The Power – Sparklefingers

By starrymag | April 28, 2023

By: Dawn Inchaurregui-Miller

 

 

Urbandox are spouting chauvinistic propaganda that swirls in contradiction, designed to let angry men pick out the parts they most agree with and to let them spiral and build in hatred. Around the world men sit and lap it up in bars while Matty (Gerrison Machado) sits at his computer desk with headphones absorbing every word. Walking his dog along the beachPaul Jordan (Alexander Lowe) bends down to pick up his dog’s waste while he listens in and the walk i, ,surely a cover for stalking Margot (Toni Collette) up in her family home.

Inside the Cleary-Lopez family home, Margo picks up her phone and notices it needs to be charged, but the interesting thing is that her hands now have the ability to charge due to the EOD she now has at her disposal. Having not spoken since the events after the party, Rob (John Leguizamo) knocks on the door to change his trousers and we learn he is no longer sleeping in their bed and Margo is still angry that he sent private information about the skein to his friend who published it everywhere online. Rob has spoken to a lawyer who has told him he would be fined at best but possibly jailed if he is exposed as the leak. Another fight breaks out in which Margo feels like he not only put both their careers on the line but that he also didn’t tell her before making such a dangerous decision. From his perspective however, he is the only one out of the two of them doing the right thing. Both of them are feeling that they no longer know the other and a chest puffing match of who’s job is more important, ends the fight.

Before leaving Margot goes to her wardrobe, but this time instead of pulling out designer heels or affordable ones that she has been told to wear, she opts for boots. She now not only has the power, but is feeling a visible empowerment and kick in her step that says she isn’t taking anyone’s s*** anymore.

Upon walking into the front entrance for her place of work, Helen’s (Edwina Findley) first instinct is to criticize Margot’s shoes, but the shoes are now no longer up for discussion. It doesn’t take long for Helen to realise what has caused the change in her literal footing and she exclaims in horror over the increased danger that her friend will now be in. Margot offers her the power, telling her how amazing she feels, but Helen feels she had enough of a hard time as a black woman in politics without intentionally taking on EOD. Helen tells Margot that women have already begun being fired, even from talk shows, for merely having the ability. Margot is disgusted at the illegal use of discrimination. Even with a warning to stay quiet, Margot’s current mood is not one that’s easy to break.

Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh) is all smiles as he exits his car in excitement to be back home at his childhood friend’s wedding, but even the slightest noise is enough to bring on PTSD from his experiences in Saudi Arabia. His brother Dami (Emeka Sesay) startles him when he asks him to come help their friend who just found out his bride to be has EOD. Wale (Antony Acheamping) feels both betrayed by and scared of his fiancé and Tunde, the newly crowned feminist king of journalism, attempts to make him understand how beautiful and important this phenomenon is actually. Tunde compares the strength that a man naturally has over a woman, yet he points out that his friend has never hurt one, but now, women have a means of evening the playing field, but his bride has never used it on him either. When Dami pops a cork behind Tunde, it brings a flash of fight or flight that gives their friend a chance to leave the room, potentially fleeing the wedding for good. Realizing how startled his big brother is, Dami tells him to sit and hands him the champagne.

Walking through the cemetery Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz) finds her brother’s grave where she breaks down in sobs, apologizing with everything she has left inside her. She didn’t pull the trigger, but she feels the guilt dragging her siblings into a situation in which a bulls eye could be placed so easily upon them. Elsewhere, her dad Bernie Monke (Eddie Marsan) prays for his lost son and then stares off into the distance in thought. Upon a bench on the pathway Roxy sits with Darrell (Archie Rush) still in the graveyard where the first words he speaks are an apology to Roxy for the loss of her mother. He empathizes with why she wanted to destroy the man who took her mothers life as she lay unconscious beside her.

They talk of the difficulties that Roxy experiences as the illegitimate child of Bernie Monke and how his wife hates her, though it wasn’t her fault how she was born. Darrell starts to cry as he tells Roxy that he doesn’t want to be a part of their dads business when he goes to university. We get to see how close the two of them are, having been born only a few months apart as well as how empathetic and gentle Darrell is. He wants to know what it felt like to kill Tony, to which she replies to him that it felt good.

Back in Seattle, Jos (Auli’i Cravalho) and Ryan (Nico Hiraga) kiss in a parked car, rain crashing around them as they listen to music. Things start to heat up as Jos wants to take things further, electricity crackling through her fingers the more excited she gets. When Ryan tries to slow her down, it’s obvious that with the EOD,it’s more than just electric fingers that has changed inside the bodies of young girls. He’s eventually forced to push her from on top of him after repeating no, accidentally making her lip bleed, at which point she storms out of the car and Ryan drives away.

