s side, nearly running a few of them over. Now, not only is Blink so sick that she needs to go to the hospital (and we learn that Mama Strucker is supposedly a nurse though we’ve seen none of her nursing) but a few of the others are injured too, but they’ll be alright. The portal opens again but Lauren is able to close this one with her powers.

Meanwhile, their father, who was taken down by the sentinels, ends up in an interrogation room with Jace who wants to know where the kids went. He ain’t sayin’ nothin’. So they try to charge him with colluding with terrorists because he went against protocol and showed Lorna her health report that said she was preggers. Speaking of, Lorna who has an X name of Polaris, adapts to the prison where a shock collar is put on all of the “muties” to discourage their power use. Some mean bee-otch that has control over the other mutants inside but is all human tries to make her do her bidding. When she threatens to beat the unborn baby out of her, Lorna powers through the shock collar to throw a metal table at her. Congratulations, you’ve won a trip to solitary.

Back with the group, Kate leaves with Eclipse to go steal some medicine for Blink. They use Kate’s supposed nurse’s rep to get the drugs. Eclipse reveals his taped-over gunshot wound from the first episode to get them into the back. The doctor patches him while Kate steals the drugs and they barely slip out the back to get back to the Underground HQ. They return to find Blink’s portal sickness has worsened to where portals are randomly generating all around the building and a SWAT team was trying to breach through the one where the truck came through. So Kate plays hero against all odds and runs in to give Blink the proper dose of meds. She has to jump through portals to get down to her as the stairs are gone and the building’s a mess. She gives her the meds and things immediately clear.

Back in the police station, Jace threatens Reed’s mother who he dragged in for questioning, too. Reed insists that he wants to make a deal in which he goes down for any and all crimes and his family are kept safe. But Jace wants the Mutant Underground as part of this deal. Reed must decide whether to give up the very people he just entrusted his family with or not, but he doesn’t take long to make that decision.

Episode three sees the family and the mutants at odds with how to best do things. Kate and the kids leave in the middle of the night to see if they can’t rescue Papa Strucker and use the system to get him free from wherever he is. The mutants are trying hard to train Blink and push her to learn how to use her powers so that she will be inclined to use them to help break into Lorna’s prison. But while Kate struggles with old friends not having any loyalty to let them stay at their houses for a while, another mutant named Dreamer (played by Elena Satine) proposes that they do a mind dive into Blink’s psyche to implant some dreams and memories that would spur her on to think that Lorna was her best friend. This way Blink would have someone and something to focus on when trying to control her powers.

Meanwhile, Reed gets rigged with some kind of high-tech bug that will help Jace track him back to the Mutants Underground. He goes to the same bar where he met Eclipse and gets the owner to take him toward the mutant safe house. But he isn’t the only one going. A mother and daughter are also going in search of a new life after the husband/father was taken by the special sentinel services police. The mother is able to take away the pain of Reed’s gunshot (an immobilization bullet, not a real one) and he changes his mind about doing this. He is thrown out of the transport and gets a talking from Jace.

Well, the rest of the Strucker family goes to Kate’s brother’s house and spends the night. But before they have breakfast in the morning a group of angry pitchforkers come to the house after seeing a picture of a trophy that Andy messed up real bad with his powers. They manage to get into the car but then they must escape. But to escape they need a portal, so Dreamer gives Blink a forced memory that makes her think she was once/still is in love with Proudstar. The memory is actually one of Dreamer’s real memories because she wants to jump Proudstar’s bones on the daily. Once again, the day is saved, but Proudstar is pissed and Kate learns that Reed is still alive and is determined to see him again.

What’s my grade? I give it a B. This series has the potential to be great but, like I’ve said so many times before about judging a show by one episode, the pilot for this show rather sucked. It seemed clunky, bounced along too quickly, gave minimal character development and never quite did the plot justice. Also, I’d say that the overplayed mutants and/or superheroes on the run has been done so many times before that it almost feels bland here. There’s nothing to distinguish this from pretty much every other X-men film ever in existence. Hell, in fact it goes so far as to be similar to the Man of Steel movie which was more of an X-Men/mutant film than a Superman film. When executing a motif, plot, storyline, cliché or whatever, you have to try to be inventive and innovative with making the idea feel new. This doesn’t make the idea feel new in any way. At least here, unlike on ABC Marvel’s Inhumans, you get to see cool powers getting used every episode. But they’re both on-the-run shows, which isn’t as drawing as the execs might think.

The acting is decent from all involved, though they haven’t really had to stretch themselves much. The series has been rather bland for the most part. Have they bothered to make the political stance of how people abnormally fear and hate that which is different? Yes, but not in any meaningful way that hasn’t been explored in all the other X-Men films. Wait... Now I know what it is about this show that bothers me: it’s essentially a watered-down version of an X-Men film, except without a wolverine and without a Professor X. I would give a strong nod to Andy and/or Lorna becoming the Magneto of the show (being just like her father. Damn that dude was laying a lot of magnetic pipe in his life, and he’s still mad as hell after getting all that free love. Sad). I also think the most likable character on the show is at a tie between Blink and Lauren. But outside of that, there’s almost no difference between this and one of the movies, save for the quality of the special effects and people not having costumes. The storyline isn’t exceptionally deep and hardly makes good commentary on refugees fleeing their own countries, but it’s a time-killer and it has the power to be something great. All the elements are there. Again, it’s just like every single X-Men movie ever made: the potential to be great but most don’t quite make it.

Should you be watching? If you like the X-Men films and what they’ve done for the last two decades, then chances are you will like this TV version even if it doesn’t have your favorite named characters. But if you were here looking for another Legion or something similar to the Marvel-Netflix shows, then look elsewhere. This is family fun with little substance, but does manage to keep your attention with a plethora of characters to like and identify with. The Gifted airs on FOX Mondays at 9pm EST. Catch up on FOX on Demand.

What do you think? Have you heard of The Gifted? If you haven’t, do you think you’ll check it out now? And if you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did you like it? What do you think they can improve? How do you think Blink’s new love interest in Proudstar will impact the team and the family? And will Andy finally lose it and kill someone at some point, causing his family to have to abandon him? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking

If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “We’re gonna go on the run. Only take the essentials.”

‘OK. Should we take our cats?’

“Yes to Mrs. Pettibone, but not Mr. Fluffykins. That cat’s been a real dick to me.’

P.S. That’s not even from a movie but I totally wish it was. Seriously, though, how many movies/shows are we going to see in which we have the X-men mutants trying to hide their powers or fight for equality? It’s getting tired and not adding anything new to the actual fight for equal rights and justice in this country or around the world.

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