The Power – Baptism

By starrymag | May 4, 2023

By: Dawn Inchaurregui-Miller

 

 

Walking through an underpass in London, the episode opens with Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz) meeting up with a crowd of teenage girls. All looking to improve their EOD, the girls pay her £20 to teach them, having seen videos of her online. So far in the series, she is the one with the ability to direct her electricity with the most precision and force. Roxy stands in front of the other girls, raises her hand and sends out a current to a light switch metres away from her, sparking the lights above their heads. The girls are shocked and impressed as Roxy barely needed to concentrate to achieve this. She begins the lessons by calling one of the girls, Vanessa (Samantha Allison) forward and attempting to teach her what triggers the EOD and how to call upon it in an instant. Vanessa becomes frustrated when nothing happens and the others giggle. Roxy explains it comes from the same place as throwing a punch and asks the girls which of them have been in a fight, but is not surprised that the general consensus is none of them. She calls Vanessa forward and has her begin with a simple spark between her fingers, asking her to think of who she hates. When a controlled crackle begins between her fingers, the rest of the girls become excited for her.

On the wall in front of her hangs a crucifix and directly below it the TV, where Allie (Halle Bush) watches footage of the man that set himself on fire during the press conference in Seattle. The news talks of the man’s misogynistic antics leading up to the suicide, including sending hate mail and openly following the words of the mysterious Urbandox. The voice begins to communicate once more with Allie, telling her there are weak minds everywhere. She mentions that if Allie is calling herself Eve, she needs to live up to that name. Footage of riots around the country shows on the TV and the voice tells her she needs that kind of power.

Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) is being walked through the school by bodyguards, assigned to her after the suicide burning and everyone watches her as she awkwardly moves down the hall to her locker. Quinn (Tiffany Tong) is the first to greet her, excitedly talking about Jos being low key famous with her entourage. She tells her she saw what happened at the press conference and calls it that her mom is going to be the next President. Jos just wants people to stop staring and to know where Ryan is but Quinn hasn’t seen him in a few days. Over her shoulder she sees someone slowly approaching her and in a flash of PTSD she remembers the man burning as a fellow student leans in and says “burn baby, burn.” He is instantly dragged away by several of her security personnel, shouting about how his dad will sue them.

With a big smile on his face, Tunde Ojo (Toheeb Jimoh) is now in Carpathia to meet Declan Blease (Risteared Cooper), the man responsible for the leaked government documents that had been sent to him by Rob Lopez (John Leguizamo). He rushes upstairs to meet Declan who asks him to sit down and they begin discussing Tunde’s footage. Declan tells him he needs someone to go to dangerous women who kill men and that Tunde has an eye that will be useful, alongside a charm that women like. Declan shows him images of women who had escaped sex trafficking and are now angry and hiring. He snows Tunde, the leader of the group, Zoia (Ana Ularu) and when asked why he himself is not going, Declan tells Tunde that he has a meeting with Viktor Moskalev (Alexandru Bindea). Declan thinks that there will be a war and that people will look to profit from EOD, whereas Tunde thinks that women liberating themselves will show the world a better way forward.

Tunde is travelling down a river via boat, his voice carries over the background as he writes down what would be later added to his footage. He tells the audience that Carpathia is the human trafficking capital and explains briefly how their system worked. Townspeople usually knew what was happening to the girls in basements or abandoned buildings, but were bribed or threatened into silence. He writes that the women are burning the towns down now they are free and looks up to see a cluttered group of men hiding in the bushes. He is told they are refugees, hiding from the women that hunt them.

When he is on land, he is handed a gun by two men and told to try using it, but has absolutely no experience in doing so. The men voice their hatred of the women, specifically Zoia and crudely talk of her as a liberated whore that now thinks of herself as a revolutionary. Before they leave they tell Tunde to put a bullet in her head and Tunde stands mute, seemingly afraid of both sides of the coin.

Sat around the dinner table of his home, Viktor Moskalev and his wife Tatiana (Zrinka Cvitesic) host several of his generals who talk of a system to keep the women in line. They have spent millions making leg tags that will inform them if a woman uses EOD and the location where it was used. Viktor is told that it is much cheaper than building prisons to keep all the women inside. Viktor takes one in hand and smugly tells his wife that he has jewellery for her and hands it to General Miron (Bogdan Albulescu) to place around her ankle. Viktor slaps the table for her to put her foot up and General Miron empathetically looks her in the eye as he fits the band around her leg. She is then ordered to eat her food in her room.

