Lorna is starting to get a little irritated by Reeva’s lack of sharing on the details of what the mission is that the Inner Circle are planning for, so Esme tries to win her around with mixed results. Meanwhile, the Underground get a call for help from another base after a bomb attack on a mutant-sheltering church and Caitlin and Lauren track down the nurse who took pity on the mutants at the mental hospital to see if she can tell them more about Rebecca.

There’s at least four main threads going on this week, with at least as many subplots intertwined within it all. What’s impressive is that the show never misses a beat, and there’s never any sense of things being overcrowded or difficult to follow.

Starting with the Inner Circle – it’s been clear for a little while that things aren’t all roses there. Lorna is used to being in control, and Reeva’s insistence on keeping her and the others in the dark is starting to grate. Added to this, Esme is not exactly the happiest of campers, and not just because her arm is still bearing the marks of Marcos’ attentions. It’s fairly natural that when the Frost sisters persuade Reeva that they should tell Lorna something of what’s happening, the job should fall to Esme. What’s surprising is the direction that the episode takes this in, especially by the ending when we know a lot more about Esme specifically and the Frosts in general, as the flashback from the start of the episode gradually gets deepened and given greater context throughout.

Ex-agent Turner is now in deep with the Purifiers, and that’s working out about as well as you might expect for him. This character has come an awful long way from the early episodes of the first season, and Coby Bell deserves full credit for the subtlety of his performance as much as the writers do for the material he’s working with. It’s genuinely unsettling watching this group of what might – a few years ago – have seemed like caricatures. Armed, angry men with a need to blame an ‘outside’ group and round them up, violently if necessary/they get the chance, the Purifiers are not what Jace wants them to be, however hard he tries to make them. The overtones, as I mentioned last week, are obvious and uncomfortable to observe, but no less deserving of praise for it.

Reed is trying to get a handle on his powers, which means getting training from John. That’s not really something easily done though – as John points out, Reed has missed out on the years between when his father supressed his X gene and now when he should have been learning how his power worked. When the team get the call that a mutant-friendly church has been bombed and their help is needed, there’s no time to finish the training, because it’s action stations for all. Unfortunately, when they get there, it rapidly becomes apparent that everything isn’t as straightforward as they might have hoped.

And then there’s Caitlin and Lauren, going to the nurse Mike described to them in the hope that she might tell them more about Rebecca. When she does, of course, they’re presented with a whole new set of worries. Turns out that slight hint of Rebecca being maybe a little bit dangerous last week in terms of her outlook as well as her powers might have been underselling things a little. There’s an interesting role reversal here as well, where Caitlin is suddenly once again the reasonable one and Lauren shows the first flashes of being her mother’s daughter and her brother’s sister in ways we hadn’t necessarily anticipated.

By the time the credits roll, however much has been resolved, far more is up in the air. The war is definitely coming but honestly at this point, I couldn’t begin to tell you exactly who will be on what side.

Verdict: Tense and uncomfortable to watch in all the right ways, The Gifted continues to be my absolute favourite live-action treatment of Marvel’s mutant characters. Unflinching, challenging and bold. These are the kinds of stories the genre can be used to tell when handled correctly. 9/10

Greg D. Smith