Nemesis is all about choices.
The new series from Power creator Courtney A. Kemp and Tani Marole follows two men on opposite sides of the law: hotheaded Detective Isaiah Stiles (Matthew Law) and calculating thief Coltrane Wilder (Y’lan Noel).
Neither is what you might expect. “We wanted a cop who was basically acting like a criminal: loud, boorish, cursing,” Kemp tells Tudum. “And then the other side of that, we really wanted the criminal [to be] controlled in every aspect of his life.”
Stiles and Wilder may be diametrically opposed, but these two have more in common than they’d like to admit. “They’re the guys that stay up late and do all the preparation,” Noel told Netflix. “They’re part of the 1% who are willing to put in the work and are incessant about being better than they were the next day.”
As he gets closer to the truth, Stiles runs up against the glowing reputation that Wilder has built for himself. The golden boy of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division is about to spend all of his capital on accusing a beloved local businessman of being a secret criminal mastermind. “My objective is always clear, which is to fuck with him, to take him down, to dismantle what Isaiah Stiles sees is a lie,” Law told Netflix.
Stiles and Wilder are both on the warpath, desperate to destroy each other — if they don’t destroy themselves first. “It’s like a 100-year blood feud,” Marole tells Tudum. “If everyone keeps going for revenge, it never stops. And these gentlemen, they never stop until the last frame.”
Read on to find out what happens before that last frame, and whether Stiles and Wilder ever escape the pull of their Nemesis.
A brazen series of heists leads Isaiah Stiles to Coltrane Wilder, the man behind the death of his partner. But Stiles and Wilder are more connected than they think.
“The two Los Angeles neighborhoods Baldwin Hills and View Park are separated by a street called Stocker,” Marole told Netflix. “These are two very nice affluent neighborhoods that sit right on top and right on South Central. Courtney and I really thought it was a wonderful story to tell a tale of two people who are actually damn near neighbors, but you would never know.”
As it turns out, the Stiles and the Wilders are more than neighbors. Totally unaware of their husbands’ rivalry, Wilder’s wife Ebony (Cleopatra Coleman) and Stiles’s wife Candace (Gabrielle Dennis), have become fast friends. “For Candace, Ebony is like this relief,” Dennis told Netflix. “Of course she has a family and a world, but all of them are attached to her marriage in a way where she can't be free and open up. That's the beauty in her relationship with Ebony is like, ‘Oh, I got a girlfriend, then I can really spill the tea.’ ”
Ebony, meanwhile, is recovering from a tragic miscarriage and struggling to cope with her husband’s return to crime. “Coltrane's not really listening to her, her sister isn't really listening to her,” Coleman tells Tudum. “And the one girlfriend she has in her life, that really hears her, is Candace. She's never had a normal sort of civilian friendship that was really real.”
But the pair’s budding friendship has a lit fuse. Everything builds to a confrontation at Candace’s Baldwin Hills Cares Gala, where Stiles and Wilder meet face-to-face and trade barbs over their respective philosophies. “You’re playing with fire,” Stiles tells his target.
“Nah, man, you got it all wrong,” Wilder responds. “See, I’m Prometheus. I bring the fire.”
A desperate Stiles nabs Wilder’s glass from the event and passes it off for DNA testing, determined to nail his man. Meanwhile, Ebony learns she’s pregnant again, and Wilder makes a counterintuitive decision: He’ll take the $9 million heist Ebony’s sister Charlie (Sophina Brown) has proposed to him, and then get out of the game permanently.
Wilder and co. manage to make off with a massive ketamine shipment without a hitch, but the game isn’t over yet. Both Stiles and Wilder are keeping tabs on their rival crews, and it’s even beginning to affect Stiles’s home life with Candace and their son, Noah (Cedric Joe).
The lines are quickly blurred, with Stiles using a borrowed police camera disguised as a necklace to spy on his wife. “We’re talking about two people who have been in love and in a relationship for a long time,” Law said. “But now we’re seeing them as they're on the ropes a little bit. How are they going to navigate this conflict of, ‘Are we too far gone, or is this something that we can save?’ ” The pair have good days and bad days, but Stiles’s push to catch Wilder means they’re leaning increasingly towards the latter.
