It’s a challenging time to be a woman in America, as a certain segment of the population seems all too eager to roll back the hard-fought gains of the women’s rights movement. Laws restricting bodily autonomy and reproductive healthcare are being passed at an alarming rate. The threat of gender-based violence is steadily rising. So, on paper, it’s the absolutely perfect time for a show like Prime Video’s The Power, an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s bestselling novel of the same name, a simultaneously empowering and dystopian tale about gender, oppression, and violence that asks uncomfortable questions about the nature of humanity and the societies we’ve built for ourselves.
Sadly, The Power isn’t quite the show this moment requires. It’s pretty clear that Prime Video was hoping to create something akin to its own version of Hulu’s award-winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale, with its unflinchingly feminist point of view, uber-detailed depictions of oppression and violence, and simmering rage. But while it’s easy to see Margaret Atwood’s influence in Alderman’s original novel, the two television series have little in common, most notably because The Power almost goes out of its way to avoid having to commit to a specific point of view about what sort of story it’s telling.
Alderman’s novel deconstructs everything from the idea of the female revenge thriller to the empowerment fantasy, and is at its queasiest and most uncomfortable when it’s forcing its readers to confront and wrestle with the ways in which we unthinkingly gender power. That doesn’t translate nearly as well to the screen in the Prime Video version, which seems to want everyone watching it to still generally like the majority of the main characters, even as they make increasingly dark and uncomfortable choices.
The basic premise of the series is simple: What if, one day, teenage girls all over the world suddenly developed the power to emit electric shocks from their hands, like an electric eel? If those girls could then transfer that same power to older women? If a group that had long been oppressed in many parts of the world suddenly gained the ability to fight back? If women no longer had to be afraid of the threat of physical violence from men? What would the world look like then?
The answers to these questions are both varied and complicated, and The Power addresses them through a sprawling story that’s spread across a half dozen major characters and almost as many countries. Allie Montgomery (Halle Bush) has spent her life struggling to survive in the foster system of the southern United States, dodging abusive caretakers along the way. Her gift—and the voices she begins to hear in her head—send her on a journey of reinvention as a faith leader. Roxy Monke (Ria Zmitrowicz) is the illegitimate daughter of a London crime boss who revels in the power of her new abilities, hoping that they will both help her avenge a devastating loss and finally earn her father’s respect. Tatiana Moskalev (Zrinka Cvitešić) is a former gymnast turned wife of an Eastern European dictator who longs for freedom and agency of her own. Margot Cleary-Lopez (Toni Collette) is the Democratic mayor of Seattle, whose daughter Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) is one of the first young women to develop the titular power. And Tunde Ojo (Toheeb Jimoh), one of the story’s primary male characters, is a Nigerian journalist traveling the world to report on the seismic shifts taking place in countries that are traditionally oppressive to women, whose female citizens are rising up to forge a different sort of world.
The series’ sprawling setting is obviously meant to reflect the global nature of the story it’s telling, but often it simply feels exhausting. The story drags badly in the series’ early episodes as the revelation of the women’s new abilities is parceled out in painfully slow chunks. The pacing is such that certain major characters can often go for entire episodes without appearing, and while there are several disturbing and high-tension sequences—a roundup of teen girls rumored to “have it” at a local high school, a tragic catastrophe caused by a young girl’s fear, crowds of women shouting at armed men—big chunks of the narrative drag interminably for no clear reason. And while the series is interested in exploring the effect of this new power in countries where women are traditionally seen as second-class citizens or freely trafficked between the elite and powerful, it remains largely unconcerned about how the trans community would be impacted, despite the presence of both trans and intersex characters in the story. (This was also one of the novel’s failings and something I think many hoped the show might find a different way to address, particularly given the anti-trans panic currently at work in the world.)
Thankfully, The Power picks up considerably by the season’s midpoint, when the show is finally allowed to stop explaining what the women’s new ability is, speculating about where it came from, and doing extended info dumps about specific character backstories This is also about the time that—for the most part—the series’ sprawling cast of characters becomes, if not outright compelling, at least more focused, and the show itself starts asking more difficult questions about how their new abilities have changed both the women who possess them and the men in their lives.
The addition of an anonymous YouTube radical who encourages men to rise up against the newly empowered women and take back their rightful places in the world feels sickeningly of our current moment. But it also allows the series to finally dig into the way that the supposed weaker sex gaining access to some version of the power men have always possessed radicalizes those who can’t view true equality as anything other than a loss for themselves. As more women begin to claim their power both literally and figuratively, The Power is occasionally quite deft at showing the ways that long-established gender roles begin to shift and swap even in the most seemingly egalitarian of relationships: Husbands are suddenly complaining about housework and uninterested wives who refuse to ask how their day was, both siblings and classmates begin to openly resent the newly gifted young women around them, and patriarchal institutions immediately mobilize to find some sort of treatment to restore the proverbial way things used to be.
And it’s honestly difficult not to enjoy the catharsis of watching abused and oppressed women get their own back at last: Saudi women rioting in the streets of Riyad, victims of abuse and trafficking violently turning on their oppressors, young women attempting to teach each other the best ways to use their new abilities to protect themselves, corrupt governments getting overthrown in favor of matriarchies. It’s fun to see women get the chance to live lives free from fear of the men around them— to walk down a street at night without clutching their car keys between their fingers, to tell a creep that no, actually, they don’t feel like smiling right now, to be freely and finally themselves.
But throughout the eight episodes available to screen for critics (out of a total of nine in a first season that seems deliberately angling for a second), The Power has yet to find a cohesive voice or perspective in its larger story. By the back half of the first season, several characters’ stories have at last begun to intersect, in ways that promise intriguing overlaps in the future. But without a clear sense of where this show is headed, it may be too little too late.
The Power premieres Friday, March 31 on Amazon Prime Video.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.
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