Powerless Recap With Spoilers: Pilot

The episode opens on Emily, our point-of-view character, who is riding the subway to work reading a business book written by Bruce Wayne. She annoys one of her fellow passengers with her unbridled enthusiasm for Charm City, where she is a new transplant.

Then the train encounters a scene that excites her and annoys everyone else: a super-battle between Crimson Fox and Jack-O-Lantern taking place outside. The train is derailed and damaged, but saved by Crimson Fox…but everyone is annoyed that they’re going to be late.

She flashes back to her small-town upbringing and her soul-crushing job at a local insurance company, then to a point more recently when her father told her that you don’t need powers to help people, and that she should do something with her life that she’s proud of.

It was then, she says, shifting back to the present day, that she decided to go work for Wayne Security, where they make products that help protect everyday folks from supervillains, and the collateral damage caused by the heroes who fight them.

At work, nobody is interested in her story of being saved by a superhero, and she’s ushered quickly into the office of Van Wayne, the distractible and self-absorbed cousin of Bruce who wants Emily to whip her research and development team into shape so that they can take the company to the next level and get Van promoted out of Charm City and off to Gotham where he thinks he belongs.

When Emily starts to talk about herself, Van excuses her by pretending his agent Jackie was calling him. She steps out of his office, undaunted by Van and still thrilled to be working for Bruce Wayne, but everyone else at the company is pretty miserable and down on everything. When she meets her team, her cheerful disposition seems to put them off.

They’re also full of stale ideas, bad ideas, and rehashes of existing successes, either their own or things pilfered from LexCorp, which has a similar division to Wayne Security.

Teddy, her erratic chief design officer, introduces her to the rest of the team, which includes Wendy and Ron.

She gives the larger team a pep talk, but when nobody is impressed, the team reveals she’s the fifth new boss they’ve had this year. Emily confronts Van, who reveals that he only wants her there to develop an idea that will move him to Gotham.

While Emily bickers with the team, Jack O’Lantern takes over all the monitors in the building. During his monologue, though, Jackie comes in to tell Van that Bruce really has called.

In the R&D room, Wendy has created a device that alerts the team when Emily comes near. She tries to talk over their pessimism, but Van comes in to gather the employees in the lobby, telling them that they’ve been fired because Bruce thinks they’re obsolete.

Emily goes to Van’s office to confront him again, where she learns he’s not upset at all: he’s being absorbed into the corporate office in Gotham. She asks him how long they have until they’re being sent home.

She tells the team that they can come up with a game-changing product that will make Bruce change his mind. She’s pitched a couple of terrible ideas and excuses herself to avoid being demoralized. On a patio, Emily bumps into Jackie, who tells her that she used to be just like Emily. After sharing an anecdote about how she used to smell her father coming (he owned a flower shop), she pitches the team on creating a device that would use scent to enhance Wendy’s Emily alert and use it to sense super villains coming. They reluctantly agree to give it a try.

The next morning, they’ve created an alert watch that detects Jack O’Lantern. It works, and by threatening to skip over Van and take it straight to Bruce herself, they convince Van to pitch it to corporate. It works, and to Van’s disgust, that saves the branch. Everyone except Van is thrilled.

That night after work, the team has drinks at a local bar, where they give Emily a bus pass, so that she can have a safertravel to work.

The next morning, the team hears on the news that Batman apprehended The Joker by using a device that would track him by his smell. They muse that they wish they worked for Batman, and Emily says that maybe someday, they will.