What’s Better? The Gifted vs The Gifted: Graduation
Tags: Drama, Fiction, Fantasy, Thailand, Thegifted

Not just one drama review this time, but literally binge watching 2 season of this drama in 2 days and wanna make a comparison what’s happening in the 1st season and the sequel. What’s the differences? Which one is better?

Here’s a glimpse of story what is The Gifted series about. We were introduced with school that had “Gifted Program” in it. Gifted Program is a special class for few ‘special students’ that chosen by school headmaster. In 1st season there are 12 students that chosen to get into “Gifted Program”, include Pang, 10th-grade student from the lowest ranking class. Little did they know, this program was designed to awaken their ‘potentials’ that will evolve to some kind of special powers. After discover and develop their ‘potentials’, they found out that this special power come with troubles as well. Besides that, Pang and his friends realized that there are school secret that they need to revealed and that’s related to them, The Gifted.

The Gifted stories are more focus to the introduction of what is “The Gifted” itself. It starts with a school that classify their students based on their grade and the group who will get the best facility and advantages are the one who succeed get into “Gifted Program”. In every episode, they will focus on one character that shows us what is their potential and what problem they’ll get after develop their power. With that, we really get to know well every character and every character have their important roles because it’s explained in every episode. So the story will not just focus on our first lead, Pang but every one of them will get their own story. That’s what I like about this series. It’s so fun to see their potentials also what side effect that they got because of the potentials , how to handle it, and what’s the use of their power for the big plot in this series. With focus on every character also make us the viewer not just feel close to the main lead, but we get closer too to 10 of them as a character and we could see their character developments are getting better after their own story are revealed. So the screen time distribution for every character are really fair. In the first 3 episode the story we’ll see a lot of Pang, Ohm, and Namtarn since these three are hanging out a lot together and the story focus on Ohm and Namtarn potentials, after that the next 3 episodes the focus changed to another character like Punn, Claire, and Korn potentials since these three are related to each other, and the focus will change again when we’ll reach core of the story. The most important thing in this season we’ll get is what’s the relationship between the school and gifted program and what’s the secret they hide for many years related to The Gifted and how The Gifted are formed.

Between this two, I like The Gifted more for the way they carrying out the story. They really did a good job arranging the plot and it’s indeed matched with the title that they choose. They really put on detail to every story not just talking about the potentials that the character have, but we get their backstory, and I like how they made this potentials with flaws. It make the story become more realistic because when we have a superpower of course it means we use our capability to max and everything in excess is not good. But they didn’t put the story end just like that, instead they also give us what’s the solution or how they overcome this problem and they can wrap it well. But still you can’t just watch only The Gifted alone. This will make you need to watch the next season, The Gifted: Graduation. It’s not a choice, it’s a must. Why? Because in The Gifted we’ll get a cliffhanger ending. Many questions unanswered in this season.

The most visible difference we can see between The Gifted va The Gifted: Graduation is the character. There are good and bad news. For the good news, of course there are few new characters will be found in The Gifted: Graduation. In general, the students join ‘Gifted Program’ will increase a lot, but the story will focus to three students, Time, Third, and Grace. Like I said that the focus story is changing in this season, so they didn’t get one episode each for introducing their potentials like the other kids in previous season. But without that, we still can see how their potentials come up and what’s the use. A little spoiler, we will not get to know Grace potentials until like last 3 episodes of the season. We just keep wondering and asking what’s actually Grace super power? Just keep watching.

Another good news is all the old cast still playing their character in the first season, so the viewers still can feel the character that build up in The Gifted really well. But the bad news, there is one character who missing in The Gifted: Graduation. Who? Namtarn. In a real case, the cast who played Namtarn is studying in New Zealand so she can’t go back to Thailand on time because of the pandemic. However, the production team can pull through their lost to Namtarn character well into the story. *She’s back in the last episode as a cameo*.

I was hardcore fans of Namtarn and Pang relationship in The Gifted and so sad when knew that Namtarn wasn’t came back for The Gifted: Graduation. It means I need to let this feeling go~ their relationship didn’t even start yet it can’t be developed to the next level huhu. But still the team they’re doing well despite Namtarn departure instead we got so much bromance scene from Pang and Wave. Yes them! It’s enticing consider that Pang and Wave start with a bad relationship in The Gifted and turned out Wave become the most loyal best friend throughout The Gifted: Graduation and always become the last one that staying with Pang.

For The Gifted: Graduation, the story didn’t focus on what kind of potentials that they have anymore because it considered they already develop their current potentials. We could see their upgraded potentials in here but we don’t need to see how they develop it. But I think, in this season we didn’t see much they using their potentials. We could see it in the beginning though. I see it that focus on this season was story about ‘The Gifted’ existences. Focus on their feelings, where are the positions to achieving their goals. Even we don’t get scenes when ‘The Gifted’ students sit in the class, get their lesson from Mr. Pom like before.

Like I said, we could see they using their potentials to work together in the beginning of this season, so I can still the feeling of watching The Gifted S1 when they’re doing the mission and using their potentials until we introduced to the new students of The Gifted program. But from the middle of the series, they didn’t talk too much about their potentials anymore because this series have so much problem that need to be solved. We couldn’t see their friendship relationship as much as in The Gifted S1 and The Gifted: Graduation indeed want their audiences strolling around this series by giving too much plot twist in it. Although I think every season have their own strength, but I enjoyed more watching The Gifted because the story more clear and simple. Not circling around but still give us a deep impression. While watching The Gifted: Graduation I feel betrayed over and over until I feel I don’t know how this story will reach what stage till the truth revealed. But I still like both the series just a little confused. But I can assure you that if you decided to watch The Gifted, absolutely it’s impossible not to continue The Gifted: Graduation because in this series everything will be explained. As we know, there are drama that because the first season had nice feedback from audiences, so they starting to make another multiple season just because the audiences like the first season. Thankfully it didn’t happen in The Gifted, because in the end everything will be explained even all the questions in The Gifted will be answered.

So, the plot is;

The Gifted; is about character development for the story

The Gifted: Graduation; about revelation and mind blowing plot twist in every episode.

and my conclusion;

I could say that The Gifted is like the introduction and the main story, while The Gifted: Graduation is like the root and the revelation of the story.

It’s really worth watching if you like a kind of genre; fantasy, mystery, plot twist and movie like Harry Potter or X-Men. Overall for both drama, I give 4,5 stars out of 5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