Baby Dawn’s decreasing health means the Stepford Cuckoos (Skyler Samuels) are sent after the one person who may be able to save her life – her father. This leads to a reunion for Eclipse (Sean Teale) and Polaris (Emma Dumont) and an all-too-short daddy-daughter moment that Marcos is not willing to leave without a fight. Although he isn’t successful in his fight to keep his family together, he’s not about to leave Polaris and Dawn to the Inner Circle. Speaking of distraught fathers, Turner (Coby Bell) continues to try and fight the fight by attempting to partner up with local law enforcement, which works for a time but falls apart once they learn about why he left Sentinel Services. As the show amps up to a battle between the two mutants sides, I’m a little surprised that so much of the show continues to be dedicated to Turner.
We now have our first look at X-Men: Dark Phoenix. Returning the core cast from X-Men: Apocalypse, the latest film in the franchise tries its hand at telling the story X-Men: The Lamest Stand bungled so spectacularly. The film opens in theaters on February 14th.
Although I enjoyed The Gifted, I was feeling a bit of super-hero TV fatigue and eventually fell off from the show’s slow building First Season which was heavy on world building and weak on payoff. The Second Season premiere beings with Reeva Payge (Grace Byers) consolidating her power within the Inner Circle and preparing for an important birth. As for our heroes, they continue to save what mutants they can from the increasingly vicious and murderous Sentinel Services while Caitlin (Amy Acker) and Eclipse (Sean Teale) continue to search for answers about the whereabouts of their missing loved ones. The premiere resets the stage for the season with our heroes, what was once the Hellfire Club, and Sentinel Services all with distinct motivations and agendas. Despite Payge’s murderous spree to open the episode, she still comes off better than the human soldiers killing unarmed men, women, and children in their own homes.
Fans of the comic character knew this was coming. The Second Season finale of Legion sets up David (Dan Stevens) as villain (or at best anti-hero) heading into the show’s next season. While I don’t have any issues with how the episode concludes, I do have some quibbles over how it gets there. First, no matter how much Division 3 is afraid of David or how much Syd (Rachel Keller) feels violated by his deplorable behavior, the group of David’s friends choosing the Shadow King (Navid Negahban) as an ally makes no sense. The Shadow King being less of a threat than David doesn’t all the sudden make him a hero. (Ted Bundy murdered more women than Jack the Ripper, but that doesn’t make Jack “good.”) This is, after all, the man responsible for David’s current mental state, not to mention his sister’s death, and various mind-fucking and murdering he’s done along the way. Is David a good person? That’s a central question to the episode. However, even if you conclude David is a bad person (or has the potential to be one) that, in and of itself, doesn’t all the sudden make Farouk a good or trustworthy person.
Without showing us what she did with Clark (Hamish Linklater), “Chapter 17” fills in on how the Shadow King (Navid Negahban) won over Melanie (Jean Smart). Frankly, it wasn’t that difficult (and pretty much unfolded exactly how you would expect). Despite preventing Clark from fulfilling his part in David‘s (Dan Stevens) plan, the rest of his time-delayed chess peices are all able to perform their actions which end in Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) the desert with the monks and a weapon David believes should be powerful enough to destroy the Shadow King. How crucial was Clark’s role, and will it be large enough to derail David’s plans?
