‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’ Season 5 Episode 4 Review: The Board Is Set, and Kanan Is Finally Playing to Win

The fifth and final season of ‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan‘ has been building toward the inevitable collision between a mother and the son she could not keep, and “Pawns and Rooks,” the fourth episode of this last run, makes the title’s chess metaphor feel entirely earned. Kanan and Raq do not share a single scene together in this hour, yet their forces are crashing into each other with a force that makes their physical confrontation feel like the most loaded clock in all of prestige crime television right now.

What has made this final season feel genuinely different from its predecessors is Mekai Curtis. The performance he is delivering here is something worth stopping to acknowledge. Kanan Stark is colder now, more deliberate, more recognizable as the man the Power universe introduced to audiences years ago, and Curtis is threading that transition with a precision that the writing often demands but cannot always guarantee. Every calculation in this episode, from the way he manipulates Jarita to the way he handles the Taz situation, reads as the work of someone who has stopped asking permission to become who he was always going to be.

The episode’s most corrosive sequence involves Kanan coercing one of Flossy’s escorts into swapping her drug delivery for a lethal batch, resulting in the death of a federal judge. The collateral damage to Raq’s fragile new partnership with Flossy is immediate and significant. These two women were always a combustible pairing, and the episode is sharp enough to show that it only takes one body to remind Flossy how much of a liability proximity to Raq can be. The scene works both as a plot mechanism and as a character statement about how far Kanan is now willing to reach.

Taz’s exit arrives with the kind of inevitability that was baked into his attitude from his first scene this season. His entire energy operated on the assumption that his relationship with Breeze was a shield, and the episode does not waste time disabusing him of that notion. What lingers is the aftermath, specifically Breeze walking Kanan through the methodical disposal of the body, a tutorial in covering tracks that functions as something darker, Breeze investing in Kanan the way a mentor does when he has already decided the student is worth keeping.

The Breeze and DefCon revelation at the episode’s close is the kind of mythology bomb ‘Raising Kanan’ has deployed before, but this one hits differently because of the layers it disturbs. The audience knows that Kanan’s biological father is Detective Howard, not DefCon.

So whether Breeze genuinely believes what he is saying or has engineered a lie perfectly calibrated to deepen Kanan’s loyalty, the scene opens a fascinating duality. Their entire relationship is now sitting on a foundation of either shared truth or shared fiction, and the show is smart enough to make the distinction feel genuinely unknowable for now.

The episode’s quieter material holds up just as well. Marvin’s ongoing pastoral thread continues to develop with an authenticity that could easily feel out of place in this world but consistently does not. His conversation with Raq about the two of them being the last ones standing is one of the more emotionally precise moments the show has managed this season.

Patina Miller does not need a great deal of screen time to make Raq feel besieged, and this episode uses her economically, which turns out to be the right call.

The weakest thread remains Jukebox’s storyline, not because it is poorly written but because Garcia as a menace has not yet been given enough depth to feel like a genuine threat rather than a logistical inconvenience. Her arc feels compressed in a season that has otherwise been generous in developing its players.

“Pawns and Rooks” is one of the strongest episodes of this final season, moving multiple story engines forward simultaneously while landing a mythology reveal that will reshape the remaining four hours.

7 out of 10.

Drop a comment and let us know whether you think Breeze is telling Kanan the truth or playing him for a fool.