‘Powerless’ has made its’ debut. Does it work?
Okay, that is a loaded question. Shows can get aired
regardless of whether or not they work, just look at AoS: not only its episode
for this week, (‘Hot Potato Soup’), contained a bunch of Russian clichés for
villains, (yes, and the Donald seems to be a fan of Russia for the moment,
cringe!), but it also had some tall and skinny secondary agent that played no
particular role at all; maybe he was supposed to be a love interest for the
girl Koenig, but somehow it just didn’t happen – one of AoS’ problems is a bad
delivery of what are otherwise good ideas. ‘Powerless’ seems to have something
similar too.
No, seriously – the idea is very good: the lives of
background civilian characters who have to endure the fallout between the
various superheroes and villains; the show, in particular, focuses on a company
that invents, (or tries to), ways to make the civilians’ lives more bearable.
Okay. There are worse ideas in existence, but the way that the S1 premiere of
the series has done it? Not so good.
The first half of the episode has characters interact
in humorous ways that border on outright obnoxious and unbearable; it is a fine
line between that and humor, and I am unsure where ‘Powerless’ had landed. In
the other half, the humor had abated, and the episode had some very good
moments, especially the discussion between Emily and Jackie…where the humor was
at its’ lowest. Somehow, at least in this episode, the sitcom format of the
show did not really work. You can have a sitcom show about an inventing
company, (run by Bruce Wayne’s cousin, no less, who just wants to return to
Gotham City, ha-ha), set in the DCEU, but somehow, tonight, it didn’t work. The
show was simply – uninspiring, uninviting, and not just because the villain of
the episode, (Jack-o-Lantern or someone like that) seemed to be a cliché, (and
even AoS was able to avoid clichés in most of its episodes), while the
superhero, (Crimson Fox?), was not depicted very well either. AoS did its’ best
to grab the audience’s attention from the start; so did ‘The Librarians’, and
they are much more comic than AoS is, (for the obvious reasons).
…Yes, ‘The Librarians’ have actually scaled down the
humor in S3, but the thing is that their humor was never as lowbrow as ‘Powerless’
seems to be. (There was an off-kilter remark regarding sex with robots, for
example. Yeah, ha-ha). In addition, ‘The Librarians’ are an adventure show, not
unlike AoS, or any of the ‘Arrowverse’ shows, it’s just that its’ heroes are
unconventional, and battle their foes in unconventional ways. ‘Powerless’, on
the other hand, is a sitcom; it doesn’t have any action, and relies mostly on
humor to get from point A to point B – and in the first episode, it seems to be
functioning the best when its’ humor is low, rather than high. Hah.
So. The newest component of DCEU is off to a rocky
start, and there are rumors that DCEU movies are not doing so good either.
(They are not). Hopefully, ‘Powerless’ won’t be the first sign of DCEU’s end.
On this pessimistic note, see you later.
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