Andrew Onwabulu, AKA Rapman, is the eponymous British rapper who is no stranger to dealing with socially conscious themes in all media. He is responsible for developing “Supacell” and comes ambling into a world already inundated with superhero content to the point that saturation is threatening to overflow. The central hook, then, to involve the audience is to situate a superhero show in a very grounded reality and how that reality gets affected when elements of these genres intermingle.
Supacell (Season 1) Episodes 1 – 5 Recap:
Who are the protagonists of Supacell?
The cold open, as it stands, begins with a woman attempting to escape from a facility and being chased by armed guards. As she reaches the locked door separating her from freedom, unable to open due to deactivation to hamper her escape attempt, her eyes glow with a yellowish tint resembling the eyes of a leopard before she uses a form of telekinesis to break the door open. But her unique escape attempt fails, as she is shot from behind. The guards then drag her dead body back to the long hallway surrounded by glass windows, revealing more such prisoners of the organization.
The action then shifts to, and mostly remains in, the vicinity of South London. We are introduced to five characters who will be mostly the central ensemble of the season. Michael Lasaki (Tosin Cole) is a delivery driver in a longstanding relationship with his partner Dionne (Adelayo Adedayo), a human rights activist. Michael even buys a new car for her and has plans to propose to her. Michael’s mother, meanwhile, is suffering from sickle cell anemia, and he plans to finally shift her to a private center specializing in sickle cell disease disorder treatment. It is an expensive affair, but money is not an issue for Michael; rather, his goal is to ensure the two women in his life remain safe and content.
Events occur in Michael’s delivery route that also connect and introduce us to two other characters. Michael goes to visit his restauranteur friend, Gabriel. To inform him of his marriage plans, he is pestered by a drug dealer named Rodney (Calvin Demba). Rodney is a hapless, unlucky drug dealer who might be a charming and even affable bloke. Still, his charm doesn’t help in selling weed, which is putting a strain on the business model of both Rodney and his childhood friend Spud, who had been friends since school and the only family Rodney has after Rodney had been kicked out by his mother’s new boyfriend on account of being mixed-race.
The other person Michael interacts with tangentially in his delivery route is Sharleen, one of his clients who lives with her sister Sabrina and likes to flirt casually. Sabrina (Nadine Mills) works as a nurse at a hospital and is very well-liked by her patients as well as her bosses. However, she is frustrated by her sister’s relationship and its volatility with gangster Krazzy (Ghetts), worried about how much Krazzy mistreats her, and is currently being imprisoned for assaulting her, which has led to Sharleen living with her sister until she can get her bearings.
Meanwhile, Tazer (Josh Tedeku) is a young upstart gangster leading his gang, The Tower Boys, against the Sixers, led by Krazy. Krazy and Tazer have a history, with Krazy having acted as a mentor of sorts for Tazer until they had a fallout. In the first episode, Tazer is brutally attacked by Sixer gang members at a house party and vows revenge against them. Most of the show deals with Tazer and Krazzy’s rivalry and how that intermingles with the main throughline of the narrative.
The final character we will follow is Andre, a person with a felony conviction who is finally out of jail and ready to integrate back into a semblance of normal life. He is eager to re-establish his relationship with his son while also trying to land a permanent job rather than worrying about being fired from a job every six months due to his criminal record and having to barely scrape by on paying his rent and alimony.
How do the superpowers affect these characters’ lives?
Michael
The first instance we see of a superpower being “activated” is when Michael has to unwittingly deliver a package in the projects where the Tower Boys hang about. When the gang members try to bully Michael by taking his package, Michael protests a tad bit too vehemently and gets stabbed in the gut by Tazer. But as he lies on the road bleeding out, his eyes turn yellow, and he teleports backward in time, remembering the fatal event, which allows him to mildly change his tactic and get home scot-free. However, he still believes the event to be a severe case of deja vu until that night.
After returning to their apartment and slowly beginning to consummate, Michael’s proposal succeeds because of Dionne’s acceptance; the lovebirds are locked in a heated bout of lovemaking when suddenly Michael is teleported into the future. He witnesses a team-up of the five principal characters (including a future version of himself) readying for battle against a group of hooded antagonists exiting from a portal, exhibiting superpowers.
