Summary
Mayor of Kingstown returns for Season 4 with an effective reminder of how good this show is at building tension when it wants to.
You know Mayor of Kingstown is good, since its Season 4 premiere is riveting despite being, for most of its runtime, about one character bursting into the office of another character and having a passive-aggressive argument. I lost count of how many times this happens, with only slight variations here and there; sometimes the office is literal, sometimes it’s more a place of business, but the effect is the same. Episode 1 excels in conversation because all the conversations are leading inexorably to the same place.
And this shouldn’t be a surprise, given the show we’re dealing with, but that place is nowhere good. There’s no way to stop its momentum, either, the metaphor of a quickening, relentless engine finding literal form in an opening sequence that introduces a new villain — identified by the screener subtitles as Frank Moses — whose MO is tying Russian goons to train tracks so that a passing locomotive lops off their heads. This is the only sequence involving a literal train, but the entire episode makes you feel like you’re aboard one.
Moses is killing off the remnants of Konstantin’s operation. Following the previous season’s finale, there’s a power vacuum in Kingstown. Bunny has benefited from it and risen to the top of the pile — when we first see him, he’s meeting with Mike on a roof, surveying his kingdom, completing the image — but that only makes him a bigger target. Things aren’t going well for the Crips on the inside, either. Roberto, the leader of the Colombians, won’t give Raph an inch when it comes to changing their arrangement, and the relationship is frosty.
Speaking of the prison, Anchor Bay is about to get a new resident. This is where most of the premiere’s tension comes from, since that resident is Mike’s brother, Kyle, who is looking at two years — six months with good behaviour — for shooting Robert Sawyer during last season’s bridge stand-off. Kyle was justified, but he’s swallowing the sentence to cover up Sawyer’s psychopathy. Sawyer knows too much about Ian and Mike to risk ruining him completely, since he won’t go down quietly. He’s spending his time on suspension following Evelyn around like a creeper stalker, as if to prove the point. ‘
Anchor Bay has a new warden, too. Nina Hobbs is a specialist at cleaning up dysfunctional facilities and is determined to do things her own way, which means refusing Mike’s offer of a quid pro quo arrangement to secure Kyle a soft landing. He’ll be housed in Ad Seg, but Carney won’t be keeping an eye on him, and he won’t be getting any special privileges. Bunny has Raph watching over him, too, but he might be too distracted by the Colombians. Hobbs boasts about a fine track record of reducing violence in all of her postings, but she’s perhaps underestimating Kingstown and how much influence Mike wields in it as its de facto “mayor”.
Hobbs’s indifference only makes Mike — and the audience — worry about Kyle more. You can feel something bad coming a mile away. Kyle has a few drinks before he surrenders himself and has to be dragged out of a self-loathing stupor by Mike, who has to painstakingly reiterate how much danger he’s going to be in every time he steps out of his cell. Carney can’t supervise his arrival or his transfer to Ad Seg, so for at least that period, he’s going to be vulnerable. And, lo and behold, he’s immediately jumped by a prisoner wielding a lock in a sock — I’m a poet and I didn’t know it — and barely escapes being beaten to death. Cindy, a new hire whom Carney had earlier prepped about the importance of Kyle’s protection, is first on the scene and gets a sharp shock about what she’s in for.
Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 1, finds Mike at the end of his tether. Every effort he makes to ensure Kyle’s protection backfires, and when Carney eventually tells him he has been hurt, his little outburst is a major clue that he’s fraying. I dread to think how he’ll act when he discovers that Kyle’s next-door neighbour is now Merle Callahan, who Hobbs had claimed wouldn’t be anywhere near him. Kyle knows better than to go to sick bay and make himself even more vulnerable, so he’s forced to recuperate in his cell under Merle’s watchful eye. It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Who knows what Merle is up to? When Mike leaned on one of his Aryan goons, Todd, earlier in the episode, he claimed that Merle wasn’t calling the shots anymore and also that it wasn’t him who killed the Russians. He wasn’t lying about the latter, as we know, but the former remains open for debate. His being housed right next to Kyle seems very deliberate to me, and if someone can pull those kinds of strings, Mike’s probably up against a serious adversary on the outside — perhaps adversaries, plural. It seems to be the Colombians who try to assassinate Bunny late on, and Mike makes the error of assuming they also killed the Russians. Are two rival players both trying to occupy the power vacuum, or is Moses, and whoever he represents, trying to scapegoat the Colombians to make room for himself?
Time will tell. And if Kyle’s experiences thus far are anything to go by, it’ll be hard time at that.
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