While the leaders of the MU try to capture Dr. Campbell and stop his Hound program before it can get the support to go national (and thus sentence MORE mutants to brainwashing and slavery) Reed, Cait, and the mutants at MU headquarters get to face down Jace Turner and a few of Campbell’s Hounds. The horror of mutants being hunted down by their potential future is not lost on me.There are lots of moments of victory in spite of the tense situations, and it’s fantastic to see Reed and Cait throw themselves not just onto the mutants’ side, but step up to protect them and become leaders. But the biggest moment in this episode for me was when the Strucker’s right to be leaders was challenged. No one can live the life most of those refugees live and not become distrustful, and internalize some of the vitriol being spewed. Certainly Reed has a shaky past. But when he stepped up and boldly declared himself a mutant it seemed like he had hit an important note of character development.
First, Reed instantly became more sympathetic to me when it was revealed that his father “cured” him of his mutant powers so he could pass as normal. But as he has actually been struggling with that, with his identity, and having that and the truth taken from him by someone who thought they knew better, it was at that moment when I realized Reed is our series’s trans representative.
He was medically mutated, raised as something he wasn’t, his father made the choice and purposefully sought out to raise him in a societal role that he didn’t “belong” to, and he discovers this as an adult and is clearly upset that his true potential has been taken from him. Reed will never “fit in”. Even the mutants like Shatter, who cannot hide what they are, fit in and are more accepted than this mutant who had his true self stripped from him.
So while the Strucker parents still give off the “white saviors” vibe, the series writers make it clear that they aren’t that, reinforcing that the fight for equality falls to all people, and you can’t judge someone’s minority status just by looking at them.
The season didn’t end on the note I expected it to, but it does still end on a downswing. Yes, the Struckers absolutely helped innocents escape a horrid fate. Our good and bad guys (the Struckers versus Campbell and Turner) are solidly into their chosen roles. (This is a big deal for me because the downfall of Heroes IMHO was when they switched everyone around and made the serial killer Sylar a good guy and the token conflicted good guy, Matt Parker, a bad guy. While I liked exploring telepathy as a “bad” power. The characters should have stayed on one side, or shouldn’t have been at such binary extreme points to begin with. This is another way The Gifted gets it right.) And our conflicted good guys (namely Polaris, for whom laymen-viewers now have gotten hints at her powerful, big bad daddy past) are walking the path between good guy and proper vigilante. As a side note, this ties in well with what Marvel is doing on other fronts with Civil War and Punisher, blatantly exploring the less flashy and positive side of super heroes, without wallowing in depression like DC seems to be doing with their film-verse.
One final note, can I just send the writers and big Hell Yeah! for 1. including mental issues/ptsd/depression on top of mutation with their characters, but also accepting neither mental illness (Polaris’ bipolar disorder) or genetic mutation as a justification for evil actions. What a wonderful moment to have Eclipse and Blink both outright refuse to accept Polaris’ choices as anything less than choices. Because in accepting the wide variety of human functionality as all valid humanity, we also accept that while being different doesn’t justify abusing or enslaving a person, being a mentally ill or oppressed also isn’t an excuse for evil actions.
My expectations for season two? Well Campbell had to be working with people, and we can clearly see how Turner has turned his daughter into a marytr for his anti-mutant ideas. Now that a very public figure has been killed by a mutant we will see just how crazy having a marytr can make a cause. But at least the government will be distancing themselves from Trask and the Hound program, right?