Helen reiterates her point about the dangerous situation that Margot has found herself in when she brings in a box of mail and up-turns it onto her desk. The box is entirely full of hate mail, death threats and a bag of dog waste. No sooner have they discussed some of the more vile letters when Liu (Jasmine Chen) burts into the office to tell them that all women on their staff are being tested for EOD. Margot exclaims aloud at how illegal that would be and can’t be done and is interrupted by Governor Daniel Danton (Josh Charles) entering through the doorway telling her that indeed they can as he has issued a statewide public health emergency. He claims that the measure is for data collection and will only be performed on government staff for public safety. She tells him that things like this start with a list and becomes angry at the unethical idea of forcing this test on her staff, so he dismissively tells her anyone can decline and go home on unpaid administrative leave.

Bursting into the women’s toilets, Margot wants to come forward and throw in Daniel’s face that she has EOD. However, Helen points out the reason why these tests are being done is clearly to prevent Margot from being able to take Daniel’s senate seat. She previously hadn’t been interested in such a feat, but Daniel’s measures are becoming increasingly dangerous and he is already trying to prevent her from running. They look up online a way to beat the machine to prevent Daniel from finding out that she has it as another woman bursts in behind them in floods of tears, presumably having been tested and found positive. In theory, the trick is to control your breathing as the machine pumps electricity through your body, filling the skein organ and triggering an involuntary discharge of electricity.

Margot goes into the test and after a few questions she asks the test administrator Denise (Kayla Deorksen) how she can live with herself. Avoiding the question, she claims that if she is found positive there is counselling available to “consider your options,” though heaven knows what these options would be.

The machine now wired up to her is being raised in voltage, the current increasing causes a steely Margot pain but she slowly breathes through it and before long the test has ended and she is told she has passed. She pulls off the wires and tells Daniel she will see him in the primaries, now hellbent on taking the senate seat that she once dismissed and storms through the halls. The electric current that had coursed through her, had filled the skein causes it to swell and that energy is ready to burst. She struggles to hold it like a stifled scream as she goes down the elevator,  pushes out into the street and upon finding a park bench she sits as the rain pours down over her usually calm and collected head. With her hands outstretched she releases the energy and electricity crackles out, burning the wood surrounding both hands.

Sat drinking together in a bar Rob is with his college friend Declan Blease (Risteared Cooper). They laugh at the femininity of the code name Scarlet Minnow. Rob is beginning to become afraid that a connection could be made to him for the data leak, though Declan assures him he would never do that. Declan tells him he will be going to Carpathia the next day to follow up on the story while Rob is still being punished by Margot. They both discuss that time Margot was a civil heroine of sorts, always ready to blow the whistle on the evil doer for the sake of the oppressed. Rob loves that she’s ambitious and has never had a problem with a powerful woman, but feels that this is more than he expected and feels she cares about nothing more than politics. He is worried at the effect it is having on their children, specifically with the death threats they have begun regularly receiving, but Declan reassures him that it won’t be long till people move on and someone else will be front page news. As they talk in the background a man named Mike (Kalvin Olafson) orders another drink, but is so intoxicated that the bartender tells him he is cut off. After demanding another beer and still being refused, he finally decides the most appropriate course of action would be to call the bartender lyla (Destiny Millns) a bitch. She lifts her hands and passes electricity through her fingers, telling him he has ten seconds to leave, at which point he pulls out a taser and begins shouting that men are the top of the food chain and Urbandox is right.

Scrolling through the comments under his videos from the protests in Saudi Arabia, Tunde orders a drink and leans on the bar at the wedding that doesn’t seem to be happening. He stops on one of the comments and clicks a link that takes him to Declan’s article, exposing top secret government research. As he drinks a shot and zooms in on Declan’s picture at the top of the article, he is startled by a woman attempting to flirt with him. However, she is almost immediately interrupted by a strikingly dressed Ndudi (Heather Agyepong) giving her a nod to move away. The two greet each other in a way that would seem more friendly than it even was before the incident at the woman’s meeting. Something has noticeably changed in Ndudi, just as it has for Tunde. They drink and talk outside in the evening sunlight and talk turns to the things he has seen while working for CNN. He speaks of what he witnessed being life changing and that he has never seen such sisterhood, but she is surprised and asks him to clarify that he hasn’t seen it where they live. They laugh flirtatiously and he tells her that he wished she had gone with him, but as it turns out she has a project of her own – a coalition to put a matriarchy in place and fix Nigeria. He smiles, impressed by her determination, but unsurprised after the experience he has gained from watching women awaken to strength all throughout the world. He tells her he misses her and, with a touch of hands, they lead each other upstairs. In a montage of before, during and after intimacy, they find themselves entangled together on what should have been their friend’s wedding bed. Not surprisingly, she also has EOD and it releases in tiny bursts throughout their time in the bed.

As they lay together after, she tells Tunde that he should write a book detailing the events of everywhere he travels. He looks to her and asks Ndudi to come with him, but she declines, stating that her work is there in Nigeria. They both jump upon hearing his phone go off and begin to scramble after finding out the wedding is back on.

