Marvel's The Gifted

Cafe Society
21

Right, that’s the premise of the show, so we know that going in.

Right again. Draconian laws against mutants, OK. Acting like idiots, not OK. It wasn’t that they didn’t act 100% to established procedure, it’s that they acted 0% toward it. Even if sometime later in the show it’s established that the draconian laws include “shoot on sight,” which would also be stupid, they went beyond even that. They couldn’t see any mutants. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t think they even saw any mutants go into that building, and they sure didn’t check whether they left out the back. They just drove up and said “we know you’re in there” and started shooting at the walls and windows, hoping maybe they hit a mutant, and not worried about whether anyone else (hostage, wino, squatter, legal resident) might be in there.

Sorry if you don’t like my opinion.

22

Ok so you don’t like the show. Cool. Not everyone likes the same things.

I don’t make it a habit of posting in threads about things I don’t like and only spent 5 minutes with though. I mean you have spent more time posting to this thread than you did watching the actual show at this point. I guess we’ll just carry on with the discussion now, thanks for the input though.

23

I watched the show and liked it well enough to give it another shot next week, but I had pretty much the same reaction to this scene. It was mind-numbingly stupid and lazy writing, almost to the point of being offensive. I wonder how many people bailed at that point in the show.

I understand the trope they’re relying on here with the draconian cops who have no regard for the rights or humanity of the “othered”, and it obviously makes sense to have that in a show like this. Also, with mutants being as dangerous as they are, it makes sense for cops in this universe to ramp things up from what we’d see in a real-world standoff. But that scene was Uwe Boll level stupid and it lowered my opinion of the show.

Maybe I’ve gotten a bit spoiled by the large amount of excellent television that’s been available lately, but there’s a line between popcorn-munching mindless fun and gag-inducing mind-killing dreck. In a show that was mostly the former, that scene was the latter.

24

FFS, if you only want good reviews about the show, say so in your title or OP, and I won’t spoil your little tea party. The fact that it took only five minutes for me to hate it is IMO all the more reason to post a bad review. It makes a hell of a lot more sense for me to post a bad review about a show I turned off after five minutes than for you to make three posts ragging on me for it.

Yeah, fuck your condescension, too.

25

I actually appreciate discussion about different peoples’ limits to their suspension. I think its totally valid to write off a show based on an instance that goes too far for you.
I wrote of Ray Donovan because characters could make it from Calabasas to Hollywood in the blink of an eye when that drive w/o traffic is at least 30 minutes and over an hour with traffic.
People have different threshholds.

26

It’s not about good or bad reviews, it’s just more interesting to exchange views with people that have actually watched the show we’re discussing. I get that you didn’t like the first five minutes and that it wasn’t your cup of tea. You’re right It was probably not necessary to even respond in the first place.

My tone in my last reply was also unnecessary, apologies.

27

I just got around to watching the first episode on Hulu. I enjoyed it. But the X-Men comics were such a big part of my youth, it’s easy to sell me on this sort of thing. Especially when they include versions of two of my favorite characters, Blink (Clarice) and Polaris (Lorna). And I appreciated the little nods to the fans, like Marco’s ring tone.

28

Felt like The Tomorrow People to me.

29

This, if you mean the recent CW version, mostly because there seem to be no free mutants over 30.

I wasn’t wowed, but I might give it a shot for a few more eps to see if it improves. It seemed pretty clumsy and obvious, for the most part.

Here’s what I’m going to hate, because these shows always do this: I’m going to hate how no one with super powers ever practices to get better. This isn’t just annoying because it’s a crappy way to add tension, it’s unrealistic for teen characters. When you’re young and you find you can do something cool and amazing and fun, all you do is practice! Friends spent hours doing nothing but breakdancing when we were kids, and I logged hundreds of hours on my skateboard and later on dirt bikes. Video gamers spend days and weeks leveling up and honing skills. You want your shit down when you’re a teen with something cool.

But on tv, someone that can teleport or move things with their mind waits until they’re in a firefight to fire up those powers, so they can fail epically or face-plant in front of everyone (especially their love interest). Or they decide to practice in public, where they’re sure to get caught, like the vending machine scene. :rolleyes:

30

They literally already did this…

31

You literally cut the paragraph where I noted this. Not to worry - it will happen repeatedly, along with other tropes like someone whose power is perfect for solving a situation failing for no real reason, or someone whose power was too weak to do something earlier in the ep coming through when they need it at the climax (also already done with the teleport/wormhole character).

Bets on the sentinel agent who said “It’s different when it’s your kid” on having a mutant child?

