Powers Review: Shaking the Tree (Season 2 Episode 5)

You don’t always choose who you work with.

That seems to be the lasting message of Powers‘ latest episode, “Shaking the Tree.”

However, for our heroes, there is a choice — and that choice will make all the difference moving forward.

While each character is dealing with their own issues and personal crisis, they all have one thing in common; a choice to work with the right people and to do the right thing, or to live under the thumb of someone else whose intentions are less than honorable.

For some the decision is easy, although it’s an uneasy choice.

Pilgrim’s loyalty to Walker seems off when it’s compared with loyalty to her father, but when it’s revealed that dear old  Dad is asking her to use her own connections to help him bury his own improper actions, it’s clear that Pilgrim’s loyalty isn’t to anyone at all.

She’s loyal to doing what’s right, even if that means she’ll have to take a suspension or cut ties with family. She’s made a choice for the better.

Pilgrim seems to be the moral compass on a show full of people who can’t decide what direction their morality should go in. One conversation with Pilgrim could help everyone get back on course.

Zora and Martinez are also choosing to work with the right people, despite their initial hesitation to joining forces.

Triphammer sees an opportunity to create a new powerful team, one that could surpass what Retro Girl, Supershock, and the Cobalt Knight had in their heyday.

To do that, he brings Zora out of hiding and back into training, and he sets Martinez up to fight her. We finally understand why Triphammer has been spending so much time working on the robotic devices for his disabled friend.

Triphammer is smart in joining these two together. Zora’s knowledge of being a Power and fighting other Powers is the perfect balance to the skill that Martinez has been training so hard to achieve, a feat not easy for a man with no legs and only one arm.

But that still only fills two hero slots. Triphammer must have a third hero in mind that will complete his new team.

Will it be Calista?

She seems to have her hands full with living the high life. Moody is giving her everything, from her own action figure to her own apartment. He’s treating her like a playmate…

…and then he’s getting really weird when she’s not around.

What is it exactly that Moody is doing? Slow-dancing with a hologram of Calista? Is it a bizarre sexual fantasy?

Actually, the answer is no. It’s not sexual. When Calista’s hologram pops up naked initially, Moody boyishly looks away and asks his robotic cloud to clothe Calista as Retro Girl. Only then is he charged up to dance with her.

So what is Moody’s deal? I thought maybe he was a bad guy, creepy, or maybe sinister. He doesn’t come off that way in this episode. He’s more of a grown man stuck in a phase of arrested development who has an insatiable need for Powers.

I just wonder how it would play out if he tries to make a love connection with Calista and fails. Maybe that will come down the road.

Calista’s choice is harder to pin down during the hour. She’s obviously choosing the lifestyle that comes with having powers. She’s choosing to work with Moody.

She has a scene with Supershock that leaves me feeling a bit confused though. When Supershock comes to see her, he calls her ‘Janice,’ and she doesn’t correct him. She seems to understand that he sees her as Janis, so she behaves as Janis, speaks like Janis, and really just fills that void.

I’m beginning to wonder if Supershock is experiencing a form of Alzheimer’s. With Calista, he’s slipping into his past, unaware that it isn’t the 1960’s.

Meanwhile, with his old friend, Senator Brown, he seems to know exactly who he is and what year it is.

Oh, the Senator. You know, I said I wasn’t good at Clue, so it’s not a surprise that the Senator isn’t Retro Girl’s killer.

It isn’t a surprise that he’s crooked though, if not a murderer. (Do I get points for that? Half points?)

The Senator likes Retro Girl so much that he engages in some S&M type of role-play with women dressed up as his old (and now deceased) friend.

While he does play a role in Retro Girl’s murder (he is the one who was secretly working with the FBI against the Powers and brought Heavy in to begin with), he’s clearly regretting his choice in who he worked with. His visits with both Supershock and with Walker show that he wishes he had chosen a different path.

A different path may not have left him dead by the episode’s end, leaving more speculation into who is actually behind Retro Girl’s death.

The most surprising choice this week comes from Schlag, Agent Lange’s blue, lettuce-loving partner.

Schlag quietly listens to Lange and Walker debate the right thing to do with the information that Heavy carried out Janis’ murder on someone’s orders, and watches as Lange dismisses Walker and Pilgrim, suspending them both.

He then shocks the audience by sending that vital information that will help solve the mystery of who Heavy’s employer is directly to Walker at home, despite his suspension. There’s no way that Schlag has shared this information with Lange.  Schlag is just choosing the side he believes to be right.

Everyone chooses who they work with, despite not truly believing that they have a choice.

And maybe those choices in partners will lead us to finding out the truth that appears to be much bigger than any of our cast of characters knows.

Who killed the Senator? What’s going on with Moody? Is Supershock losing it? Sound off in the comments below!

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New episodes of Powers stream Tuesdays on the PlayStation Network.

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