This is unprecedented in the history of Chosen Ones, at least as far as I know. They actually put it to a vote. Democracy in action. Is this guy the magical savior whose dead dad holds the key to everything creamy and delicious? And guess how the Tomorrow People voted.
Spoilers ahead...
That's right. They voted almost unanimously to stop choosing this particular Chosen One. Imagine if Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker faced an election to see if he was still going to be the chosen savior, and lost? Or Buffy? Ha.
As if to underscore the gravity of this decision, Stephen spends the rest of the episode getting shot on purpose, and then laying in bed while other characters actually do stuff. He's been demoted from protagonist to pawn.
Of course, the aforementioned election isn't framed as being about "do we accept Stephen Jameson as our chosen savior?" That's just the main issue at hand. It's actually a leadership election, in which John faces a challenge to his authority, and Cara is chosen as the candidate to replace him.
John has just confessed to all the Tomorrow People that he actually killed Stephen's father, the legendary mutant leader Professor X Roger Price, first by blowing up his car and then by shooting him at point-blank range and finally by feeding his body into a wood-chipper and then shooting all the pieces out of a cannon. But John believes that Roger Price may still be alive!
Because Stephen, the Chosen One, has been able to visit his father in near-death experiences, by visiting Limbo, the dimension between life and death where his father escaped to. And John wants to put all the Tomorrow People's resources into Stephen's quest to contact his father's Force Ghost and reunite him with his body. (This week, Stephen has a lead based on a dead Ultra employee named Simon Plame, which basically goes nowhere.)
Cara, meanwhile, says that the dead guy is dead, and they should concentrate on fighting the people who are trying to kill them instead of putting all their hopes into Stephen's messianic visions. Not to mention that Stephen can be useful to them as a double agent, since he still works for the most gullible secret organization in the universe.
So they put it to a vote, using telekinesis and candles, in the time-honored tradition of democracy. And John's leadership is ended — wait for it — like a candle in the telekinetic wind.
Cara immediately wants to rescue a mutant who's escaped from the secret mutant prison, where her kind is experimented on, and then find the location of that prison and attack it. This is not a terrible plan, although the show wants us to think she's being rash and impulsive again. Her raid goes sort of okay — they got one girl out, and she's very adorable — but more importantly they now know where the secret mutant prison is, and it's unlikely to be moved any time soon because mutant prisons are expensive to build.
Cara does show a lapse in leadership, when she almost turns over Jedikiah's girlfriend Morgan to Jedikiah's evil organization Ultra, just to show that Cara can't be fucked with. But John talks her out of that, and shows why he's a perfectly good second in command.
Oh, and this episode introduces a new mutant (or maybe he just hasn't been featured in the past) named Mike (Shamier Anderson). Who is the main person challenging John's leadership, and putting Cara up as his replacement. I half expected Mike to die in this episode, since he's a random African American mutant we've never seen before, whose defining characteristic is that he doesn't understand how special Stephen is. Hopefully Mike isn't being groomed to recognize Stephen's wonderfulness just in time to sacrifice his life for Stephen.
In any case, it's refreshing to see people questioning the whole "Chosen One" schtick, even without directly calling it out at all. And meanwhile, Stephen gets to have a bit more of a home life — his mom is dating a new guy whose mind can't be read (dun dun dunnn) and Stephen suddenly has a brother again. But no sign of Astrid, which means this episode gets a major demerit.
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Tomorrow People held a vote about whether Stephen is the chosen one