Mayor of Kingstown is undoubtedly one of the bigger successes on Paramount – created by Taylor Sheridan, and led by Jeremy Renner, Season 1 delves into an important issue of our time – America’s prison system. The audience is introduced to the McLusky family in a world where incarceration is a thriving industry and they are desperate to bring order and justice. If you have watched Season 1 and want to catch up, I’ve put together a comprehensive recap so you do not miss anything.
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episodes Recap (Episodes 1-10)
Episode 1 – “The Mayor of Kingstown”
It’s obvious what the McLuskys do, even if nobody seems to want to say it out loud. When Mitch is given an assignment by Vera, the wife of an incarcerated yet obviously influential inmate named Milo, we know what’s up. The assignment is following a map to a cache of $200,000 buried in the woods.
Everyone seems to know what Mitch and Mike are up. Their mother, Mariam, teaches history in the prisons, telling young minority women about their own backgrounds, but when one of the inmates suggests she puts in a good word with her sons, she viciously lashes out. Mariam the teacher is kindly and empathetic.
Mariam the mother is a firecracker. She doesn’t approve of the family business, obviously. But it doesn’t seem to be a secret what the family business is, or even that she’s part of the family.
Others are more approving. When a prison guard’s nephew elicits the anger of another inmate, the guard goes to Mike. Mike, in turn, goes to Bunny, a local gang leader. Before long, the favors add up, and both a guard and prisoner find themselves brutally beaten – the prisoner, one of Bunny’s guys, particularly badly, such is the way of prison guards when one of their own is attacked. (This is later explained, rather shruggingly, as justification for the severity of the prisoner’s injuries, and it’s accepted without question.)
There’s a third McLusky brother, Kyle, who helps Mike retrieve Milo’s money from the woods, much to the annoyance of his wife and Mariam. Mike lets his guard down with Kyle in a way he doesn’t with Mitch, or at least not that we see.
His dream is really to escape, to join a cooking school, but nobody seems to escape Kingstown, where there are seven prisons in a ten-mile radius. Kyle, with his happy-ish family life and regular career, probably seems like someone Mike can have this conversation with. But he’s still helping him retrieve dirty money from a stash in the woods. There’s only so clean anyone in Kingstown seems to get.
Taylor Sheridan is very good at this sort of thing. He’s less good when it comes to using violence against women to advance the plot. Enter, Vera. At the strip club where she works, she’s approached by a man who clocked her in the mayor’s office. He pays for three dances, takes one, and hurriedly leaves.
Later, he turns up at Vera’s home looking for the other two. When she pulls a gun on him, he beats her unconscious, rapes her, strangles her, and discovers the map to Milo’s money. To get that, he heads straight to Mitch’s office, where Kyle and Mike have just deposited it in his safe. Mitch is happy to hand it over, but what happens between the robber and Milo won’t be any of his business. This turns out to be true, but not for the reasons he expects, since the robber coldly shoots him in the back of the head to keep his role in the matter a secret.
This represents a major turning point in Mayor of Kingstown. Mitch’s murder isn’t much of a mystery – the cops track his killer down almost immediately and engineer a scenario in which he has to be shot rather than being taken alive.
But it means that Mike is suddenly the mayor, even if he doesn’t want to be. Even if he isn’t suited to the task. Mitch, we can tell, was more calculating and diplomatic. Mike still has the instincts of a felon, a willingness – an eagerness, even – to glass people who annoy him. But he seems willing to take on the responsibility all the same.
Episode 2 – “The End Begins”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 2 (Credit – Paramount)
“The End Begins” is the second episode of Mayor of Kingstown, but in many ways it feels like the first. With Mitch having been surprisingly and unceremoniously killed off in the premiere, this week we see Mike take the reigns of their father’s inherited fixer business, and we see how his approach differs vastly from his late brother’s.
It’s an introduction, essentially, to a man who finds himself suddenly thrust into a promotion that he might not have the temperament for.
You can see this particularly in Mike’s negotiations with Bunny. After the incident between them last week, Mike orders Bunny’s men to be pulled from the prison yard, preventing them from smuggling drugs, and then when Bunny later called to threaten him, he threatened him in return with superior firepower.
Bunny eventually handed Sam’s letter over, which he could have just done in the first place. But power is everything in Kingstown. Everyone is testing the waters to see how much they really have.
