Warning: SPOILERS below for The Gifted!

The Gifted has all the necessary elements and X-factors to be great but it hasn't fulfilled its potential. FOX's X-Men-without-the-X-Men series about mutants trying to survive in a world that hates and fears them premiered in October to decent ratings but it has steadily lost viewers each week with its December 11th fall finale episode falling to series lows. Many fans who sampled The Gifted thanks to the lofty promise of an X-Men TV series and the exciting pilot directed by Bryan Singer have scattered ever since. Unfortunately, this is because despite the series' many gifts, The Gifted has proven to be boring.

Even without the name brand X-Men characters like Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, and Professor X, The Gifted started off well. Series creator Matt Nix leaned on many of the characters fans met in the apocalyptic future scenes of X-Men: Days of Future Past like Blink, Thunderbird, and Eclipse (the latter two were Warpath and Sunspot in the film, but The Gifted's mutants exhibit similar powers). The Gifted introduced an effective hook: a 'normal' nuclear family, the Struckers, who discover their children are mutants, which forces them to go on the run and join the Mutant Underground. The Gifted ably dropped fans into its universe where mutants are societal pariahs hunted and imprisoned by the government's anti-mutant Sentinel Services - therefore, all of the familiar X-Men themes are in place. What's more, the backstory of what happened to the X-Men has been teased via intriguing dollops of info throughout season 1.

Related: Will The X-Men TV Shows Actually Introduce The X-Men?

The series also has a tremendous cast, with Jaime Chung's sarcastic Blink, Emma Dumont's dangerous Polaris (the daughter of Magneto), and Blair Redford's proud and rock-solid Thunderbird as standouts among the heroic mutants. When the mutants use their powers, like the instance where Polaris and her beau Eclipse, played by Sean Teale, created an Aurora Borealis, the results are thrilling. Amy Acker and Stephen Moyer as Caitlin and Reed Strucker anchor the series as the human POVs for the audience plunged into this unsettling mutant world. Coby Bell's Jace Turner, the agent in charge of Sentinel Services, is a complex and driven villain. In the rare moments Turner unleashes Sentinel robots on the mutants, the suspense is genuinely chilling.

With this intriguing universe populated by compelling characters set up so well, what went wrong with The Gifted and why have audiences found it so lacking to the point where many have quit the series?

A Cycle of Repetition

The Gifted dragged its heels instead of letting loose. The early episodes saw young mutants Lauren (Natalie Alyn Lind) and Andy Strucker (Percy Hynes White) indoctrinated into the Mutant Underground, which was focused on freeing Polaris from imprisonment by Sentinel Services. The Mutant Underground eventually rescued Polaris and brought her back to the safety of their headquarters, an abandoned bank in Atlanta. Since then, while there has been a pleasing exploration of the characters and their backstories, instead of escalating the superhero action, the series has set a tedious pace and has largely been a prolonged game of hide and seek, with Sentinel Services trying to locate the mutants' refuge to no avail and the mutants content to evade detection.

Several excursions, such as the Struckers trying to get help from Caitlin's brother Daniel or Blink leaving the Underground because of a breach of trust and going to search for her foster family, ended in the same way: a scramble to get back to the Mutant Underground headquarters as Sentinel Services give chase and fail to catch them. Sentinel Services, which has an unlimited budget, personnel, and sinister mutant-hunting technology at their disposal, unavoidably look like buffoons as they can't find dozens of mutants hiding in Atlanta, nor can they hold onto a mutant whenever they do momentarily capture one. The mutants, meanwhile, don't come off as very heroic in these situations. Their central motivation tends to be finding a way to get back to that abandoned bank and hide from the big, bad humans when things get hot.

Meanwhile, a lot of The Gifted's issues also stem from one of the biggest problems with the show: the Mutant Underground itself.

Define The Mutant Underground

The Mutant Underground seems to be an amorphous organization without clearly defined goals. The gathering of mutants led by Thunderbird is one of numerous cells across the United States, and we've seen mutants from other cells uncovered by Sentinel Services absorbed into the Atlanta cell. This has provided The Gifted with an influx of interesting new mutants like the devious psychic Esme (Skyler Samuels), but it also creates numerous questions. The biggest being: What is the Underground's ultimate goal or do they even have one?

