Back when "The Gifted" was first released in 2018, I heard many people raving about the series and recommending it to me. Although the general premise of the show did appeal to me, I put off watching it for a total of four years because I simply didn't think I would like it as much as everyone else and I didn't want to go into something with high expectations just to have them shattered immediately. Now that I have finally watched it, I am glad that I waited because I feel like if I had watched it back then, I would have undeservedly given it a worse rating merely because I would've been disappointed by it.

Don't get me wrong, "The Gifted" is certainly a good drama and I didn't feel like I wasted my time watching it. But it was just not the 10-stars-worthy drama everyone made it out to be.

First of all, the anthology-esque narration style utilized in the first few episodes has both its pros and cons. On one hand, it allows you to dive deeper into each character's psyche and develop a better understanding of each of their potentials and their corresponding downsides. However, this kind of narrative only works well if all of the characters are equally compelling to watch, which they, at least in my opinion, weren't. While I thoroughly enjoyed Claire and Punn's episodes (Episode 4 and 5, respectively), I could barely get through Namtaan's and Korn's episodes (Episode 3 and 7). But there were also some episodes that I felt rather neutral about, such as Ohm and Mon's (Episode 2 and 6). So, what differentiates these three sets of episodes, and what makes some better than others?

Claire and Punn's episodes are immersive and engaging because they actually succeed in presenting a thoroughly crafted character study. The characters start out with very clearly defined characteristics and while they don't suddenly turn into completely different people by the end of their episodes, you can definitely see them grow out of the negative aspects of their personalities a little bit and learn from the drawbacks of their potentials. It makes you root for these characters throughout the rest of the series and not only makes you understand them but also their relationship to each other better.

While Ohm and Mon's episodes succeed in conjuring up an overall impression of the character, their personality and imperfections, and potential, they do fall a little bit flat in comparison to Claire and Punn's episodes, simply because their storylines are not as exciting to watch. In their episodes, you can easily tell where the story is going to go from the first few minutes and in Mon's episode, it's even directly spoiled at the beginning, which I wasn't really a fan of.

However, no episodes were as bad as Namtaan and Korn's. Their characters are so flat and one-dimensional and they don't change at all throughout their respective episodes. I quite liked the overarching storyline of Namtaan's episode and its mystery flair and it did end up being important for the overall plot but instead of making me sympathize with Namtaan, it made me annoyed with her and her reckless curiosity. The fact that her actress, Lilly Nichapalak Thongkham, is also easily the worst actress in the series and her expression never really seems to change, didn't make it any better. I understand that the actress was a novice at the time but so were most other actors in this series and she really did not sell the role well for me. As for Korn, while I did not have any real issues with the actor, I found his character to be insanely boring. He is depicted as kind and caring and a good friend in Claire's episode, which made me like him for a while, but the fact that he instantly turned his back on her after being rejected by her and his character did a 180 and turned into just a basic lonely, sad boy didn't sit well with me. His episode starts out with him being miserable and ends with him being just as miserable, essentially rendering his episode pointless.

I also don't understand why the show almost completely forgot about the twins, Jo and Jack. I'd much rather have watched an episode about them than Korn since their potential was barely explained besides them being synchronized perfectly and it seemed like it had the "potential" to be interesting.

Furthermore, I don't think the story is anything special and I also don't think it's particularly well-written. The concept of students being divided into different classes based on their intelligence or some supernatural powers has existed for a very long time in various iterations. At first, I thought the show would try to stand out from other shows revolving around the same trope by really taking its time and slowly building the conflict while primarily focusing on its character-driven narrative. But that never happened. In fact, most of the previously established characters ended up being pretty much unimportant for the finale. And the two characters that did end up mattering, Pang and Wave, had simply not been invested as much time in as they should've, resulting in two pretty shallow characters.

Especially in Pang's case, the only things we really learn about him are that he is academically ungifted but can somehow do the mental gymnastics to construct his plan for the finale and that he is driven by the ideal that all men should be equal. He is framed as this boy with an immensely powerful potential and the only one who could possibly defeat the evil director but it doesn't exactly take a genius to come up with a way to defeat both of them. The story should've at some point invested some time in developing Pang's potential to actually become stronger than, let's say, Punn's potential because as it stands, Punn could easily just copy Pang's potential and use it against both him and the director since technically, he doesn't have the same potential and they are therefore not immune to him. This could be easily solved by, for example, establishing that Pang's potential has developed in such a way that he can now also shield his brain from being manipulated by others or by simply not giving Punn the ability to copy others' potentials.

The finale also just overall felt very disjointed in the context of the whole show. I actually liked how up until around Episode 10, everything was decently predictable in the sense that it had been foreshadowed at some point before, making it so that certain plot points didn't just appear out of nowhere all of a sudden, but there was still enough kept hidden so you would be excited to see how all of the details would unfold. However, by the last three episodes, it had just become an amalgamation of plot twists stacked together in a huge messy pile, essentially resulting in a game of "I made this plan to overthrow you." - "Well, I expected you to make this plan, so I made this other plan to sabotage your plan." - "Well, I expected that you would expect my plan, so I made a counterplan to the plan you made in expectation of my plan." and so forth. The way every single Gifted character besides Pang and maybe Wave was also remarkably passive in the last three episodes and some of them suddenly acted completely out of character at the end, didn't make it any better.

I also felt like some plot elements were sort of unnecessary. Aside from Claire and Punn's relationship, which I really loved, all of the romance plotlines felt discardable to me. I didn't think Pang and Namtaan had good chemistry at any point in the series and I would even argue that whatever Namtaan and Wave had going on for one episode was slightly better, although I also did not like it very much. Unlike a lot of other viewers, I also didn't really see a whole lot of chemistry between Pang and Wave and the little bit I did see seemed very one-sided from Pang's side. Even Chanon and Pom's storyline seemed more romantic to me than Pang/Namtaan, Wave/Namtaan, or Pang/Wave. I cannot say I cared for Wave's tragic backstory either, it just failed to get me to feel for Wave and there were lots of other parts in the show that made me sympathize with him more than his weird middle school crush on his teacher. If these parts had been cut out and instead used to develop Pang, Wave, and the twins more, the story could have been infinitely better.

Overall, I just think "The Gifted" really suffers from having such large quality differences between different episodes that while some are really good and could be worth 10 stars, others are just so boring and poorly written that it really drags down the entire show's rating for me, which is why I gave it 7 stars. I can see why other people really like it and it's an enjoyable and lighthearted enough watch to be a good introduction into the paranormal/supernatural mystery drama genre but if you are already into this kind of stuff and have seen quite a bit of it, it just doesn't hold up as well in comparison.