The Gifted Review: outfoX (Season 1 Episode 9)
On The Gifted Season 1 Episode 9 “outfoX,” Reed reveals his family history and the Mutant Underground prepares to strike a valuable target.
This is usually the point in a series where, if you don’t already have the audience’s attention and their investment in your characters, it can be hard to move forward.
Nine episodes in now and The Gifted is extremely lacking on both counts.
This is a carry-over from the previous episode, but a significant chunk of the tension throughout “outfoX” deals with the worry that Lauren and Andy might become this unstoppable force capable of pulling apart a building, bringing about the deaths of all inside.
The only problem with that is, for a show that is all about them, there’s little-to-no emotional investment in them as characters.
The Gifted, in one breath, would like us to be okay with the Strucker siblings being amorphous blobs of characters, devoid of any charisma or personality, while at the same time trying to get us to care what might eventually come of them. It’s a “have your cake and eat it” philosophy and it comes off as being wildly disingenuous.
The emotional aspects, on the other hand, work rather well in regards to Reed and Caitlin. One of the most interesting aspects of the series is how white, hetero-normative families willingly exist within a bubble that they only pop when discovering that someone within is different.
This concept gets some nice lip-service as the parents discuss the ways they would have raised Andy and Lauren differently, because, again, only one of them being different could call for a different thought paradigm.
Whatever strengths The Gifted may have, the one it does not is any sense of subtlety. It telegraphs every creative choice it makes with what very often feels like a flood light.
That’s very much the case when, sticking with the source material, the series decides that the newcomer Esme (Skyler Samuels) is a future villain and the show really wants you to know that. In all honesty, an anvil would feel more nuanced than what they’re doing with her.
The only way that their current characterization and direction of that character could be even slightly clever is if they somehow subvert the audience’s expectations for the clear, obvious manipulation that we’ve seen from her in this episode. That seems less than likely at this point because The Gifted hasn’t proven itself to be that kind of show.
The same goes for the end of the episode with Blink, Dreamer, Andy, and Lauren all getting captured by Sentinel Services, something that should have a bang and instead feels more like a thud. The reason for that is it doesn’t seem like anyone is in any actual danger.
If just one of those characters had gotten captured, it would feel much more like maybe that character doesn’t make it out alive or as themselves in the strictest terms. The fact that all four of them get captured gives much fewer teeth to the tension.
The Gifted is winding down its season, but it’s clear that it will just be more of the same during these next few episodes.
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.