With the head of the Robbery-Homicide Division, Sealey (Michael Potts), insistent that Stiles give up on Wilder if he wants to continue rising through the ranks, Stiles is forced to investigate on his own terms. Wilder is also on the outs with his crew when Charlie’s ketamine buyer, Andrei Malakian (Shahar Isaac), backs out. A frustrated Deon (Quincy Isaiah) comes to his boss begging to allow him to sell the drugs himself, but Wilder shuts him down — or so he thinks.
In reality, Deon is making his own deal on the back end, trying to provide for his two families and win respect from the rest of the crew. Things turn tragic when one of Deon’s supposed buyers turns out to be an undercover cop. Isaiah hitches along for the arrest, and watches Deon die in a hail of bullets, the crew’s warehouse hideout smoldering behind him.
Killing Deon was always the creators’ plan, but that didn’t make it any easier when the time came. “It was hard,” Kemp says. “We brought Quincy on in part because he played Magic Johnson [in HBO’s Winning Time]. You’ve got to love him. You got to fall in love with him.” His team certainly did, and now they’re out for revenge.
Things snowball quickly from here: Stiles and the LAPD raid Wilder Holdings and Wilder’s home over Ebony’s protestations, and Stiles confronts his nemesis beside his father’s grave. “See, I got some good news and I got some bad news,” he tells Wilder. “Good news: There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, brother. Bad news: it’s a train, coming at you.”
The walls seem to be closing in on Coltrane Wilder, but he still has a few cards up his sleeve. He, Ebony, and his crew embark on a multilayered revenge scheme. Ebony encourages Candace, who’s shell-shocked by her husband’s treatment of her friend, to meet with her college beau, assistant district attorney Malik Jacobs (Jeff Pierre), in a predetermined, easily photographed location. Malik kisses Candace, and one of Charlie’s subordinates grabs a photo for blackmail.
Meanwhile, both Stiles and Wilder are closing in on Andrei, who they soon discover is the confidential informant who turned Deon in. Wilder is determined to take out the snitch; Stiles knows that if he can find Andrei, he’ll find Wilder.
But Wilder is also playing even deeper head games. Soon after Stiles financially cuts off his criminal father, Amos “Nightmare” Stiles (Moe Irvin), after finding out he’s been spending time with Noah under his nose, Wilder arrives at Amos’s home with a proposition. Amos will be the team’s getaway driver, a plan hatched by Wilder after breaking into Stiles’s home and discovering the family connection between the men.
With Wilder’s high-powered attorney effectively shutting down the investigation into his crimes, the stage is set for the team to move in on Andrei’s penthouse, where they kill him and strip his walk-in safe of funds. But Stiles has called in a favor from the head of the Alvarez cartel, who owes the cop one after he saved his kidnapped child in Episode 1. The LAPD is on their tail, and the situation soon devolves into a heated shootout on the streets of Century City.
This set piece was a central part of Kemp and Marole’s vision for the series: a massive action sequence set in the heart of Los Angeles. “You’ll see some familiar landmarks, but you'll see them differently and usually with guns,” Kemp told Netflix. “It's been a big gamble for us to do this kind of action. It’s much easier not to. I always joke with people that someday I’m going to make just like two people talking in a room, no explosives.”
The shootout has a heavy fallout, with both the police and the robbers taking heavy casualties. Wilder and Amos escape, heading in different directions. Stiles is stripped of his badge and service weapon after he refuses to name the source who led him to Century City. And to make matters worse, he saw his father’s face among Wilder’s men.
Wilder is tailed to a parking garage by Detective Harper (Stephanie Sigman), and for a moment it seems like the game is up. But then Harper lets him go, revealing herself as Charlie’s mole. “We’re playing fair with the audience,” Kemp says. “Once you realize Charlie does have a mole, it has to be a woman, because only women work for her. So who else could it be? Someone might figure it out, but probably not.”
Stiles and Wilder are once again after the same man — and this time, it’s Amos. They track him to a strip club where he’s trying to make his way out of the country, but he gives them the slip after a bitter conversation with his son about all the money the Stiles family has spent on him. Harper corners Wilder and passes him a plastic bag containing a crucial tool: Stiles’s confiscated service weapon.
