DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
 
 
 
POWERLESS
April 27, 2017  | By David Bianculli

NBC, 8:30 p.m. ET

 

Don’t look for it, it’s gone. This was the night and time slot the newest episode of NBC’s Powerless sitcom was scheduled to air – but the network just pulled it from the schedule, replacing it with a doubleheader of Superstore instead. The reason I’m stubbornly keeping Powerless, which starred Vanessa Hudgens as a worker drone in a DC Comics comedy where all the costumed superheroes are offscreen peripheral characters, in Best Bets tonight is because of what would have been tonight’s plot. Lois Lane dies. And the characters in Powerless, savvy to the tropes of comic-book death scenes, surmise that Superman is about to spin around the Earth fast enough, in reverse rotation, to somehow reverse time, to a point where Lois was still alive – and save her. It’s an actual plot from an old comic (and movie) – but in the Powerless universe, the characters realize that, in the window between Lois Lane’s death and Superman’s sure-to-come time-reversal heroics, they can do anything they want, anything at all, without any lasting consequences. That’s a really clever spin on the old reversing-time idea – and if I had the power, I’d spin the planet backwards to before NBC’s cancellation announcement of Powerless, so we could see tonight’s episode. Eventually, I’m guessing, NBC will burn off the remaining episodes somewhere, so we’ll get to see them – but that’s sometime in the future. Hey, wait a minute… If Superman were to fly clockwise around Earth, would that propel us onto the future? If so, we could see Powerless… now. Because it would be now, then.

 
 
 
 
 
Leave a Comment: (No HTML, 1000 chars max)
 
 Name (required)
 
 Email (required) (will not be published)
 
GHSYD
Type in the verification word shown on the image.