POWER AND POTENCY PT. 5

This is just a quick follow-up to Part 4, which discussed the knotty problem of imputing "power" to fictional characters who have no power save that of being alive when they used to be dead. SPOILERS in advance.

In Part 4, I noted that Golden Age character Major Victory was one such character. Some afterlife judge returned a nameless patriot to life, giving him a costume and a mandate to fight the Axis. One story imputed a limited super-power to Victory, but this is seemed to have been created for the writer's convenience in that one tale. However, most readers would still deem Victory a superhero, if only because he wears a costume.

My newest inductions into the superhero idiom don't wear costumes, but like Victory, they are characters who were dead and became alive again through supernatural means. I've just finished my review of the 1999 telefilm PURGATORY, and in that review, I noted that though the story starts with a band of outlaws, it actually centers on five characters-- the one savable member of the gang, and four residents of the town Refuge. The four residents are all famous gunfighters-- Wild Bill Hickock, Billy the Kid, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James-- who, like the rest of the townfolk, have been brought back to life to serve a purgatorial sentence, to see if they're worthy to enter heaven.

The four reborn gunfighters, obviously, don't look like anything but ordinary men in ordinary clothes, and they have no special abilities. The rules of the game seem to suggest that they can be wounded by the guns of the mortal outlaws, although none of them are so wounded. The principal threat to their well-being is that, by fighting the bad guys, they may lose their chance at heaven. Nevertheless, there's no question that the climactic gunfight has the same combative value that it would in any commonplace western-- and since one side of the fight is fought in part by dead-alive men, it also becomes relevant to the world of metaphenomenal narratives.

Thus the four gunfighters of PURGATORY would be another example, like others discussed in this series, where the heroes have "potency" but not "power" as such.