The Gifted recap: The last dragon

This week begins with everyone trying to make sense of the explosive news that Reeva Payge and Benedict Ryan have apparently been working together. Lorna, now fully turned against the Inner Circle, is determined to learn as much as she can about the secret mission Reeva’s planning for her new prison recruits. Evangeline is in the midst of planning a council meeting of Mutant Underground leaders but says that now the top priority must be protecting Lorna and keeping her turncloak status secret.

Caitlin, meanwhile, wants to reach back out to her brother Danny, who works with Homeland Security. He helped them out once last season, and maybe he can use his connections to dig up some information on the Purifiers and Benedict Ryan for them. Since this undercover mission is a little closer to home than most, Caitlin goes Full Undercover and dyes her hair brunette. This amuses Lauren to no end; in fact, their whole trip to see Danny involves a few fun mother-daughter bonding moments. Even amidst a burgeoning race war, you gotta find time for light-hearted moments.

That said, Lauren is definitely addressing her situation seriously. As she spends more and more time with the music box, she uses the internet to translate Andreas Von Strucker’s note, since it was originally written in German. The letter has a lot of important information for Lauren: Not only that it falls to her to succeed where Andreas and Andrea failed at “freeing our people from bondage,” but also that Fenris always has two sides, light and dark, that must battle in order to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. This division becomes clear the next time Andy and Lauren meet in their dreamscape. He’s wearing black and she’s wearing white, in case you didn’t realize who was who. But Lauren has learned her lesson; this time, she gets the best of Andy in their psychic tussle, and he wakes up with a bloody face.

Lauren’s refined skills aren’t limited exclusively to dreams. The meeting with Danny goes bad; he tries to help them, but as soon as he tries to look up information on Benedict Ryan or Reeva Payge, he gets arrested and forced to wear a wire in order to trap Lauren and Caitlin. Thanks to Lauren, the trap doesn’t work; she single-handedly fights off an entire convoy of Sentinel goons until she and Caitlin can make their escape.

While his girls are gone, Reed is drawn to the music box. It’s not the first time he’s seen it; as he contemplates it, he’s reminded of a time in his youth when he was drawn to the box and yelled at by his dad for it. In the present day, the box’s music activates Reed’s power, though he’s able to get it under control before damaging anything. He does find the papers inside though and realizes what Lauren’s been doing with it.

NEXT: To slay a dragon

Evangeline sends Marcos, John, and Blink to pick up Erg for the meeting. He’s clearly reluctant to participate but grumpily goes along anyway. When Blink asks him about his attitude in the car ride, he explains that he and Evangeline founded the Mutant Underground together years ago. He moved mutants through the tunnels, while Evangeline organized operations and alliances on the surface. Their partnership fell apart when Evangeline was betrayed by a human ally, leading to the massacre of many mutants, even though Erg had already warned her about working with humans. They split up after that, with Erg retreating into the tunnels to form his mutant-only Morlocks community.

At the last minute, Lorna realizes the goal of the terrorists’ mission when one of them tells her they’re off “to slay a dragon.” Evangeline, after all, has dragon-like mutant powers. Lorna uses her emergency phone to call Marcos and tell him, but since Evangeline and the rest of the Mutant Underground leadership go radio-silent during meetings, they can’t be contacted. By the time their team shows up to the meeting place, it’s too late; emergency workers are pulling bodies out of the wrecked building.

Evangeline is dead, and the hope of the Mutant Underground seems gone with her; she was the last dragon. It reminds me of the season 1 finale, when Lorna neutralized the Sentinels as a force by assassinating both Dr. Roderick Campbell and Senator Matthew Montez. The two sides of the conflict in season 1 (the Mutant Underground on one hand, and the Sentinels on the other) have both been derailed and destroyed at this point. All that remains are the more extremist factions: the Inner Circle, the Purifiers, and the Morlocks.

Blink decides to throw her lot in with the later. Even though she loves John, she refuses to watch him kill himself as part of his suicidal drive to fulfill the dream of the X-Men. Erg’s appeals finally get through to her, and she goes with him to join the Morlock community in the tunnels. Meanwhile, the Cuckoos convince Andy to let them reach out to Lauren through his mind with the intention of bringing her into the Inner Circle. That probably won’t end well…

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