Inside the Killer ‘Power Book IV: Force’ Season 2 Finale — and What Season 3 Could Look Like (Exclusive)

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Power Book IV: Force Season 2 finale, "Power Powder Respect."

"I'm a dead man." Well, Vic, it's the Power Universe, so join the crowded club!

As it turns out, Vic (Shane Harper) makes it out of the Power Book IV: Force Season 2 finale — but many others might not be so lucky. The sophomore installment of the popular Chicago-set Power spinoff proved that anyone not named "Tommy F---ing Egan" (Joseph Sikora) is in jeopardy of being killed.

After eliminating Gloria (Gabrielle Ryan) and Lilliana (Audrey Esparza) in Season 1, Walter (Tommy Flanagan) and Paulie (Guy Van Swearingen) were dealt the same outcomes, while the Season 2 finale, "Power, Powder, Respect," left the fates of Vic's sister Claudia (Lili Simmons) and Tommy's girlfriend Mireya (Carmela Zumbado) up in the air. But, in good news for Tommy, he's officially the main drug connect in the Windy City.

To reflect on the entire second season, we chatted with Force showrunner Gary Lennon about returning to the Power Universe, fixing what he felt like didn't work in Season 1, and bringing in a Power OG for Season 3 to "dirty things up."

We get the phrase "Tommy F---ing Egan" a lot in the finale, and I love it every single time. Do you get a kick out of writing dialogue in the scripts that is simply "Tommy F---ing Egan"?

Gary Lennon: [Laughs.] Definitely, definitely, definitely! I wanted it to be the title of the finale.

Before we get to the finale, Joseph Sikora really credits you with helping craft Tommy, even pointing to an episode that you wrote and directed, Season 5's "There’s a Snitch Among Us," as his favorite Power hour. So what is about the character of Tommy and the actor in Joe that you really connect with?

I think that I've been with the show so long because of Joe. I came into the second season of Power and I was asked, "Who is your favorite character," and I said, "Tommy." When I saw Joseph Sikora as Tommy F---ing Egan, I was like, "Oh, I know this guy." I grew up in an Irish-Spanish neighborhood in Hell's Kitchen, and he very much was my brother Jim in my eyes. And so when I got to meet Joe, see him portray Tommy and then what I brought to Tommy in the writer's room, it was so clear that it was meant to be.

[Power creator] Courtney [Kemp] was very generous in letting me bring a lot of myself and my history to Tommy, and so I saw a lot of my brother in the character. And then I really liked Joseph Sikora as an actor, as a thinker, as an artist. I saw his potential, and I really just wanted to get in and play with him and explore sides of the character that we hadn't seen. I love exploring Tommy's humor, his relationship with his mother, his sense of loyalty and brotherhood with the guys on the street, his fury of betrayal, his viciousness. It's a character that I was born to work and play with.

After being such a pivotal voice on Power and for Tommy, you weren’t involved in Force Season 1, so what made you want to return to Tommy and the Power Universe for Season 2? And did you have a creative mission or direction that you were really invested in once you took the reins?

When I left Power, I thought I was really done, and I moved on to other things. Through the first season of Force, Joe and I talked, and he was unhappy with how the character was being handled, but I kept a professional distance because it wasn't my job. But I did advise him as a friend. And then when it came that [creator] Robert [Munic] was going to leave the show, I got a call from [producer] 50 Cent saying, "We'd love to have you back," and then I got a call from Joe. I had not seen the first season of Force, so they sent me the tapes, and I saw what Joe didn't feel like he was getting, and it was one of those God-at-work moments because I knew how to fix it.

Coming into it, I didn't think it was a very strong, coherent narrative in Season 1, and I wanted to go back and do how I thought Tommy would behave in another city. I've always thought of Power as a high-end, low-end world, and I felt like Force was missing the low-end, the grittiness, the cinema verite. Working with my team, our mandate was, "Let's f--- this up. Let's get Tommy F---ing Egan back to work." And we did. My mission was always to keep Tommy at the center of the story, because I don't think Tommy was at the center of the story in the first season — he got lost. The other mandate was to really bring it back home to the streets of Chicago. And Joe was a producer this season and weighed in because he knows Chicago so well. He gave notes on all the scripts, and I think made everything better.

Speaking of Chicago, I remember talking to Joe before Season 1 about the notion of Tommy becoming the Jack Reacher of gangsters, just traveling the country, city-to-city. But, now two seasons in, do you feel like Chicago is the permanent home for Force?