On noticing Michael, the future version stops time and teleports with him to a somewhat earlier time, but a near future of the present-day Michael, where he reveals that Michael needs to locate all five people if he wants a chance to survive against this oncoming battle. He then reveals that he needs to do it to avert the death of Dionne, who will die three months from now.
Michael’s actions after teleporting back to the present are to reveal almost nothing to Dionne, try to connect with Tazer, and even reveal his powers to him, but to no avail. Instead, he almost manages to escape by the skin of his teeth, literally stopping time to avoid a bullet. He also tries to locate the rest of the future team, with the limited aid of his friend Gabriel and his wits about him.
Rodney
Rodney, in one of his drug dealing adventures, gets a call about a big shipment that needs to be delivered. As he rushes to catch the bus, his super speed gets activated, and he finds himself stuck in Edinburgh. He manages to return to Edinburgh after selling all his weed for 75 quid and catching the train. Upon his return, much to the excitement of Spud, Rodney uses his super speed as a business feature. His efficiency cannibalizes the market of the rest of the drug dealers, landing both Rodney and Spud in Krazzy’s crosshairs.
In the middle of this, Michael manages to contact and barely rescue Rodney from being skewered alive by a flaming ball thrown by a hooded figure. That is the first time one of the hooded figures reveals itself in the present timeline, though it is not the first time viewers are made cognizant of the fact that the organization is keeping a watch on all these “interested” parties through surveillance devices. Rodney, however, while appreciating the save, doesn’t believe in Michael’s pitch for the future battle to come, refusing to help him, much to the disappointment of Spud, who wanted an “Avengers” style team-up.
However, fate has other plans for Rodney, as he manages to become embroiled in a team-up, nonetheless, when Spud accepts a large delivery and goes out on the assignment alone. His reason would be that after the altercation with the hooded figure, Rodney’s speed is taking time to “recharge,” and it also forces the individuals into a state of deep tiredness. Thus, while Rodeny had been napping, Spud went on this delivery, which turned out to be a trap set by Krazzy. Rodney wakes up hours later and realizes Spud is missing, so he races to the location of the Sixers’ Trap House.
Tazer
This trap house also becomes the target of Tazer after a series of altercations with Krazzy that almost threaten the two of them to go to war. The first altercation with the Sixers ends with Tazer revealing that he can control his invisibility power, and he utilizes it by becoming invisible and stabbing through a large group of Sixers, killing them without letting them have a moment to react.
This increases the Tower Boys’ confidence to try their talents on a bigger stage by connecting with a drug dealer. Tazer uses his power to steal one of the bricks while his team distracts the drug dealer, but their celebration is short-lived as the Sixers, led by Krazzy, converge on the Tower Boys’ spot. After defeating the drug dealer in a one-on-one fight without utilizing his superpower, Tazer doesn’t get any downtime to celebrate as one of his younger crew members gets shot by Krazzy in the back. Wrought with grief and harboring plans of revenge, Krazzy and his team plan to attack the trap house at night to kill Krazzy once and for all.
Sabrina
Krazzy’s return also entailed his return to Sharleen, much to Sabrina’s chagrin. Both sisters are unlucky in regards to their love lives, though Sabrina discovering her boyfriend cheating with another girl and catching the two of them red-handed leads to her anger and her powers getting activated, throwing her boyfriend against the door of his house in a rage. But unlike Sabrina, Sharleen is mollified by Krazzy after being gifted a diamond-adorned watch.
However, Sabrina still doesn’t trust Krazzy enough to let Sharleen go alone to a party at a club and agrees to accompany her, as that would also take her mind off the mistakes she had been making in her nursing job that had almost put one of her patients in jeopardy. In the club, however, Sharleen gets comfortable on the dance floor with a man named Qadim.
When the man tries to get too comfortable with Sharleen in the alleyway behind the club, he is soundly rejected by her. Angrily, he tries to assault her but is attacked by Sabrina. The two sisters are shocked when Qadim begins to levitate, revealing he has powers. But as he readies himself to fly straight at Sabrina and headbutt her, she pushes him away into a wall, killing him instantly.