The political climate in The Gifted universe is stacked against mutants, but the Underground seems to be nothing more than a poorly funded and supplied temporary sanctuary. There seems to be no central leadership and no plan in place to fight back for mutants' rights in any meaningful way politically or socially. The mutants in the Underground are all refugees and fugitives from the law with no money or property to speak of. Most possess awesome and dangerous powers, and there is lip service paid to the mutants 'training' with Polaris, which are scenes where Polaris orders some mutants to briefly use their powers before the training session is routinely interrupted. But otherwise, the mutants in the underground seem to just wait around with nothing to do unless there's a crisis (often of their own making) to react to.

Related: The Gifted's Biggest Themes (So Far)

Meanwhile, the Underground isn't preparing for a war with humans, either a physical one or one fought politically. The Mutant Underground seems to have no plan at all to improve the lives of the mutants it takes in. Unlike how mutants are both educated and prepared to fight if necessary in Professor Xavier's school, the Mutant Underground isn't equipped to provide anything more than an emergency shelter for mutants to hide. The abandoned bank seems like a safe place for a mutant to turn to when Sentinel Services is on the hunt, but it's actually a dead end.

The Gifted needs to strongly define the Mutant Underground's goals, greater purpose, and how the organization plans to combat Sentinel Services and restore the civil rights of mutants. It should have been doing that all along. The X-Men fight for a world that hates and fears them. The Mutant Underground seems to fight when they have to and hide always, fearing the world that hates them.

Strucker Family Matters

The mystery of the Strucker family has been one of the best slow-burn reveals of the series. We've learned that Lauren and Andy are part of a family legacy of mutants tracing back to their great grandfather Andreas (Paul Cooper) and his twin sister Andrea (Caitlin Mehner) von Strucker. Collectively known as Fenris, the von Strucker twins were terrorists and two of the most powerful and dangerous mutants ever. Lauren and Andy possess similar abilities and villainous potential, which is why they're so prized by the devious Dr. Roderick Campbell (Garrett Dillahunt) and Trask Industries.

Related: The Gifted Should Bring Back Peter Dinklage as Bolivar Trask

As satisfying as this revelation was, getting there meant enduring a tedious series of episodes in the middle of the season where Caitlin and Reed attempted to keep their family 'normal' in the midst of the Mutant Underground, including subplots where Reed disapproved of a mutant boy who liked Lauren and Andy generally being surly and acting out. While Lauren and Andy are powerful mutants who ultimately belong in the Underground, the powerless elder Struckers stick out among the mutants. The series has labored to make Reed's knowledge of the law and Caitlin's medical abilities useful.

The Strucker parents seem unable to accept there's no going back to their old life but also aren't preparing themselves or their children for their new lives as mutant freedom fighters - if Lauren and Andy don't succumb to their potential for evil first. However, Lauren and Andy remain two of The Gifted's weakest characters until they are fleshed out beyond their stereotypical roles as angry, bratty teens who disobey their parents whenever it's convenient for the plot.

The fall finale of The Gifted provided a spark of delivering on the show's promise, with the tragic murder of Dreamer (Elena Satine) and the reveal of Esme as the Stepford Cuckoos, which is comic book fan service the series does very well. The final three episodes will hopefully turn The Gifted on its ear and make all of the dragging of its heels for most of the season worth it. However, the damage may already be done with so many fans having already decided The Gifted is non-essential viewing among the wealth of options available. A season 2 renewal hasn't been announced.

The Gifted should be the most exciting and dangerous superhero show on TV, serving as a cracked mirror into the political climate of our society in the real world as well as delivering thrilling superpowered action. But so far it has mostly settled for regurgitating trite plots about mutants hunted and hiding, with only fleeting moments hinting at the ballsy superhero series it could be. Mutants are dangerous, frightening, sexy, tragic, and awe-inspiring. There's no excuse for a series with so many gifts to be boring.

NEXT: MARVEL EASTER EGGS AND REFERENCES IN THE GIFTED

The Gifted's final 3 episodes of season 1 air Mondays @ 9pm ET on FOX.