I haven’t written a review in I don’t even know how long, but after watching the series finale, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Man… where do I even start with Raising Kanan?

Five seasons. Done.

And I can honestly say this has probably been my favourite show from the entire Power Universe. Initially, I didn’t think that. But the last couple of seasons, especially this series finale, solidified that for me.

It’s funny when you think about it, because we already knew how Kanan’s story ended. 50 Cent even narrated it in the very first episode. “Y’all seen how my last fight ended. This right here is how my first fight started”.

We knew the man he became. We knew what eventually happened to him in Power. We knew Kanan Stark as this ruthless, cold-hearted character who could kill someone without thinking twice about it.

Yet somehow, Raising Kanan made me forget about all that… or at least made me look at the character completely differently. 

Instead of watching Kanan Stark, I felt like I was watching Kanan. A kid. A son. A cousin. A best friend. Someone who, at one point, actually had people around him that he loved and who loved him.

And that’s why I think the finale hit me as much as it did. Because when you really think about Kanan’s journey across these five seasons, he got pretty much everything he spent the entire show fighting for.

Independence. Respect. Money. Power. Freedom from Raq…. He finally became his own man. But at what cost? Famous is gone. Krystal is gone. Howard is gone. Lou is gone. Marvin is gone… and now, Raq is gone.

Even Jukebox, someone who was basically his sister and one of the closest people to him throughout his life, is no longer the Juke he grew up with.

Everyone is gone.

And there is Kanan… alone.

I don’t know why, but that really stuck with me. Maybe because feeling alone is such a strange thing. You don’t necessarily have to physically be alone to feel lonely. You can have friends. Family. People messaging you. People who genuinely care about you. You can literally be standing in a room full of people and somehow still feel like you’re there completely by yourself.

That’s what I saw when I looked at Kanan by the end. He has people around him. He has money. He has a name. He has respect. He’s feared. But who does he actually have? That’s the sad irony of his entire journey.

Kanan spent years wanting to escape Raq’s control and become his own man, and by the time he finally does… there’s barely anyone left to share that life with.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

The title of the finale, Unconditional Love, couldn’t have been more fitting. Kanan and Raq’s relationship has been fucked up from pretty much the first season. Lies. Manipulation. Betrayal. Resentment. Anger. And Kanan literally killed both of her brothers. Yet, she still loved him… because that’s her son.

I think that’s what made their final moments together so powerful for me. After everything that had happened between them, underneath all the bullshit, anger and hatred, there was still love there. You could see it in the way Mekai Curtis portrayed Kanan that he didn’t want anything to happen to Raq… their final conversation meant something to him… they managed to hash it all out, in some way.

It was complicated love. Damaged love. Probably even unhealthy love at times. But still love. Unconditional love.

And then for Jukebox to be the person who kills Raq…. Man.

JUKEBOX

Whilst watching the first season of Raising Kanan, the most important question I always asked was how did Kanan and Jukebox’s relationship turn out the way it did… for him to end up killing her without any hesitation or remorse. The closeness they had as cousins growing up together reminded me of myself and my cousin.

I think this might be one of the most pivotal parts in the finale. Juke telling Kanan that his mum didn’t love him. Telling him Raq begged for her life and to take Kanan’s instead. Knowing what we, the audience, had just seen between Raq and Kanan made it hit differently because…. It wasn’t true.

Raq did love Kanan. Was she the perfect mother? Absolutely not. She lied to him. Manipulated him. Controlled him. Put him in situations no mother should ever put her child in. But if there’s one thing I took from their final conversation, it’s that despite everything that had happened between them, Raq loved her son. Unconditionally.

Jukebox knew that. Everybody in the Thomas family knew that. Raq protected Kanan throughout everything. After all the bodies he dropped, she protected him. Killing her younger brother, protected him, fucking with her business – she still was trying to protect him in her last days.

Yet, after killing, Juke tells Kanan the opposite. Telling him she killed his mother. Telling him Raq didn’t love him, in a way manipulating him. She’s manipulating his grief and almost rewriting what happened for him. She’s telling Kanan, who has pretty much lost everybody at this point, that even his own mother didn’t truly love him. That’s cold. Especially when you compare it to the Jukebox we’ve spent five seasons watching.