The next morning, however, Sabrina plans to surrender to the police, but before that, she goes to check that alleyway out only to find it empty. She believes the cops had shifted the body away, or the man is alive, but considering how much the organization had been keeping watch and how Qadim’s activation of his powers flagged their systems, it is a logical extrapolation that they had been responsible for the clean-up.
Either way, Sharleen and Sabrina travel to the trap house the next day to buy drugs for Sharleen so that she can relax, but they are interrupted by Michael, who has resumed his search by perusing through his delivery parcels and finally hitting a target. As the two of them travel to the trap house, Michael requests to accompany them, which they reluctantly acquiesce to, but even as Michael tries to convince them with as limited information as he can muster, they are still not convinced. Michael is then suddenly forced to teleport to the sickle cell center, where he would be at the side of his mother while she suffers through a crisis session that occurs, albeit rarely, with sickle cell patients. More importantly, he is the only character who wouldn’t be present in the unintentional team-up at the Trap House.
Andre and the attack at the Trap House
Andre discovered his power (super-strengths) during one of those moments of frustration when he punched an ATM after noticing the negative balance on his account. While that temporarily solved his monetary issues, his actions would be caught on camera and thus capture the attention of the organization. Krazzy’s trap house is also the unwitting target for Andre, who, after having been rejected in multiple job interviews, hatches a plan to rob the safe in the backroom of Krazzy’s trap house with the help of his friend. Wracked with worry and guilt, he even calls up his friend and requests that he look after AJ (his son) if something happens to him.
That night, Andre sneaks into an already chaotic trap house that is under attack by the Tower Boys. He finds himself in Krazzy’s office with the safe, only to be met by Rodeny, who had super-sped himself to recuse a bodied Spud tortured by Krazzy’s henchmen due to interrogation. Sabrina and Sharleen, to protect themselves from gunfire, manage to hide in that exact room, with Sabrina also deflecting one of the bullets being shot at her. Tazer, meanwhile, screams in frustration at his plan failing because Krazy hadn’t been present at the trap house when the Tower Boys launched the attack.
However, that would be the first time the team would interact, and Rodney would remember that interaction. While Spud is recuperating at the hospital, Rodney discovers that Sabrina is a nurse and requests to look after his friend. Meanwhile, Andre would be successful in bringing home an empty safe, and in the process, while recuperating, he would fall into a deep slumber and miss interacting with his son, who would be disappointed in him and walk away. While that happens, Rodney visits Michael at his house, shocking Dionne and Michael, and even risking disappointed looks from Dionne, Michael manages to contact Andre with Rodney’s unconventional assistance, convincing him to meet up with them. However, before Andre could meet them, he was attacked by a group of hooded figures and overpowered.
What does Dionne’s investigation reveal about the organization?
A parallel track would emerge from Dionne’s worry mixed with curiosity about Michael’s vision of the future. This would be further exacerbated by the regular visits to the Johnsons’ diner. The matriarch and owner of that diner would be dissatisfied with their platitudes regarding their failure to locate and extract their daughter Jasmine, who had disappeared a while back.
As the internet begins to buzz about super-powered individuals in South London being captured by hooded figures of a mysterious organization, Dionne’s suspicions grow. Her suspicions get reinforced when she finally asks Jasmine’s mother about her power, which ultimately allows the parents to reveal the truth—that Jasmine had been taken by a private organization and had experiments conducted on her. If Dionne wasn’t careful, even her partner would be taken away.
Upon further investigation by Dionne, bolstered by the growing distance between her and Michael due to Michael being cagey about the details of the vision, Dionne learns that Jasmine’s power would be to heal, and recurring experimentation would entail utilizing her powers by the organization as a result. Her father knows where she has been taken but is afraid because of the legal landslide that would befall their family, and he requests that Dionne convince Michael to rescue his daughter once he learns that Michael has multiple powers.
Why is the organization searching for superheroes?
From the beginning of the season, the organization would be keeping watch on individuals exhibiting sudden bouts of power, all under the watchful eye of a man named Ray (Eddie Marsan). As it is revealed, when Ray interrogates the captured Andre, the superpowers are a result of the Supacell, itself a mutation of sickle cell. Creator Rapman takes the ingenious route of taking the real-life statistics of sickle cell anemia, a disease vastly prevalent in about 8–10% of African Americans. He manages to integrate the ethos of the X-Men while bringing in real conversations about race and utilizing that conversation as the narrative engine for the superheroic backstory.