At the convent, Savannah  (Emily Renée) frantically tries to work a doorknob with her EOD to gain access to her phone. Allie, walking past, sees the struggle and goes inside to help her so that Savannah  can make a call to her little girl. Allie takes her hand and places it on the doorknob with her own on top. She explains that you let it build up and visualise it like boiling water and to think of bad things that have happened to you before releasing it. The door knob bursts through with the strength of the current and as Allie thanks her, she tells Savannah  it was all her. She sits in the office to call her little girl and introduces Allie to her, where upon waving, a burn across her arm is visible. Savannah  asks how the burn is healing and tells her that she never meant for it to happen, but Allie respectfully walks away, having realised how the burn would have happened.

Inside the Monke household. Roxy hands a roll of money to Barbara (Juliet Cowan) for rent, but she refuses to say thanks after what happened to her son. Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan) calls her into a room where his sons Darrell (Archie Rush) and Ricky (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) are already waiting for their dad to rearrange his will now that Terry has died. To the dismay of his eldest son, Ricky and his wife Barbara, Bernie is considering giving that third to Roxy. He tells them the world is changing and in ten years it could look wrong without a woman also leading the family, so he wants to see how his youngest, Roxy and his eldest, Ricky, work together. Ricky storms off, infuriated by the request.

Tunde approaches the liberated women of the Carpathia sex trafficking ring with caution. They all consider him, speaking in Romanian amongst each other with weapons in hand. They take him inside where he explains that he is a reporter for CNN, but as he has no badge and lies about having no weapon on him, they aren’t quick to believe anything he says. In the background we begin to hear groans of pain and most of the women rush to the pregnant women’s aid while another takes Tunde at gunpoint, where he’s locked in a room. Sealed inside the room, he looks through the window down at the woman comforting her as Zoia gives birth to a girl.

By contrast, her sister lays in a large circular bath, in what should be luxury, but is in fact, merely a beautiful prison where Tatiana increasingly feels the walls move closer. With her foot out of the water, leaving the tag bracelet in view, Solongo (Bayra Bela) arrives to do her hair. Tatiana begins to ask her about her life, where she is told that most days she has to walk miles to work and lives in an apartment with six other girls. Yet Tatiana envies her life. Instead of having her hair done, Tatiana decides they playfully swap lives and dresses Solongo in her fancy clothes, while she puts on the clothes her hairdresser arrived in. She begins to teach her how to walk and stand and they get increasingly drunk on champagne. Tatiana then lays back with her hair wet and watches Solongo, telling her that she looks beautiful. The younger woman lays down next to her and opens up about her brother who was wrongfully arrested, in the hopes she could ask her husband to free him. The conversation turns to her own sister Zoia, who she silently misses. Solongo states wrongly that Zoia must be very proud of her, Tatiana jumps up on top of her, touches her face and kisses her.

Roxy, Darrell and Ricky go to the home of one of their dads suppliers, in other words, a fellow London gangster. Roxy is all smiles and glad to be included but Ricky stops her to stress to his half sister that she must keep her mouth shut. He is the eldest and he does the talking. Making sure to put across that he thinks their dad is messing with her, he is sure that she won’t be there with them in a week’s time.

As they walk through the garden for the meeting, Darrell tells Roxy that the house was once owned by David Hasslehoff and they laugh together. Primrose (Phil Daniels) waits for them, paper in one hand, cigarette in the other and warmly greets the boys upon arrival. He apologises for the loss of their brother Terry and Darrell introduces Roxy as his sister, while Ricky feels the need to interject that she is their half sister. He’s heard of her and warmly welcomes her as a chip of the old block, passing a comment that Ricky should watch out. This makes Roxy give a wry sideways smirk to her brother, who receives the comment with silent anger. Primrose tells Roxy he hopes they find the b*****d that planned the murder of Roxy’s mother.

