X-Men‘s forgotten series The Gifted should have gone on for at least one more season. The series, which debuted in 2017, is set in a world where the X-Men have disappeared and mutants are hunted by the government. When teenager Andy Strucker (Percy Hynes White) is revealed to be a powerful mutant along with his twin sister Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind), they go on the run with their parents and find refuge with the Mutant Underground, whose members include Lorna Dane/Polaris (Emma Dumont), the daughter of the iconic Marvel character Magneto.
Season 2 sees the Mutant Underground divided, as some stay with the original group while others join the Hellfire Club, which takes a more extreme approach in the fight for mutant freedom. An outcast mutant community known as the Morlocks also plays an important role in this season, as do the Purifiers, who are a group of humans that hunt mutants. While the season 2 finale wraps up many of the ongoing storylines, The Gifted still needed another season.
Fox Canceled The Gifted After Season 2
After having strong ratings for season 1, a significant drop in season 2 led to The Gifted being canceled by Fox in 2019. While declining viewership was a major reason for the cancellation, another factor was the merger between Disney and 20th Century Fox, which was finalized only about a month before the X-Men series came to an end.
The show was produced by Marvel Television, but in the aftermath of the merger, it was absorbed by Marvel Studios. Instead of Marvel movies and shows being separate entities, they were now going to be under one umbrella, with WandaVision and other new Marvel series being part of the MCU and released on Disney+. There was initially speculation that The Gifted would find a new home within Disney, but this did not happen due to season 2’s ratings and not fitting within Marvel’s larger plans at the time.
The Gifted Season 2’s Finale Set Up A “Days Of Future Past” Storyline
After resolving the Mutant Underground’s conflict with the Hellfire Club and the Purifiers, The Gifted season 2 ended on a cliffhanger. Clarice Fong/Blink (Jamie Chung) is revealed to have survived and insists that she needs her fellow mutants to follow her through a portal to an apocalyptic world. This set up a third season that likely would’ve been influenced by the X-Men comics’ “Days of Future Past” storyline, which was also adapted as a movie in 2014, with both taking place in a dystopian world where mutants are hunted and imprisoned in internment camps by robots known as the Sentinels.
In the comics and in X-Men: Days of Future Past, an attempt is made to use time travel to go back and undo this horrific future from becoming a reality. The Gifted season 3 was poised to follow a similar story, as the season 2 finale teased that Blink had traveled to an apocalyptic future. With the government (via Sentinel Services) and the Purifiers already hunting mutants, The Gifted was already on its way to becoming a “Days of Future Past” world, and it would’ve been up to Blink and the other mutants to stop it. Instead, it is unknown what happens after the cliffhanger.
The Gifted Season 3 Could’ve Explained What Happened To The Missing X-Men
Along with following through on the cliffhanger with Blink, The Gifted season 3 could’ve allowed the show to finally explain what happened to the X-Men after the events of July 15, 2013. The logistical reason behind their absence related to the show being a completely different universe and narrative from Fox’s X-Men movies, but even without bringing in characters like Professor X, Magneto, Wolverine, or Storm, season 3 could have at least shed more light on their disappearance.
The season’s focus still would have been on the surviving Struckers and Frost sisters (Skyler Samuels), Blink, Polaris, Marcos Diaz/Eclipse (Sean Teale), John Proudstar/Thunderbird (Blair Redford), and other established mutants, but The Gifted also could’ve benefited from clarifying the X-Men’s role in the show’s larger mythology before it concluded.
- Release Date
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2017 – 2019-00-00
- Network
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FOX
- Showrunner
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Matt Nix
