The setting: a nondescript apartment somewhere in Chicago. The scene: a handful of dudes debating whether a small group of incredibly average roommates — who also happen to have superpowers — should be tracking down a bad guy.
"We don’t just like do this all the time," comes the annoyed response. "We’re not, like, a crime-fighting team. This isn’t a secret sanctum, this is our tiny little apartment and those are my roommates."
And that kicks off the final season of the comedic superhero web series "The Platoon of Power Squadron," which screens Saturday at the Music Box. Launched in 2009 from writer-director (and co-star) Jake Jarvi and shot in and around Chicago, the show, now in its 10th season, is the kind of under-the-radar gem that strips down all the bombast of a blockbuster and imagines what it would be like if "regular people — like me and my friends who work minimum-wage retail jobs — had superpowers," said Jarvi. "It would be impossible to be a superhero." Consider the expenses, alone!
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The roommates are a foursome: Jonas (Jarvi), who can control all matter and read minds; Virginia (Eliza Toser), who can freeze time and create portals for time travel; Donald (Craig Benzine), who has electricity shooting out of his hands and can create objects like a lightning lasso; and Sebastian (Carlyn Janus), who has the ability to clone (and just as frequently reabsorb) herself.
"People like us have to be especially careful about strangers who are too interested in us," Jonas tells Virginia in an early episode. She looks at him and replies, deadpan: "People like us? Middle-class Caucasian people in their 20s?"
There’s something kind of fascinating about the series, with its bare-bones aesthetic, and you realize how effective this kind of superhero story can work without all the studio hoo-ha and bombast. The writing here, the sensibility, it’s a big part of the draw. You don’t actually need something expensive-looking (or visually loud) to capture what’s so great about the genre.
The Platoon of Power foursome is a ramshackle group, a hobbyist crime-fighting team not really sure what to do with its powers — the roommates don’t even know why they have them. It’s one of the weirder projects I’ve seen at this budget point, with a vaguely "It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia" vibe. The performances are middle-of-the-road, but that’s not actually that much of a drawback. The show is incredibly well-shot. And a lot of it is funny.
"As surprised as I was to find other people with powers, I think I was more surprised that we all had minimum-wage jobs," Jonas says while recounting their origin story. "Figured one of us would have figured out how to turn superpowers into some kind of money. After that it was simply a matter of — do you want to get tacos or anything while we’re here?"
The early seasons are less impressive, and even Jarvi acknowledges that. "You learn a lot about the process of making a show just by doing it."
Seasons 1 to 4 were self-funded. "They were all done for the cost of Taco Bell meals for my friends for helping out," he said. By Season 5, the show had attracted a following thanks to Benzine, who has a popular YouTube channel called WheezyWaiter. "He’s made his living off of YouTube for, I dunno, the last seven years, so his popularity helped turn the spotlight on us. People who were really passionate about our show started giving us crowdfunding money, and we used that to upgrade our cameras and start really putting more money and energy into the visual effects. So Season 5 is when the quality jumps."
The mythology was built as they went along. "In Season 3, this thing" — it looks like the smoke monster from "Lost" — "emerges from Virginia’s time portal and starts possessing people and body-hopping, and that becomes our main villain." (Saturday’s screening will include a 10- to 15-minute "previously on" that recaps the plot through Season 9.)
Season 10 (which will be available on YouTube starting March 12 and was made with a budget of $44,000) opens with Jonas becoming so fed up with that aforementioned conversation in his apartment that he blasts through the ceiling just to get out of there. Later, Donald stares at the hole: "There goes another security deposit." It’s these small throwaway lines that work best, whether it’s two characters squatting over an unconscious body and passing the time talking about dark roast coffee having less caffeine than light, or Jonas stuck in a coma-induced feedback loop that has him talking to a girl in a bikini:
Jonas: "It’s been a while. Didn’t know if I’d see you again."
Girl: "You don’t spend a lot of time anymore digging around in your subconscious."
Jonas: "Oh, I don’t need to. Our phones all have games now."
The visual effects are good — surprisingly good. "We’ve always done them ourselves," said Jarvi. "We used After Effects, which is the visual effects program we used for almost everything. When I wrote the first episode, none of us had even tried visual effects. So it was a matter of finding online tutorials that put you in the direction of what you wanted to do."
There are also several computer-generated 3-D effects that "one of our viewers from Germany got on Skype and taught director of photography Ryan Wolff how to do. This was the only way we could do it. We didn’t have the time or money to go to school to learn, or pay to hire people who knew how to do this."
The later seasons improve on the pacing and storytelling and just the way it is shot; midway through Season 10, a character is framed so that we see only her head through a diamond-shaped window set into a door. It’s a gorgeous shot.
Saturday’s screening will also include a few outtakes, Jarvi said. "Maybe we’ll do a quick Q-and-A and then we gotta get out of there, because there’s a midnight screening of ‘Rocky IV.’"
The final installment of "Platoon of Power Squadron" screens in its entirety 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. Go to www.musicboxtheatre.com.
nmetz@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @Nina_Metz
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