The adventures of the mutants continue, but first – the obligatory
disclaimer. Real life sucks, change hurts, and I cannot guarantee that I will
be able to review ‘The Gifted’ in the following weeks, and not just because our
TV set was testy over the weekend. You’ve been worn, and now onto the main
topic: in this week’s episode – ‘outMatched’ – the Mutant Underground found
themselves, well, outmatched by the Inner Circle once again, while Jace has
made contact with the Purifiers, at last. To elaborate?
The entire plotline of Jace in this episode was actually well
done and designed. The Purifiers do not appear to be too different in their
approach from the Mutant Underground, truth be told. They are not exactly
supported or approved by law enforcement either – but then again, neither did
the KKK in real life; there probably were supported unofficially by, and even
approved by, people, even political people, but officially? They were
criminals, hence the whole secrecy, hoods and robes thing.
…And now, in modern times, in real life, we got the
Republicans, on one hand, who seem to embrace the alt-right groups, such as the
Proud Boys, (whatever their details are), and have candidates who spew racist
rhetoric, (well, at least it ain’t Nazist, but this is a small comfort at best,
especially by American Integration standards), while the Democrats, on the
other hand, seem to be going leftist and socialist – in response? What is next,
an all-American version of Hitler vs. Stalin? American Civil War version IV?
This is not what USA needs, and it needs division just as little.
Again, the problem is not Russia exactly; the problem is
that USA has a very weak state and many very powerful individuals, each of whom
has their own idea in which direction to take America to success…and they are
all fighting about it and not getting anything done. The result is, well,
chaos, and the reason why USA was not toppled yet is either because its’
opponents have its’ own problems, (like Russia), or are not willing to have
America dismantled for real, (like China) – yet. In the future, this may
change, especially if America itself does not change. The more its’ leadership
fights, the more fighting drips down below, and the same goes for fractioning,
partition, and separation. If the American society fractions far enough, it
will fall apart completely, into, well, fractions. If that happens we’ll end up
either with a USA that isn’t too different from the world of ‘The Gifted’, with
a distinctly Nazist undertone, (especially in S1, now – not so much), or with n
USA at all, but rather a semi-balkanized North American continent, with Canada
in the north and Mexico in the south, and how will they fare in such a mess is another question, for another time.
Back to the show? In ‘outMatched’ there was a lot of
running, a lot of action, a lot of John posturing very manly with his
firefighter’s axe and a machete, (or maybe even a cutlass), but little that
actually was done.
Well, no – the Inner Circle, especially Lorna and Andy, have
released a crowd of mentally-disturbed mutants, and the Mutant Underground have
to take care of them now, especially since the Inner Circle also forced or
coerced the asylum’s staff into admitting their guilt – before presumably
executing them or something along those lines. As a result, the Struckers…let
us recap what the Struckers did separately. We have Andy and Lauren having
their first big confrontation and Lauren lost. Maybe she was pulling her
punches. Maybe she underestimated just how intensely Andy was training during
this hiatus. Regardless, she got knocked out cold. This brings us to the
parents. We got Catelyn…sorry, Caitlin Strucker channelling her inner Cersei Lannister
by drugging a junkie mutant hacker so that they could help their team and rescue, cough, Andy, and maybe
Lorna. That didn’t work, and Graph – the poor sap in question – almost died as
well, causing Reed to challenge his wife at last regarding just what they are
doing and whom they are channelling, and how they are better than the Inner
Circle? And then his powers popped-up again and he got forced to pick-up his pills
from the floor in the most pathetic scene of the entire episode; Jaime
Lannister pats him on the back sympathetically – he knows both about tricky
hands and loss of dignity that is related to them – and suggests that maybe Mr.
Strucker should talk to Ser Luke Skywalker regarding prosthetic limbs. Luke is
ready and willing to advice, especially since he got killed in the canon. Reed
hates them both.
That is the Struckers, really. They are going for some
character-driven plot-development here, as do everyone else – Jace and the rest
of the Mutant Underground. Jace has finally decided to talk to the Purifiers at
last – well, what else can he do? He is on the outs with his wife for real and
he just cannot be a civilian and he needs to do something than just stay in
some motel and watch TV, not forever, while the rest of the Mutant Underground…
Their confrontation with Lorna was more lackluster than Lauren’s with Andy – at
least the Strucker siblings talked to each other, while Lorna just stared at
John and Clarice and released the patients. That is it. Marcos/Eclipse provided
some support to Lauren but got taken out by Andy as well. Not very impressive
either. And now the Inner Circle got their new mystery mutant member/weapon and
who knows what they will do next? We will just have to wait and see it next
week – hopefully. If real life permits.
This is it for now, though – see you all soon!
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