A two-hour season finale finds The Gifted at a crossroads where its best meets its worst

Usually when a show does a “two-hour finale,” I roll my eyes
a little at the attempt to create an event out of what is, more often than not,
just two episodes of the show run together (I’m also a big believer in the
power of the episode, so I get a little twitchy when shows start getting all
feature-length on us). I know that The Gifted had a 13-episode season, and so
tonight’s “finale” included the twelfth and thirteenth episodes of that order.
But the combination of “eXtraction” and “X-roads” did feel something like a
single supersized episode of the show, in ways both good and bad. (I’ve decided
to grade it as one, not least because the unevenness of a typical Gifted episode
makes parsing out grades for two installments that run into each other seem
kind of arbitrary. If you’re really into that sort of thing, I arrived at my single grade by figuring the first episode as approximately a C+ and the second as approximately a B. But that range of C+ to B- to B is about where I’ve graded most of the series, so, again, a little arbitrary.)

For one thing, “eXtraction,” though largely structured like
a typical episode of The Gifted, has a bit more time to develop its stories
without needing to rush to some kind of nominal conclusion-for-now around the
three-quarters mark. Though one of these stories involves the Frost triplets
joining up with the Mutant Underground in an uneasy alliance to take down Dr.
Campbell and the Hounds program, the other somewhat inexplicably catches
Grandma Strucker up on a lot of the season’s recent plotlines while the kids
bicker about how to use or not use their powers. A B-plot where the Strucker
parents go and talk to another family member whose story and character
contributions amount to little of much interest and the Strucker kids rehash
the same arguments that more interesting characters are already having feels
almost like a parody of The Gifted’s worst tendencies involving its
family-drama side.

But as the show stretches into its second hour of the
evening, the parallels between Andy Strucker and Polaris feel less repetitive (which
is not to say non-repetitive) and more productive, because they both turn on an
interesting question for this world of mutants, hereditary and non: the
question of whether a family’s past can or should dominate their present-day
lives. The more Andy reads (or really, re-reads) about his murderous Von
Strucker relatives, the more he thinks they’re getting a bum rap. Polaris,
meanwhile, doesn’t ever visibly or vocally accept Magneto as her father (and
the show’s reluctance to say “Magneto” in a pair of episodes that say “X-Men”
like half a dozen times is becoming a little silly), but she clearly wrestles
with an awareness of how other mutants have reacted to oppression in the past,
and whether she wants to stay on the X-Men-approved side even if it involves
lots of, yes, “sacrifice.” It’s an understandable feeling from a pregnant lady
who wants a more just world for her kid, and it’s an understandable feeling
from a young, impulsive guy who seems like he’s about to enter the mutant
version of his Ayn Rand phase (Andy Strucker is still kind of the worst, but
give the show some credit for making him the worst in a pretty realistic way).

Both storylines also take advantage of the fact that as the
season has gone on, The Gifted has become bolder in incorporating X-Men
mythology and name-drops into its main deal. Maybe this was always the plan, to
start from a more obscure vantage point and work up to the XCU stuff, but it
also feels like the show has figured out its relationship to the X-Men as it
goes.

“The X-Men chose us” has become a major refrain in the last
few episodes, and the finale gets more explicit about this than ever; the cold
open of “X-roads” shows Polaris in a mental hospital, visited by a mutant lawyer
who basically tells her she’s been recruited by the
missing/departed/undercover/whatever X-Men to help with the resistance.

And though the Strucker children continue their boring-ass
arguments that echo the boring-ass arguments Polaris and Eclipse have on a
semi-regular basis, one of their lines stands out from the finale (and gets
echoed in the effective final moments): “We’re not little kids playing X-Men
anymore.” A bunch of second-and-third-tier mutants, and a bunch of kids who are
just coming into their powers, know the stories of the X-Men, and now
attempting to work through their own versions of battles they have understood
in the abstract but now find themselves in directly. It’s a neat trick, sort of
a diet version of how last year’s Logan used the X-Men comic-book mythology as
both just that (a comics mythology even in the world of the movie) and
something more (a possible blueprint for how the mutants can attempt to save themselves).
If the X-Men adventures can become aspirational to some young mutants, it
follows that the Hellfire Club might start to look a bit less evil and a bit
more pragmatic than it really was.

I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that while everyone
on this show understands that the Cuckoos are manipulative—that this is
literally one of their superpowers—they’re only ever really attacked for their
arguments, not their mind-invading powers. It’s very ethical, I guess, but it
seems like the more X-Men-ish members of the Underground should be more
concerned about this, especially when Polaris rolls back into their lives
sporting a new jacket, more cleavage, and a Cuckoo BFF. Then again, it’s
apparently not that hard to stumble into these groups. When needled by one of
the Frosts, Blink confesses that she more or less accidentally joined the
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants when she was younger, something that really ought
to have been played for laughs rather than pointless and borderline nonsensical
melodrama with Thunderbird. (Pointless melodrama between Blink and Thunderbird
that I can get behind: Kissing!!!!!! This should could really use a romance
that isn’t more of a fraught-domestic thing, and also that doesn’t involve Wes,
who went back to Augusta. Good riddance.)

