I’ve
loved Yo-Yo from her first episode, and that love has only grown over
time. With cool powers, an awesome
connection with Mack, and a great characterization, there’s a lot to like about
her. And now, season 5 has brought it
with an upgrade from recurring to regular status – it’s high time! (Yo-Yo-related spoilers.)
First of
all, I love her powers. Super-speed is a
neat power, but it’s very prone to narrative problems, because it often seems
the only to keep the speedster from solving all the episode’s problems in
seconds is to make the speedster stupid and have them opt not to use their
powers at key moments (hey there, Barry!)
And sure, there are times when Yo-Yo is taken out of the equation to
prevent a quick fix, but at least the parameters of her powers themselves place
limits on her: she can use her speed for
one second at a time, going as fast/far as she can but then snapping right back
to where she was when she started. So
she can, say, speedily steal dangerous weapons or needed access cards from bad
guys, or she might be able to knock them out or tie them up, but she can’t run
away, because she’ll always “yo-yo” back.
It’s good for powers to have rules like that – there’s plenty of room to
play around within it, but she doesn’t become an all-purpose speeding Deus ex
machina.
I also
love that she loves her powers. It seems like, particularly with female
heroes, we’re more likely to get a story – at least in the beginning – about
someone who’s afraid of her powers, can’t control them, and/or just wants them to
go away. That’s how Daisy’s Inhuman story
begins, and I’ve seen it play out elsewhere, too. It’s not as often as we see a woman acquiring
powers and immediately start using them for the greater good. Granted, we don’t see Yo-Yo’s earliest time
as an Inhuman, so she very well may have freaked out at first, but that’s not
the story we’re given. Instead, we start
with Yo-Yo already at work, using her powers to clean up the streets of her
city. I like seeing her eagerness to use
her powers, her swagger when she pulls off something incredible, and her
insistence that she can handle herself.
We’ve
mostly gotten to know Yo-Yo through her relationship with Mack, a by-product of
her up-till-now place on the show as a recurring character and his love
interest – all roads generally go through Mack where her storylines are
concerned. But still, we are getting a chance to learn a little
more about her. She tends to be wary in
giving out her trust, especially on a more personal level, and she can be
caught up in waiting for the other shoe to drop. When she’s ready to give, though, to really
go all in, she’s in it for the long haul.
In season 4, after what Daisy and Simmons tell her about the Framework
and its dangers, Yo-Yo still doesn’t think twice before plugging herself in to
save Mack. Seeing the altered Mack
inside the Framework, the one who doesn’t know her, kills her, but she still
doesn’t give up on him, and she refuses to abandon him even as the world starts
disappearing around them. Yo-Yo can be
very stubborn, which sometimes works against her, but it can also pay off in a
big way because she’s more than ready to stare down death in order to bring her
man home.
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