Of course, ultimate power still rests with the authorities, represented in “The End Begins” by Special Agents Aldrich and Perry, who had a cushty deal with Mitch and want to extend the same one to Mike – it’s another way in which the episode is dealing with the transition, confirming that the family business is still operating, that Mitch’s legacy has already been burned away with the bloodstains that Mike torched from his carpet. It’s not the most compassionate handover in the world, but there’s little room or time for sympathy here. There is business to be done.
There’s little business in Kingstown that Milo Sunter doesn’t seem to have an interest in. Milo was namechecked in the premiere, but we see him for the first time here – Aidan Gillen playing the same character he always plays, though this time behind bars – and learn a little more about his arrangement with Mitch.
Mitch arranged Milo’s surrender after he killed two armed guards during an armored car heist and then helped his wife, Vera, to dig up the part of the haul he buried in the hopes of collecting after his release.
Milo is indirectly responsible for both Mitch and Vera’s deaths, but he isn’t the sympathetic type. He also wants his money, which is currently in police custody, and he recognizes immediately that Mike can’t be dealt with in the same way as Mitch. He’ll require the manipulations of a woman named Iris instead.
Taylor Sheridan, for what it’s worth, seems to love bears. He built a couple of episodes of Yellowstone around one and uses one as a metaphor here for Mike’s determined self-destructiveness, his inclination to meet danger head-on. Maybe, for Mike, the bear is another potential emotional connection.
Maybe it’s a way to kill himself. Either way, instead of hiding from it or trying to discourage it from visiting, he feeds it. He just can’t help himself.
Episode 3 – “Simply Murder”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 3 (Credit – Paramount)
Everyone makes mistakes. In Kingstown, though, they get you killed. “Simply Murder” is a horrific episode chronicling a horrific crime and the penance that must be paid for it, all while several interested parties try to maintain a fragile peace in its wake.
Taylor Sheridan’s vision of America’s prison system and the back-patting culture of favours and deals that power it isn’t exactly pleasant, but neither, at least a lot of the time, is life. Especially not for people like Kenny.
Kenny hardly engenders any sympathy. He’s a meth addict whose habit and irresponsibility leads to the deaths of his lady and their child, both charred alive in the trailer where he cooked his meth. The kid was five years old. The event is enough to unite Kingstown’s law enforcement and criminal elements both. Kenny must be brought to justice, and not via means of a courtroom.
Luckily virtually everyone in Kingstown is willing to help make this happen. With Kenny on the run, Mike is given the responsibility of finding him and arranging a deal whereby basically everyone gets to kill him.
While Kenny sobs and punches himself in the face, clearly devastated by his own role in things, even his own boss agrees to turn him in if he sees him. Kenny cannot be saved; “Simply Murder” makes this clear, and the sense of inevitability is what powers the episode.
Of course, this all has ramifications. Prisoners of various affiliations are all volunteering to do the deed. The cops are determined to have Kenny killed without a fair trial; to violate an essential tenet of American society. And nobody can wait to do any of these things.
It doesn’t bode well for Kingstown, even if everyone agrees that Kenny deserves it, so when Kenny presents himself to Mike, he’s offered a deal. If he turns himself in, as a parolee he can be put in protective custody. He’ll still be convicted, he’ll still be sent to Death Row, and he’ll still be executed, but at least he’ll get a trial.
When Kenny follows Mike’s advice, though, he’s still placed in general population and immediately set upon by all the prisoners, stabbed and beaten to death while the guards look on. Mike, upon hearing the news, smashes his office up in frustration.
Mike’s attempts to save Kenny were self-preservation, not sympathy. Kenny was dead either way. But the fragile balance of peace in Kingstown is contingent on Mike keeping the scales even. If the police enlisted an affiliated prisoner to kill Kenny, the police would have been indebted to the gang.
As Bunny laughingly mentions to Mike, they’d milk that debt forever. Suddenly, the police would be indistinguishable from the criminals – not that there’s much difference between them at the best of times.
But even for the Mayor of Kingstown, there’s only so much influence one can wield. Kenny had broken a sacred code by inadvertently killing a child. So many people wanted him dead that they ensured it happened without thinking too far ahead.
Now, Kenny has been killed by various members of several gangs with the police’s full knowledge and complicity, meaning that everyone will suddenly owe everyone else a favour. With Mike being the broker of those favours, his new job is likely to get a lot harder before it gets easier.
