'The Gifted' recap: 'no Mercy'

No one ever said the revolution would be bloodless.

Well, maybe some of them hoped it would be. Reeva certainly seems like she genuinely wanted to carry out her master plan with a minimum amount of bloodshed, even though she probably knew deep down it was unavoidable. After all, this week’s cold open flashback saw a younger Reeva watch her best friend get knifed by humans outside of a mutant activist meeting.

In the present day, Reeva has an orderly plan for the long-awaited bank heist on Creed Financial. Lorna will disable communications while Reeva and the Cuckoos use their powers to keep the bank employees under their control. Rebecca will then open the vault, with Andy alongside her for protection. The key piece of the plan, though, depends on human connection — specifically, Reeva’s relationship with a Creed banker named Quinn. After months of seduction, Reeva invites Quinn to a fancy dinner, where he talks about how she’s made him (and by extension, his sons) happier than he’s been since losing his wife. The moment they get to the parking lot, though, the Cuckoos arrive, and Reeva springs her trap. She tells Quinn that he needs to insert a drive into Creed’s servers that will disable their mutant-detecting security system. He needs to obey for the sake of his sons, though Reeva doesn’t seem very interested in hurting them or him unless she absolutely needs to.

So Quinn follows along. He walks into Creed just like any other day but then inserts the drive into the computer system. Once they get the all-clear, Reeva and her team walk right in through the front doors of the bank. They look so cool standing there in their black jackets that it’s hard not to root for them. When security guards try firing on the intruders, Polaris stops all their bullets mid-air, Matrix style. Then Reeva unleashes her scream, making everyone extra pliable to the Cuckoos’ manipulation. Everyone’s escorted to a conference room, where the Cuckoos make the lead banker give another on-camera confession (just like they did with the asylum doctors) about how Creed’s fortunes were built on the back of mutant oppression and exploitation.

The Mutant Underground, by contrast, is a total mess. Reed’s powers are completely out of control, and obviously taking him to a hospital is out of the question. John and Caitlin decide to take him back to the clinic where they endured the Purifier raid a few weeks back, but the team is riven by division. Marcos is suspicious of Blink after their Morlocks meeting, which as she points out, is pretty rich coming from the guy with a baby momma in the Inner Circle. John just keeps getting more and more stressed out about all the mutants he couldn’t save and returning to the scene of a recent failure certainly doesn’t help.

Meanwhile, Jace’s leadership of last week’s successful Purifier raid has earned him a lot of prestige in the mutant-hating ranks. In fact, he gets invited to meet with one of the organization’s biggest supporters. This turns out to be TV news host Benedict Ryan, played by Peter Gallagher. Since I know Gallagher best as playing lovable dad Sandy Cohen on The O.C., it’s quite a change to see him playing the analog of a white supremacist leader. But I guess that’s the whole point because so far he does give the character a sympathetic charisma. It’s not enough to sway Jace, though. Ryan offers Jace the chance to come on his show and tell the truth about what happened in Atlanta and how Sentinel Services lied about it. Jace doesn’t want to betray his old Sentinel friends until another Purifier reminds him that they haven’t stood by him. Jace agrees to go along with Ryan’s plan, just in time for the Mutant Uprising’s bloodiest attack yet.

NEXT: Be careful what you wish for

While the Cuckoos are herding the employees, the strike team of Lorna-Andy-Rebecca head downstairs to the vault. Made of adamantium, the vault at first proves impervious to even Rebecca’s powers. But once Andy gets her to remember the pain, loneliness, and anger she felt during her asylum stay, she’s able to rip the vault around and break them in. Once there, Quinn helps them hack the accounts, which get immediately uploaded to Sage’s computer. The Inner Circle now has total control of Creed’s assets — the mutants have, in a way, seized the means of production.

Andy should’ve been more careful about giving Sith-style advice to Rebecca, though. The kind of anger he brought out is hard to put back in the bottle. As the mutants prepare to leave without harming a single Creed employee, the lead banker (who was forced to make the on-video confession) makes the brilliant decision to tell them all that they should be wiped off the face of the planet. Rebecca, who has felt the brunt of anti-mutant hatred up close and personal, refuses to take that lying down. The moment Reeva’s back is turned, she uses her powers on the people in the conference room. That’s right, she turns their bodies inside out. We don’t see the final, horrifying result, albeit for blood smears on the walls. Reeva is rightfully horrified at Quinn’s brutal death and the orphaning of his sons, but like I said at the top: The revolution was never going to be painless. Those bankers hurt a lot of mutants for their own profits, even if it was indirect. When conflicting sides are so polarized like this, something’s gonna give.

I understand where the Inner Circle is coming from with their righteous revolutionary anger, and I understand where the Purifiers are coming from with their vicious terrified reaction. The only side I don’t understand is that of the show’s actual protagonists, who have been spinning aimlessly for most of this season. John is shocked at the revelation that Blink has been helping the Morlocks, just like he’s shocked that so many Mutant Underground stations seem ready to join the Inner Circle’s #MutantUprising. But this is where steadfast refusal to make compromises or coalitions will get you! People are going to side with the forces they see as actually helping them. His team better get their act together soon, because I suspect things are about to get a whole lot bloodier.

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The Gifted recap: Seize the means of production

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