As her brothers talk business with Primrose, Roxy looks over her shoulder at the man she had been too afraid to shock when her father asked her too. He still owed her father money and here he was jumping into a pool with a glamorous woman. She walks towards them with a mission, as Ricky and Primrose assume she is just headed to look at the pool. Roxy abruptly interrupts David’s (Paul Brightwell) fun and reminds him she is Bernie Monke’s daughter. David owes her dad money and here he is playing around in the pool of one of her dads main suppliers. He tells her to get lost, which she is not happy about, but the woman in the pool (Jenny Gayner) climbs out and takes it upon herself to challenge Roxy herself. David tells his friend that Roxy didn’t even have the balls to use it last time. The woman marches forward, electricity building in her skein, but before she’s close, Roxy has already effortlessly used her own electricity to take out her leg. She crashes to the floor and begins to scramble, backing away from a calm Roxy, who turns her attention back to David. His voice shaking, he asks what she wants, to which Roxy replies, her dads money. She wants him to bring the rest of the money by the morning but he continues to brush her off and undermine her. She bends down and lowers her finger to the pool, electricity crackling and arching as she waits to hear an acknowledgment of her terms. “tomorrow morning 9am. That’s your final warning,” she tells him with a smirk, before lowering her finger into the pool. His body jerks up as it’s electrocuted and a birdseye shot shows he has soiled himself inside the pool. Her brothers and Primrose arrive just in time to see this and Darrell heavily laughs as Primrose scolds with disgust for what David just dumped into his pool.

Walking towards the shore, Allie watches several of the other girls playfully zapping each other in the water. She quietly bends down and puts her hands in the water, sending a little jolt to the girls, who think a fish has touched them. The voice tells her she doesn’t even need to touch them to move them and Allie smiles. The girls move back towards the shore and Allie spots someone new with them. Luanne (Alli Boyer-Ybarra) introduces Allie – whom they still know only as “Eve,” the non-binary Jean (Lex Mayson) recognises Allie, but can’t put a finger on why. The girls begin to tell them about all the miracles and amazing things that Allie has done, like bringing the bird back to life and curing Luanne of her seizures. When Jean isn’t so sure that they believe this, Allie says that she does them through god and the others tell Jean Allie speaks to god and has told them god is a woman. Jean’s dad was a preacher so they aren’t a fan of religion, but the other girls tell them they have seen the miracles themselves. Allie comforts Jean, saying that she used to go to church though she never believed in god, but when she raises her palms and runs a spark through her fingers, she tells them that if it isn’t evidence of god, she doesn’t know what is. They then all stand in a circle, running the currents between their hands together, laughing.

From behind them, the voice of Sister Veronica (Emily Kuroda) calls out Allies pseudonym, Eve. Raising the door knob from earlier into the air, she demands an explanation. Sister Maria (Daniela Vega) asks why she keeps breaking the rules if she wants to stay, but Allie thinks the rules make no sense. She doesn’t understand why they believe the stories from the bible, yet doubt the miracle of electricity that girls and women across the globe have been given. She states that they are the words of god and are not a lie like Allies identity is. She says aloud that the identity she claims to have, “Eve Jones,” is a lie. Sister Maria tries to stop her from shouting this out, but she continues, undeterred and warns that she will find out who Allie really is.

Alone now, Allie breaks down in tears inside the church, remembering what she did to her foster dad that had been assaulting her. She calls herself a killer and a fraud, speaking to the voice that has led her this far through so much. She is scared they are going to throw her out, but the voice tells her to make the others believe as belief is power.

Inside her bedroom, Jos tries to push the terrible images from her mind of the man’s eyes, the match striking and the flames that engulfed his willing body. She can’t escape the feeling of helplessness and finds herself circling her room in tears. She rushes to her laptop and opens it on a clip of Roxy from the other side of the world, teaching girls how to fight via video. Her London accent pours out as she teaches the correct way to punch, advising how to follow through and to aim for the body. Roxy then sparks her EOD through her fists and tells a world of angry girls to “light ‘em up, bitches.” Jos practices in her room, her mind swimming through flashes of the boy from earlier and the matre of misogyny that burned in front of her family’s eyes. As she practises, her anger and fear swell up and a spark travels across her fists. She stops and looks down at her hands, having never experienced this much control. She pauses for a moment when she hears Ryan’s (Nico Hiraga) voice break through her mental chaos. She goes to her window and sees him surrounded by fairy lights in the shape of a heart, his finger on the switch, powering them with a spark of his own. On the other side of the house from his own bedroom, her brother Matty (Gerrison Machado), holds up his phone and begins to record. Jos rushes outside to Ryan and slows in front of him as they both awkwardly try to reconcile. He tells her he heard what happened at the press conference and wishes he had been by her side. The people that want to hurt her and hate her, may not know about him yet, but they will hold the same feelings towards him and he tells her that he is with her. She smiles and steps forward into the heart of lights, kisses him and as she places her hand on his, a joint current rushes through the bulbs, exploding them all at once.  Her brother Matty finishes recording and stands a moment, perhaps in thought over what would be the right thing to do.

Back at the secret hideout of Zoia and the other former sex trafficking victims – turned rebels, after birth is cooked in a frying pan. Zoia breast feeds her new baby girl and looks up as Tunde is brought through and sits cautiously down in front of her. She asks him why CNN hasn’t sent a European journalist, but he answers that he is a correspondent. He wants to help her get her story out to the world and calls it the end of sexual slavery. Wondering where men like him were when she was begging for help and tells him to leave. In a bid to be heard, he calls out that he recorded the first video of EOD in Nigeria and that he was the one who recorded the Saudi Arabia protests. He wants to give her a voice and when asked, he offers to pay her, but states again this will give her a voice, she dismissively replies that he merely wants to get famous. She wants it to be worth it for her, so when asked what she wants, she tells him that she wants to speak to her sister. She tells him her sister will be at the palace, so he assumes her to be a worker, but Zoia pauses before responding, that she lives there. His brows furrow for a moment while he works out what exactly she is saying to him. Her sister, Tatiana, wife to the President of Carpathia may be spoiled, but she is still her sister and she needs to know if she still cares. A plate of slices from the cooked placenta gets passed to her and she begins to eat it in front of Tunde, who tries to mask his surprise, or perhaps disgust. She places a fork in a slice and passes it to him, leaving him to hesitate for only a moment, before realising the respect and trust that would be lost for refusing such a gesture. He takes the fork and eats the slice whole without breaking eye contact. She nods, happy for his compliance that shows respect for her. She repeats that he wants to give her a voice, but says she learnt to ask for help in eight different languages. She states that the ones seeking peace are usually those that caused the pain to begin with. Shame for his gender sits flush across his cheeks and he lowers his gaze, deep in thought of the ignorance of entitlement that he had only recently realised he carried. Tunde will get his story, but there will be no peace. Zoia wants her sister to know change is coming and for her to choose a side.

Allie, still inside the church, holds her hands in prayer. The voice tells her though miracles may be fake, she is real, as if the way she makes the other girls feel. She tells her that she is the voice of a Revolution, she can build a new faith and her time has come. The reflection and moral boost from her personal god is interrupted by the sound of multiple desperate voices, calling out for Savannah. A bloody knife was found in the sink and no one knows where Allie’s friend has gone, but they fear for the worst. Sister Veronica is shouting for everyone to go back inside, but the girls all break off into smaller groups to find her. Allie looks up, being the only one to notice the desperately sad girl stood at the edge of the rooftop. Allie dishes upstairs, telling no one, so as to not give her a chance to jump. When she makes it to the top, she creeps up slowly and grabs her, pulling her back from the edge. Savannah cries to be left to die, but Allie will not let her go.

Down stairs, Allie and a group of the girls carry her away from the convent, so as not to be seen by Sister Veronica. They carefully place her on the ground and surround her with a blanket and sit in a circle together. Savannah stiles tears, telling them that she is no longer allowed to talk to her little girl, who is being placed into foster care. Allie tells her they will bring her little girl to them there, but they need her with them to do that. Savannah begins to claw at the skein in her chest, hysterically repeating that she wants it out. Allie stops her and begs her not to think that way, promising things will get better.

Savannah, Allie, a large group of the girls, even several of the nuns, take to the stairs, descending down to the shore below. They sit talking together through the night, telling their stories of the dangers, the molestation, the cruelty and injustice they have all lived through. When a quiet falls over them, the voice tells her to give them something to believe in. The wind howls through the grass and laundry lines that stand behind them aside the convent as Sister Veronica searches for the missing girls. Allie stands and begins to walk, leaving Savannah to ask where she is going. She tells them to follow, leading them into the calm waters, all holding hands except one, who stays behind to film. “You don’t need to touch them to move them,” the voice repeats. Their hands no longer joined, Allie tells them that there has never been a god for girls and says that they all go through life being told what to do and who they need to be, but that it is now their time. More of the girls, alongside sister Veronica make it to the cliff edge in time to watch Allie, or Eve as they have come to know her, create a glow of electricity, bright blue beneath the water. Suddenly the girls, all except Allie, are pulled to their knees, causing gasps from the others on dry land while all within the water begin to float. Allie lays back with them, arms outstretched, floating in the small circle of bright blue, beneath the dark waters.