Episode 4 – “The Price”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 4 (Credit – Paramount)
With virtually every gang in the city having participated in the murder, they all want favours from the cops for apparently doing their dirty work. And it turns out cops and criminals have a very different idea of favours. Being light on frisking prison visitors and tossing cells isn’t enough. People are getting unreasonable.
It’s Mike’s job to manage all this. But Mike has other things to worry about. He’s having sex with random women in bathrooms (who can’t be seen with him, naturally) and chilling with bears in his front yard.
His mother is slapping him in full view of the public because he doesn’t know his sister-in-law is pregnant, and now it’s his responsibility to ensure that Kyle gets a job that won’t leave her a widow. Mariam doesn’t say it out loud, but she means a job as far away from Mike and the family business as possible.
But some things won’t wait. Bunny calls Mike to explain that his guys want candy for offing Kenny, and Pete later calls to demand Mike push him and his boys to the top of the line for the same candy. It’s a conflict of interest.
Mike isn’t exactly amenable to demands – he throws a trash can through Pete’s plate-glass office window – but he tells Pete the same thing he told Bunny. There aren’t any favours, at least not specific ones. The prison officers will lighten up a bit, at least for a while, and that’s that.
But you can tell the stress is getting to Mike. His best friend is a wild bear, he’s putting liquor in his coffee, Kyle is hesitant about accepting a safer job because it doesn’t “feel right”, which only opens Mike up to more slaps from Mariam, and he needs to start taking on some clients lest the office go under.
But the only person arriving to meet him is Iris, the pretty young hooker that Milo sent from New York to keep him on-side. Mike isn’t falling for that. She’s barely 22 and obviously naïve, and he gives her a year to live in this business if she doesn’t get out. Maybe she’ll listen. Maybe it’s not that easy. Either way, despite Mike telling her to report to Milo that they had “a good time”, I don’t imagine we’ve seen the last of her.
For now, though, Mike has bigger fish to fry. He advises one of his connections in the Department of Corrections to turn up the heat on the prisoners as a reminder that you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and then makes a $4000 bail for Carlos Jimenez, who has been picked up for failed child support payments, to make the same message clear to the Mexicans. Carlos knows Mike from his own time in the yard.
They’ve both been in the game a long time, so he’s willing to shelve his pride, but he cautions Mike that some of the younger players might not be. This all seems likely to blow up sooner rather than later.
What is arguably the best scene of “The Price” comes right at the end, and doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything. Kyle and Ian are stopping off for pizza when Kyle realizes the joint is being cased by a tweaking addict.
Thanks to Mike’s conversations with Mariam and Kyle earlier, and knowing what Taylor Sheridan is like, it’s easy to think that this is going to go pear-shaped and Mike is going to pay the price. And it does indeed go wrong, but in a surprising way – the owner tries to open fire himself and Kyle and Ian are forced to gun him down.
It’s a tragic scene that speaks to the violence of Kingstown and the familiarity everyone there has with it – including Kyle. Maybe that’s why his potential new job doesn’t seem the right fit for him. There’s no wonder Mariam is worried.
Episode 5 – “Orion”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 5 (Credit – Paramount)
After the out-of-nowhere shootout that capped off last week’s episode, Kyle and Ian remain in the firing line as they’re forced to prove the shooting was justified. It seems likely that the owner of the pizzeria was dealing drugs to his customers, and that the tweaker who looked like he was casing the joint was really looking for his next fix.
Most of the people involved would be content with a drug bust. But a drug bust requires drugs, and thus far, despite the owner’s prior convictions for drug-related offenses, none have been found on the scene. We haven’t heard the last of this, but it’s shelved for now as “Orion” introduces some new subplots and clients and nudges the ongoing storylines in the right direction.
We’re introduced, for instance, to a prison guard named Ernest who has taken to hanging around the penitentiary on his days off and eating Vienna sausages from the can, since he’d rather do that than care for his quite clearly severely disabled son and his put-upon wife.
What relevance this guy will have going forwards remains to be seen, but one assumes his story won’t be a positive one. Likewise, the prison guards continuing to torment Bunny’s guy P-Dog by serving him bowls full of human sh*t isn’t going to be tolerated for long either.
