SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for Power Book IV: Force Season 3, Episode 7.

If anyone had any doubt that Power Book IV: Force was ending, Season 3, Episode 7 erases it. “Lines in the Sand” is too tame a title for this hour, which dismantles everything viewers know about the Starz drama. And the death of another main character is just the shocking cherry on top.

Everyone is out for themselves more than they’ve ever been before; the episode involves so much double-crossing and backstabbing that fans will get whiplash keeping up with the changing alliances. But when the dust settles, nothing is the same anymore. People who were enemies are now potential allies, and people who were allies are bitter enemies. This will be remembered as the episode in which the coalition ended, and Tommy Egan and Diamond Sampson came to blows. Actors Joseph Sikora and Isaac Keys make their confrontation as massive and as visceral as it deserves to be. This is taking down the core of the entire show, and so it needs to feel practically apocalyptic, and it does.

It’s not necessarily surprising that Tommy and Diamond’s alliance has finally failed; audiences have seen Jenard get more and more in his brother’s ear since the start of Power Book IV: Force Season 3. Once Diamond and Jenard made their deal to move fentanyl, that felt very much like a last straw. Tommy and Diamond have disagreed, but to do something that Tommy—and Shanti “Showstopper” Page—so clearly disagreed with was an obvious choosing of the sides. But even with the writing on the wall, it’s still painful to see them come to blows, given how much the audience has invested in Tommy and Diamond over the last two-plus seasons. Fans wanted them to be ride or die, and there’s no real coming back from this. Yes, there are three more episodes left, but after everything that was revealed it’s hard to think they’d ever trust each other again.

They’re not the only ones in trouble, though. It’s game over for Jenard and Shanti, after she catches him having sex with Jade in a bathroom at the club. It’s a prime example of Jenard’s reckless behavior; he can’t handle his frustration with Shanti. But Force makes the situation even worse when it’s revealed that Tommy paid Jade to hook up with Jenard, in a sneaky attempt to undermine him. That’s just one “are you serious?” level moment that happens in Season 3, Episode 7. Shanti taking a baseball bat to Jenard’s Lamborghini is another one. No matter how it happened, he’s deserving of every ounce of her anger.

That’s because Jenard is so fixated on taking down Tommy that he’s trying to play every side. When Diamond and Tommy send him to scare some sense into Vic Flynn, Jenard throws him a bone instead—and when Vic understandably asks why, Jenard goes on another mini-rant about Tommy. This forces Vic to make his own disturbing decision: he kills his childhood friend Conor to make him the patsy for the attack on the Albanians, similar to how CBI served up someone else in D-Mac’s place earlier this season. For Vic to be able to shoot someone he grew up with in the back says a tremendous amount about how desperate all of the main characters are to stay alive.

Unfortunately, one of them fails in that respect. “Lines in the Sand” is the final Power Book IV: Force episode for Miriam A. Hyman as Stacy Marks. A distraught Stacy decides to stand up to Tommy—but Tommy, just having had it out with Diamond, is done taking grief from anyone. He shoots her as soon as she tries to arrest him. This is another quite interesting choice from the Force creative team, because it obviously creates a major void on the government’s side. However, the answer is equally obvious: Bill Tseng is almost certainly going to step into that space, and viewers already know that Tseng is corrupt. This is going to make everything a lot worse for Tommy, Diamond and even Miguel (although fans will get to enjoy a lot more of actor Alain Uy). Hyman goes out strongly, though, as it’s clear that Stacy is at the end of her rope. Her integrity was the one thing that separated her from Tommy and so there was really nowhere for her to go.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, Miguel Garcia survives an attempt on his life by Ortega. He does it in a pretty ingenious way, too, able to fight off Ortega’s henchmen long enough that one of them stabs the other instead of him. When the hitman lets slip that Mireya is pregnant, then Ortega sets his sights on Miguel’s sister. Again, this isn’t unexpected; everyone could guess as soon as Mireya’s pregnancy was revealed that she and her baby were going to be in trouble. There’s no safe space in the Power universe. But Ortega making that choice, just like Stacy’s death, adds another layer to the narrative. It’s a reason for Miguel and Tommy to join forces. These two bitter enemies are going to have to become friends, and they’re about to become family anyway.

In relatively short order, Power Book IV: Force has flipped its script, with some fantastically powerful scenes. It now looks like it’ll be Miguel and Tommy against Ortega, Diamond and Jenard (separately or together, who knows?). Which side will Shanti and Vic end up on? Will Madame Wu and her group wind up playing a bigger role than just being the catalyst for Diamond and Tommy’s split? Was Kate Egan really just making a cameo? Every alliance that Force fans thought they knew lies broken on the floor, and nobody can really be trusted. The best news is that Gary Lennon and company have done this relatively early, so they have three episodes to fully explore the consequences of all these actions. Audiences are going to get every ounce of violence that should come out of all this hurt and betrayal. In one hour, the stakes of Power Book IV: Force have climbed through the roof.

Power Book IV: Force airs Fridays at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT on Starz. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Starz.

Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.