‘Power Book III: Raising Kanan’ Returns: Where Did Season 3 Leave Off?

The mother-son dynamic on Starz’s Power Book III: Raising Kanan is becoming a business arrangement, but the Thomases still have issues to work out and enemies to confront in Season 4, premiering on Friday, March 7, at 8/7c.

Season 4 has Kanan (MeKai Curtis) “continuing to step out of the shadow of his formidable mother, drug queen pin Raquel Thomas (Patina Miller), as she questions if she can trust her son and business partner,” Starz explains. “The two continue to expand their drug empire, working with street legends ‘Snaps’ (Wendell Pierce) and ‘Pop’ (Erika Woods) and Italian mob boss Stefano Marchetti (Tony Danza), all while a resurrected ‘Unique’ (Joey Bada$$) is working in the shadows, looking for vengeance against those he believes wronged him.”

How did we get here? Season 3 starts with Raq and Kanan’s relationship on the outs now that he knows that Detective Malcolm Howard (Omar Epps) is his father. Howard is devoted to them both, so much so that he kills Detective Burke (Shanley Caswell) to protect them and to hide his own corruption.

Estranged from his mom, Kanan goes solo in Season 3 and starts operating a weed delivery service. Raq, on the other hand, vows to leave the drug trade behind — after her near-fatal run-in with the mafia in Season 2 — while striking up a romance with Unique, her onetime rival.

But Stefano ropes Raq back in, tasking her with killing New Jersey mafia leader Sal Boselli (Michael Rispoli), who’s becoming too much of a problem for his organization. Raq puts brother Marvin (London Brown) on the job, and Marvin kills Sal.

Speaking of Marvin, he and daughter Jukebox (Hailey Kilgore) are getting closer — so much so that he’s supporting her burgeoning music career. He helps Juke score a spot in a girl group. But when the feds show up to interrogate Juke about her father’s activities, an embarrassed Juke watches her musical dreams go up in smoke.

With the fed closing in on the Thomas family, Howard wants Marvin to take the fall, believing either Marvin goes down or he, Raq, and Kanan do. But Raq, who’s getting the family drug business back on track, doesn’t see it that way.

As for Raq’s other brother, Lou-Lou (Malcolm M. Mays) is getting drunk to deal with his guilt over killing Scrappy (Ade Chike Torbert) on bad intel in Season 2. He even confesses his crime to Scrappy’s mother (Mia Y. Anderson), who talks to the police. Howard tells Raq about what Lou confessed, and Marvin made Lou kill Scrappy’s mother. By the end of the season, however, Lou is in therapy at a rehab center and making amends with Raq.

But the major antagonist in Season 3 is Ronnie Mathis (Grantham Coleman), Unique’s older brother. Ronnie notices Kanan’s weed delivery service and gets him to start peddling harder drugs. Ronnie is so ruthlessly committed to his business that when Unique gets in his way, he beats him with a metal pole and leaves him for dead.

When Raq finds out that Kanan is in cahoots with Ronnie, though, she kills Juliana Ayala (Rosal Colón), Ronnie’s drug connection. In the Season 3 finale, Ronnie has Kanan pretend to be kidnapped so that Raq shows up at a warehouse with ransom money. Raq and Howard arrive with with $500,000 she got in a loan from Stefano for Kanan’s release. But Kanan kills Ronnie, and then Raq kills Howard. As the Thomas family leaves the scene in the last moments of Season 3, another figure steps over Ronnie’s body, and we viewers see that Unique is very much alive…

Power Book III: Raising Kanan, Season 4 Premiere, Friday, March 7, 8/7c, Starz