The Gifted recap: 'eXploited' 

The Gifted has my favorite opening of the season so far. We begin at a rally for Senator Montez, who’s running on a platform of manipulating anti-mutant paranoia to justify an even more repressive crackdown on that segment of the population (as you may remember, Montez has come up before in this show; Caitlin’s brother works for him). After his rally, Montez runs into one of his assistants, a beautiful young blond woman named Stephanie. She reminds him that he has an important meeting coming up and asks if she can attend. Just then, Montez gets an important call on his cell phone, and Stephanie gets a message of her own.

Montez’s call is from Sentinel Services, notifying him that apparently mutants have been infiltrating his organization. One of those infiltrators, Stephanie, gets a message from her sisters, saying that they’ve been captured by Sentinel Services and she’s next. They tell her to “find us” and “save us,” and after a change of clothes and name, she gets to doing just that. The screaming telepathic voices, and Stephanie’s frantic run through the crowd away from Montez’s headquarters, give this cold open a real horror-movie feeling. I’ve loved the X-Men universe’s increasing willingness to tell stories across different genres — impressive that they can now do so within a single episode!

Back in the present, Esme (as we know her) is ready to implement her plan. She sets about exacerbating divisions in what remains of the Mutant Underground, probably so that they’ll be easier to manipulate. Reed and Caitlin want to get their kids back, but they still believe in the system they’ve served their whole lives. They don’t want to launch an aggressive escape attempt (and they’re probably not wrong there, given how last week’s attack plan worked out). Instead, Reed wants to try using his contacts in the judicial system to see if he can at least get Andy and Lauren transferred to a normal prison rather than Campbell’s deranged Hound facility. Esme has a better idea. Approaching Reed and Caitlin while they’re on their own, she plants the idea of them going to talk to Jace Turner. Yeah, sure, he’s the very Sentinel agent who just collared their kids and sent them to the aforementioned brainwashing facility, but hey, he’s a father, maybe he understands!

Funny enough, literally at about the same time they’re saying this, Jace himself is busy telling the imprisoned Dreamer that he’s going to take personal satisfaction out of delivering her into Campbell’s hands and watching her get turned into a Hound. Yeah guys, I’m sure making overtures to this guy will go great. He’s not at all a sadistic bloodthirsty psychopath.

Well, you know Reed — he never met a dumb idea he didn’t love. As he and Caitlin drive to Jace’s house, they notice this suburb looks a lot like theirs. Reed wonders aloud how many of these people would still have a smile on their face is they knew their fellow Americans (specifically, his children) were being brainwashed and tortured while they put up their holiday decorations. Caitlin replies with the obvious answer: They wouldn’t care. People already know what kind of oppression occurs in their society; they see homeless people on the street, they read news stories about unarmed African-Americans killed by cops, maybe some of them have even looked over the Bush torture report. And these happy suburb people (the same class to which Reed and Caitlin once belonged) don’t care about what’s happening to the Strucker kids any more than they care about any of the other victims of inequality, violence, and oppression in America.