Whew chile. So I’ve been watching Power Book II: Ghost. I have to be honest, I am mostly hate-watching it because it centers Tariq St. Patrick, who I have been WAITING to get killed for seasons now. Instead of killing him off, they turned him into a younger, smarter, more privileged version of his father who is still slanging drugs, but doing it to white college kids at an elite New York City university, Stansfield.
If you’ll remember, when Power ended, Tariq killed Ghost and then Tasha took the rap for it. This storyline focuses on Tasha being in jail—nigga, the jail is some otherworldly non-sense—and Tariq trying to get her OUT of jail with Method Man as his lawyer and Mary J. Blige being his money-source via drugs since she’s a queen-pen running her incarcerated husband’s drug operation with her three kids, only one of which actually has any business being a criminal.
This show is fucking ridiculous. I love it.
For one, Tariq is always running. We’re four episodes in and this nigga has run more miles across New York City than Forrest Gump ran across America. Like, why is this nigga always running? He’s always late. In Power’s television universe is Uber not a thing? (It’s definitely a thing; Tariq pitches a drug dealing app to Simon Stern’s opportunistic husband as an Uber of sorts.)
The latest episode, though, was a fucking clinic in shenanigans. I literally stood up and clapped several times because of them. For instance, there are two obnoxious and insufferable Black professors who, thus far, I legitimately hate. Luckily, and as Mary J. Blige so eloquently stated, “everybody who ends up around that boy (Tariq), ends up dead or in jail.” Hopefully, they die (on the show).
The Black woman professor (can’t remember her name—she was Kevin’s girlfriend in This Is Us, Beth’s cousin) has a sex addiction AND is damn near addicted to the obnoxious, full-of-himself Black male professor (whose name also escapes me), so much so that they can’t be in a room together without fighting first and then fucking. She hates him; he never got over her (and even wrote a book about her), and yet she got him a job at her school and now they antagonize one another...into sex. I hate them. Where’s Kanan when you need him?
Mary J. Blige’s drug operation is being run by Cain (played by Woody McClain—he played Bobby Brown in the New Edition Story and Bobby-Brown-With-The-Bobby-Brown-Jaw-On-Occasion in The Bobby Brown Story) and her two other kids. As an African-Ancestry aside, none of them look like they came from their parents, at all. Cain is an absolute soldier in the vein of Tommy, but Drew looks like he just wants to go to college with Tariq—he already got an almost full, but ultimately interrupted sex scene with a dude he picked up in Tariq’s art class—and Diana wants to go to college and smash Tariq but is scared of her mother. I’m sure they’ll smash later.
We got a Method Man sex scene to include Method Man’s bare naked ass; no word yet from Emmy voters on if this puts him in the running for Best Supporting Actor in a limited series; he should lose; his actual work as the lawyer is ridiculous. But so is the show. I love it.
But the most importantly non-sensical shit is this: Tariq is trying to get his mother out of jail (Meth is his lawyer), and since she has nothing better to do and is absolutely NOT reading any books, Tasha is “taking” to the jail lifestyle which included this nigga DOING FUCKING PUSHUPS, 50 Cent in a music video style, to show how she’s adjusting to and getting harder in jail.
Read this again: Tasha St. Patrick was in jail doing jail-ups with cornrows and an orange jumpsuit to let the motherfuckers around her know what time it is. Does she think she’s never getting out? Also, its kind of hard to watch these niggas who clearly belong in jail—lest we forgot, Tasha killed the shit out of Keisha, her best friend and the woman her other best friend, Tommy, was going to marry and robbed Keisha’s son of a mother—work so hard to get her out of jail on the one thing she actually DIDN’T do: run Ghost and Tommy’s organization.
Even after all of the shit this show has brought us, Tasha doing jail-ups was some high-level fuckery and Dear Courtney Kemp...thank you. Your team literally made me stand up and clap.
I hate this show.
I love it.