Nerding Day: The Gifted RAP

I love when I’m watching a movie or a TV show, and I see the exact moment someone said, “Fuck it, I’m not getting paid enough for this shit.” If you're the set designer for The Gifted, hi, I'm talking about you.

Everyone phones in their job sometimes, even when their job is important. I’m sure sometimes a hostage negotiator is like, “You know what? I need to get to Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, RIGHT NOW. That Cheeseboozer in Pear-A-Dise Margarita is calling my name, bro. Do we really need an ambassador to Prague anyway? I’m going to tell this cartel to go fuck off, and we can split some Jimmy’s Jammin' Jambalaya.”

Never has this attitude been more present on television than in season two, episode thirteen of Fox’s short-lived X-men (but not) series, The Gifted, when this graffiti was displayed in an abandoned hospital:

Sorry, I know not everyone is an eagle-eyed pop-culture aficionado like me. Maybe you can’t see what’s funny in this picture? Let me help you out.

A set designer, or an intern, or a guy who everyone thought worked on the show but was actually just some guy who broke onto the Fox production lot, was assigned to put graffiti on the walls of this abandoned hospital clinic set, and he did not feel like doing it that day. Whoever did this clearly had somewhere else to be. Probably not someplace important. When important shit is going on, you want to throw yourself into work and distract yourself from it. This person just wanted to go to Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville.

A cinematographer, a director, and a network executive all watched this scene and approved it. They, too, did not give a shit because this bad graffiti isn’t even a passing moment. It’s centered during what is supposed to be a pretty emotional scene that sparks character growth for the steampunk pirate man.

They cut back to it multiple times! There is no other graffiti surrounding it. The rest of the wall is spotless. It’s just RAP. Just the word RAP in general. Not a specific rapper, the entire genre, which incorporates everything from "X Gon’ Give It To Ya" to “I’m the master rapper, and I’m here to say: I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way.”

It’s not rap rulz, or rap sucks. It has no opinion on rap. It simply wants you to know rap exists in the X-men universe. Rap is canon, everyone! Get ready for Dazzler to be way more problematic.

There’s not even a line or a scribble to indicate that someone intended to further pontificate on RAP but was interrupted and couldn’t. There’s no punctuation. Could it be a question? Is it supposed to be RAP? Or RAP. Or RAP!

Is it a command? Could it be saying you should rap? Or, or, maybe I’m thinking of this all wrong. It’s on a door; what if you’re supposed to rap on the door for entrance? I’ve put so much thought into this, far too much thought, and I think of more options every second.

Sometimes when you’re driving through on a long empty midwestern backroad, a sign will suddenly appear that just says JESUS, and you’ll think, what am I supposed to do with that? Are they assuming I’ve maybe never heard the word "Jesus" before? In Illinois? They’re just throwing it out there and hoping I’ll give it a Google later? From the makers of JESUS now comes RAP. Two baffling flavors of the same idea?

As far as Marvel adjacent shows go, The Gifted wasn’t the worst. That distinction goes to Inhumans, but The Gifted and Inhumans were like two houses on the same street that were both pretty rundown, but Inhumans doesn’t even have a roof, so The Gifted looks fine by comparison even though all their lawn gnomes have their dicks out.

The lead-up to the RAP graffiti fiasco is amazing because it makes the whole situation even less plausible. I guess maybe it’s possible a lone graffiti artist with a single can of black spray paint popped into this abandoned clinic, and instead of hitting any of your classic graffiti staples like dick, dick and balls, dick that’s cumming and the jizz spells out zowie, they decided to pay homage to their favorite entire musical genre. That’s not impossible! The thing is, these are the guys we saw destroy the clinic with the rap graffiti in it eight episodes ago:

They’re called The Purifiers, and they’re all about having “pure” non-mutant genes. There’s some pretty specific imagery going on there, right? We know who this group of people represents, and historically they’re not big rap fans.

It would make total sense if the clinic was covered in anti-mutant graffiti. The in-universe pejorative term for mutants is muties. If I was given, even thirty seconds, to come up with some anti-mutant phrases for The Purifiers to have left behind on the clinic walls, I easily could! Go home muties, mutants SUCK, lazy muties with your dumb laser hands. Wow, was I maybe too good at that? I had those loaded up and ready to go, huh? Do I hate Mutants? I’m going to have to do some reflecting on that.