This is the same Juke who loved Nicole. The same Juke who struggled with wanting love from her own mother. The same Juke who cared about Famous, wanting revenge. The same Juke who Kanan could talk to and who, for so much of their childhood, felt more like his sister than his cousin.

Now look at her. We’ve seen her turn into the Jukebox that we saw in the original Power. My mind immediately went back to Power and her conversation with Tariq. Years later, she’s doing something very similar. Getting in his head. Making him question the people who supposedly love him. Saying Kanan only used him as a pawn and didn’t care about him. 

That’s when I saw Jukebox from Power. Not just because she killed Raq. But because of what she did afterwards. That’s the contrast I love about this show. 

We’ve spent five seasons asking how Kanan became Kanan Stark, but quietly in the background, we’ve also been watching how Laverne Thomas genuinely became the cold-hearted Jukebox spoken about in Power.

Man… when you think about the girl we met at the beginning compared to the woman we know she eventually becomes, is actually heartbreaking.

Because, just like Kanan, she wasn’t always like this. Life made her colder. Loss made her colder. The streets made her colder. The worst of it all, her own family made her colder. Eventually, that softness we saw in Laverne became harder and harder to find.

That’s what makes knowing their future in Power so tragic. These two were once basically brother and sister. They loved each other, protected each other. Understood each other… and eventually they become two people capable of doing some truly fucked-up things to one another. 

Perhaps Raising Kanan was never only about raising Kanan. In a way… We’ve been watching them raise Jukebox too.

SASCHA PENN

I have to give Sascha Penn his flowers. Seriously. The writing on this show has been incredible. Creating a prequel isn’t easy because your audience already knows where the story eventually ends. We knew Kanan survived. We knew Jukebox survived. We knew where their lives eventually took them. So how do you make us care when we already know the destination?

You make us care about the journey. Sascha Penn and the writing team did exactly that. Kanan didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and become the Kanan Stark we knew from Power. We watched it happen. Piece by piece. Loss by Loss. Episode by Episode and Season by Season. For me, that is great character development.

Penn’s writing, direction and overall vision for the series gave Raising Kanan its own identity. It never felt like it was desperately trying to remind us that it was a Power spin-off. It was confident enough to be its own show. 

The 90s setting. The music. The cinematography. The dialogue. The family dynamics, the slow character development. Everything worked.

And what I appreciate the most is that this wasn’t simply a story about drugs, killing and the streets. At its heart, Raising Kanan was a family story.

Every relationship either took something from Kanan or left something behind in him… and slowly over the five seasons, we watched those pieces create the man we already knew he would become.

Post Credit Flashback

I think the flashback after the credits might have affected me even more. It made the ending hit harder. Seeing everybody together again, before all the deaths, betrayals, hatred and everything the streets took from them, was painful.

They were just a family. That’s something I’ve always found fascinating about memories. Sometimes you don’t realise you’re living through a moment that you’ll eventually wish you could go back to. At the time, it’s just life. Just another day. Just another conversation. Just another moment with people you assume will always be there.

Then years pass by. People leave. Relationships change. People die. Life just…. Happens. Then suddenly that ordinary moment becomes priceless.

Seeing the Thomas family together again reminded me of that. Once upon a time, Kanan was just a kid surrounded by his family. And knowing everything that eventually happens makes seeing them together almost hurt more. That’s probably what I’ll remember most about Raising Kanan.

It wasn’t simply the story of how Kanan became a gangster. It was the story of everything he lost while becoming one.  Maybe that’s why the ending feels sad to me… because after five seasons of watching Kanan fight to become his own man, he finally gets there… but at what cost?

He got the independence. He got the respect. He got the power. But sometimes getting everything you thought you wanted doesn’t mean you’ve won. Sometimes you spend so much time chasing where you’re trying to get to, that you don’t realise what you’re losing along the way.

And then one day you finally get there. You look around… and realise there’s nobody there with you. You’re alone. Exactly how Marvin said he would end up. 

Perhaps that’s the real tragedy of Kanan Stark. We knew how he died. But Raising Kanan showed us how, little by little, the person he used to be died long before that.

What show. What a journey.

What a way to Raise Kanan.

9.5/10