I am a fan of both Toni Collette and John Leguizamo so starting to view this series was something of a "no brainer". Unfortunately, the script seems to have been an actual "no brainer" at times. Let me say that I have not read the book so I may be too harsh on the script writers who are currently on strike, a strike which I support on principle. I just hope that the downtime of the strike allows the writers to reflect on their silly, lazy and cheap plotting.
It isn't all bad. I find the basic premise that women the world over awake one day with the ability to electrify the world out of their own bodies is brilliant. Seeing it play out in the lives of a diverse group of people is generally handled well. Unfortunately, the script writers (the author?) are inclined to be very thoughtless at times.
Is there any American actor who does smarmy as naturally as Josh Charles? I'm not sure that there is. His Daniel Dandon is kind of the love child of Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz but he's just unmitigatedly awful. There's no depth to his obnoxious straw man. Charles is a much better actor than that. I'll return to him in a minute.
Toni Collette is not an actress to be denied, thus her Margot Cleary-Lopez, while set up to be the good angel to Josh Charles' bad, can play more complexity as thoughts cross her face than the script gives her.
In a story of women achieving extraordinary power in a world heretofore ruled by men, Toheeb Jimoh's Tunde Ojo is a shining light in the series. He is the guide for old, ossified, cis gendered men like me through this new world of women with The Power. He fills that role exceptionally well, embodying the confusion of men caught up in this sea change.
Zrinka Cvitesic' Tatiana Moskalev is perfectly steely. Above all, she is the character I would least like to meet in person. We get a scene with her mother that is colder than a Greenland January before global warming. Yet, the subsequent scene of the romp with her hairdresser is fraught with the certainty that things will not end well for that other poor girl. Also, her ascension to leader following the "untimely" and well-deserved death of her husband the "president" is unexplained, simply taken for granted and more than a little bizarre in a culture that treats women like pinky rings. We needed a scene explaining why General Miron doesn't inherit the top office and Tatiana as well. We do get the cold, steely Tatiana a little later, dealing with potential rivals to her power with the help of her rebellious sister. I don't know about you but I am already worried for her sister.
The greatest complexity of motives and actions falls to Halle Bush's Allie/Eve. Eve becomes a cult leader whose first friend, in the community where she finds shelter, becomes her conscience and fiercest opponent. It remains for future episodes to show us whether Eve surrenders to her conscience or to the rather questionable "voice of god" in her head.
The Roxy Monke story line is very important but is also mostly a total set up. Roxy is a thug in her father's mold and the first of the major characters to intersect with another major character. Her story line is still in development and. Consequently, the hardest of which to speak intelligently.
So having run down some of the major characters and their plot lines, I will return to the biggest mess the writers (author?) have made, that of Toni Collette's Margot.
Margot's got a complex family which is getting more complex with each episode. She has a very public profile as the mayor of a large city who decides to run for an open senate seat against the governor of her state, Josh Charles' Daniel Dandon. This brings her to the notice of the story's stand-in for Q-Anon/Fox News, Urbandox, and brings her upset, wounded and insecure son to the notice to that wheedling seducer to the darkest side of the story's politics. This seduction of Margot's son, Matty, is at best problematic but is also amazingly well handled by the writers. The personification of evil is rightly called "the Father of Lies". Matty feels that his mother has abandoned him for her career and that his father, John Leguisamo's Rob, isn't "man enough" to protect him. He's ripe for the picking by a male chauvinist and fascist seeker of low hanging fruit, his surrogate Father of Lies.
In contrast to the well written seduction of Matty, we are given a season ending cliffhanger that insults the audience's intelligence and undermines Margot's character. A couple of episodes before the season finale we see Margot privately endure literal torture orchestrated and observed by Daniel Dandon. She passes without a flaw, yet when confronted in public by Dandon with a fact that her chief of staff arranged without Margot's knowledge and concerning her family only peripherally, she cannot contain herself and makes Dandon's case for him. When, as a boy, I watched television and movies with my movie buff mother, she would view some melodramatic ending only to dismiss it with the comment, "Ain't that DRA-MAT-ic." The ending of The Power's 1st Season certainly was DRA-MAT-ic, but it was utterly inconsistent with Margot's character.
I shall probably be back for the 2nd Season of The Power but my "willing suspension of disbelief" has been irrevocably made unwilling by the cheapest of cheap shots. I'm still a Toni Collette fan which is why I'm angry with the writers and/or author for requiring her to play a scene that is antithetical to the Margot she's already created.