The Purifiers destroyed the clinic because it was the only one in the area that treated mutants. Are we supposed to assume that after they tore it up, a third party, unaffiliated with the mutant drama going on in the world, wandered in and was like, “You know what this place could use?” RAP.

I can’t stress enough how little other Graffiti there is in this scene. It’s mostly scribbles, the phrase "Big T" by the entrance, written very big, and oh my God, it’s another cameo from RAP!

Nothing else anywhere near it. Do you think this old neo-Nazi getting shot into the word RAP is symbolic of something? Is there a Youtuber out there who’s going to do a forty-minute video where they explain this was a Lynchian commentary of colonialism, and I’m missing the point? Or is the point simply RAP?

The Gifted followed the mutant underground, a group of mutants who weren't quite preppy enough to be X-Men or quite terrorist enough to be The Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. It had a lot of cool concepts from the X-men like The Hellfire Club and my favorite non-X-Men mutant group, The Morlocks. They're sewer-dwelling mutant crust punks whose powers are things like face melting and blowing tornados out of a corncob pipe, and they rule so hard.

Still, it felt like the people making The Gifted hated it. They wouldn't let any name brand mutants appear; everyone was the Admiral Munch version of X-Men. It felt like every time they added a character, someone said, "No, we can't have the leader of the Morlocks be Callisto. She's awesome; we might use her in another movie. Make it Erg, I guess? He's boring enough to be on this show."

Erg is the post apocalyptic jeweler standing in front of the RAP graffiti. The episode of The Gifted where RAP appears is called "teMpted" (all the titles have a stupid capital M, again, everyone making this show hated it), and it's supposed to be about Erg confronting his anti-human biases. The pretty human nurse, Caitlin Strucker, is trying to collect supplies from her ruined clinic to help an injured Morlock, while Erg complains that he doesn't want her help because she's a filthy non-sewer dwelling human.

She explains to him how the clinic was run by humans who wanted to help mutants, but they all got beaten up by the Purifiers, the same as the Mutants did. Erg is listening to her intently and reacting with chastened shock. Meanwhile, all I'm seeing is...

It's so distracting! Also, while I’m not an expert on what is and is not racist, spray painting just the word rap on the wall and having a black character stand in front of it and learn about how he’s been stereotyping humans seems preeeeeeetty racist? The X-Men have always been a metaphor for all people of color and that metaphor has always been bad because black people don’t have laser hands and lots of X-Men have literal world-endingly dangerous powers.

Who did this!? I decided to look into who needed to go to Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville so bad they let RAP slip by, and it turns out this episode of The Gifted had a celebrity director. It's none other than Jonathan Frakes, AKA Will Ryker from Star Trek The Next Generation, certified best show on Earth.

Frakes has made a name for himself directing genre television. After getting his start on Star Trek, he directed episodes of Dollhouse, The Twilight Zone, Roswell, even Marvel's less bad TV show, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. This man knows how to direct a TV show. It's not like his credentials are one commercial where Barney Rubble raps and being the showrunner’s firstborn son. He's done TV good before; he just didn't feel like it that day.

Jonathan Frakes isn't the most beloved person in the Star Trek fandom. It's possible whoever was in charge of graffiti that day hated him and wanted to ruin his episode of The Gifted. Maybe they couldn't take being pushed around by Captain Picard's second in command, the guy who can't even sit in a chair right! Seriously, have you seen the fan edits of the insane way Will Riker sits down? It's bizarre.

I'm sure doing graffiti for television is hard. You can't use real graffiti because it's fifty percent gorgeous works of art smooshed super close to the other forty-nine percent, which is all dicks, and one percent sorry that's another dick. So you have to reconstruct a sanitized version that will make it past the network's censors while still looking believable, and sometimes you don't want to do that. Sometimes you write RAP on the wall and call it a day.

This lone graffito -- it’s not even enough to be called graffiti; it’s a single graffito -- is a monument to fucking around at work. It's a shrine to carelessness. Within three more episodes, The Gifted would be done forever, but it knew it was over in season two, episode thirteen, and it didn't give a shit.