The Gifted is a Better X-Men Story than the Movies

Since their first Marvel Comics appearance back in 1963, the stories involving the X-Men have addressed the misunderstood, the hated and the overall concept of "the other." However, when 20th Century Fox brought Bryan Singer's X-Men to the big screen in 2000, many of the cerebral, thought-provoking or deeply emotive aspects of the property had to be sacrificed in order to kickstart it as a blockbuster Hollywood franchise.

The same could be said of Matthew Vaughn's soft reboot via X-Men: First Class in 2011, which told the story of younger versions of Professor Xavier and his mutant charges, as opposed to the adults Singer employed in his team. What both films held in common was that they romanticized the notion of people discovering they weren't truly human and embarking on swashbuckling missions against villains who wanted to rule the world. But in the process, they failed to capture much of the depth and grit of the comics' exploration of what it means to be outsiders struggling against a world ready to destroy you for simply being different.

NBC's Heroes told this kind of story pretty well in the early stages, opting for substance over style when it came to individuals who were discovering their special abilities. Ultimately, however, the series failed to live up to its early promise. Now, Fox may just have found another working formula with The Gifted, as it delves into the plight of mutants who are being persecuted for well, their gifts.

This series brings a very relatable aspect to this all-too-familiar narrative of people with powers by needling down into the psyche of such individuals. It's more drama than action, and as a television show, showrunner Matt Nix and his team have a bunch of episodes to spin this narrative, which means that they can flesh out things that feature films can't. This gives Fox the opportunity to take away the idealist component of mutantkind's fight to exist in peace, and allow The Gifted to show that for mutants, their powers are just as much a curse. The X-Men movies touched on these issues, whether it be with Rogue in Singer's early movies, or Cyclops, Nightcrawler and Jean Grey in the wake of First Class, but it wasn't as in depth.

The Gifted, on the other hand, really expands on the discrimination these mutants experience and offers better insight as to how we would really face the world, and how it would view us, if we woke up one day with superpowers. Thus far, the show hasn't painted mutants as explicitly illegal, but we've seen them detained by the government when they use their powers in public. Clearly, Nix's writing team is patiently angling towards the destination of full-blown oppression, but with a much slower burn than the movies, and this gives us more time to better connect with the heroes, villains and those in between. What this kind of introduction also does is focus on mutants being feared before they're hated. This allows us to better understand the systematic approach towards the control, apprehension and imprisonment of mutants as the series progresses.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Like%20The%20X-Men%2C%20The%20Gifted%27s%20Mutants%20Can%20Only%20Save%20The%20World%20After%20Saving%20Themselves']

We also get to empathize with the cast on a higher level, such as Reed Strucker, who moved from being a mutant interrogator for the government to now going on the lam after finding out his kids were mutants themselves. In the pilot, his new reality resonated with such angst that he started questioning his past and how he persecuted those with abilities, particularly a pregnant Polaris, whose lover, Marcos, ironically began to help the Struckers. The audience saw Reed was in denial over the role he played in discriminating against mutants, and just how much he basked in his ignorance, being part of a bigger and deadlier machine.

Reed later realized that while his family was off living the American dream, he placed others in danger and, perhaps, sometimes in graves. With the tables turned and this stark realization made, he found himself on the receiving end of the injustice he helped dished out. Seeing both sides of this coin on The Gifted adds a perspective, political, personal and social, that we would never have gotten from the films, simply because this duality in narrative would have taken up way too much screen time.

What this bleak take does is create a space away from the glitz and glam of the superhero life, shifting deeper into the grime of mutants not just being outsiders, but fugitives. When we meet the likes of Thunderbird and Blink, as well as the rest of Marcos' team, they were battered and bruised. There wasn't any Xavier as a savior (or any X-Men as a matter of fact), there wasn't any X-Mansion as a haven, and in short, there wasn't any degree of comfort.

The Gifted instead bases its principles on the underground railroad for mutants, as a movement and a philosophy. It's about pure, unadulterated survival because here, the Danger Room isn't a mechanical construct, it's the real-world. There's no reset button, no scenarios to be programmed, or second chances. It's all about baptisms of fire and, basically, life and death from the very start, which helps to produce all these emotional idiosyncrasies and intricacies that we'd never see from the X-Men on film.

The only time we got this on-screen was from James Mangold's Logan, and that's because the character's story was similarly stripped away from the grandeur of the superhero narrative. And once more you can see the common ground here -- mutants on the run, with no real leaders, no real army, but simply fleeing for their lives with clouds of paranoia, xenophobia and persecution looming overhead. The Gifted has all of these in spades, while still keeping the age-old X-Men tropes such as high-school bullying, sinister government operatives and sneaky Sentinels intact.

All of these end up being used in tandem to then establish the main pillar and overall heart and soul of all X-Men stories: Family. Because The Gifted has such a widespread and blank canvas to paint its story upon, it doesn't explore the sense of family with humans in a traditional way (as with the Struckers before their mutant woes), and it doesn't just dive into the mutant underground (as with Marcos' team) as a family under siege. It also looks into the nefarious family that wants to subjugate our protagonists (aka, the government).

It places all these pieces on the chessboard and allows us detailed access into everyone's instincts to escape, hide or kill to achieve their goals. In the end, The Gifted brings all of these elements together to give us an introduction to a mutant world where in order for our protagonists to survive, it may require them to not even be heroes at all. And that's because they're not really trying to save the world, they're just trying to save themselves.