Rapman, through the underhanded workings of the organization in kidnapping citizens (mostly African Americans suffering from sickle cell) and running illegal experiments on these activated superheroes, also parallels the real-life horror of the Tuskegee Experiments from the period of 1932–1972, where scientists would conduct experiments on African Americans to test the effects of unregulated syphilis without providing treatment. It is horrifying, yet a very interesting and grounded callback for a television show, very grounded even in its dabbling of super-histrionics.
Ray ultimately presents a proposal to Andre: a job where he would be given a salary far more than he could imagine and with enough time and freedom to visit his son. The job is to use his power and bring in super-powered individuals for the organization, which Ray believes and even convinces Andre is an organization dedicated to helping people with “Supacell,” the mutated cell responsible for the activation of powers.
Supacell (Season 1) Episode 6 Ending Explained:
Where is the organization located?
Tazer’s sudden attack by a hooded figure, with him unable to hide due to his invisibility, raises the stakes in the narrative. As Tazer is being dragged to a portal, the rest of the team appears to rescue him. A furious battle leads to a win, albeit barely, with Rodney’s back being burned. However, once they are brought back to the hideout (Sabrina’s house), they learn about Rodney’s healing factor.
The next day, once recovered, Tazer receives a call from Krazzy, who taunts him at his failed attempt to attack the home of Krazzy’s mother, which had resulted in the arrest of Tazer’s friends. Krazzy had also attacked Tazer’s grandmother in her own home, which further infuriated Tazer. Tazer demands a meet-up, which Krazzy accepts, ordering him to meet up that night at A-Town. This information is also helpful to Sabrina, who has been worried ever since her sister called her up, angrily informing her that Krazzy had strangled her before taking a kitchen knife to attack Krazzy. Ever since that incident, Sharleen has been missing, and Sabrina believes that Krazzy had something to do with her disappearance. Sabrina later learns from Rodney that A-Town is a drug den housed in the old Ashington Estate.
The Ashington Estate, coincidentally, is also the location where Jasmine’s father managed to track his daughter down before losing the signal of the tracker attached to Jasmine. Armed with that information, Dionne had been investigating and also managed to impart the same to Michael, who teleported to her location, scared that she might be in danger. The couple finally reconciled, with the two of them reaching an understanding, albeit still sacred, of the even more uncertain future now that Michael had traversed the future and whether the Butterfly effect would become a cause for concern. The couple is met by Sabrina and Rodney, who have also arrived at the location. The four, using Dionne’s new car, enter the dreaded A-Town.
Who is the leader of the hooded figures?
The subterfuge that the A-Town is simply a well-hidden drug den and a meeting place for drug dealers falls away quite quickly once the team begins their attacks on Krazzy’s forces. As Krazzy begins to recover, Tazer moves to deliver the final blow, only to be attacked by the hooded figures emerging from a portal. This leads to Krazzy revealing that his impact on the narrative is much more than simply a gangster affecting Tazer and Sabrina’s subplot.
On the contrary, as his glowing eyes would attest, Krazzy is the leader of the hooded figures, who are the Supacells that had been conscripted within the organization with the promise of money or other benefits. Through that, we also learn that Andre is also one of the members of the conscripted Supacells. Krazzy, to further twist the knife in, also reveals that the woman we had seen being killed in the first scene of the show had been Tazer’s mother, who had been kidnapped and kept in captivity all these years while being led to believe otherwise.
Does Michael save Dionne?
The battle of the hooded figures ends with Michael using his time manipulation to stop the fight midway. He convinces Andre to follow what Andre had already suspected—that the organization is already corrupt—while also convincing Dionne to get back to her car and try to escape from the now-rapidly developing war zone. As the battle finally ends, the team leaves Krazzy alive in the hopes of obtaining information about Sharleen and Jasmine’s abduction. However, when Rodney tries to take the phone out of his pocket, Krazzy uses his powers again—to absorb other superpowers within his vicinity. He uses Rodney’s super speed against him and stabs all the heroes multiple times, viciously killing them.
