Spoilers

As teen girls grapple with their new abilities, parents and political leaders try to make sense of a sudden rash of fires, power outages, blown electrical grids and mysterious burn marks.

The Power continues to impress. Episodes 2 and 3, directed by Ulga Hauksdóttir are part of the same single mini-arc. After the initial premise was outlined in the first episode, this pair of episodes lay out the emergence of the Power among teenage girls and how, for the most part, no one is really sure what is happening but are determined to have opinions.

The narrative follows those same characters from the first episode, each in their own locations, as they encounter, explore and deal with the consequences of the Power. For most they’re not even sure if it’s real because they have no words for it, no language and no framework into which to fit it.

The show does a fantastic job of managing that road to discovery – because humans are terrible at believing in things they can’t imagine. We would rather call something impossible than accept it when the consequences are that we need to entirely revise our belief in the way the world works.

The Power also captures the dynamics of power (with a small p) as it’s played out, not simply between men and women but in all the contexts in which it’s telling this story.

I’m a little unconvinced by Tunde’s (played by Toheeb Jimoh) world as it’s drawn but I think most Western audiences will find it authentic enough that its story is acceptable for what it’s trying to do. I would like to have seen more politics and power in Tunde’s Nigerian context, to really exemplify how different and how similar his world is to that of Mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette).

What I think the show is really sensitive to in all the best ways is how the asymmetries of power between men and women are additionally complicated by social expectations, structures and explicit misogyny. They are there as micro-aggressions, explicit discrimination and all the rest – whether it’s tone policing, permissiveness for men vs women or whatever.

There’s a great scene that feels entirely innocuous but captures this perfectly. Margot’s empowered daughter Jos has an encounter with her brother, Matt, being entirely entitled (as is so often the way between siblings) but the situation played out how young men of power believe the rest of the world should bend to their will. When she resists the consequences are dire but at the same time, it is very much entirely his fault, but no one looks to him and his behaviour as if it needs examining.

Then, when it slowly becomes clear how and why the Power has arisen in young women, the show carefully portrays powerful men and their responses, from calling it a hoax, to making death threats, to even rounding up teenage girls and handcuffing them for nothing more than the fear it produces in the adults around them.

And all of it feels entirely believable.

A story like this could be on the nose, and would have every right to be, yet the showrunners and Alderman have managed to create something that portrays everyone in their own light. Margot’s husband Rob Lopez is ‘one of the good ones’ even as Roxy Monke, played with incandescent fire by Ria Zmitrowicz, is clearly going to create the kind of trouble no one wants. In other words it’s nuanced and not seeking to blame or to preach but rather it’s telling a classic SF story of ‘what if’.

Verdict: I’m loving this show and would love there to be a greater commitment from studios to these kinds of new stories that don’t have endless serialisation written into their bones nor rely on older IP, instead being completely original.

9 new organs out of 10

Stewart Hotston