The Gifted Review: eXploited (Season 1 Episode 10)
The Gifted Season 1 Episode 10 “eXploited” is the strongest episode of the series so far. That doesn’t stop it, however, from being a fairly middling hour of television.
One of the things that separates “eXploited” from previous episodes is the small fact that this episode is making involved choices. They may not be terribly interesting choices — losing Dreamer doesn’t hurt as much as the writers would like it too — but it’s something.
Dreamer wasn’t a character that I (or anyone) cared about all that much, but her death is actually crucial for the show. It demonstrates that when a character on The Gifted gets captured, the Underground can’t swoop in at the end and have it all be okay with everyone unscathed.
There need to be actual, defined stakes and consequences for this sort of plot — one that is most certainly going to be repeated throughout the series — and now there are.
On the other hand, one thing that The Gifted continues to do that it desperately needs to stop doing and never go back to, is the need for the Struckers (usually involving Caitlin) to have a phenomenally terrible plan that they should know is bad and everyone tells them is bad, but they go out and do anyway.
It makes sense, to a certain extent, why Reed and Caitlin so often get slotted into that plot, because they’re the only Underground characters that don’t have powers and, as a result, the series feels a need to do something mildly interesting with them.
It’s getting to the point, though, that it’s making that couple (Caitlin especially) seem unwise at best and recklessly stupid at worst.
On a similar note, the extent that the characters don’t recognize base-level manipulation from Esme also makes them seem, at the very least, ridiculously naive towards human behavior. The fact that no one at any point throughout this episode bothers to wonder if they should automatically trust the telepath that just arrived is mind-boggling.
That’s one of the biggest problems with the series at the moment: There aren’t enough contrarian voices in the cast. Those kind of moments usually only happen between Caitlin and Polaris and even those are few and far between.
Granted, The Gifted can’t have a character ask the kinds of questions necessary to fulfill that, because it would essentially break a good many of the plot lines. If that’s indeed the case, it’s probably a good sign that they shouldn’t be doing those to begin with.
“eXploited” marks the mid-season finale for The Gifted with only three left in the season when it comes back in January. Hopefully it can wrinkle out a lot of the previous problems of the first ten episodes for this last chunk and bring a satisfying conclusion to this season.
What did you think of this episode of The Gifted? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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The Gifted airs Mondays at 9/8c on FOX.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.