These aren’t the only subplots that are teed up for subsequent episodes. A man named Duchard wants his straight-A student little brother out of prison, though both seem to have more of a gang affiliation that he claims, and a representative from the District Attorney’s office wants Mike to try and get another confession out of the semi-famous child murderer who killed – and, according to Bunny, perhaps ate – his daughter. A confession will mean another trial, which will delay his imminent execution and thus prolong his suffering. It’s the least he can do.
And then there’s Iris. Having been relocated from New York to Kingstown, she’s forced to work in a local strip club since Milo doesn’t want her walking the street like the hookers. After being made to strip off to prove her willingness, she manages to swerve actually dancing – which she “understands the concept of” – by “selling the idea of a dance”, which seems to be working out for her.
For now, anyway. As she’s told, once the mystique wears off people are going to want more of her, and she already seems to be catching the eyes of the wrong people given she’s a) important to Milo and b) claims to already be in a relationship with Mike, news of which I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear.
In return for helping out with Duchard and the attorney’s problems, Bunny wants a favor from Mike – to escort his nephew, Hakim, to a hockey game, since Bunny can’t leave the block without getting killed. Hakim wants out of Kingstown, like everyone else.
Hockey might be his way to do that, if only it weren’t for all the racist parents who aren’t happy about a kid from the wrong side of town checking their boys. As ever at hockey games, a fight between the players breaks out, but when one of the parents grabs Hakim, one breaks out in the stands, too. On the way home, Mike tells Hakim he’s going to take him to every game with half the Irish mob, and he means it.
His subsequent conversation with Bunny at the end of “Orion” is great, classic Taylor Sheridan stuff, two deeply flawed men lamenting their circumstances. Bunny claims that for 500 years being able to run fast has been a Black man’s only route to freedom; slavery ended 150 years ago, and it still comes down to that.
As they look up at the constellations together while drinking 40s, Mike describes how a carving of Orion was discovered in an ivory tablet over 30,000 years old. For all those years, men very different from them have sat and gazed at the same stars. Perhaps none of us are all that different after all.
Episode 6 – “Every Feather”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 6 (Credit – Paramount)
Mayor Of Kingstown hasn’t exactly painted a favorable picture of prison officials, but for the most part, their problem has been corruption, not incompetence. The opening of “Every Feather” makes it difficult to distinguish the two.
During a prison riot, the same young guard who beat up an inmate and staged him having initiated the attack finds himself in a watchtower, firing live rounds at a trio of inmates, two of whom are stabbing the third. He hits the guy being stabbed.
What to do? The guard had already been stationed out of the way for his own protection, but he was inadequately skilled for the position, marksmanship-wise. The next best thing is to station him in the women’s prison, but there’s a good chance that a good-looking guy like him would be eaten alive in there.
Either way, the prison itself goes into lockdown, instantly ceasing all kinds of criminal operations that, needless to say, have a knock-on effect for Mike.
Virtually immediately, Mike is besieged on all sides by complaints, but everyone from Bunny to Duke is saying more or less the same thing – this means war, and it won’t be a war confined to the prisons. Blood is going to spill out into the streets. But Mike has other issues. As predicted, Iris turns to him for help, sent by Milo once again.
This time, though, he has one of his goons brutally assault her, assuming Mike might be more inclined to help a broken angel. He’s right, but not in the way he expects. Milo remains an elusive figure, but his influence is felt more deeply here than it has been before, which gives the show a welcome edge of menace.
Mike is used to dealing with problems by beating someone up, which we see when he sets about Iris’s attacker to send a message back to Milo. But he eventually learns that he’s dealing with someone much cleverer and more connected than usual. A few good right hands aren’t going to be enough.
Iris at least becomes more of a character in “Every Feather”, not that she suffers fewer indignities. She tells Mike about her past of molestation and abuse, about her present as essentially Milo’s property and plaything, and about her future – which likely contains even more trauma than she has suffered thus far.
She’s forced to strip down and be photographed, to identify mugshots of New York’s politicians and officials who she has been paid to have sex with, and is treated dismissively by the FBI agent speaking with her. When Mike is offered a meeting with Milo about Iris, you can tell why he takes it. He’s trying to protect a woman who clearly can’t protect herself.
But can he? At the meeting, Mike is greeted by another version of Iris, another pretty woman at Milo’s beck and call, and is told via video call – despite the inmates not being allowed phones – that if Mike doesn’t do Milo another favor, he’ll skin Iris alive and send Mike her scalp.
