I totally dislike the X-Men outcasts of society angle. It's been done to death. My biggest complaints are that the writing in general has made the show almost unwatchable. The dialog is suffering in a big way. The effects have gone down hill, the acting is getting worse and the whole thing is just completely preposterous. The characters have become hyper-artificial to the point where they're simply parodies.

They've gone down the soap-opera slope they've been previously been skirting.

Where someone gets a particular power is somewhat irrelevant when the whole story line and characters have been turned into a joke. Characters have been completely undeveloped such that their attitudes, personalities, actions (what makes them that character) have become totally malleable and interchangeable.

The franchise has no direction left and it's painfully obvious. If they're trying to emulate everything that made the X-Men movies bad, they've achieved what they were after. As far as making compelling TV, I'm tempted to start a petition to get the show cancelled. It doesn't have any legs left to stand on and it's painfully obvious no one working on the show cares at all about what promise they had in season 1.

The story unfolds rigidly with awkward actions of convenience forming the only workable path - like a really crappy video game. That probably explains how Parkman got his new power. It was just needed to advance the latest plot. Never mind that he could have used his old power umpteen times to change the direction of every conflict scene he's been in.