Anyway, not all that much happens in “eXtraction” (both
attempted extractions fail), but a fair amount happens in “X-roads”: Polaris agrees
with the Frost triplets that they need to make one more attempt to really take
down—as in murder—Campbell and his political crony; Thunderbird, Blink, and
Eclipse try to stop her when they realize what’s going on; and Agent Jace
Turner (whose role in this last run of episodes has seemed like kind of a
shruggy dead end) leads Sentinel Services in a final attack on the Mutant
Underground HQ, the kind of large-scale action sequence this show continues to
do quite well. When the Underground is attacked, even the Struckre stuff, with
the family rising to the challenge of leading with a lot of the actual leaders
out of the picture, is pretty tolerable following a lot of patience-testing
Lauren/Andy conflicts.

In the end, Campbell’s plane goes down, the Underground’s actual building is destroyed
by Strucker Power, and Lauren in particular is shaken by the fact that she used
her abilities to knowingly kill fellow mutants—the Hounds who were about to
bring the Underground to its knees. As the Underground regroups and
contemplates starting over “from nothing,” Polaris and a Frost enter to recruit
some of them over to the Nu-Hellfire Club side, in a divvying up that recalls a
similar scene at the end of X-Men: First Class. Most of the other primary
mutants stay, but Sage peaces out, and so does Andy Strucker.

It’s a decent combination of conclusion and cliffhanger for
a first-season show that we now know will be back for a second season. And like
much of this season of The Gifted, the two-part finale has some great ideas,
plenty of cool mutant action, and a number of points where interesting
developments are simplified into boilerplate dialogue and
do-you-trust-me-or-them non-dilemmas. The brief scene with Polaris in a mental
hospital serves as a reminder that the show could pay more direct attention to
how Polaris navigates mutant persecution with her bipolar disorder (rather than
just engineering situations where her friends ask if maybe this is part of her
disorder and Blink has to point out that assassination attempts are not a
symptom) (and I’m not sure if I agree with Blink on that one, only because hubristic assassination
attempts could totally be a symptom if the bipolar person is an assassin).

The Gifted started out as a more grounded exploration of
mutants on the run, and I’ve enjoyed its forays into bigger, crazier, more
X-Men-like adventures. But I do hope the second season finds some more
interesting ways of going small than just having the Struckers argue amongst
themselves. The best moments of “eXtraction” offer a glimpse at a world that is
not always in the superhero purview but very much affects the heroes of this
particular universe. The XCU often treats mutant powers as a barely-coded stand-in
for homosexuality, but there are more parallels here to anti-Muslim and
anti-immigrant sentiment, complete with calls to end “politically correct”
tolerance at a rally in a southern city where a bunch of destructive bigots
gather under the guise of concern for “humanity.” (Sound familiar?) Now that
the show has gone ahead and drawn the lines between characters that they’ve
been tracing all season, I hope they can take this opportunity for its smaller
stories to get more nuanced and idiosyncratic than this year’s endless arguments.
I’ll certainly be watching to find out.

Stray observations:

• Andy is the kind of dude who reads one book about a
  particular subject and suddenly feels like a goddamn expert, huh?
• Setting the Humanity Today conference, the convergence of
  anti-mutant groups, in Charlotte, North Carolina, sometimes confused with
  Charlottesville, Virginia: Clever allusion, or pointless silliness?
• You know an episode has a lot of ADR when you’re hearing it constantly
  despite not watching the unfinished screener version.
• I like Amy Acker. I like moms. So why doesn’t Acker going
  into badass-mom mode barking orders and stuff land for me at all? It just feels
  so cheesy and self-conscious, but I’m not sure why.
• Shatter in action!
• Wait, was the mutant who visited Polaris in the hospital to
  sorta-recruit her an actual lawyer? Specifically, Evangline Whedon? Who I’d
  never heard of before Googling around trying to figure out if that was
  somebody, but apparently can turn into a dragon? More of her, please!
• Agent Jace Turner has quit in disgust. It seems like the show is fully prepared
  to either give him some cool off-the-grid role in the new season or maybe just
  write him off all together.
• Speaking of antagonists: Are we assuming Campbell is dead, like we would in real life, or are we going by comic-book gotta-see-the-body rules?
• That’s a wrap on my season-one coverage of The Gifted! I hope I’ll be able to come back and do it for the next season. In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Twitter (I’m more into movies than TV but on the plus side I do talk about Riverdale and Degrassi a fair amount) or just read my every single stupid word elsewhere on this site. Seriously, though, thank you guys who have followed along with me, offered comics-related color commentary, corrected my weird oversights and mishaps, and generally had fun with this pretty cool mutant TV show. It’s been fun!