The pieces are all in place for a true tragedy. Before he flees the country, Amos stops by his son’s guest house to dump off a pile of Andrei’s stolen cash: the exact amount his son told him he’d spent keeping Amos afloat. Noah stumbles upon his grandfather just as Wilder enters, and Amos shoves the young man into a closet with a gun. Noah is left to watch in slow motion as his grandfather is murdered in cold blood.
“It's like a great fighter,” Noel tells Tudum. “You might have respect for your opponent, but the point is to win. You're going for the gut.”
Stiles arrives just in time to watch his father bleed out, with the police right behind. Both he and his son are arrested. It doesn’t look good for Stiles: The crime was committed with his service weapon, and he was on the scene.
Noah testifies to seeing his grandfather murdered by Coltrane Wilder, and his words hold weight, especially when it becomes clear that Noah didn’t have time to coordinate with his father. It’s the perfect opportunity to corner Wilder — until a text comes through to the ADA, with a photo of Malik kissing Candace attached. The blackmail attempt works, and Wilder goes free yet again.
For Candace, it’s an opportunity. She wears her bugged necklace one last time: to incriminate Ebony and clear her husband’s name. Ebony is hauled into custody, but she leaves Candace with a chilling message: Her son is now a target. “She’s so protective of her son, and she wants to be protective of that union,” Dennis said about her character. “But as we see, things fall apart, because [Stiles has] got his own mission.” Noah is missing, and his father is helpless to stop him from becoming another casualty.
Confronted in custody with a choice between giving up Wilder or her sister, Charlie, Ebony calls Charlie and tells her to take the hit off of Noah. “She does that for Candace,” Coleman says. “She knows what it's like to lose a child, and she doesn’t want to see that happen.” Ebony’s relationship with her sister has been horribly damaged by the revelation that Charlie interfered in her miscarriage, but Charlie agrees. Harper backs off, heading for Coltrane instead; she dies in a knife fight with him on the Inglewood Oil Field. Stiles’s fractured family has spread to Wilder.
Stiles finds his son at a party, plotting to kill Wilder himself, and promises Noah that he’ll be the one to take the criminal down. To do so, he turns to the Alvarez cartel one last time, and begs them to kill Wilder, a final compromise of his moral code that will come to haunt him. “By the time that happens, the death of Nightmare and then being accused of that death cracks something in him where he’s not the guy we met in Episode 1 anymore,” Kemp says. “His right and wrong, the black and white are not quite as divided.”
Law tells Tudum, “He makes a call that he hopes will keep his hands clean, and it unfortunately does the exact opposite. Once you let the genie out the bottle, it can't go back in.”
The cartel does its job, capturing Ebony and using her as bait to lure Wilder in. But they make a mistake: Candace is also with Ebony, and they capture her instead. Wilder arrives at the warehouse where Candace is being kept and saves her, killing six cartel men. “He saves [someone] that Stiles loves,” Noel said. “They’re destined to do this dance in this way.”
Candace returns the favor, cluing Wilder in to the hospital where his wife has been taken. Charlie sends in a team of “nurses” to break her sister out while Wilder lures the police away. A final deadly chase through the streets of LA ensues, pulling in Stiles, Wilder, the out-for-blood cartel, and even Noah, who’s cruising the streets with some of his more unsavory friends.
It all comes down to a final showdown in an alleyway, where Stiles is forced to choose between his son, hit by an errant cartel bullet, and catching Wilder once and for all. “At the beginning of the season, they both have the opportunity to just choose their families,” Kemp says. “At the final minute, having almost lost everything and never [having] made a choice [in favor of] their families, they finally make the right decision.”
Stiles saves his son, even though it means taking down the cartel henchman he had set on Wilder in the first place. And rather than take down Stiles, Wilder escapes to be with Ebony. The two men’s lives may have been utterly destroyed, but they’ve learned something.
“They choose their families over their obsession,” Marole says. “They’ve been choosing obsession over family and they for once do the right thing: being vulnerable.”
But the damage may be done. Candace has fled into the arms of Malik, Stiles has made an enemy of the cartel, and Wilder’s carefully curated legitimate life has been upended. “Is it too late?” Kemp asks. Only time will tell.
Nemesis is now streaming on Netflix.
