What the Lightning Left Behind
Alisha’s superpower is that anyone who touches her skin immediately wants to fuck her. Not eventually—right now, involuntarily, with a desperation that overrides everything else. The show presents this as a curse, and has enough integrity to follow it toward its uglier implications rather than just milking it for shock. That detail alone told me Misfits was going to be worth at least a few hours of my time.
The setup is aggressively simple: five young offenders sentenced to community service at a grey urban recreation center get struck by lightning during a freak storm and each comes away with a power loosely tied to their personality or damage. Curtis can move through time. Simon turns invisible—which, given that everyone ignores him anyway, reads less like a gift than a confirmation. Alisha gets what she gets. The fifth character’s ability doesn’t surface until the finale, which is the show’s most effective piece of withholding.
I watched the whole first series on a weekend with enough alcohol in my blood to lower the resistance I’d built against it—it had been sold to me as the rough alternative to Skins, a comparison that poisoned it before I’d seen a frame. That comparison still isn’t fair to either show. Skins has a specific quality of making you feel sixteen again from the inside, that particular ache. Misfits doesn’t have that. What it has is a willingness to go somewhere genuinely unpleasant and stay there: by the end of the first episode the group has accidentally killed their community service worker and buried the body, which sets the register for everything that follows. There’s an episode built around sex with a reanimated elderly woman. There are time-loop paradoxes played entirely for gut-punch rather than spectacle. It goes places.
The problems are real. The community center setting is grey and confined in a way that starts as gritty and becomes oppressive through repetition—not purposeful claustrophobia but we-couldn’t-afford-another-location claustrophobia. Some of the cast is difficult to watch, and not productively. None of the characters made me root for them consistently, which is either a deliberate stance on young people the system has given up on, or a writing failure. I watched all six episodes without resolving that question.
The second series was already running in the UK by the time I finished the first. I’ll probably get there. Not out of love—more the low-grade curiosity the show managed to sustain, which is honestly more than a lot of things manage.