When Emily learns that Jackie needs some extra cash, she tries to help her out; Van is on a witch hunt and sets his eyes on Teddy, Ron, and Wendy.

Powerless is a bit of a mixed bag with an episode that mainly feels like its role is to address Emily’s personality and how it generally clashes with the rest of the cast. Her pluckiness is in contrast with everyone who I’d generally describe as sarcastic and a bit dickish.

When it comes to Emily the story has to do with her and Jackie’s relationship and Emily’s habit of meddling. There’s some solid jokes about using people’s names as a way to describe an act or habit. It’s a topic that’s been discussed on other shows before but the patter shows the solid chemistry of the cast as a whole and the easy back and forth. The story itself at least addresses an issue I’ve had at times with the series and it feels like maybe the episodes are out of order since Emily dials it down a bit in various episodes. After this one, that makes some more sense.

The second half of the episode is Van accusing people of using his private bathroom. The punchline is obvious and not all that funny since it’s so predictable. As Van grills Teddy, Ron, and Wendy over the incident the episode forgets the laughs. In fact, it emphasizes a lot of the negative aspects of the characters making them snarky and again dickish. It had me cheering for one of them to be fired. Through the whole situation, the focus seem to be that the situation itself was the joke for folks to laugh at. It wasn’t. It just didn’t click.

We’ve seen better episodes from the series, so it’s a bit disappointing to see it take some steps back these last couple of episodes. They can’t all be winners, but when the show as a whole isn’t running on all cylinders one misstep seems amplified. And what the show seems to truly miss is that it’s a comedy first, a superhero show second. Get the laughs down and the rest will follow.

Overall Rating: 6.05