Choices - Bitten and Powers

Cool, hot werewolf fascists.

Bitten is a series based on part of the 'Women of the Otherworld' novel franchise, which tells the story of the only female werewolf and all the ways in which her werewolf family of killer, fascist casualwear models exempt her from the draconian werewolf law that they enforce, without ever really talking about it. It's been sitting on the box for a while, but despite its promise of a strong, female lead and all, it's really just about another superspecialsnowflake who just wants a normal life, by which I mean that she wants to get away from the communal pack house, a massive, richly appointed mansion in upstate New York, and her super-hot genius tenured ex-fiance to live with her superhot new fiance in his vast loft in Toronto and effortlessly sliding into celebrity photographer status. I would have far more sympathy for this character if she were choosing an actual ordinary life, and this - plus still not having enough hours in the week - is basically why I'm dropping it. That and, seriously, the 'noble pack' are a bunch of idiot fascists, enforcing a law that makes no sense in a modern world and making a crushing rod for their own backs because of it.

Produced by Playstation. For reals.

Powers, on the other hand, is a super low-budget superhero show, set in a world in which superpowers are common, and Powers are celebrities with agents and social media presences. It's not an uninteresting setup, and Eddie Izzard makes a really creepy master villain, but it's hampered hard by its budget whenever it actually wants to use superpowers. This might not be a problem, but none of the characters are really likeable enough, nor the story compelling enough, to get past that. So Powers is off the list as well.

Of course, that's like ten stored episodes, which is 1 or 2 percent of the box storage, but about seven hours of my life saved.

Powers - 'The Raconteur of the Funeral Circuit'

Consequences.

In a break from action TV tradition, this episode of Powers deals with consequences. It also makes it clear that incidents like Wolfe's prison break are rare, as the Powers Division holds a wake for the fallen and tempers flare.

Walker is caught between the taste of his old powers and his role as a mundane officer, while some of those who lost partners start to talk about using the drainer to torture Wolfe, or to wipe out the Powers altogether. Meanwhile, Pilgrim's dad, a vice captain, uses the occasion to press the flesh and tell his old stories, acting the life and soul of the funeral while glossing over the parts of his anecdotes where he disappeared large sums of money while his partners' bodies were cooling because of his mistakes. And then there's Hartley, the Iron Man of the setting, getting drunk while he muses on the limits of the drainer. There's Retro Girl, classy and appropriate, and Zora, strictly there on her agent's advice.

Johnny tries to remove the Sway from one of the Simons, but another gives Calista a dose of Sway to unlock the powers she believes she has; whether from kindness or spite is unclear. Meanwhile, just outside the police station, Calista and Krispin - the weirdly preppy kid, who turns out to be the son of Zora's agent and Walker's deceased partner, so I did miss a bunch of stuff in episode 1 - tag the wall and film a car crash caused when a Power tries to stop them. Krispin's online anti-Powers buddy Kaotic Chick doctors the video to look like people were killed and uploads it, to Calista's anger.

Walker and Retro Girl pick Hartley off the floor of the Powers Division's drainer cage. Well into his cup, he tells them that something big is coming; something called Black Swan. Pilgrim breaks with her dad, and then Wolfe announces that he has repented, seeing his evil when his powers were taken, and wants to have them permanently removed.

'The Raconteur of the Funeral Circuit' plays to Powers' strengths, which is to say not showing much in the way of superpowers, but talking about their consequences.

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.

Powers - 'Mickey Rooney Cries No More'

Retro Girl (Michelle Forbes), Christian Walker (Sharlto Copley), Deena Pilgrim (Susan Heyward), Calista Secor (Olesya Rulin), Wolfe (Eddie Izzard) and Johnnie Royalle (Noah Taylor)

Walker and Pilgrim, kind of oblivious to their rather symbolic names, continue to search for Calista, the sole witness to the death of Olympia. As the case progresses, they learn of a link to a power-enhancing drug called Sway, and things come to a head in a clash for Calista's loyalty in Johnny Royalle's club in which Retro Girl and Walker both spectacularly lose their shit and thus the argument.

"No one escapes from Chorh-Gum Prison!"

Meanwhile, in supervillain jail, Iron Man expy Triphammer and the captain of the Powers Division are experimenting with a power-suppressor, but it tends to make people explode more than is entirely desirable. They persevere since the current best model is that being used on super-regenerative power-stealer Wolfe; performing an aggressive prefrontal lobotomy once a month in order to keep him from regaining control. In the long term, this method works out about as well as it deserves to, and we close on Wolfe Tai Lunging his restraints and eating his doctor.

Not just a dickhead.

Powers exists in the uneasy interface between
superhero and gritty crime fiction, and so far is holding its own. Supers range from wannabe kids to a-list celebrities and out and out villains. So far there is no Mr Fantastic or Superman to unbalance the whole order of the world, so the Powers just change the way certain things are done. Despite the insistence of some of the characters, however, there aren't many actual heroes on show. Everyone has an angle.

In fact, easily the best scene in the episode comes when Walker and Pilgrim confront a young celebrity power, Zora, over the death of a minor power who was using sway. She loses it when Pilgrim and her agent argue across her, and Walker has to talk her down. There's a lot of dickishness all around in Powers, and it's nice to see a moment of kindness and empathy; perhaps the most heroic action we've seen thus far.

Also, Eddie Izzard is eating people. How weird is that.

Powers - 'Like a Power'

Ah, the glamour of superpowers.

Full disclosure, I'm not hitting Powers, an adaptation of a Marvel Icon (the company's creator-owned line for keeping top writers in-house) comic series about a world where superpowers are just part of the status quo, at full speed. I missed the first episode, so I was sort of playing catch up through this one.

Charlie Walker is a detective with the Powers Division, a section of the LAPD dealing with superpowered crimes. Himself a former power, he is partnered with a rookie named Deena Pilgrim to investigate the murder of a superhero named Olympia, linking his death to a drug named Sway and a young woman named Calista Secor. Also involved are superpowered criminal Wolfe, who among other things stole Walker's powers, Walker's former partner Retro Girl, and dodgy teleporting power Johnny Royalle.

Powers is a grungy, street-level superpowers story, with noirish elements of constructed identity and mysterious pasts. Across these mean skies a man must fly who is not himself mean and all that. The characters are pretty much cyphers so far, but a lot of that is deliberate - we're kind of coming in in media res after all - and some is probably due to missing the pilot. The cast are pretty good, but the sense of the plot is as yet sketchy (again, that's partly the noir influence and partly missing the murder of Olympia, on which much of the current movement hangs, entirely.) It's got definite potential, anyway, and is better than the first original drama commissioned by the Playstation network necessarily deserves to expect.