For this iteration of Force, I think Chicago is the place. As you see in the finale, Tommy accomplished his goal. At the beginning of our season we have him say, "Aren't you tired of being at the bottom of the top? Don't you want to be the connect?" And, at the end of our season, he and Diamond (Isaac Keys) and CBI have become the connect in Chicago, but it's at the expense of losing his family and everyone that he loves. What is Tommy F---ing Egan going to do about that? We will answer that in Season 3. So this story is tied to Chicago, but I do want to say just a little tiny caveat to whet the fan's appetite is, I'm not saying that Tommy would never wind up back in New York, because maybe he ends his story there. To me, that seems like poetic justice.

Tommy's mother, Kate (Patricia Kalember), is obviously important throughout the season, and we get a few LaKeisha (La La Anthony) mentions, but there aren't a lot of Power callbacks or hat tips outside of those two. Was that a conscious decision to separate Tommy a bit from his past and concentrate on building this new world?

Yes, a thousand percent. A couple of times throughout the season it was brought to me, "Do you want so-and-so to come back? Do you want so-and-so to be in this?" And I was like, "No." I think one of the weaknesses of the first season was that there were too many stories to follow, too many characters, and I wanted to focus on the characters that we had. And one of my dilemmas as storyteller taking over Season 2 was that I needed to constrict and contract the stories at the same time. But, if given a Season 3, I will say that I do have a story in my mind where I will bring back a character from our Power OG world to intersect with Tommy Egan.

Oh, that's intriguing! To be honest, I don't even know who I'd want that to be since so many of the OG characters are either dead or busy on other shows.

I think it'd be a really cool, interesting reveal. And I love that our fan base is so dialed in and have their own theories. I've read somewhere that someone thought that Vic and Tommy were going to be revealed as brothers! But there's a character that I think that intersecting in our world would make absolute sense and would dirty things up in a really good way that would excite me to write.

It was shocking that you guys took Walter off the board so early in the season. What went into that decision, and was it a tough call to get rid of such a great character and actor in Tommy Flanagan?

It was a really painful decision because Tommy Flanagan is such an amazing actor, and nobody in the writer's room wanted to see Walter or Paulie go. But we knew that the story had to escalate and needed to move in a direction. Coming into Season 2, I thought of Walter and his children, Vic and Claudia, as King Lear. Like, King Lear's children want him to go and want to take him down. And so we talked about different iterations, and it was on the table that Claudia would go or that Vic would go, but, ultimately, the group consensus of the best story was to have Walter go and then play out the Vic and Claudia drama.

We didn't have a queenpin like Claudia, and she's so ambitious and it feels overlooked, that it seemed like such natural storytelling that felt honest of the world that I was already handed. Because I didn't create these characters, I was handed them, and I had to make sense of their story. But it was a painful decision because Tommy Flanagan as a human being is tremendous. Tommy's so well-loved that I actually think the crew was mad at me for a bit, and I think Tommy probably was, too. But he's come around; we actually texted about three weeks ago. Joe was devastated when he found out that we were going to take Walter off the board.

We know that Walter is dead but the fates of Claudia and Mireya are left up in the air. What, if anything, are you comfortable sharing about the future of those two characters?

With Claudia, we definitely shot it the way we shot it so that people would be like, "Will she survive?" What I'll say is, if we get a Season 3, we will reveal who survives and who doesn't in 301. I can't get into it because it would be a really huge spoiler, but I love working with both of those women, and our writers' room has very strong design of what Season 3 looks like.

Wrapping up, is it just me or was the finale scene on the roof with Tommy, Diamond and Vic a nod to Dicaprio and Damon's climactic meet in The Departed?

Yes! I'm glad you got that.

Amazing! Being a Massachusetts native, I didn't know if I had Departed blinders on. What inspired you to do that?

I'm a huge Martin Scorsese fan, and you're always stealing from your favorites, and this just felt like such a natural place to do that. There was all that exerting of power but doing it in a subtle way, and who's telling the truth, and how much am I saying, and how much am I not? Joe has worked with Scorsese before on Boardwalk Empire, and the scene on Power where Tommy kills his father and then crawls into bed with his mother, I had heard that Scorsese likes to sometimes tell actors, "We're going to shoot this scene but with no dialogue, so come in, get what you want and leave." And so I asked Patricia and Joe if they would do the scene with no dialogue, and they were up to play, and we shot the scene of him coming into the room and crawling up in bed with Kate, and, in the final cut, I used more of the silent scene than the dialogue. So I'm always taking from Scorsese.