Amazon’s The Power really reminds us how much society sucks for women

polygon.com:

It takes three hourlong episodes for The Power to finally say the thing that it wants to say — namely that teenage girls have manifested the shocking (ha) ability to electrocute at will.

While some shows do admittedly need three episodes to establish lore and world-building, The Power pretty much takes place in a world like our own, save for that particular quirk. So in order to hammer home the point that young women develop this power because of how much society mistreats them, we have to see nearly three hours of women being mistreated — from workplace microaggressions to sexual assault and everything in between. Nothing about it is subtle, which is the point, but at the same time, being so blatant for so long makes for one drawn-out experience that might just have you going, OK, OK, I get it.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of Prime Video’s The Power.]

Based on the 2016 novel of the same name, The Power isn’t restricted to just one facet of womanhood. The cast is expansive, showing the different kinds of discrimination that a wide variety of women face. Margot (Toni Collette), the mayor of Seattle, struggles with the double standards placed on women in politics, while Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), the illegitimate daughter of a London mob boss, fights off a home invasion that kills her mother. The most painful scenes to watch, however, involve Allie (Halle Bush), a teenage runaway whose powers manifested after her foster father sexually assaulted her. It is important to be reminded that women all over this world suffer, and in various ways. However, having three episodes of women suffering while the plot crawls slowly to a revelation that the audience basically figures out in the middle