FOX
At New York Comic Con last week, Marvel showcased a new Fox TV series that features the manic-depressive superhero Polaris, who has superpowers in addition to bipolar disorder.
Polaris is part of the X-Men universe, even though she’s not one of the main characters. However, she plays a significant role on the new Fox television show The Gifted, which began airing a couple weeks ago and is scheduled for a 10-episode run.
Bipolar can be a gift, a curse, or both, as I explored in a recent blog post.
The Gifted focuses on a family headed by Reed Strucker (played by Stephen Moyer of True Blood) and Kate Strucker (played by Amy Acker of Alias) who discover their teenage children have mutant abilities. Fearing his children will be rounded up by the government, Reed enlists the help of an underground network of superpowered mutants — Blink (Jamie Chung), Thunderbird (Blair Redford), and Polaris (Emma DuMont) — to assist his kids in developing their powers.
Polaris — like her biological father Magneto — controls magnetism. She is instantly recognizable because of her green hair.
Sci-fi is notoriously ahead of the curve, imagining worlds that are farther advanced or farther in decay than the one we live in today.
In 1962, JG Ballard’s The Drowned World imagined a planet with rising sea levels, where the polar ice caps have melted due to solar radiation. Spider Man vs. The Prodigy tackled the importance of sex education way back in 1976.
And then there’s the 2005 documentary How William Shatner Changed The World, which outlines technological advances in the real world that were inspired by Star Trek.
Polaris first emerged in an X-Men comic in 1968, two years before Lithium, the first drug to treat bipolar disorder — then called manic depression — was introduced in the US.
Gifted actress Emma Dumont — who plays Polaris — said at a Comic Con panel that Polaris’ bipolar is “untreated, she’s unmedicated… You will see her have very, very high highs of manic behavior and very low lows of depression, of crippling depression.”
The Gifted is directed by Brian Singer, who has made six X-Men films in addition to old-school classic The Usual Suspects and the more recent Superman Returns.
The Gifted wants to depict Polaris’ mental health and trauma with sensitivity. “Something we’re treating respectfully is she’s not just ‘the crazy girl,’” Dumont said. “Through her history, a lot of people have [called her] the crazy girlfriend. We’re showing her the respect that I think she deserves and take her seriously.”
The Gifted airs Mondays at 9PM (ET) on Fox.