Using makeup to cover the cut in her lower lip, Jos is grumpy when she assumes it’s a member of her family knocking. When she finds out that it’s Ryan, a shame falls over her as she quietly opens the door. She assumes that the problem was that her small crackles of  EOD were what deterred him from intimacy, but it turns out to be something much deeper and far more complicated. Ryan was born intersex. He explains that he had surgery as a baby and was raised as a boy. Jos takes a moment to absorb what he has told her before addressing it and reassures him of how much she likes him. When she tells him she will keep liking him, he tells her he hopes so and removes his shirt and places her hand on his collarbone. She can feel the active skein attached to the bone and he raises his hand to show that his higher levels of oestrogen allow the EOD to work for him. She isn’t happy when she finds out that he has had the ability to use it since Jos accidentally electrocuted him at the lockers and never told him. Her mother is putting her career and safety on the line to give a voice to those with EOD and she feels betrayed, but from his perspective he is a boy with EOD and would be taken apart in a lab. She doesn’t understand with everything she has been going through why he wouldn’t have at least told her, but he believes as it’s his own body that it’s his secret to keep and he leaves the room before Jos has chance to respond.

Roxy arrives back at her dads house where Barbara (Juliet Cowan) assumes it is her son Darrell who has come home. She strides up to Roxy and tells her she isn’t afraid of her, but clearly Roxy doesn’t feel the same. She steps back from the confrontation and awkwardly asks Barbara if she wants “it” to at least make her feel safe, but she refuses, with a look of disgust. She lunges forward hitting Roxy, blaming her for the death of her son, but Roxy misses her brother too. Barbara screams that Terry has nothing to do with her as Bernie enters the front door and runs to try and cool things down. Bernie hands his daughter a handkerchief and tells her they are going out.

Out the front of the house Bernie silently leads her to the car and she assumes she will be reprimanded but instead he leads her in silence all the way to one of the jewellery stores he supplies. Inside the store they head upstairs with the shop owner, who gives his condolences for the passing of his son. He asks if Bernie has any more stones for him, but Bernie is there to collect for the last ones given and the money that’s then handed over is only half of what was agreed. He gets the store owner in a headlock and asks Roxy to shock him, not enough to kill him but enough to teach him a lesson, but Roxy refuses. He mocks her for now cowering out after what she did and all her efforts to work for him and as they leave the store she tells him she understands how much she messed up. They stop in the street after Roxy tells him she’s glad she killed Tony for murdering her mother, but that the mistake was how she went about it. She tells him Terry made the choice to be there, they knew why she was going and he had made the choice to pull out a gun first. Tempers flare and they scream at each other in the street.

Sat around the dinner table for presumably the first time in years, the Cleary-Lopez family silently eat dinner together where Margot surprises everyone by asking them all abou their days one by one. Matty’ first instinct is to ask if they are getting a divorce, which takes both Rob and Margot by surprise. Margot tells them all together that she has decided to run for senate but the only genuinely happy member is her daughter Jos. The poisonous words that then begin to fall from their son’s mouth spell trouble for the family and are full of the same misogyny that Urbandox’s podcasts have been spewing out. He believes that Margot imasculates their dad, that their family is backwards and that she should be doing the cooking instead of him. When they ask if he’s been hearing this stuff from Urbandox, Jos is shocked that Matty would ever listen to him, as he has such disturbing opinions on the girls with EOD. They continue to bicker but ultimately Matty storms off, deciding no one actually cares what he thinks or feels, leaving Rob to follow after him. The youngest daughter, Izzy (Pietra Castro) soon asks to sit and eat on the couch, leaving Jos to ask if her mum wants to go outside with her again.

Outside Jos tells her mother she has her vote, a far cry from where their relationship was even two days before and follows up that they need someone to fight for them. Margot shares with Jos about the test that they were forced to take at work and that she managed to pass. Jos questions why she hasn’t told her dad, but she gives her a piece of advice that seems to reflect the situation she was in with Ryan earlier and again now by not passing on his secret to her mom… “Sometimes you have to lie to the people you love to protect them.” They then agree that Rob is a terrible liar and would crumble under pressure as he can’t even keep a surprise party under wraps. They affectionately touch hands and crackle electricity between their fingers, laughing together when Margot says “Sparkle fingers unite!”

At a press conference the next day supporters sit in pink T-shirts and Margot talks of Governor Dando’s plans to segregate the schools and reminds everyone to the sound of cheers, that separate is not equal. She tells the eager crowd that she is tired of fighting the same battles for the rights of her little girls, just as every other mother has to and that Mother Nature must have also had enough. Rob tries to play the part of dutiful husband. However, Matty doesn’t seem to be able to keep up the pretence of supporting his mother and wears an uncomfortable expression throughout the entire speech. When she tells the crowd of supporters and press that she as their Mayor will be running for senate, everyone stands to cheer but someone else in the crowd has other ideas. To the voice of Urbandox playing over the top, the scene slows down as Paul Jordan walks to the front centre of the aisle and looks Margot in the eyes. This is the first time we see him since he was watching her while he walked his dog at the opening of the episode. Stood directly in front of Margot, never breaking eye contact, no one has time to intervene before he covers himself with petrol, lights a match and sets himself on fire.

We see supporters and press trying to flee while Rob huddles Matty and Jos together. Margot shields the eyes of their youngest from the flames still engulfing the man that shockingly committed suicide moments before.