‘Power’ season 4 debate: How long should Ghost stay behind bars?

Over the course of the first three seasons, “Power” found a way to drop a lot of surprises on you. Therefore, they had to come up with something big for the most-recent finale, something that would leave jaws on the floor and leave you wondering how they were going to get themselves out of the situation. Great writing in television, at least to us, is all about finding an extremely complicated corner to write yourself into, and then using your talent to crawl your way back out. You want to surprise people with your cleverness and the resiliency of your characters.

At the moment, the show’s certainly got that degree of super-shock going on with James St. Patrick a.k.a. Ghost. At the end of season 3, we saw Omari Hardwick’s character behind bars after Angela, his former lover and a woman he was set to divorce his wife for, decided to put him there. She accused him of murdering Greg Knox, her associate-turned-rival-turned-new-lover who was really just using her in part for information.

So how long do you keep a guy like Ghost back there? The reality here is that there are two different ways to look at this. From one side of the coin, you don’t want to leave him there for so long that you run the risk of the story stalling out, given that there are only so many people who he can interact with there at one time. However, at the same exact time you also have to remember here that if you release him within five minutes of the premiere, it suddenly feels like this entire prison lock-up was for nothing and it no longer matters.

To us, the ideal amount of time to keep Jamie there is around two episodes. It’s long enough for it to be clear that there were consequences of Angela’s actions, but at the same time short enough that you’re not spending longer than 20% of the season watching a man sit around in an orange jumpsuit. After all, Ghost may be guilty of many things, but murdering Greg isn’t one of them. That goes instead to Mike Sandoval, a man who to date’s been able to avoid any sort of suspicion as a mole. We have a hard time believing that’ll last through season 4, but crazier things have happened.

Tell us: How long do you think we could be seeing Jamie locked up for? Share in the comments, and head over here to get photo previews and much more when it comes to “Power” season 4! New episodes will air on Starz in 2017. (Photo: Starz.)