The Gifted – First Impressions

Sky is putting a lot of marketing effort behind The Inhumans right now. As everyone who has seen it tells me the series is awful I am not inclined to bother. However, rather more quietly they have also shown (on Fox) three episodes of another new Marvel series, The Gifted. This is set in the X-Verse rather then the main Marvel Universe, and Bryan Singer directed the first episode. The story takes place after anti-mutant laws have been put in place in the USA, and the X-Men and Brotherhood have both vanished from the scene. It follows the adventures of an upstanding white family who discover that their teenagers are mutants and therefore wanted criminals.

From an X-Men point of view, it features Thunderbird, Polaris, Blink and a number of others running a Mutant Underground. This makes me very happy because a) Johnny is not fridged, and b) having Lorna around takes me back to those heady days when there were suddenly two girls in the X-Men rather than just Jean. It was a Big Thing for me as a teenager.

From your point of view the interesting thing is that, like SHIELD, this show is heavily political. It is all about people being declared un-citizens, about them being rounded up by clandestine, quasi-military government organizations, about lynch mobs, and about clueless white people discovering just how hard life is for the less privileged.