Reviewer Rating: 4/5.0
4
And just like that, everything fell apart.
Just when you think everyone is going to band together to defeat the greatest evil of all, Detective Carter, things take a shocking turn, as is the case in Superbook II: Ghost.
Carter and Norma team up? Brayden kills drug dealer in the name of love? what is going on?
This moment is weird because, on the one hand, nothing should be too surprising. The loyalties of these people come and go, but there are still moments that baffled me.
I don’t know how they plan to get it all done in the next two hours. Good luck.
Carter is getting more evil every week, he lied to Nico about Felicia’s death and Nico supported him more than anyone, and he has to come back to bite him with his other lies.
Carter doesn’t seem to trust anyone completely, and his fast, loose, reckless approach will eventually come to a head, because why would anyone be loyal to him?
Monet and Tariq spend a solid hour trying to get up from his oppression, but when your plan depends on the help of a woman who wants you dead, the chances of your plan succeeding are slim.
It felt sudden for Tariq and Monet to forget all their worries and work together, even if it was something no one really talked about. Yes, they now have a common enemy, but the fact that the history between these two is completely forgotten is another tragedy of the speedrun of the last few episodes.
Norma would never be willing to help Tariq and Monet, especially when she had no reason to fully trust them.
For all she knew, they were probably setting her up (which they were), and she was right to bide her time.
The unlikely meeting between Tarik, Monet, Norma and Kane gives us one of the best moments of the hour: Norma showing off the ring to Monet, Tarik snickering in the background .
Monet is so tired this season. While the first half of the season digs deeper into her past, helping us better see that Monet has always put her career before her children, you can tell she’s trying to protect her kids, but she’s taking on Monet’s way to do it.
This means she tries to protect them by scolding them, telling them they are stupid, and doing things behind their backs.
For Monáe to come out of a near-death experience and suddenly become Mother of the Year was very out of character for her. That would never be Monet Tejada.
But is she now actively trying to find the root causes of her children’s failures? No, she’s not. She can no longer control them, which is obviously causing her stress as well. She forces them all to make decisions for themselves, whatever that means to her.
For Kane, it took him a long time to come out of Monet’s shadow, and his situation with Norma left him feeling indestructible.
Cane’s feud with Dru had been brewing for years and came to a head when Papi chose Dru over Cane to follow in his footsteps. Kane never got out of this situation, and no matter how sly insults from Monáe or Drew, Kane would not turn up his tail and run back to his family.
However, Norma joining forces with Carter should force him to choose a side once and for all.
The revelation that Norma and Carter will join forces with their evil forces instead of hunting each other down is definitely a huge, shocking cliffhanger, but it creates a huge buzz because these two have up to an hour before it happens to cause serious damage.
But this should force Kane to either completely alienate his family, or force him to join forces with them to defeat the super-evil inspired by Norma and Carter’s partnership.
The same goes for Drew.
He’s running around with Kane doing little things and doing Carter’s bidding, but Norma is doing him no favors with Carter and further hurts Monet, which doesn’t seem to be what he’s after right now.
Drew had to do some tricking on Carter, and I respect him because he was proactive instead of reactive. Maybe his plan will be a mess, but at least he’s trying to do something, which I appreciate.
Whether you like Drew’s arc this season or not, you have to admit that he’s showing some serious flashes of who Pappy sees. He’s good at adjusting angles, gaining leverage, and he’s got a great touch. He is the opposite of unmotivated.
Dru has made a lot of stupid choices in the past, and maybe things with Carter are going to blow up in his face, but he’s doing something for himself. This is what all Tejeda kids need to achieve.
The last child, Diana, had a hard time with what had happened to her, not only grieving the loss of her child but also feeling guilt and shame for killing Felicia and the impact it would have on her son. .
Felicia is not a nice person. Even though we barely know her, making such a statement doesn’t feel like a big deal since she’s actively aiding criminals while taking the moral high ground by beating Diana to a pulp, causing her to abort her child.
That’s a terrible person. But that doesn’t mean Diana doesn’t feel sad about the consequences of her actions.
It’s unclear exactly how much time passed between Felicia’s death and when we saw Diana here, but she wasn’t handling things well and she didn’t really have anyone to talk to.