Mike isn’t keen on the idea, but Candace, on command, lifts her shirt to show a scar where Milo embedded a tracker in her. And if she has one, so does Iris. Mike thought he was keeping her safe, but he was really keeping her still while Milo’s goons tracked her down.
By the time Mike returns to the office, the FBI agents are dead, Iris is gone, and a message has been scrawled on the wall in blood – “Every Feather”, which Milo promised to pluck from the wings of Mike’s new angel.
Episode 7 – “Along Came A Spider”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 7 (Credit – Paramount)
As ever, there’s trouble everywhere in Mayor of Kingstown. Mike and his place are under investigation after the death of the FBI agent and the kidnapping of Iris, yet he’s determined to keep working, driven mostly by his emotions. He’s adamant about finding Iris, but that’ll mean playing Milo’s game.
In the most screen time we’ve had with him thus far, he explains that all he needs Mike to do is retrieve a metal case from the woods – he can even take his FBI tail with him if he likes. Of course, if something sounds easy, it rarely is, but what choice does Mike have?
If he really wants to protect Iris, then no choice at all, since as punishment for her failure she has been “returned to her old job”, or in other words offered up as a gift to Duke and his gang. As Kyle warns Mike while they sit on his porch drinking beers, this is clearly a set-up.
But when the body of the turncoat FBI agent that Milo’s people killed turns up, Mike decides to do him the favor anyway, though “Along Came A Spider” ends without us seeing what’s actually inside the case after Mike uses a metal detector and a shovel to find and dig it up.
Elsewhere, the ongoing feud between the prison officials and the inmates persists, with the prisoners making statements that the guards interpret as threats.
Given that the warden doesn’t know the guards were complicit in the gangs’ murder of the meth-head who killed his family, the guards push to double-down on the lockdown, but the warden is open to a negotiation, which P-Dog leads. He knows that the response is disproportionate, designed to facilitate the guards getting overtime pay, and he also reveals the underhanded deal that was made to kick off this whole issue in the first place. The warden then has no choice but to lift the lockdown, which is sure to mean even more trouble for everyone.
Episode 8 – “The Devil Is Us”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 8 (Credit – Paramount)
When Milo told Mike to dig up a “metal box”, he wasn’t expecting it to be a school bus full of 26 dead and rotting corpses. To be honest, there’s a good chance Milo wasn’t expecting that either. After discovering the crime scene – the leftovers of that serial killer we saw be executed in the previous episode, I think – Mike goes right to Milo’s lawyer to rough him up a bit.
But he’s visibly panicked. He starts talking about millions in bearer bonds, not dead bodies. The police are going to try and charge Milo for being associated with these murders in any way they can. Mike’s sure he’s being set up, but in what way? What can Milo possibly be up to?
“The Devil Is Us” abandons this subplot for the rest of the episode, so presumably it’ll be revolved in the remaining two. The remaining time is spent, mostly, on Iris, though there’s plenty going on in the prisons, too. We’ll start with the latter.
So, at the women’s prison, Sam continues to be seduced by Cherry, the inmate who kept displaying herself to him in the previous episode. Here, she feigns a pain in her flank so that she can be escorted to the infirmary, but on the way, she drags Sam under the stairwell, which is unmonitored by cameras and is apparently a popular hook-up spot.
Sam tries to resist for all of five seconds but quickly succumbs. As if proving that he’s totally unfit for the position, he finishes inside her, which is a remarkably stupid thing to do. Luckily, Cherry gets all praying mantis, stabs Sam multiple times in the neck, and then screams for help, making it seem like he attacked her and she defended herself.
Mariam told him that he was in danger.
At the men’s prison, meanwhile, the very well-orchestrated passing of a shiv between queueing inmates allows P-Dog to stab one of the guards and, in the commotion, slip out of a nearby door. Where this is going is anyone’s guess, but it probably isn’t anywhere good.
Anyway, Iris. When “The Devil Is Us” picks up, she has been thoroughly broken by Duke and his gang to the extent that they have to inject her with drugs just to stop her crying and screaming.
Determining that she’s no use to them in this state, Duke sells her to another gang. Mike arrives shortly afterward, oblivious to all this, to try and talk Duke out of his white trash race gang conspiring to kill one of the guards, fearing the consequences will spill out into the streets.