However, this, too, serves as a premonition for Michael, who teleports back a few seconds within his body and, before Krazzy can even think about a plan, attacks him and stabs him to death. In fact, even in those last moments, he shoots a stray shot at Michael, which Rodney saves him from by deflecting the bullet away. Unfortunately, that bullet hits through the windshield of Michael’s car into Dionne, killing her instantly. The butterfly effect works because Michael’s meddling with time changes the period of this “canon event,” moving it forward in time. Considering Michael’s power depletes immediately after, it is a matter of certainty that Dionne’s death couldn’t have been changed.
The death does provide an impetus, however. Two weeks after the event at A-Town, Michael invites all the team members to Gabriel’s restaurant for a private meeting. There, he reveals that he is going to travel into the future. He will locate Sharleen, Jasmine, and every other super-powered individual imprisoned within the organization. He will also find out who gave the order that day—the true head of that organization.
Who is the head of the organization?
A post-credit scene reveals some important information. One, that Krazzy had survived, albeit barely, and that he had been brought back to full health under the orders of Ray, presumably utilizing Jasmine’s power. However, his multiple failures don’t exactly endear him to the top brass, and Krazzy looks in abject shock as Victoria enters the room.
Her presence reveals that the private organization responsible for the Sickle Cell specialized center is behind this organization, running experiments on superheroes. It could be inferred that patients from that organization would also be transferred here and experimented upon or that they would be used as source code for identifying supacells within the family tree.
Victoria also turns out to be an amoral, ruthless individual. She was the one responsible for Krazzy’s early release from jail, under the condition that he would serve the organization’s agenda. It tracks with Krazzy’s confession to Sabrina that he had struck up a relationship with Sharleen because he had suspected her of being one of the Supacells. However, Krazzy’s failures can’t be tolerated anymore, and as Victoria and Ray leave, a security guard enters and shoots Ray dead. As both Victoria and Ray enter the elevator, she doesn’t hesitate to remark how deep in trouble Ray has found himself before proclaiming she will handle these operations in her own way from now on.
Supacell (Season 1) Review:
More tiring than superhero narratives are those that tease realism and double down on grimdark, cynical tonality. A similar lack of interest is also noticeable in origin stories, especially ones where ordinary people suddenly begin exhibiting superpowers. This conceit was explored almost two decades ago in Tim Kring’s “Heroes.” But just because a trope is often repeated doesn’t mean it won’t work if executed under the right circumstances.
What is appreciable about Rapman’s treatment of this superhero narrative is how stubbornly he dedicates an entire season to simply going through the motions of each character’s journey through the grassy knolls of the projects or the streets of South London. There is a specificity and vibe to the narrative that is unlikely to be replicated or seen unless it is being crafted by a creator with a similar background.
To call “Supacell” a mixture of Tim Kring’s “Heroes” with the South London-based realistic take of Ronan Bennett’s “Top Boy” wouldn’t be a stretch. One could logically extrapolate that Tazer’s plot thread, which is the closest callback to “Top Boy,” is also the one the show chooses to focus the most on, much to the detriment of the character development of key members of the cast, especially Eric Kofi Arefa as Andre.
However, Rapman and director Sebastian Thiel also don’t forget to explore some measure of humanity amidst the darkness, especially in the relationship between Dionne and Michael or the sisterly bond between Sabrina and Sharleen. It is further helped by a universally excellent cast and strong acting performances, barring a few young actors playing the roles of Tazer’s comrades. Tazer might be one of the more compelling characters, but his entourage is less so.
“Supacell” rests at a curious crossroads. It is neither very long nor very short. It chooses to explore so much of the lives of these characters that, at times, the pulp and knotty plotting prevalent in the sci-fi genre gets shifted to the side. Even then, there is an inconsistency, as explained in the previous paragraphs, with the depth imparted to the characters. As a result, while some characters are extremely compelling, others come off as bland.
However, what is also fascinating are the wrinkles introduced in the backstory to provide rational explanations for a superhero narrative to exist comfortably conjoined within the conversations about race and the troublesome racial history. It provides an unexpectedly different dimension to the story, which does serve as a unique hook. Perhaps these unique hooks and storytelling devices are a new way forward for this genre to avoid becoming stale, and while “Supacell” doesn’t entirely reach its true potential (storytelling and budget both could be responsible), it is brimming with such, and thus deserves a continuation.
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