Last week on "The Gifted" we were given a better introduction to both the Sentinel Services and the Mutant Underground, showing us the resources of both and how outclassed the mutants are. We also got to see what life in prison can be like for mutants through the eyes of Lorna (Emma Dumont), a member of the Mutant Underground who had been arrested in the first episode. We also saw the Strucker parents bent into different directions, with Reed (Stephen Moyer) agreeing to give up his freedom and the Mutant Underground and Kate (Amy Acker) still not grasping the situation of the mutants.
In this episode, she is still trying to cling to her past life.
Kate and Andy
The episode starts with John (Blair Redford) arguing with Marcos (Sean Teale) in front of everybody as they try to work out a plan. Marcos wants to use Clarice's (Jamie Chung) ability to create portals to break Lorna out of jail and has an ally in Dreamer (Elena Satine) who wants to see her friend freed. Kate and John are both against this, although for different reasons. John is worried about the safety of the group, while Kate says that they live in a world of laws and they can't just break into a prison. She insists that they should try to find lawyers to help them, that some people are sympathetic to their cause.
In the end, Kate takes the kids and goes to the house of one of their relatives, Danny (Jeffery Nordling) who has strings to pull.
Kate's refusal to accept that their old lives are out of reach and to break the law are opposed by Andy (Percy White) this episode. He's fully given up on the idea of their old lives and the law.
He suggests breaking into a bank to get cab money. Kate says they have to stay within the law if they want their lives to go back to normal, and he snaps back at her, shattering a line of parking meters to get the money and telling her that normal is long gone. This is interesting, as watching parent and child oppose each other despite being part of a very close family shows the pressure they're under.
Lauren (Natalie Lind) is mostly quiet during this because what's really happening is the fact that both Kate and Andy are struggling with the fact that Andy is a mutant. Lauren, having hidden her powers for several years, has come to terms with this faster than the other members of her family.
Reed's betrayal
At the end of the last episode, Reed agreed to give up the Mutant Underground for the sake of his family. This episode he has to make good on this, with Jace (Coby Bell) giving him a tracker and setting up a sting operation to get him into the Mutant Underground headquarters. Reed went back to the bar he met with Marcos and convinced the bartender Tex (Jeff Philips) to take him to the Mutant Headquarters to find his family.
While there, he meets a young girl and her mother who are trying to get someplace safe after her husband was taken by the Sentinel Services. They were also targeting the girl who, despite not displaying any powers, did carry the X-gene. When they were driving to the headquarters, Reed chose to jump out of the van so that they could escape rather than leading Jace to headquarters, an action that will have severe consequences.
This was an interesting test of Reed's character. It feels like both his arc and that of his wife involves coming to terms with the plight suffered by mutants. He was a federal prosecutor at one point. Here, he was willing to give up the entire Mutant Underground for the sake of his family but after meeting this small family, he realized that this wasn't the only family in the world and that other people were going through what he was.
He chose to make this sacrifice and trust that his family would be able to help themselves to defy the Sentinel Services and help another family.
Behind bars
Lorna is back for this episode, and her situation is looking desperate. Interestingly, we don't catch a glimpse of the aggressive prisoner from last week who claimed the control all the mutants in prison. Instead, we do get Jace coming in to offer her a chance: They're about to close in on the Underground's headquarters, but if she helps them he'll make it so she and Marcos can have visitation rights with the child she's pregnant with. She refuses because it won't help her out. Later, she tries to escape despite the collar that harms her for using her powers.
She's able to force the door of her cell open, but the effort consumes so much energy that she can barely crawl out her cell.
We learned a little bit more about Lorna in a flashback earlier in the episode, where she used her powers it mimics a little bit of flight and learned that when the light in her palms meets with the light Marcos can create, it creates a small Aurora Borealis. This glimpse of a lighter-hearted Lorna shows just how desperate she is. In prison, she's putting on an aggressive act to hid her desperation, but it doesn't seem like it will hold, an act that will ultimately break.
Escape
Danny's house wasn't as safe as Kate had hoped. After Danny's son, Scott, sent a picture to one of his friends of a trophy that Andy tore apart with his power the rest of the neighborhood gathered to chase them out of town.
This happened just after John and Marcos showed up so that they could convince the Struckers to come back instead of compromising the headquarters' location. When the situation dissolves into a car chase, Dreamers implants a fake memory of falling in love with John into Clarice's mind to help her control her powers enough to create a portal large enough for the others to drive through. This sequence changed Kate. It forced her to accept that the fair world she used to live in has slipped away from her grasp and she prepares to do anything she has to save her family.
This episode of "The Gifted" was yet another great, tense episode full of important moments. The series so far seems to have a tendency to introduce a problem in one episode and completely address it in the next; after all, Reed's choice to betray the Mutant Underground was dealt with in this episode and became a completely different problem when he chose to defy Jace.
It's likely we'll see most of the fallout of Clarice having fake memories of loving John in the next episode, as well as what will happen to Lorna after her escape attempt and Reed after defying Jace.