32

I actually didn’t recognize Amy Acker as a blond until I heard he speak.

Brian

33

[Moderating]

Airbeck and TonySinclair, you both need to calm down. In particular,

This is way over the line. That’ll be a Warning for TonySinclair.

34

That post is a week old. I’m all calm now.

35

Turned out he had a kid killed by a mutant.

I was amused when they referenced Hypercortisone D; alas, I doubt we’ll be betting Morrison-inspired weirdness like that. That’d be more of a Legion storyline, I’d think.

36

The Fenris Twins aren’t technically mutants, but they do get their powers from the X-Gene, thanks to some good old fashioned Nazi superscience experiments when they were fetuses. I’m wondering if that’s the angle they’re going after with the “Strucker” name – is there going to end up being some dark family history unearthed at some point that ties into the spread of the mutant gene, or at least connects to the historical oppression of mutants? We haven’t seen Grandpa Strucker yet, right? Just a mention that he lives somewhere off by himself? Bet he’s going to turn out to be a major villain in the show.

Man, you really need to re-watch that scene, because what you just described is not at all what happens in the show. The cops don’t just open fire - they roll up and call for anyone in the building to come out with their hands up. Polaris stands at the window, hands raised, and then starts blowing up cop cars with her mutant superpower. Its only at that point that the cops start shooting, which is pretty much justified - I’d expect real world cops to respond about the same if they surround a building and someone starts firing a gun out a window.

37

OK, I did, it’s still on my TIVO.

Everything I said happened, did happen, although I didn’t include every detail. IMO my summary is far less misleading than yours.

In fact, they roll up and say, “We know the fugitive is in the building. Come out now or we WILL open fire.” And on second viewing, it’s obvious that they arrived much too late to see her go in, so unless they have a mutant tracking device (which is plausible if it’s mentioned later in the show), they can’t really know she’s in there. But since they seem to be addressing people other than the fugitive, they seem to know that other people might be in there, too.

No, she doesn’t. She blows out some light bars on top of the cars.

If someone fires a gun at you and misses, you have no idea whether he was trying to kill you and missed, or if it was just a warning. If someone with superpowers blows out the light bars on several widely spaced cars at once, but does no other damage, you pretty much know she was deliberately pulling her punch.

Still, anyone who follows the news would concede it’s not out of the question that cops would shoot back at her. But that’s not what they did. She ducked out of view, and they just started shooting at all the windows and (glass) doors, hoping to hit her by accident, and not caring who else was in there.

Again, I think my summary was more accurate than yours. Mine sounded like what an objective bystander with a less than perfect memory would say. Yours sounded like what the PR guy for the department would say.

My second view did reveal a detail I had missed. When she first went into the building, it looked like a junky abandoned warehouse, and that’s what I remembered. With my second viewing, I see that the front of the building that the police were indiscriminately pouring lead into was evidently an operating Salvation Army-ish soup kitchen. It had clean floors, neatly lined up tables and chairs, and the lettering on the door said “Donation Hours” and “Kitchen Hours.” Which makes it even more likely that there could have been innocent homeless people or night shift workers in the building they were shooting full of holes.

38

One of the “details” you left out is, “They attacked the cops first.” That’s a pretty big detail to overlook, and wildly changes the narrative that the scene is setting up. The cops just randomly opening fire on a building would, indeed, be dumb. The cops returning fire at a building from which they were just attacked, much less so.

I disagree with that assumption pretty strongly. It would require in-depth knowledge of how superpowers work in general, and how that specific individual’s superpowers work in particular, to know that. It’s the sort of thing that you “know” as a genre-savvy viewer, not as a character within the fiction. And in the context of this specific work of fiction, it’s an even less reliable assumption, because a major theme in the show already is that a lot of mutants have little control over their abilities, particularly when they first manifest.

And you’re saying this part is unrealistic?

More accurate… except that you forgot about the part where the cops were attacked first? Because, again, that’s a really significant part of the scene, particularly if your criticism is about the police response.

It also appears that Blink has been hiding out there for at least a few days, so I doubt that it was a functioning facility at the time of the shootout.

39

Yes, I forgot about the part where the light bars were attacked first. And you forgot the part about how the cops were going to shoot whether or not the light bars were attacked, whether or not they were in fear for their lives, whether or not anything at all happened, other than the fugitive surrendering immediately, which they had to know was not going to happen, or she would have done it when they were chasing her before. And that they did not seem to care who they hit, as long as it was someone in the same building as the fugitive.

IMO my omission was less serious than yours, but I can easily understand someone disagreeing with that.

40

Sorry, how do we know that?