eXposed
"The deal is this: your family goes tonight."
Written by Matt Nix
Directed by Bryan Singer
Directed by Bryan Singer
"I have to get my family someplace safe. If I can contact them, they might be able to help."
— Reed Strucker
While the life for mutants is getting harder and harder after the disapearance of both the X-Men and the Brotherhood, District Attorney, Reed Strucker, and his wife, Caitlin, are suddenly confronted with the harsh truth that their own two children are gifted too.
Tropes:
- Barbaric Bully: Andy gets picked on by a bunch of them, who are responsible for his Traumatic Superpower Awakening.
- Barrier Warrior: Lauren's power, which allows her to compress air molecules into shields.
- Big "NO!": Lorna lets out one after she learns that she is pregnant while being imprisoned.
- Book Ends: At the beginning and end, someone is shot and the Mutant Underground is forced to abandon them to law enforcement. For extra irony, the first was a mutant criminal and the second was the human prosecutor assigned her case.
- The Cameo: Stan Lee gets one as usual, stepping out of a restaurant.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: One of the bullies that attacks Andy sports a hairdo that, according to AVClub
, wouldn't look out of place among the alt-right. - Fantastic Racism: It's a show about the X-Men (more or less), so this is to be expected.
- Get a Room!: At the dance, Andy tells Lauren to not get pregnant while she makes out with her boyfriend.
- Honor Before Reason: Reed willingly enters Lorna's cell in an attempt to reason with her, despite knowing how dangerous she is. While she threatens and injures him a bit, he is still playing 'good cop' when he could just have laid out how legally screwed she is and then walk away.
- If I Wanted You Dead...: After being confronted with her attempted murder charges, Lorna shows Reed how easy it would be to kill him and how easy it would have been to kill the cops that arrested her, if she really wanted to do it.
- Person of Mass Destruction: Andy's powers nearly destroy the entire gymnasium in his first scene. Once he's got a slightly better handle on them, he easily rips apart several spider Sentinels when Marcos and John had serious trouble dealing with just one of them.
- Power Incontinence: Andy has trouble controlling his powerful telekinetic abilities.
- Punch-Clock Villain: While Reed's job is to prosecute mutants, he is shown to sympathize with them on a personal level even before his children are revealed to be mutants. His job is a means to provide for his family, and he's quick to choose them over it when the truth comes out.
- Rabid Cop: In typical X-Men fashion, law enforcement is very quick to use deadly force on mutants.
- The Reveal: Both the audience and Marco and Lorna learn that the latter is pregnant.
- Revenge Before Reason: Lorna is caught because a police officer wounds her boyfriend and she is so focused on hurting the cop that she allows herself to be blindsided by other cops.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: When being introduced to their step-by-step system on how they deal with bullying, Reed gets impatient and threatens to sue the school if they don't do something about Andy's tormentors now.
- Shout-Out: Marcos has the intro song of the 90's X-Men series as his ringtone.
- Skewed Priorities: After breaking the vending machine and threatening the safety of his family, Andy still takes time to take some food out of it before running away.
- Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Andy's power manifests while the bullies are force-showering him.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Reed was doing his job to protect society, he never shows any hints that he has something against mutants personally. He is prosecuting Lorna not because she is a mutant but because she tried to kill a police officer.
- You Are What You Hate: Andy makes a racial slur about mutants early in the episode, only to then discover that he is one himself.
"Right now, you need to think about what's best for your family."
