Video: We’ve known for a while now that Fox’s upcoming X-Men spinoff TV show The Gifted would tell a classic story of mutant persecution with a handful of well known characters like Blink, Polaris and Thunderbird thrown in for good measure.
Fox
Up until now, though, it wasn’t clear just how the show would link to Fox’s X-Men movies.
In the The Gifted‘s first full trailer, we’re introduced to Amy Acker and Stephen Moyer’s Caitlin and Reed Stucker, a couple whose lives are torn apart when they learn that their teenage son and daughter are both mutants and being tracked by the government. Lauren Strucker (Natalie Alyn Lind) explains to her brother that she was born with the ability to push air and water molecules together in order to move things or form force fields, and in another scene we see Andy Strucker’s (Percy Hynes) similar powers manifesting as he’s picked on by bullies.
It’s also revealed that Reed Strucker works for the shadowy organisation that’s hunting down mutants, and it’s the revelation that his children have the X-gene that pushes the family to go on the run. Of all the new information packed into the trailer, the most interesting comes from Eclipse (Sean Teale), a new mutant created for the show, who says that no one knows if the X-Men and the Brotherhood (of Evil Mutants, perhaps) even exist any more, implying that they did at one point.
Compared to FX’s Legion, the only other Marvel show incorporating mutant characters, and which largely avoided any direct connections to Fox’s movies, The Gifted seems to be aiming at building something of a shared universe from the jump. We’ll all see whether this new synergistic approach for Marvel’s mutants works when The Gifted premieres sometime between later this year and early 2018.