Since we last left the beleaguered mutants and mutant-adjacent characters of Fox’s possibly-doomed X-Men spinoff series The Gifted, they’ve been doing what they do best: constantly changing sides. Say this for a series that sometimes threatens to move quickly while going nowhere: It didn’t save a bunch of reversals for the season finale, a move that would have shamelessly mimicked the events that ended Season 1. No, before the finale even aired, there were change-ups and switch-backs and feints aplenty: Andy Strucker, the wayward aspiring edgelord, finally returned to his family. His fellow Inner Circle member Polaris, the smart-mouthed, revolution-hungry daughter of Magneto, became a spy for the Mutant Underground, accidentally got Sage killed, made the same reversal, after (further) revelations about Reeva’s extreme methods for her pro-mutant group. Blink left the Mutant Underground to join the Morlocks, then got killed… or, it seems, stuck in some kind of portal purgatory. (Wherever she is, it’s no longer in the MU.) Less officially, Caitlin Strucker has pivoted from reluctant and protective mom figure to fiery freedom fighter, and Reed Strucker is now a murderer! Which Andy finds very relatable.
I’m not trying to recap every development of the past couple
months. Suffice to say, there’s been a lot of group-hopping, and a lot of those
groups getting backed into different corners and shooting powers and/or bullets
at each other. “oMens” dispenses with voluntary side-switching, though it also
quickly dispenses with the Strucker family reunion, as Andy and Lauren get
snatched back up by the Cuckoos just as they’re plotting their latest
out-of-the-corner escape, from their Purifier-surrounded apartment building.
Reeva, mostly undaunted by the defections in her ranks, wants to use the
combined Strucker powers to destroy the Sentinel Services building.
And she succeeds! A whole damn building gets destroyed without
a whole lot of fanfare before Esme’s slight hesitation allows the Mutant
Underground to recapture their youngest members. None of this feels as
momentous as it probably should, because “oMens” performs an uncommonly adroit—for
this show anyway—act of refocusing the story from a multitude of drawn-out,
season-long arcs to a particular character’s particular fate in a kind of
back-to-basics move.
Usually back to basics is not where I want The Gifted to go,
because it involves returning to the Struckers, who are consistently the least interesting
and most irritating characters on this program (sometimes actively, sometimes
just by default). But while the episode’s additional flashbacks are written in
the same clunk-on-the-nose style as the typical cold opens without the benefit
of brevity, the scenes from the marriage of Caitlin and Reed do build to
something: Reed’s sudden decision to go up against Reeva, knowing that her
attempts to knock out his powers will backfire, destroying her… and him.
And he succeeds! And there is the episode’s more momentous
explosion, despite the smaller number of casualties. Reed Strucker dies, and
Stephen Moyer is presumably off of this show, if there’s even still a show for
him to be off of. (More on this in a moment.) Reed was, as mentioned, never my
favorite character on the show, and Moyer’s performance always felt a bit too
workmanlike to transcend how stodgy the character has been written. But I
admit, I found his sacrifice, and his family’s devastation, affecting. On a
less emotional level, I admire Gifted creator Matt Nix (who penned this installment, his first one in a while) for seeming to
understand what a corner Reed had been written into, either defined by
suppressing his powers, or defined by not being able to control them. To make
such a serious, controlled personality realize that his destiny in all this (ugh,
but I’ll allow it) involved surrendering control—at least of his body.
This move takes out season-long Big Bad Reeva, too, and I
have to say, she turned out to be sort of a disappointing villain. Grace Byers
certainly cuts a stylish figure in the part, but Reeva pretty quickly settled
into the predictable kind of movie/TV ideologue, willing to game the results in
order to hasten violent revolution on her side, blah blah blah. The most
notable aspect of her character wound up being the strange visual cue that through
some combination of framing, the Byers performance, and a profoundly
dopey-looking depiction of her mutant power, Reeva often looked like she doesn’t
have use of her arms. Now she has use of nothing.
It’s a satisfying end for Reed and a relief to be done with
Reeva, but “oMens,” in typically fast-paced and mostly entertaining fashion,
does point to just how much of this season has consisted of rapid piece-moving,
a sort of perpetual motion that’s often fun in the moment but can feel wearying
and repetitive over the course of 16 episodes; I think the slightly extended
season was a mistake, and if anything, this is the type of show where 10 would
be fine. Especially considering that even with more episodes at their disposal,
the resolution of the finale felt a little rushed: Reed dies, the Struckers
mourn, Polaris and Eclipse are reunited with their daughter, Morlock Erg (Michael
Luwoye, whose increased role has been a pleasure of the last bunch of episodes)
joins the group for real, as does Esme (great additions, also basically not
commented upon at all). Another reconfigured group—and another cliffhanger, as
Blink returns, looking futuristic and Future Past-y, ushering everyone through
a new portal.
