WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the second season of Fox's The Gifted.

Fox's The Gifted kicks off the new year on Tuesday with a midseason premiere that picks up with Washington, D.C., in chaos, mutants nationwide freed from incarceration, the Inner Circle moving on to the next phase of Reeva's bewildering plan, and the Struckers manufacturing some new family drama (it's Lauren's turn). It's a perfect meta-commentary on the state of the once-promising X-Men television spinoff, which went completely off the rails somewhere along the way.

Well, that's not entirely true, as we can pinpoint precisely where it all went so wrong: the Season 1 finale, which upended the status quo with little apparent idea of what would take its place. With the Mutant Underground's Atlanta headquarters in ruins, and Lorna Dane and Andy Strucker (plus some other characters that nobody cares about) turning their backs on friends and family, and joining the Frost sisters in the Inner Circle, we were left to expect a second season packed with emotion. However, what perhaps no one fully realized is that, when you remove Lorna, Andy and the Stepford Cuckoos from the Mutant Underground, what's left is ... all of the blandest elements.

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In fairness, The Gifted's debut season had the benefit of newness: There was a world to be constructed, X-Men Easter eggs to be discovered, and mysteries to be unraveled. The Mutant Underground, and the Struckers, had a driving purpose -- the former to save mutants from an ever-more-dystopian government and halt the nefarious Hound Program, and the latter to protect their children, and uncover the secrets of the family's past. They, more or less, drove the narrative, helped by the arrival of the mysterious, and manipulative, Esme Frost. But with the core characters splintered into two factions following the events of the Season 1 finale, The Gifted succumbed to a problem common to superhero comics: By and large, superheroes are reactive.

The Gifted Season 2 Episode 10

They fight crime, and foil the unnecessarily complicated schemes of supervillains. Oh, sure, every once in a while a writer will reboot a title, and make a team proactive -- maybe "Strike Force" will be added to the name -- and they'll seek out evil-doers before they can, you know, do evil, but then they stop feeling much like "heroes"; if we're being generous, we might call them "antiheroes." Nine times out of 10, the new approach doesn't last, and the team goes back to its old, reactive ways.

With the Hound Program shut down by Lorna's actions in the finale (she destroyed a plane carrying the program's director, Roderick Campbell, and an anti-mutant U.S. senator), and the Atlanta safe house no more, the Mutant Underground became downright passive. After stopping only briefly at a Nashville way station, they moved on to Washington, but apparently only in pursuit of Lorna and Andy, now settled in to the Inner Circle's swanky, and secret, base of operations. Aside from caring for displaced and injured mutants at a community clinic, the Mutant Underground's raison d'être became pining for Lorna and Andy. It's certainly understandable that Marcos would seek out his girlfriend, and their unborn child, and that the Struckers would do anything to be reunited with their teen son. But Eclipse scanning the D.C. skyline, and power lines, for clues to Polaris' whereabouts, and Lauren dreaming about meeting her brother on a rooftop don't rise to engaging drama. (Tellingly, no one went looking Sage and Fade.)

NEXT PAGE: The Inner Circle Storylines Have Their Problems, Too, But ...

But then, neither does Reed Strucker's struggle with his suddenly emerging mutant abilities, suppressed in childhood by his father, nor whatever it is threatening the utterly unappealing relationship between Blink and Thunderbird. (Is it that he thinks she's having a fling with Morlock leader Erg, or that she helped out the group of outcast mutants without telling him?) And that reveals the core problem with The Gifted's second season. Most of the Mutant Underground were never developed as characters; instead, they merely filled cookie-cutter roles to serve the narrative: John Proudstar is the strong leader, burdened with upholding the X-Men's legacy; Marcos Diaz is the hothead, destined to buck authority; the powerful but unstable Lorna Dane embraces a less peaceful philosophy more in line with that of her never-named father (psst, it's Magneto); and Clarice Fong is the outsider, destined to form one side of an unconvincing love triangle. There were other members of the Atlanta safe house, of course, but most of them were little more than cardboard cutouts, representing those mutants who could never pass for human. They were so one-dimensional that when some of them were reduced to cannon fodder in a Season 2 attack by the Purifiers, their deaths elicited little more than an "Oh, yeah, that guy!"

The Gifted Season 2 Episode 10

It's telling that the two best episodes of the second season (by far) centered not on any remaining members of the Mutant Underground, but rather on Lorna and the Frost sisters. It's not simply because they dealt with their backstories -- similar flashbacks involving John and Marcos fell flat -- but instead because the audience has become invested in those characters; glimpses of their tragic pasts only help us to understand their actions in the present.

That's not to say the Inner Circle storyline hasn't had its problems. While Reeva Payge was finally given nuance with the episode "no Mercy," her plan to create a mutant utopia was as ill-defined as her superpower. And there's still no real explanation for why, when there are such powerhouses as Lorna and Andy at their disposal, the Inner Circle had to risk so much to free the teen sociopath Rebecca from a mental facility so she could use her oddly specific mutant ability -- she can twist objects, and people, inside out -- in a bank heist. (In a not-so-surprising (ahem) twist, the girl who killed her family ended up killing again, endangering everything they've been working toward.) In the end, Rebecca's accidental death, at the hand of boyfriend Andy, was as pointless as her introduction.

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But most of the characters in the Inner Circle (Lorna, Andy, the Frost sisters, Reeva) are compelling enough in themselves that viewers could overlook most of the shortcomings of the storylines, at least in the moment. The same can't be said for the members of the Mutant Underground, who have demonstrated over the course of the past nine episodes that they aren't interesting enough to stand on their own. The only solutions would seem to be to flesh out those characters, or at least make them tolerable, tout suite (highly unlikely); wipe out the Mutant Underground, and shift focus to the morally gray Inner Circle (again, unlikely); or reunite the principal cast, so that one-half of show is no longer weighed down by the other.

If the promo for the midseason premiere is any indication, The Gifted may be making the first steps toward the latter, with Lorna warning Marcos of Reeva's plot to destroy the U.S. government (wait, that's what this was all about?), and Lauren's sudden (like, really sudden) tendency toward violence causing Reed to make a concerned face. Both hint at a reconciliation that could not only make the show's core "family" whole, but also begin a course correction. A ticking clock and a clearly defined mission, to take down the Inner Circle, would reinvigorate the Mutant Underground, and The Gifted, while an alliance with the Morlocks would give that group purpose, beyond fan service. And, while they're at it, return to one of the big mysteries of the first season: the cataclysmic July 15th event in Houston that led to the disappearance of the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and the crackdown on mutants.

But there's at least one major obstacle: Only seven episodes remain, leaving little time to get The Gifted back on track and salvage this second season. Unfortunately, not even the combined telepathic powers of the Frost sisters can make the audience forget what it's seen so far.

Returning Tuesday at its new time, 9 p.m. ET/PT, Fox’s The Gifted stars Stephen Moyer as Reed Strucker, Amy Acker as Caitlin Strucker, Sean Teale as Eclipse/Marcos Diaz, Jamie Chung as Blink/Clarice Fong, Coby Bell as Jace Turner, Emma Dumont as Polaris/Lorna Dane, Blair Redford as Thunderbird/John Proudstar, Natalie Alyn Lind as Lauren Strucker, Percy Hynes White as Andy Strucker, Skyler Samuels as the Frost sisters and Grace Byers as Reeva Payge.