The Gifted has taken a dark turn, and it’s working

On last week’s episode of The Gifted, The Inner Circle carried out their planned attack Creed Financial, which in turn upped the stakes surrounding all of the characters we’ve been following.

Episode 7 and the episodes of season 2 leading up to it have marked a turning point for The Gifted. This episode took the show over the line from a fun, lighthearted production to a much more dynamic, violent, and even believable story if we are looking through the lenses of what this fictitious world would actually look like in real life.

To briefly recap, in episode 7, The Inner Circle decided to take down a bank which had been built by anti-mutant activists.

According to our friends at Hulu Watcher, Creed Financial is likely the creation of Graydon Creed, who is the son of Mystique and Sabretooth. Creed was, however, born without mutant powers, which caused his parents to abandon him. So he would eventually become an enemy of mutants.

The Inner Circle’s raid on the bank went according to plan and without a hitch. However, their newest addition, Rebecca, ended up acting on impulse and killing every last human they had held hostage during the raid. Fresh out of a mutant holding facility, she refused to obey Reeva’s orders and stand down.

The Inner Circle then fled the scene and escaped having accomplished their goals: raiding the bank and stealing all of its data. They will now likely be the top target of every anti-mutant group, private or government, for the remainder of the show.

Now, the fact that we are getting possible Mystique and Sabretooth tie-ins is exciting enough — but the fact that the show has gotten darker and more complex over the last few weeks is really going to do wonders for retaining and growing its adult audience.

Were the showrunners wrong to build things up slowly? Absolutely not. The best food is slow-cooked. They are simply letting things fall where they may and developing characters at a healthy rate of speed.

Here’s whyThe Gifted is doing so well right now and why this is significant. 

We can all pretty much agree that Christopher Nolan has been the only director up to this point who has really been able to create a dark AND successful superhero depiction, right? And it appears that Disney’s big-screen Marvel franchise is destined to continue along the lighthearted, comical/action trajectory it’s been on for several years. (And who can blame them? Those movies are incredible and tons of fun to watch.)

But The Gifted fits a niche that few directors have attempted to take on — let alone successfully as Matt Nix has — and it’s that of a high quality, dark multi-character superhero show.

Let’s be honest, he has about as many characters to deal with as an Avengers movie has. And directing that many individuals successfully can be downright difficult to do. But Matt Nix is making it work beautifully.

And to his credit, sort of like his big-screen Marvel colleagues, he makes it so that The Gifted  does not take itself too seriously as a show. But if we’re being honest, the fact remains: it’s easy to use boatloads of humor as a shield to hide the fact that grown adults are running around in superhero costumes than it is to actually attempt to take it seriously.

Like Christopher Nolan, Matt Nix has dared to take it seriously — at the risk of the whole thing falling apart — by adding in dark elements and intense dialog. And guess what? It’s working. And he deserves a ton of credit for going in this risky direction.

Matt Nix is also doing an incredible job of dropping Marvel easter eggs slowly. He has made it clear that he wants to mirror the X-Men big-screen movies, and it would appear that he has access to a lot of X-Men characters — but he is doing right by The Gifted by being patient in bringing them into the fold, if at all.

Of course, we all want to see Wolverine slash through a wall at some point, or Gambit burst onto the scene in acrobatic fashion; but would the show be the same without the suspense they have been building? Probably not — and not every showrunner understands that.

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So a few Sabretooth, Mystique, Magneto, Adamantium easter eggs are just fine for now. And when that iconic character finally hits the screen, should it happen, it will be awesome.

Basically, this show is just getting started. And if the fact that the show’s names’ all contained an “X” last season (X-roads, eXtraction, 3 x 1, eXploited, outfoX) and contain an “M” for all of this season (eMergence, unMoored, coMplications, outMatched) then might there be hope that there will at least be enough seasons to spell “X-Men” by the time they’re done?

Fingers crossed! Who knows. We could be in for the long haul!

Soon we’ll see how things unfold in the wake of The Inner Circle’s attack on Creed Financial. At the rate we’re going, it seems an all-out war might be where the season finale is headed. Time will tell.

The Gifted airs on Fox Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m EST.