Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 5 Episode 4 Escalates the War Between Kanan and Raq

Critic’s Rating: 4.3 / 5.0

4.3

People in the Power Universe are notorious for making bad decisions.

Sometimes those decisions are so bad they’re comical, while other times, they’re so bad they make you angry.

It was poor decision after poor decision on Power Book III: Raising Kanan Season 5 Episode 4, and even that feels generous.

This battle between Kanan and Raq has been brewing for years now, and while it’s had many peaks and valleys, you can tell this time it’s different because Kanan is different.

When Power Book III: Raising Kanan first started, Kanan Stark was nothing like the adult we knew. And of course, he’s changed as the series has gone on, but we’re now seeing the closest version yet of the Kanan we met in Power.

Adult Kanan was a sociopath, and he didn’t care about anything or anyone.

If you want to debate whether or not he “cared” about Tariq, feel free to plead your case in the comments, but the more we learn about Kanan’s past, the more apparent it’s become that he lacks the capacity to truly care about people.

Somewhere between watching his mother kill his father and killing his uncle—maybe even before that—Kanan lost the ability to truly care about anyone.

He’s about himself—and himself alone. I’d say it sounds a lot like Raq, but that’s not entirely fair to her, since we know that Kanan will always be her Achilles’ heel.

Kanan doesn’t have one of those.

In this hour, Kanan was on a path of destruction, making statements wherever he could. First with his mother and then with Taz.

If anyone embodied this episode’s terrible decision-making, it was Taz. I could do a whole dissertation on Taz because what exactly was he hoping to accomplish?

There’s a certain air of superiority and confidence you have to possess when you live your life on the streets, and it works for a lot of people. Tommy comes to mind when I think of someone who doesn’t even know the meaning of humility.

But not everyone has the smarts and abilities to get away with saying anything and acting any way they want.

Taz walked around with a massive chip on his shoulder, constantly challenging Kanan in public and private as though Kanan was going to react rationally.

Genuinely, what was his problem?

Taz’s beef was mainly with Breeze, and he knew what he was doing in pitting him against Kanan, and he fell right into the trap almost gladly. Then he paid the price for it, and he had no one to blame but himself.

It’s fairly obvious that Breeze plays games, and he does things to see how people will react. It’s a dangerous game to play, because people don’t like being used as real-life pawns in someone else’s chess match, but when you’re moving around silly people like Taz, then it can work.

Taz’s death was a guarantee from the first surly look he levied at Kanan this season, but it was a little surprising to see the chopping up of his body because so often in Power, people don’t go out of their way to hide their misdeeds like that.

It’s very interesting to see the early evolution of the Kanan and Breeze dynamic, given the distrust that still exists between them. Or maybe not distrust, but caution.

They’re still getting to know each other and feel each other out, which is why Breeze met up with Raq without saying anything. And also why Kanan didn’t tell Breeze immediately that he knew he was lying about the Taz situation.

Perhaps the biggest sign that these two are still learning about each other was the Defcon admission, because huh?

I’m going to take the Kanan voiceover about truth and lying and blah blah blah to infer that Breeze just made up that lie because he assumed that Kanan didn’t know anything about his supposed father, and he could use their supposed connection as a way to get Kanan further aligned with him.

Or should we assume the lies in question were really from Kanan’s end, since he knew Defcon wasn’t his father, but he couldn’t very well tell Breeze that!

Either way, their early dynamic is now characterized by deceit, and if that isn’t true for literally EVERY male dynamic throughout the Power Universe.

Just men everywhere claiming to be brothers and lying when it suits them.

Speaking of lying, I never thought I would see the day when a young Kanan would turn into Don Juan, but that day arrived, and I was not prepared for it.

Kanan’s mission with Tiana was to gather information about Raq’s new business, which he did, but there was something else beneath it.

We’ve seen Kanan fall for a few girls throughout the series, and when we got that extended clip of the two of them in bed together, it didn’t give the impression that he was just after information. It felt like he genuinely wanted to get to know her.

I’ve been wondering whether we’d meet Shawn’s mother in this series, and it finally happened with only a few episodes left.

On the one hand, I thought Jarita would be a bigger part of Kanan’s story, but then again, she didn’t exactly play a major part in Power either.

Knowing that she was working for Raq and entered into an arrangement with Kanan under false pretenses makes you think about how terribly strained that adult relationship was, and why Kanan always had such disdain for his own son.

Jarita’s arrival is a very intriguing little side plot to look out for, especially if he uses that relationship to hurt Raq, because that’s clearly one of his main agendas this season.

The whole plan to get one of Flossie’s customers to overdose was a smart move, and Kanan making it clear it was him, so Raq wouldn’t think otherwise, was lowkey a power move, because you can tell he’s reaching a point where he’s not scared of anything.

Raq’s face when she found out Kanan was messing with her was the complete opposite of unbothered. One thing about Raq is that she’s always prepared, and what Kanan did caught her off-guard.

There is no way she could have ever predicted that Kanan and another kid named Breeze would wind up being something she’d have to contend with, and that’s to say nothing of Stefano, who’s a thorn she can’t get rid of.

The conversation between Raq and Breeze was a highlight of the hour because Raq was running circles around him, but in the same breath, you could start to see why Ghost and Tommy held Breeze in such high regard.

Breeze has a firm grasp of the game, and as I mentioned earlier, he’s clearly a master at maneuvering. Raq’s someone he knows he will never be able to maneuver around the way he wants because of his proximity to Kanan, but his mention of her as a woman was reductive, a product of the times.

We’ve had to hear that Raq doesn’t belong because she’s a woman, and people can keep underestimating her all they want. When she says she’s about her money and that no one will know what she’s thinking, believe her!

Raq had a busy hour, and the decision to go after Stefano was one of those horrendous decisions I was talking about earlier.

I understand why Raq wasn’t trying to cut Stefano off a piece because he was the one who came at her to begin with. He’s only circling back around because he’s greedy, and he thought that he was hitching his wagon to the winning horse with Snaps and Pop, only to realize Raq was never going to lie down and die.

But while I applauded Raq for not giving in to Stefano, getting into a war with him feels like the wrong move at this point, when she’s just getting her business off the ground.

Bringing in those Memphis men smelled rotten from the jump, though I suspected Stefano was going to sniff them out more than I thought the one guy was going to go rogue.

All it accomplishes is sending Stefano onto the warpath, which means that as we move into the final four episodes, Raq has haters coming at her from every angle, and it’s likely to be a bloodbath at the end of the day.

The tension is escalating exactly as it should as the series enters its final stretch, and if this episode proved anything, it’s that people aren’t really thinking long-term.

They’re making emotional, impulsive moves, and in this universe, that’s usually a death sentence.

Everything Else You Need To Know

• Marvin’s faith journey is making me incredibly nervous. You couple that with these heart-to-hearts with Raq, and I fear he’s not making it through this season, and THAT will be the catalyst that pushes Jukebox into being a dirty cop.

• That man dancing around, snorting cocaine, and then dying was so jarring.

This was a decent hour in a season that’s shaping up to be pretty slow-moving. It really does feel like this season is getting us ready for the latest spinoff more than anything, and I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Let me know in the comments how you felt about this one!

You can watch Power Book III: Raising Kanan at midnight on the STARZ app. On linear, it airs on STARZ at 8:00 pm ET/PT in the U.S.