“Mickey Rooney Cries No More” is episode three of season one of Powers.
This episode opens in the Federal Powers Containment Facility that is used to keep Powers prisoner. One of the prisoners is led into a room where the man who put him inside waits. The man, Triphammer, is not a Power himself; he has been badly injured (he’s missing part of a leg and an arm), but wears extensive armour to make up for it, and replace his missing limbs.
Triphammer wants the prisoner to take part in an experiment. All he has to do is attack Triphammer for his sins to be forgiven. So he does. When the prisoner steps into a beam of light, his powers are taken away. Then he dies – messily. The experiment, which is being run with the cooperation of Powers Division’s Captain Cross, is not proving to be flawless as yet.
Pilgrim and Walker are at a death of a Powers kid, one they met, who could levitate up to three feet in the air. The boy, by Walker’s deduction, had fallen at least 500 feet out of the sky, and not from a plane (Walker turns out to have a pilot’s license – and he got it back when he was Diamond and could fly without a plane). When the dead boy is tracked back, a packet of Sway is found at the scene. According to Doctor Death, the drug will probably be fatal to the wannabees.
Johnny Royalle seems to be trying to turn Calista, who ran away from Retro Girl in the previous episode, “Like a Power”, away from her hero-worship of Retro Girl, so she goes around to see the latter. Quite why Royalle is so interested in Calista starts to become clear later on.
It seems that the only way they can keep ‘Big Bad’ Wolfe in captivity is by constantly lobotomising him – constantly, because he keeps healing from it, and that’s the only way of keeping his powers under control. But the lobotomies aren’t working like they used to. Which is why there are the experiments with taking powers away.