‘Power’ recap: It’s all about the last 10 minutes of the episode

Season 3, Episode 5 | Help me | Aug. 14

 

In this week’s episode of Power — the top-viewed program on premium cable this summer — only two things matter: Holly is dead and Ghost and Tommy are back together again.

Almost nothing else that happened in this episode should be of concern. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ruiz (Luis Antonio Ramos) is back, and old shady Greg (Andy Bean) is trying to get him to reveal who the real drug kingpin is, and that was meaty and important and will surely come back later in the season. Now let’s talk about the most important moments of this episode — the two we’ve all been waiting for! Everything happened quite literally in the last 10 minutes of the show.

So Holly (Lucy Walters) has been extra trifling all season long, what with her ignoring Tommy (Joseph Sikora) and his plea to let him handle how he was going to deal with Ghost and hiring Jamaicans to kill him without him knowing. Once Tommy finds out what she’s done — whoo, boy — that’s when Tommy snaps, having already smartly built up a narrative in his head that Ghost has always had his back. So perhaps he should rethink this whole murdering his best friend business? Tommy reacts immediately when Holly tells him what she did behind his back.

“I did what you should have done a long time ago. We don’t have to worry about Lobos anymore,” Holly tells Tommy.

Girl. But you do have to worry about your man.

Tommy cocks his head to the side in utter disbelief.

“Holly, what’d you do?!”

It gets real profane real quick, and Tommy, well, he’s a criminal. And he’s murdered people for less offenses. So why wouldn’t she think …? Well. You know how that stuff goes.

After she tells him it’s too late to warn Ghost, he springs into action, jumps on top of her and strangles her until she stops moving. Naturally, he freaks out, and the genius behind Power — ahem, the genius of former journalist and now showrunner Courtney A. Kemp — does this masterful, stomach-churning, edge-of-couch-sitting back-and-forth flip of the scene between Tommy and Holly and Ghost and his would-be assailants.

So while the formerly happy couple Holly and Tommy are about to go at it — it looks like the end is eminent for Ghost. He and his son Tariq are bonding, and he’s treating his boy to a basketball game. Ghost stops along the way because a car has rear-ended him. He steps outside the SUV (having told his security team the worst of his fears were over and that there’s no need for them to follow him around to protect him anymore) and sees the hit men step out. He looks back to discover that his boy has his sound-cancelling earphones in and can’t call for help.

Flashback to Tommy and Holly. She’s trying to convince him she did the right thing for the both of them. He’s angry and tries to put her out. She slaps him and he pushes her. Holly is going off, realizing that despite everything that has gone down between Tommy and Ghost, Tommy cares more for Ghost than he ever will for her.

“Now you gotta love me best … I’m all you … got left!”

Flashback to Ghost.

As he slowly turns his head from his son, who isn’t seeing any of what’s about to go down, he looks back at the Jamaicans.

He blinks.

And then the bullets fly.

Only, the Jamaicans are down.

Ghost is a little … bewildered.

His security team is still shadowing him. And they’ve saved him from certain death.

Flashback — again! — to Tommy and Holly. After telling Tommy that his best friend has already been murdered (because Holly was aware of what time the hit was going down) she piles on.

“You can’t do anything without Ghost. You can’t live without him.” This gets to Tommy.

And then, it happens. Bye, Holly. So long.

In the final moments of the show, Ghost shows up at Tommy’s place, only to find him sitting up with Holly’s deceased body near him.

“Help me.”

Ghost gets rid of Holly’s body, and hands Tommy the ring that he gave her — and Tommy realizes that it was Ghost who saved him from being killed by the Koreans in last week’s episode. That symbolism in that ring hand-off is rich.

We get it. The boys are back together.

“So you know what we gotta do,” Ghost says to Tommy. “We gotta kill Lobos. Together.”

“Together.”

Boom. Let’s do this, yo.