Powers: "Aha Shake Heartbreak" Review

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April 14, 2015

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow…

Powers ticked back up this week with “Aha Shake Heartbreak,” as Krispin’s crusade and an ill-fated publicity stunt collided at the end to bring the angry young lad even more tragedy.

So far, on this series, the stories that have piqued my interest the most involve Retro Girl, her warm chats with Walker, and Zora. Overall, I like how the themes of celebrity and superpowers have combined, and that – like in our own current society – someone can skip to the head of the line and get famous by accident. Or, at least, by with very little effort. To be fair to Zora though, she did enter The Shaft with the intent of stopping Wolfe. She just didn’t realize that her powers were mostly worthless (not that we couldn’t, simply by the way they look).

So you sort of feel for her, on an “unassuming hero who might motivate other girls” level. And one’s sympathies grow when you see her PR team try to catch her off guard with a “villain” to fight and defeat. An idea that sounded terrible the moment it left her lawyer’s lips. Yes, we knew this was all headed toward something awful, but that type of knowledge creates suspense.

For some reason, the raptor-clawed villain who was meant to take a dive dropped some sway before the big gig. Not sure why he felt he need to amp up his powers for a make-beleive performance, but the end result was that Krispin’s own mom got gutted. Because the dude was expecting Zora to actually be powerful enough to slow him down. And also because Candace ran out on stage to tend to Krispin. So there was a nice, tragic convergence there at the end. Made even more complicated by the fact that Retro Girl walked out on everything after she learned about the ruse.

No, I didn’t care that Candace died. I don’t have any emotional attachment to the characters on this show (one of the series’ big issues), but I am curious to see what comes out of this, Krispin-wise. We’re still assuming he killed Jumpstriker, but we don’t know that for sure. It’d be super weird for him to already be a murderer before his mom got killed by a power. Plus, when he got up on stage at the benefit show, he only wanted to speak to people. Not the type of protest that usually follows slicing someone’s throat in an alleyway.

The rest of the episode involved Calista getting caught (finally!) and thrown in a drainer, along with some cursory information about sway, Wolfe, and Royalle. Just as we might have assumed, Wolfe is now connected to everyone who’s ever taken sway and once the drainer malfunctions, he’ll become uber-dangerous. The thinnest parts of this show involve Royalle’s motivations – which have been all over the map.

And that’s just in the present. I’m not even including the guy Royalle’s been in the flashbacks (two different guys in two different scenes) and the person he was 10 years ago when he freed Wolfe. It seems like there are more versions of Royalle out there then there are of Simons. So now, after wanting to use Wolfe to amplify everyone powers (still not sure why he needed to do that), he wants to kill Wolfe.