THE GIFTED Showrunner On That Heartbreaking Finale, [SPOILER]'s Sacrifice & DAYS OF FUTURE PAST In S3?!

"That evolved over the course of the season. We knew that we wanted to do something big, but what ultimately drove that storyline was less a desire to do a shocking death and more in thinking about Reed’s character, “What is a fitting arc?” It was less interesting to say, “OK, Reed gets super powers, and now he’s another superhero!” as opposed to having Reed, who started this journey as someone prejudiced against mutants, wind up as someone who is willing to sacrifice his life not just for mutants, but for everybody. He sacrifices his life for tolerance and understanding, after starting his journey as someone who meant well but didn’t understand the values of tolerance and understanding.

The important thing to me about Reed was that he wasn’t a bad guy who learns to be good. He was always a good man, but when I think about the themes of the X-Men and what that world has always been about, it’s about expanding our understanding of what it means to include people. It’s not about straight-forward good and evil, it’s about understanding that people who are not like us are not so different after all."

The interesting thing about Blink is that in the comics, there have been a fair number of versions of the character. The fact is, she’s manipulating dimensions, traveling via these portals. She talked in the previous episode about how when she felt her worst, she imagined going into a portal that went nowhere and being in the spaces in between. So the idea was that — although she doesn’t understand it completely either — when she gets shot and falls into that maelstrom of portal energy, she is in the spaces in between things. And that is a place that is sort of “out of time.”

TVLINE | So the question is perhaps not where she is taking the others, but when?

"Where, and when, and what does it mean? It’s something that hopefully we get to explore at some time in the future, but the idea there is that she’s been taken to new places and seen new possibilities. And if nothing else, she somehow she had the opportunity to change clothes! [Laughs]"

"What doesn’t work in our favor is the obvious — we would like our ratings to be higher as a primetime network show. What works in our favor is that we are a show that has had a pretty decent life on streaming. And I think beyond that, because of how the story is situated, we can stay out of the way of a lot of the larger [Marvel] universe. It’s not likely that in any short term anybody is going to be doing anything that could be incompatible with what we’ve done, if that makes sense. We don’t have versions of the X-Men running around, [and the characters we use] are not smack dab in the middle of the mythology, so we’re not stepping on anybody’s toes.

The other thing is it’s my understanding that we’re doing pretty well internationally. Emma Dumont (who plays Lorna) just went to China and there were a lot of girls who really, really wanted to hang out with her. [Laughs] Superheroes with strong emotions and action seem to travel well."

Action-adventure family drama THE GIFTED, from Marvel, tells the story of a suburban couple whose ordinary lives are rocked by the sudden discovery that their children possess mutant powers. Forced to go on the run from a hostile government, the family joins up with an underground network of mutants and must fight to survive.