WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Season 1 of Super Crooks, now streaming on Netflix.
Super Crooks pulls the focus from the superheroes that generally dominate movies and TV to focus instead on the villains, making a topsy-turvy world where good and bad are not so easy to distinguish. With the villains as the protagonists, the heroes become the antagonists, and more than any other hero, the Praetorian stands out as the main physical threat in the series. But what exactly is his power?
The real answer is: all of them. Gifted with the unique ability to manifest virtually any power, but only doing so one at a time on a seemingly random basis, Praetorian has the most interesting powersets in the series. Figuring out just how exactly it works is a matter of digging into the series from start to finish, where there are startling revelations to be made.
When Praetorian is introduced, it's as a member of the Union of Justice -- the world of Jupiter's Legacy's equivalent to the Justice League. Praetorian is like a whole Justice League wrapped up into one. Said to have over 200 superpowers, Praetorian proves an immediate threat to the main characters of Super Crooks and almost toys with them as he hunts them down, making a game out of defeating almost every opponent he faces in the series. That doesn't mean he's without limitations, however. The catch to the Praetorian's powers is that he can't use all his abilities at once. Instead, they manifest seemingly at random, to the point that a global betting pool sprouts around his televised fights as people gamble to guess which power he will use next.
Throughout the series, he showcases a range of abilities from the overwhelmingly powerful to the incredibly niche. He manifests super hearing just in time to notice a heist in progress, shoots lasers out of his eyes that carve through crowds of people and the building around him, and at various points, even uses the powers of other characters in the show like Ghost so that he can become intangible and pass through solid matter. Perhaps his most useful ability paralyzes everyone in a room so that none of them can activate their own powers. If he could call these powers on command, it's anybody in the franchise could beat him.
Instead, his powers occur seemingly at random. He even carries around a deck of cards that he equates with each power, drawing one card and looking at it before he showcases abilities like pyrokinesis. Yet at the same time, the playing cards don't seem like a necessary component to his abilities. He uses different abilities without drawing playing cards at all, and even just comparing the numbers cited for how many powers he has (over 200) and the numbers of cards in a deck (52), they would not quite add up. Briefly-seen computer screens showing the Praetor betting pools have sprawling lists of possibilities for the powers he can create, so it seems that Praetorian simply uses the deck as a gimmick, reflecting his arrogant playfulness in combat.
At the same time, Praetorian is not solely reliant on his wide range of abilities. At all times, he maintains a level of super strength, speed and durability that make him a deadly threat even without any of his other powers. This is shown in the series finale when Praetorian dismantles several opponents all at once, even under the effects of a power dampener. Peculiarly, it seems the power dampeners do not apply to super strength, as both Praetorian and Gladiator duke it out, and even when Praetorian loses, he takes massive wall-busting hits that prove he is far from human.
This is the reason that Praetorian could demonstrate his super strength simultaneously to his other powers whenever he did randomly generate something else from his repertoire. The only way Praetorian could showcase multiple powers at once otherwise was specifically when he gained the ability to create clones of himself, and even then, the separate bodies could each only have one power at a time.
Nonetheless, Praetorian maintained some of the strongest, fastest and most durable fighting moves in the series. It's the randomly-assigned powers that make him so fun to watch though, making the character stand out as one of the most entertaining parts of the series. Hopefully, Praetorian will return for a future installment of the series, but that may just come down to the luck of the draw.
