Summary
Mayor of Kingstown Season 4 pumps the brakes a little in Episode 3, but still builds to a fiery conclusion that’ll have big implications.
Mayor of Kingstown isn’t pulling any punches in Season 4. Several Russians have been beheaded by a train, and Carney’s cold execution in front of his ailing father raised the stakes further still. Episode 3, fittingly titled “People Who Died”, has a solemn quality to it, since it unfolds in the long specter of Carney’s death and its implications going forward, especially for Kyle’s safety. But Kyle is already more vulnerable than anyone realises, and a fiery ending ensures that the war to fill Kingstown’s power vacuum is only heating up.
Mike is pretty chewed up about Carney’s death, but only insofar as it causes him more problems. He tries to downplay it to Kyle — who isn’t stupid enough to believe that it had nothing to do with his own predicament — but you can tell he’s worried. There are drugs in Carney’s locker implying he was dirty and fell foul of his own extracurricular activities, but the setup is so obvious, and Torres’s loose lips are so suspicious, that it’s a wonder Mike hasn’t accused Hobbs of anything directly.
But Hobbs simply isn’t playing. Even though her efforts to force Mike into interacting with her through the “proper channels” consistently don’t work, she still sees no reason to allow him unfettered access to Anchor Bay. Kyle remains on his own, his only remaining allies being Cindy, who is too junior and too poorly positioned to do much good for him, and the kindly next-door neighbour who keeps feeding him drugs between the bars of his cell. It might seem like this nice gesture is just to help him deal with the pain of his lingering injuries, but since we know Merle Callahan, we know better. By the end of “People Who Died”, Kyle is basically a full-blown drug addict.
This is one of several problems that Mike can’t get a handle on in Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 3. Another is Robert Sawyer, whose supposedly chance meeting with Evelyn at City Hall leaves several witnesses and suggests that Sawyer is going to continue crossing the line. I’m not sure how Taylor Sheridan wants us to feel about Sawyer. The habitual psycho is presented in an oddly sympathetic light here. I’m pretty sure running into Evelyn was an accident, as he claims, so Mike and Ian showing up on his doorstep to have a harsh word with him about his conduct is received even more poorly than it might otherwise have been. Later, Ian finds him extremely drunk in a bar, and takes him home to discover that his wife has left him and he’s spending his days on suspension drinking himself into oblivion. This guy is a ticking time bomb if I’ve ever seen one.
And Kingstown is combustible enough as it is. As it turns out, the Colombians are making a major play for Bunny’s territory, and have hacked several of his corner boys to pieces as a kind of declaration of war. Mike finds out about this and has to break the bad news, since Bunny is spending all of his time being mentored by Moses in the above-board art of smuggling drugs via train carriages full of literal garbage. It’s a smart operation, but its pretense of legitimacy will break down if all-out war erupts in the streets. Mike’s idea is to just unleash Bunny on the Colombians and let the problem solve itself. Moses even offers to help, as a show of trust, though really to prove that he can get his hands dirty when the situation calls for it.
But this backfires rather considerably. In one of the worst orchestrated assassination attempts I’ve ever seen in anything, two of Moses’s goons raid the Colombian safehouse — where they’re literally cleaning hacksaws in the bathtub, in case there was any ambiguity about who killed Bunny’s men — with a flamethrower, of all things. The shock and awe tactic leaves a lot to be desired, since most of the Colombians spill out of the back door and escape. When Moses’s men think the job is done and go to leave, Cortez, the dead-eyed assassin who took out Carney, follows them outside and shoots them both dead.
That means the Colombians have now killed two of Moses’s men on top of three of Bunny’s, all while suffering limited casualties and proving themselves to be entirely unflappable, even in the event of being aggressively set on fire in the middle of the night. Cortez is a particularly menacing figure, utterly emotionless in his approach. Since he was the one who pulled the trigger on Carney, I do wonder if Hobbs might have an employee, even one by proxy, who can give her control of much more than just Anchor Bay. Does she have designs on Kingstown itself? I’m sure the sitting mayor would have something to say about that.
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