She tried talking to Tariq, but that was Tariq. He doesn’t feel much guilt, and even if he does, he’s not someone who can sit back and express sympathy.
I’m saying this after watching Superbook II: Ghosts Season 4 Episode 7, and I’ll reiterate it here, but in another world, Tarik and Diana would make sense . They make more sense than almost anyone Tariq has ever dated, and there’s a quiet chemistry between the two.
But in this life, they need closure and move on. Diana has baby fever, and while Tarik is a little sad about losing the baby, he’s clearly in no rush to have another one, and that’s okay.
They had never seen eye to eye and it was time to go their separate ways. If the series ends and Tarik and Diana make it out alive, they should never speak to each other again, I mean that.
Diana needs to take a page from her oldest rival Effie’s playbook and leave New York City so she can start over. As long as she was tied to that city and those people, she could never escape Tejada’s madness.
Back to Tarik (who is barely mentioned because of how we got here), he’s as exhausted as ever and with only two hours left, I really can’t predict what’s going to happen to him.
Eventually, he’ll realize that he has to get rid of Norma and Carter, and figuring that out should be his first priority.
If he wanted to ascend to any level, be bigger than Ghost, bigger than Ghost and Tommy combined, he would need to find a way to kill these two men and come to some kind of truce with the Tejada family.
Well, no matter which Tejada is left when the dust settles, because it’s unlikely that everyone will make it out of this series alive. Their odds cannot be underestimated. As usual, he needed Brayden, because he always needed Brayden, even though he probably didn’t want to admit it.
They need each other and we’ve seen these two in worse situations than they are now, but it’s clear that everything that has led them to this point has crushed them in a way that I started wondering if they would be better off going their separate ways.
The two were always there for each other, but now there was such a disconnect. Neither party can be honest with the other, and they’re both so stressed and hyper-vigilant that every time they interact, you’re waiting for an argument to start.
This season, Brayden finds another love on Elle, but they’re slow to make progress simply because they don’t really know each other.
Rejected by the Westons, expelled from school, and then only Tarik helping Brayden more than he could have imagined. Al is a guy who’s away from it all and can relax and not be immersed in the drug world like Weston was before him.
But as we’ve seen throughout the series, Brayden doesn’t always make the right choices with women, nor does he seem to understand the women he’s dating.
While you can think it’s noble that he’s trying to get revenge on the drug dealers who supplied Ellie with bad drugs, knowing Ellie means that she wouldn’t have wanted that.
She didn’t care about that life, and she had every right to react that way.
This leaves Brayden out in the cold, without a girl, and without a best friend because Tariq thinks he’s crazy.
The hour ended in such a weird way, as we were clearly continuing the trajectory of teamwork to defeat Carter and now Norma, but it all felt so scattered.
There are a bunch of different plot points left hanging, and it starts to feel like there’s no way the ending won’t be rushed.
Does this mean it will be unsatisfying? not necessarily. But it feels like they won’t have time to give each character and plot the time it deserves.
Everything else you need to know
- Davis is a mess. Does he really seem jealous of Kane and Norma? Or is that just me? He needs to keep his head in the game because Norma doesn’t want him any more than she wants Kane.
- Speaking of Norma, the way she lied to Anya was crazy. Anya seems sassy with her mother, though, and while Tarik may use the intel she tells him to help take down Norma, don’t be surprised if Anya ends up turning her back on mommy dearest.
- Stansfield has had the fewest classes this season and we are all the better for it.
- What a surprise when Effie’s mother showed up! She sounds like a horrible woman and I understand why Effie wants nothing to do with her. Again, this feels like something they could have capitalized on earlier with Effie, rather than throwing it in here and giving it zero room to breathe.
- I may sound like a broken record, but keep these men away from the ladies! Kane needs to get Effie to perform well on another coast.
Two hours left. That’s it. We will never use Power Ghost again, and it feels wrong to even say that.
There’s a lot that needs to happen before the screen actually goes black, and I’m curious as to what you guys can expect to see before this is all over.
Who will make it out of this series alive? Write your thoughts below!
You can watch Power Book II: Ghost on Friday at 8/7c on Starz.
