Summary
The penultimate episode of Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 contains a lot of the action and developments we’ve been building towards.
Whatever Mike is up to in the penultimate episode of Mayor of Kingstown Season 3, it’s going to blow up in someone’s face – and it might even be his. Episode 9, “Home on the Range”, is a frantic flurry of false promises and double-crosses, and it isn’t quite adding up.
And that’s before the closing moments reintroduce an old complication in an admittedly predictable twist.
With so much going on, let’s break down the latest.
Raphael Escapes Prison
As with previous episodes, “Home on the Range” largely hinges on a random development that Mike tries to turn to his advantage. In this case, it’s Raphael escaping from prison after being transferred to the downtown courthouse for a hearing. His plan is to whip his prison-issue kit off and waltz out of the front door, and miraculously, it works.
Raphael dips to his girlfriend’s house to bond with his son, Trey, and play the piano, so while that’s going on, Mike gets wind of his escape and tells the KPD not to look for him too hard. If he’s in the wind for a couple of days, that should give Mike the time he needs to sort everything out.
Mike’s Plans
How does he plan to do so? Well, that’s where things get a little complicated. Mike has already lied to Merle about taking Bunny off the table and sees an opportunity to get Raphael to take out Merle and then surrender himself to KPD SWAT, with guarantees from Psycho Sawyer that it’ll all go smoothly.
But Mike promises Bunny that he will take all the other players off the board so Bunny can control all of the criminal elements in Kingstown and their cozy operation can resume. But he also tells Evelyn he’ll hand Raphael to her, and offers Konstantin Bunny’s military-grade armory for a 10% finder’s fee.
Every time Mike talks to a new person, he promises them the world. As you can see, though, there’s quite a lot of overlap. So who is he really siding with?
Milo’s Back
This all goes wrong quite quickly. Merle, after being transferred to a real hospital because he keeps vomiting blood, kills a guard and escapes his bed, so through a convoluted set of circumstances Raphael is forced to give himself up without any of the promises Mike made being kept.
At the end of the episode, Milo ambushes Roman while he’s trying to provide a clean new life for Iris on Konstantin’s instructions, revealing he has been waiting in the wings the entire time and has big revenge plans. This twist – which, let’s be frank, everyone saw coming – does fill in some blanks since it provides another suspect in every instance of a faction claiming no knowledge of something they seem likely to have done, but it also threatens to turn all of Mike’s plans completely inside-out.
Mayor of Kingstown Season 3 Episode 9 | Image via Paramount+
And Another Thing…
In amongst all this carnage, there are important smaller scenes and subplots unfolding elsewhere.
- Ian’s manipulation of Charlie reaches its logical conclusion. After using him to help find some buried legs (it’s a long story), Charlie once again alludes to Ian’s involvement in the “man on the porch” killing, so Ian shoots him dead and pretends that Charlie “went at him”. There’s zero indication that this will be followed up on, so Ian will probably get away with it.
- Tracy ends up revealing to Kyle that she went to Mike about Breen, and he takes the news exceedingly poorly because he interprets it to mean that she doesn’t think he can protect their family. More tellingly, subsequent to Breen’s transfer, Tracy is actively reprimanded at work for trying to go through official and unofficial channels to address repeated instances of sexual assault. There’s no wonder nothing gets fixed in this town.
- Kareem is told to quietly step down as warden so as to avoid the bad PR of being publicly fired – the grenade attack proves that someone on the inside was working with the would-be assassins – and he goes apeshit about it. Ultimately, though, he seems pretty powerless to change his fate, like everyone else in Kingstown.
RELATED:
