Power Book II: Ghost Season 3 Episode 3 Review: Human

Tariq has the biggest blind spot I have ever seen in the form of his girlfriend and best friend.

It’s getting a little sad to see him hold them in such high regard each hour when they’re hiding this massive secret from him, and he’s placing all his trust in them.

Tariq even went on one of his famous ‘I am NOT my father’ diatribes during Power Book II: Ghost Season 3 Episode 3, and while we’ve talked about whether that’s true or not to death, I’m not sure Ghost was ever so blindly loyal to anyone. He was far too selfish for that.

Tariq’s whole life has been him trying to prove something, but I wonder if he 100% knows what he’s trying to prove half the time. Right now, though, he’s trying to keep himself and the people he loves alive, that’s his singular focus, and his new operation is a solid one to help in doing that.

Tariq and Brayden have repeatedly proven that they make a powerful team when they’re both on their game. Tariq was correct when he told Effie and Brayden that they each bring something different to the team. And they do.

Where one slacks in one area, one of the others can pick them back up.

Everything about the coffee app is brilliant, from the cup design to getting payment through cryptocurrency. Will it all eventually blow up in their faces like Course Correct? Maybe! But right now, it will do significant numbers and help them move the weight faster than anything else.

Noma’s henchman is obsessed with humbling the kids and ensuring they understand the enormity of their situation. This is life or death and BIG business, and threatening their loved ones was a way to get them further in line, even if, at the moment, they didn’t seem terribly worried about it.

Cane was the only one who let it affect him for more than five seconds, and all he did was try and fail to give Diana a gun.

But anyway, the new business should allow them to meet Noma’s deadline, and that’s all well and good, but as usual, they get into a bigger problem before they can even get the app up and running.

While the kids were tackling the top five percenters, Cane and Dru wanted to make their mark in Brooklyn. And I’ve been wondering when the Castillo family was going to come back up in a meaningful way. Well, now I know.

Seeing Cane and Dru’s opposite approaches to a plan makes me understand why Lorenzo was never too keen on Cane being the family leader. He’s reactive and emotional, but then again, so is Dru in some ways.

But where Cane will always think to go with guns and violence first, Dru will think of a much more evolved and less bloody approach. They should both be in charge and working together to balance one another out, but that certainly does not seem to be the Tejada way.

Taking out the Russian connect was a good idea if they could pull it off so that there was no pushback on them whatsoever. You don’t ascend to upper-echelon drug dealer status by not understanding how other drug dealers think.

The connect ends up dead, and now Cane randomly calls the Castillos to swoop in and save the day? The Castillo brothers knew something smelled, and it didn’t help that the plan to get Brayden to pull the trigger went as wrong as possible.

Brayden is a lot of things. Like truly, a lot of things. But he isn’t a killer. He isn’t Tariq. He can shoot a man in the head and chest, run a few blocks down the street and then sit down at a restaurant to order a shrimp cocktail like he didn’t just take a man’s life two minutes before.

Brayden: I just really thought I could pull the the trigger, but I fucking froze. Like Elsa.
Effie: Yeah, well, Elsa would have pulled the fucking trigger, Brayden.
Brayden: You’re not helping, Effie.

Tariq stepped in to stop Brayden from getting killed because that man was surely going to get to his gun faster than bumbling Brayden. But it screws everything up for Cane, and it’s piqued his interest in some other things he asked Brayden to do.

Cane and Brayden’s dynamic is one of the best of the show because Brayden wants so desperately to be liked by Cane, and Cane is just itching for a reason to shoot him. Right now, they need each other, but all Cane needs is one reason to kill him, and he’d do it in a heartbeat, damn the consequences.

I’m not sure there’s anyone Cane wouldn’t kill if he had enough reason to.

Lauren’s non-death will eventually be exposed, and that ripple effect will be insane, from Tariq down to Saxe, whose pseudo-girlfriend keeps a ton of information from him.

I don’t want to skip ahead too much, but I’m also anxious about what comes next here because there is only so long we as an audience can be the only ones in the know before things start to feel stale.

Circling back to Cane, though, he is taking this whole head of the family thing way too far. And I’ve ragged on Lorenzo for not being anything like the man everyone talked about during Power Book II: Ghost Season 1, but why does Cane think it’s such a good idea to totally emasculate the man at every turn?

