Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Power’ On Prime Video, Where Teen Girls Get Some Electrifying Powers And The World Can’t Handle It

Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power examined a world where women became the more powerful gender because they gained the power to zap electrical bolts from their hands. A new adaptation takes that book’s many characters and tries to translate them to a TV series. Will the message come through all of the stories that the show follows?

THE POWER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A montage of scenes of various women around the world. “We never imagined it. A world built for us,” says a voice.

The Gist: “Every revolution begins with a spark,” the voice says, as one of the women in the montage, Seattle mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette) wipes away a tear as the two police officers approach behind her.

Six months earlier, Allie Montgomery (Halle Bush) is in a speech therapist’s office with her foster parents, who are concerned that she hasn’t spoken in a long time. Her foster parents are religious types, and when they go to church to hear about original sin, Allie feels a burning sensation near her collarbone and a voice (Adina Porter) telling her it’s all bullshit. She has the power, and she feels it; it comes out later, when she finally speaks and her foster father “punishes” her by taking off his pants. She puts her hands on his head and electrocutes him. The voice tells her to escape.

In London, Roxy Monke (Ria Zmitrowicz) is lamenting going to the wedding of her half-brother, being thrown by her demanding gangster father, Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan). She’s close to her mother, whom she lives with; Bernie impregnated her with Roxy then barely acknowledged her existence. During the wedding, she asks her dad for a job in his organization; he offers a low-level gig at a beach resort an hour away. She wants to work in his central business; she then gets pissed when he doesn’t even acknowledge her during his toast. As she’s downing some booze in a back alley, a shock ignites the bottle.

In Seattle, Jos Cleary-Lopez (Auliʻi Cravalho) is busy writing anonymous trolling comments on her mother’s Instagram page. She’s surprised when a spark comes through her hands to her keyboard. She also starts feeling the sensation under her collarbone, and when a classmate notices she’s making the metal detector short out, she tells Jos she knows what’s going on. That night, the two of them trade shocks on a light pole.

In Lagos, Nigeria, a young journalist named Tunde Ojo (Toheeb Jimoh), who blows off his journalist friend Ndudi (Heather Agyepong), who is on the trail of juju parties that are going on in town, to be with his current wealthy squeeze. But as they try to undress each other, Tunde’s date delivers a shock to his behind. After the girl leaves, he goes to the house where Ndudi said she’d be, and sees women dancing around, trading lightning bolts and lighting up light bulbs by just holding them.

Back in London, Roxy comes back from the wedding early, drunk and annoyed at her father. The house is broken into by attackers; she manages to shock one unconscious, but the other one knocks her out; she wakes up to see the unfathomable has happened.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Power sounds like a more serious take on “everyone suddenly has powers” that we saw earlier this year on the Hulu comedy Extraordinary.

Our Take: The Power was adapted by Raelle Tucker, Naomi Alderman and Sarah Quintrell from Alderman’s novel of the same name, and the first episode shows the beginnings of a sea change in world society. In Alderman’s version of the world, teen girls develop the power to shoot electricity out of their hands, and they quickly become the dominant gender on the planet because of that power.

But, holy hell, there’s a lot going on in that first episode. Not every story introduced is from the perspective of a teen gaining new powers. Normally, that would be refreshing because it keeps things from being repetitive. But here, without knowing where the story is going, switching the introductions from the girls affected to a male journalist feels a bit jarring. It gives the viewer whiplash, not giving them a chance to latch onto any one group of characters.

And, yes, the idea is that the things that men do to degrade women will finally come to an end because women will have the power. But those stories will likely swing in extremes, too. For instance, we get why Allie is escaping her awful situation, but what is leading Jos’s need to run, besides the fact that she’s a typical asshole teenager? Why in the world did thugs go after Roxy’s beautician mom?

It feels like, as the women of the planet learn to harness this new power they’ve acquired, and the power dynamics between the genders shifts, these stories might come together a bit. But will they? They’re scattered all over the planet. We haven’t even met some of the main characters yet, like Tatiana Moskalev (Zrinka Cvitešić), wife of the Moldovian president, or Jos’ parents, the aforementioned Margot and her father Rob (John Leguizamo). Josh Charles plays Washington state’s governor, Daniel Dandon; how do you bury Josh Charles in a show like this?

It feels like it’s going to be an exhausting show to watch; for every moment that will be interesting and show the real change in the power dynamics between men and women, there might be two others that will will feel like we’re barely in one story before we rocket to another. Sometimes shows like this are better off as anthologies, examining one story at a time. In this format, we’re not sure we’re going to be able to get into it because it’ll constantly be sending us from one place to another before we’re ready.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Listening to her inner voice, Allie goes to an aquarium, and through the glass, shares her new power with the eels.

Sleeper Star: We hope Cravalho has more to do than just be the aforementioned asshole teenager. The person who voiced Moana deserves a better role than that.

Most Pilot-y Line: After his date zaps his behind, Tunde searches for “‘electric shock hands’ + ‘butt zapping'”. We’re surprised that the results that he got weren’t all porn.

Our Call: SKIP IT. It feels like The Power is going to spend the first third of its 9-episode season setting everything up with its many characters before getting into the meat of the story. In fact, it may spend even more time than that. And that’s not the kind of show we’re willing to invest time into right now.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.