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Mutant X as Adolescent Wish Fulfillment
What is wrong with wish fulfillment?
Nothing. Living vicariously through fiction on the page and on the screen may help in deciding who we are and what we want, eventually leading to the formulation of dreams that are realizable. Mutant X takes obvious adolescent dreams to such extremes that it nearly ridicules its target audience. Once aware of the underlying manipulation and pandering, it is annoying to watch.
Mostly this essay concerns Season 1, since Season 2 and 3 are nearly different series.
Adolescents are typically concerned about their appearance. All five of the Mutant X kids are really good looking (yes, great hair and teeth!) and frequently wear the kid of clothes mom would never allow her progeny to wear to school if she allowed them to buy such clothing. Not only do the kids all wear Neat Stuff, but they are not slowed down by spike heels or chilled by having exposed tummies in the middle of winter in Toronto! Adam doesn’t care what the kids wear.
Never mind that the actors are all too old for the parts they are playing.
None of the mutant kids ever seems to have had much responsibility, and they don’t have much now. Except for Emma selling dresses and Lexa working for the GSA, none of the kids seem to have had a job in the Real World. What they have been doing all of those years before Adam adopted them is largely a mystery. Shalimar had an apartment, but there is no mention of how she paid for it.
Adam provides a roof and food, and doles out an “allowance” to them. I doubt that this is reported income! The kids don’t have to concern themselves with paying bills or taxes.
Work for the mutant kids is an exciting adventure. When they aren’t off doing something exciting, they sit around playing computer games and practice martial arts, waiting for Adam, and later Lexa, to find something for them to do. They get to handle a lot of Adam’s neat toys, like the Flying Sow, and they use computers for nearly everything. Whatever they set out to do, they always eventually win.
What the kids have in life is essentially given, not earned.
Each of them was born special, and those gifts fix their value to anyone else forever after. None of them has education beyond high school, but curiously, they all seem to have extraordinary technical mastery. Solid technical skills may of course be learned outside of a formal classroom setting, but as in a formal setting, learning requires study, practice, and effort. What other people spend years mastering, the kids just seem to absorb through their pores.
Rules are for fools.
Criminal or dishonest behavior is glamorized in Mutant X: Brennan is a career criminal, Shalimar associated with career criminals, and Emma skipped out on paying checks in a restaurant routinely. Such past conduct in no way is held against them.
Authority is ridiculed. Season 1’s villain, Mason Eckhart, is a quintessential authority figure. Unlike the kids, he is highly educated, speaks proper English, and is always dressed formally. Despite enormous resources, he always loses, despite being head of a law enforcement agency. He is not only ridiculed, but physically abused with the kids laughing at each occurrence.
Most adolescents need to belong somewhere. Some of them turn to gangs, and Mutant X is not unlike a gang. Adam tells them that they are serving a high purpose, but he never gets around to outlining the specifics of that purpose.
After Season 1, the series fell apart many ways.
With Eckhart podded, Gabriel Ashlocke was introduced as the S2 villain. However, Ashlocke was running an ever freer kiddie gang so that his organization made Mutant X look like the established norm! This is part of why Ashlocke did not work, and why introducing him was a mistake.
Adam’s motivations became increasingly suspect until it was plain that Adam had been using the kids all along. Whatever purpose Mutant X might have had evaporated and was never heard from again.
These changes, and the weird metamorphoses of Mason Eckhart undercut past episodes and made them largely meaningless. Internal coherency fell apart. Later episodes are not satisfying, since they lack the symmetry of Season 1.
Dark Mirage
Discussion here:
http://masonesque.net/forum2/viewtopic.php?p=2388#2388
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