Cane isn’t a dumb guy. He’s not all muscle and no brains or anything, but he often seems to think he’s invincible. Lorenzo has nothing on him right now, so he’s doing what he’s told and keeping his mouth closed, but Cane better make sure that NEVER changes, or he will be in for a rude awakening.

Elsewhere during this hour, things between Whitman and Monet continued to escalate, and damn, Whitman is backsliding rather quickly into terrible at his job territory! He’s entirely ruled by this desire to obtain justice for Carrie, making him somewhat reckless and stupid.

Perhaps he thinks he’s untouchable because he’s a cop, but he’s dealing with some incredibly dangerous people and tormenting the crap out of them at every turn.

Meeting with Whitman was a bad idea for Monet, but at this point, you can see she’s starting to get a little unnerved by how hard he’s pushing the investigation and the information he’s obtaining. Even with Davis standing right there as a buffer, she couldn’t help but let some information slip that won’t do her any good.

Whitman will keep probing and probing until he gets a hit, and it doesn’t matter whether he’s on that silly task force or not. He will spend every free minute he has trying to bring Monet down so he can assuage his guilt. It won’t work, but he’s going to try.

I’m the emotional one, cause it sure seems like you two have a boner for the St. Patrick kid.

Kevin

Jenny and Blanca’s tactics are way different from Whitman’s, though they are equally as obsessed with Tariq as he is with Monet. I would argue they’re even more obsessed, especially Blanca. I wonder at this point how she’s even allowed to be on a case like this because her bias is insane.

Their whole play right now is trying to pin the various murders they have on the criminal network and prove they were done to cover the drug business. But they have such little proof of anything, and I’m not sure what they thought Tate would give them.

Couldn’t they find out Tariq was working for Weston Holdings on their own? All they’d have to do is follow him for a day, and bam, they get that knowledge without having to watch Tate make moves on a woman out of his league.

For all they’re ragging on Whitman, he would have had this information last week if he cared even an ounce about Tariq!

Not to bring everything back to Lauren, but when exactly will Jenny let anyone know she’s alive? I understand the need to protect her, but someone will have to know at some point while building this case, right?

The picture Saxe took of Monet, Davis, and Tariq at the office will help Jenny in her continued quest to link them all together, but she’s still missing so much of the narrative.

Someone finally learning a narrative, though? That would be Saxe, who finally got the goods on the Theo Rollins case.

First of all, there’s a new Theo that totally threw me off. And secondly, how did it take this long for Saxe to discover he was Davis’s brother?

Again, so much happens during Power that you forget what information is known and what isn’t. We’ve known they were brothers forever, but apparently, it is brand new information for Saxe.

Davis clearly feels guilty about his brother potentially dying in jail for a crime he committed, but it’s also not like he’s rushing down to turn himself in, either. He’s hoping Saxe can save the day, but he’s putting a lot of faith into a man he treats like crap.

I want this storyline to get juicier, but it still plods along with episodes in a row where it’s not even discussed. It feels very secondary to some of the bigger things in the series right now, but I’ll continue to wait and see what they have in store for us and if they can connect it to the larger narrative.

Everything Else You Need To Know

• Dru is handling the Everett breakup as one does. He’s trying to get over someone by getting under someone else, which is whatever, BUT I’m curious about what may happen with Gordo.

• Diana and Salim have absolutely no chemistry whatsoever, but Diana deserves some happiness. And getting her into the drug game opposite Effie? Oh, the possibilities here are endless.

• Holy hotep. Cane called that man holy hotep. Cane has no business being as funny as he is sometimes.

• Tariq wanting him and Effie to be Ghost and Tasha but better is comical. In a show full of toxic relationships, Ghost and Tasha may have been the absolute WORST. Evoking their names as a form of comparison feels like Tariq killed their relationship.

• Why are Monet, Davis, and Tariq meeting in the office just to tell Tariq to stay away from Monet??? There wasn’t a better, remote place for them to meet? Or couldn’t they have just told him that same information over the phone?

• Harper seems really sweet and like she should be immune to Tate’s smarmy charm. Old habits die hard, though.

• Everything and pretty much anything involving Brayden’s family is boring, but I did like the whole RSJ thing. His and Tariq’s meet-cute may wind up paying dividends down the line.

• Cane calling Effie for what?

This season is trucking along rather nicely, with many moving parts, and the action is starting to ramp up!

Let me know in the comments what you thought about the installment, and remember you can watch Power Book II: Ghost online via TV Fanatic right now so you don’t miss anything!

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Whitney Evans is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.

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