“You have no idea, do you…? About your father, your real father. You must have heard stories…. He was a member of the Hellfire Club. More than a member; a king.”

With words such as Esme Frost’s above, Fox’s The Gifted, on multiple occasions during its freshman run, alluded to The Brotherhood’s founder as being Lorna’s father — yet always without actually uttering the M-word. Magneto.

And the reasons for that are two-fold.

“Not to be coy, but we don’t want to stumble into movie territory,” The Gifted showrunner Matt Nix recently explained to TVLine, confirming that which many a fanboy surely surmised — TV’s Marvel mutant drama tiptoes carefully around that which might be explored in feature films. (Hence, the X-Men themselves are “gone” in The Gifted‘s world.)

“That said,” Nix allowed, “canonically, Polaris’ father is Polaris’ father.”

How much she chooses to accept that is another story. In confrontations like the one with Esme above, Lorna (played by Emma Dumont) would contend that her father was no “terrorist” leader but a pilot who died in a plane crash. But she was, likely by choice, referring to the man her mother married, as opposed to the mutant who sired a daughter with similar abilities.

“One thing that we do use from the comics, that is legitimately part of the lore of Polaris, is that she doesn’t always know that Magneto is her father,” Nix said. “And she has very mixed feelings about Magneto being her father, so we’ve taken what is kind of a necessity, in terms of us needing to stay out of the way of the movies, and turned it into a virtue in our eyes.” Meaning, “It’s now a feature of the characters that they don’t really want to talk about — [that Lorna’s father is] the leader of the mutant group that made mutants look horrible and kind of put them in the position that they’re in now.”

Plus, there’s a certain fun in the mighty Magneto being The Gifted‘s version of He Who Must Not Be Named. Said Nix, “There’s a little Voldemort to it, if that makes sense!”

Want more scoop on The Gifted, or for any other show? Email InsideLine@tvline.com and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line.