Summary
Mayor of Kingstown Season 4 feels more combustible than ever in Episode 6, with Kyle’s predicament worsening and Moses’s true intentions becoming clear.
Mayor of Kingstown continues to treat Season 4 as an exercise in how bad things can get for almost everyone involved. That enduring powder keg feeling has become increasingly pronounced, and reaches perhaps its most combustible point yet in Episode 6, which is another deeply terrible hour for the McLusky brothers — among others. War between the Crips and the Colombian cartel is liable to spill over at any moment. The Aryan Brotherhood is lurking in the margins with their own intentions. Career-criminal Frank Moses turns out not to be as reasonable as Bunny naively thought. And in the middle of all, albeit for different reasons, are Mike and Kyle.
There are two main nuclei of dramatic energy in “#081693” (a very Les Miserables-coded title which, by the way, is Kyle’s Anchor Bay prisoner number). At the top of the episode, Bunny and his driver, Lamar, are ambushed on their way to meet with Mike and Moses at a vantage point overlooking the smouldering train that was sabotaged by the Colombians in the previous episode. The prime suspect is a Colombian hit squad, and Bunny takes a couple of bullets in the crossfire, leaving him comatose for the remainder of the episode. Meanwhile, Kyle finds himself in general population and tries to keep his identity a secret so that word of his being a cop doesn’t begin to dangerously spread.
It takes Mike a while to find out about Kyle. With Carney dead, Raph in isolation, and Bunny in the hospital, he has very few eyes in the prison. Kevin isn’t much help, since Torres leans on him and destroys his burner phone. It isn’t until Cindy comes on shift and discovers that Kyle’s Ad-Seg cell is empty that the alarm is raised. At the same time, Kyle is allowed to make a call from the yard, so Mike has to suffer the one-two punch of not only learning that his brother is missing, but discovering that it’s because he’s floating around in gen-pop.
Mike advises Kyle to go to Raph and the Crips for protection, and most of all to stay away from the Aryan Brotherhood, who will doubtlessly try to recruit him. But he assumes that when the guards come to take him away that an administrative error is simply being cleared up. He doesn’t know that Cindy told Torres he was missing before she called Mike, not realizing that Torres is as dirty as Hobbs. The guards hand Kyle off to the Colombians to be horrifically assaulted, but he’s saved by a few Aryans who reassure him that Merle Callahan has his back.
By this point, Mike has stormed into the prison, booted Torres in the balls, and demanded to see Hobbs, who is a bit more open about what she wants now that it’s obvious Mike has rumbled her collusion with the Colombians. She wants Frank Moses arrested. Mike is willing to make that happen, but only if Kyle ends up back in Ad Seg, and Mike gets to see him. His first wish is granted, but Kyle refuses the visit. Hobbs also reneges on a further promise to stick Callahan back in general population. When Kyle gets back to his cell, his neighbor is still in situ, and makes a point of reminding him that he now owes him a favour.
It took until Episode 6, but here is where Mayor of Kingstown Season 4 finally reveals that Moses isn’t quite who he has advertised himself to be. Mike tries to trick him into voluntarily playing ball with the KPD, who are going to pick him up that evening, ostensibly on account of routine inquiries about the burning train having passed through his depot. It’s a trick facilitated by Mike, who has told Ian and Stevie to hold Moses for long enough that he can pretend to Hobbs that he has been arrested. It’s a plan that Moses seems happy to go along with, not realising he’s being played, but it’s complicated by the fact that when he arrives at the station, a Colombian assassin tries to kill him.
It’s similarly complicated by the fact that, when he goes to see Bunny’s driver, Lamar, Mike figures out that the attack on Bunny was orchestrated by Moses. And it was supposed to be successful, which means that they’re likely to make another attempt on his life while he’s laid up in the hospital. That’s where Mike ends the episode, sitting at Bunny’s bedside, ignoring Ian’s call (which we know is to tell him that the Colombians have made a move on Moses). Everyone is trying to kill everyone else. The fact that anybody has survived this long is a miracle. But it’s not a miracle that I imagine will last much longer.
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