Mike used to roll with Duke in prison, we learn, but he’s quick to remind him that it was out of necessity, not desire. Mike visibly can’t stand him, and he doesn’t even know yet what he’s done to Iris.
Speaking of Iris, while she’s being driven away, the car is forced to detour towards the Commons, which is the territory of Bunny’s gang. Almost immediately, another vehicle pulls up alongside and opens fire. All the occupants are killed except Iris. The next we see, Mike is receiving a call from Bunny, who tells him he has something that belongs to him.
When Mike arrives – we get to see inside Bunny’s rather nice apartment for once, which is filled with his family – Iris just wants to leave. But since Bunny tells Mike that Duke is the one who sold Iris, he makes a stop along the way, gets Iris to identify Duke, and then shoots him and all his goons dead.
He takes Iris into the woods to remove Milo’s tracker from her – “I don’t have anything to numb the pain,” he says. “Don’t worry, I’m numb enough.” – and then continues on the way to his cabin, letting her see his favorite spot in the world on the way. It’s the crest of a hill where his phone loses signal. As Iris points out, though, he has to drive back down eventually.
Episode 9 – “The Lie of the Truth”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 9 (Credit – Paramount)
In the cold open of “The Lie of the Truth”, the penultimate episode of Mayor of Kingstown‘s successful first season, a trigger-happy SWAT team raid Duke’s compound.
You know it’s Duke’s place, since there are Confederate flags in the windows, and only a white trash race gang would decorate the place with those in 2021. It’s the second time in as many episodes that a guy couldn’t wait to burst in and shoot everyone inside.
But since Mike already did that, there shouldn’t be anyone inside. Only, there is. The place is full of people in white coveralls and little hats, like forensic specialists, but they seem to be bagging up drugs. Either way, all but one of them are shot and killed. The only survivor, a woman, is told that she has some explaining to do. One assumes that’s an understatement.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, apparently, and that certainly holds true in Kingstown. But “most important” doesn’t translate to “best”, seemingly for anyone. The mornings of both Mike and Kyle are juxtaposed to make a point of comparison.
Both are struggling with women — Kyle isn’t paying any attention to his wife or their unborn child, only work, and Miriam absolutely chews him to pieces about it, while Mike makes a hearty breakfast for Iris that eventually amounts to them laying on the bed together while she furiously sobs.
The point is pretty clear. If you’re on the wrong side of the tracks in this town, they don’t lead anywhere good. And once you get where they take you, there’s no coming back. Iris is so thoroughly traumatized and broken that she’ll never be the same. If Kyle doesn’t start prioritizing his family over his job, he’ll end up having seen too much to not have it reflected back at him in his kid’s eyes — if he gets to see his kid’s eyes at all.
Then again, someone has to investigate all the stabbings, don’t they? You’ll recall that two prison guards were stabbed by inmates in the previous episode, but it’s the incident that occurred in the male prison that’s a point of real contention.
The CCTV footage of the shiv being passed through the line suggests that the white and Black inmates were working together, which is not a good sign — for the guards especially, since, as we know, this is payback for services rendered and disproportionate punishments given to cover those services up.
The Warden is still at odds with the guards, who demand that the suspects be transferred to county to be questioned by homicide detectives, and that the prison is immediately locked down. The warden, determined not to punish the innocent just to get at the guilty, agrees to the former but not the latter, and waves away the idea that “innocent” is a pretty relative term in a place like this.
The same theme comes up in relation to the stabbing of Sam by Cherry. Given the evidence and timing, it seems obvious that the attack was a gang-sanctioned hit, but they need Cherry to admit that, or at least give enough away that it can be proved and exonerate a prison guard who has been posthumously approved of rape.
Given that the only compassionate person in or indeed near the prison is Miriam, she’s picked for the job, even though she’s reluctant to do it and, crucially, reluctant to believe the notion that the killing was intentional, which seems a bit naive for her.
The overall sense, though, is of impending calamity. Every time Kyle, who along with Ian is sent to the prison to escort Milo to county after the whole bus-full-of-dead-bodies incident, mentions his son and his intention to take a job offer elsewhere, I started to bristle a bit. In the holding area, where P-Dog has been moved Hannibal Lecter-style, it became obvious that something was about to go down. And it did.