Whether we’ll get to actually see what’s on the other side
is, as ever, in some doubt. The Fox-Disney deal is about to close, and if the
new studio doesn’t want a mostly pretty successful X-Men movie franchise on its
hands (it doesn’t) and already has MCU and Star Wars plans for its streaming
service (it does) and can wash its hands of ancillary X-Men stuff (it can), and
wants to treat anything that’s not Ryan Reynolds playing Deadpool as ancillary
(it does), well, it doesn’t look great for the modestly rated, if somewhat
appreciated, The Gifted Season 3…
though maybe it will get yet another stay of execution based on the Fox Network
as we know it maybe not having time to wind all the way down and reboot itself
as largely sports and reality by September 2019. There are definitely moments
in “oMens” that feel like they’re protecting the show’s fans for both
possibilities: Most of the characters get some resolution to their emotional
journeys, while the Blink thing assures fans that it’s not over, unless it is.
But that’s sort of an X-Men thing, too, isn’t it? I mean, it
applies to a lot of superhero comics, but the X-Men in particular feel like a
neverending strife generator. The movies reflect this, too: Days Of Future Past
fixes the timeline, but Logan’s timeline still leaves plenty of room for heartbreak. The Last Stand gets justifiably erased from continuity, but then Dark Phoenix
comes around and Jean looks like she’s wearing almost the same stupid goddamn
Evil Jacket. Some of this, as in the comics medium, is pure franchise-driven
cynicism: We gotta keep the series going even if we don’t have a plan, until
such time as the plan gets scotched for unrelated corporate-merger reasons. But
I think one reason I respond well to the X-Men characters on film and TV is
that this neverending fight isn’t entirely mercenary. It’s also sometimes how
the world works. If there’s any non-obvious, non-telegraphed truth in the
earnest pulp of The Gifted, that might be it.
Stray observations:
- OK, comics nerds, get to nerding: Are they just teasing a second, lower-budget Days Of
Future Past riff with that Blink thing, or is there another storyline this
Blink reappearance is queuing up? - There were such big doings a-transpiring with the Struckers
this episode that I didn’t have rom above to mention how the mutants’ latest
escape involved Thunderbird subjecting himself to an all-out chain-wrapping, speed-ramped,
mailbox-throwing brawl, with a coda where he punches powers into Erg! I don’t
have anything smart to say about any of that; I just thought it ruled. - Did Polaris say “the whole dang government” in her first
scene? Dagnabbit, she really is softening. - “In a way, I feel like we’ve been preparing for this for a
long time,” Lauren says about powering up with Andy, without so much as a wink.
Yeah, Lauren. Like maybe 16 episodes? Or 29? - Caitlin, explaining her cache of guns: “I don’t have an
X-gene. I figured it was the next best thing.” Her superpower is a bunch of
guns; Caitlin is basically the Punisher now. -
This season of The Gifted has really leaned into its stylized camera angles;
canted angles have been all over these episodes, and “oMens” used plenty of
low-angle shots, too. A nice way of keeping the show comic-book-y without
getting too crazy. - Maybe I missed more details on this earlier in the season
when I was watching merely for fun and not for recappery, but… the Purifiers
are a crazed race-war militia, right? And law enforcement never really bats an
eye at this? This episode includes a tossed-off explanation that the cops are
willing to look the other way when they surround the apartment building, but
Jace Turner (whose big journey seems to be a never-ending circle) is leading a
full-on gun battle in the streets, and it’s not the first time. I get that
maybe the show thinks it’s doing commentary here, but I feel like after a
series of escalating firefights, the cops would not be looking the other way,
or if they did, they’d just see another Purifier gun battle. - Is this the end of me writing about The Gifted?! If so,
thank you guys for watching along with me! I’ve really enjoyed taking this regular
dose of X-Men methadone in between the movies, and I’ll be bummed if there’s
truly no more Fox-era X-Men stuff after this summer. Don’t let Tony Stark be
the one who builds Cerebro!