Powers - 'Devil in a Garbage Bag' and 'Paint it Black'

Who's afraid of the big, bad Wolfe? Everybody, apparently.

For the most part Powers has been a cop show with hints at superpowers, but with 'Devil in a Garbage Bag' things get a little more epic.

Wolfe asks Johnny Royalle to kill him, which Johnny fails to do, instead fleeing with the intent of continuing to flee. He explains to Simons, his self-multiplying right hand man and lover (I literally only realised this episode that he isn't Somebody Simons, but rather Simons plural) and Calista that Wolfe was able to break free because he has been harvesting Wolfe's brain to make Sway, and by doing so hyperstimulating Wolfe's regenerative powers. He's all for running, until Calista persuades him to man up and do what his teacher has asked him to do three times.

"Tall and tan and young and lovely..."

Meanwhile, Powers Division assembles at the containment facility, the Shaft, to deal with Wolfe's escape. Despite Walker's warning, a tac team goes in and gets eaten, because it turns out that's what Wolfe does. He eats people, and by doing so grows stronger. This is especially so if he eats another Power, so Walker advises against sending in other Powers to contain him. Instead, the plan is to sweep in pairs and use sustained, heavy fire to drive him back to his cell, where Triphammer has set up the Drainer.

So, in they go, but Wolfe locates the power lines and cuts them, putting the Shaft into lockdown. As Wolfe begins to take out the cops, Walker tries to gain an edge by taking Sway himself, causing him to go into some sort of seizure. He recovers enough to lock Deena in a cell for her own safety, then confronts Wolfe, which fires off some sort of mental rapport between the two of them, manifesting as glowing red eyes and a shared hallucination of a field under a red sky.

"You are walking through a red forest and the grass is tall. It's just rained.
Most of the blood has washed away."

As we move into 'Paint it Black', Walker tries to reason with Wolfe, as the hallucinations progress, making it clear that this is a memory of Wolfe's first kill on which Walker is intruding. At the same time, we get a lot of flashbacks to the early days, with Wolfe as an effortlessly charismatic philosopher-guru with his crowd of disciples, and Walker torn between Wolfe's proposition that there are no heroes and his desire to be one.

Calista spends time with a young man who thinks that Powers are intrinsically harmful, a relationship that is remarkably amicable given her admiration for the thing he despises. Johnny returns to the Shaft, but blinking into Wolfe's cell is caught in the drainer and trapped.

Pixels.

Wolfe tells Walker that there is nothing left of his powers, all digested and excreted long ago, but Walker manages to draw something out of his old teacher before Triphammer intervenes, battling Wolfe until he loses his cybernetic arm. The young Power Zora then drops in and manages to slow Wolfe down, then Retro Girl shows up, but Zora's inexperience lets Wolfe overpower them both. Walker wrestles with Wolfe, both in the Shaft and in the flashback, and apparently manages to draw back his powers, but once he gets Wolfe into his cell and into the drainer, those powers desert him, allowing Johnny to escape undetected. In the unanimous confusion, Zora takes credit for the capture by dint of being the first one conscious.

The flashback concludes with Walker and Johnny finding Wolfe in the slaughtered remains of a crowd of Powers Kids. He begs them to kill him, but Walker chooses to take him in and claim to have stopped him, jumpstarting his career just as Zora is jumpstarting hers. Finally, we see Retro Girl open up to Walker about her grief at failing to save the victims of a hurricane, a human moment which strips the formerly unlovable character of her armour and makes us feel for her.

"You've got red on you."

By upping the action, Powers starts to show its limits, with the flight in particular looking more like something you'd expect in a Peter Pan stage production. The dramatic content is more effective, with Wolfe a surprisingly effective villain considering he's a half-naked Eddie Izzard, alternating between pitiful confusion, easy charisma and animalistic rage.

"I used to have Wolfe nightmares," Calista confesses to her new squeeze, Krispin. "Everybody's had a Wolfe nightmare," he assures her, and I can see why.