P-Dog had a whole escape attempt planned. Several of his fellow gang members were in place, mopping floors and such, and at the same moment, they all attacked the guards, attacked Kyle and Ian, and headed for the door. Some pepper spray to the eyes and a bit of a beating seemed to be the worst the cops got, which it turns out made them the lucky ones.
On his way out, P-Dog runs into Milo, who has been paying attention to the complicated color-coded key system and knows that the blue key opens the door out and the black key opens the weapons locker full of shotguns and pistols. Suddenly he’s free too, and armed — he was already dangerous.
The noise of the escape causes a riot in the cell blocks, and pretty soon every cell in the prison is open. Ian and Kyle come to in the midst of it, knowing they’re in a deeply terrible predicament. Taking the last couple of handguns from the weapons locker, they descend into the bowels of the prison, where some inmates are hiding out.
They claim it’s the end of the road. They might be right.
Episode 10 – “This Piece of My Soul”
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Episode 10 (Credit – Paramount)
Across ten episodes, the series has developed a delicate balance of power between the inmates and everyone else, and in the last few episodes, the penultimate one particularly, that balance has tipped very much in favor of the prisoners.
Led by P-Dog, they have seized the prison, taken the guards hostage, and want to make a public point about the continued mistreatment of the inmates by officials. To make matters worse, Mike’s brother Kyle and Kyle’s partner Ian are both trapped in the prison’s bowels, and Miriam is watching the whole thing unfold on TV.
It’s a disaster waiting to happen – well, it’s a disaster that has already happened, but it’s threatening to get much worse very quickly.
And outside the prison, things aren’t much better. Town and state officials are bickering over who has jurisdiction, and Mike’s “official” position as an “advocate” only opens him up to scrutiny. Having received countless missed calls from Miriam after cresting the hill leading to his cabin, he also knows that he’ll never hear the end of it if Kyle doesn’t make it out.
While Iris spends the finale figuring out what she’s going to do with the next chapter of her life, which hopefully doesn’t include being eaten by a bear, Mike has to figure out Kyle’s location and then enter the prison as a negotiator in order to discuss terms with P-Dog, whom he knows from his own time inside.
These two main plot threads, as well as a couple of others, all coalesce at about the same time. A SWAT team enters the prison via the sewers to rescue Kyle and Ian and escort them up to the yard, while Mike realizes that his negotiation with P-Dog is hopeless.
Like many of the other inmates, including Carlos, P-Dog is a lifer – he’ll never be free. But while he has lost the ability to choose how he lives, he can choose how he dies, and if he does so making the point that those in the prison are being consistently denied their humanity for the entertainment of the guards, then that, to him, will have been worth something.
So, he executes one of the guards and is gunned down by the State police lining the perimeter walls. In the ensuing confusion, many other inmates meet the same fate. It’s a massacre.
Mayor of Kingstown Season 1 Ending Explained
Kyle and Ian make it to the yard after the shooting has died down, and the McLusky brothers tearfully embrace. Outside, Miriam arrives and hugs both of them. They make it out alive, but changed, Kyle especially. One imagines that his latest career opportunities are looking a lot more enticing right now.
Mike returns home, to find Iris on the floor of the cabin, clutching a kitchen knife. After a brief encounter with Mike’s bear friend earlier, she has obviously had to confront her mortality yet again. Still sitting on the floor, she explains to Mike, who has returned home with champagne, that she realizes now what she has lost – pieces of her soul, that she’ll never get back. She thought about ending it all but considered that perhaps the soul grows back over time. She’ll have to wait and see.
None of the show’s most significant characters died in “This Piece of My Soul”, and it seems like that was intentional. Given the show’s success and its already-confirmed second season renewal, there’s much more story to tell here. Hence, Milo, after helping to initiate the riot in the first place, escapes in a prison guard’s uniform, presumably to terrorize Mike in the coming episodes.
Beyond this, there’s still the matter of his missing bearer bonds and the busload full of corpses.
While nothing seems to have been gained from the riot other than a pile of corpses, P-Dog’s point may well have been proven, and even if it wasn’t, the complete breakdown in trust and communication between the prison and the outside world is going to make Mike’s job even harder.
There’s plenty of material to develop and unpack in a second season here, and after these initial episodes, fans of the show are likely to be eagerly anticipating another visit to Kingstown.
And that completes our recap of Mayor of Kingstown Season 1? What was your favourite episode? Comment below.
