We must accept that we're unable to control the unexpected
We can’t control the drunk driver, the freak rainstorm, the dark spot on the mammogram, the plus sign on the pregnancy test (even though you didn’t miss a pill). Humans are powerless, and even in our exercise of free will, either the Universe is gonna get down with your plan or it isn’t. Great power is setting a goal, working hard for it, and achieving it in exactly the way you expected with no consequences and no remainders after the long division is done. But does that happen to anyone? The unexpected always hitches a ride along with everything you planned.
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I called my show Power because, for me, the whole series is about the way my main character, Ghost, is power-less over his circumstances, even though he has almost endless access to money and guns. In the conventional sense, he’s as powerful a man as can be, and yet he wants so much more. He can wear a suit, execute a plan, and pull a trigger, but at the end of the day, something always happens that he didn’t expect.
When it comes to power as it functions between humans, it all comes down to desire. If you know what someone wants, you can control them. It is as simple as that. And the reverse is also true: If you have control over your own desires, no one will ever own you. As humans, we are plagued with desire—it consumes us, it fuels us, it destroys us.
When we pray, we often ask for the things we want—we appeal to a power greater than ourselves to grant our wishes, protect our families or save our souls. We ask for all the things that we know we cannot do or guarantee on our own. And we stumble out into the world, powerless little beings, each in his or her own way, struggling with our inability to control ourselves and others, to make it rain or shine as we see fit.
And all of this is why I became a writer. With a pen or a laptop, I have the power to create a world, build characters from nothing, make them do what I want, say what I want, believe what I want. Storytelling was my escape as a child; as an adult it’s a way for me to wrest some sort of satisfaction from knowing that if I write a character wearing a blue sweater, on the day we shoot the scene, I’m gonna see that blue sweater. Unless someone forgot to bring it.
Courtney Kemp Agboh is a producer and writer known for Power.