Summary
Mayor of Kingstown Season 4 moves a lot of pieces into place in “My Way”, but despite Mike playing town-wide chess, he doesn’t realise he’s a pawn in someone else’s game.
The old chess metaphor is pretty played out, but it’s by far the most appropriate one to describe what’s happening in Mayor of Kingstown Season 4. You can feel pieces being moved into position much more obviously than ever in Episode 7, “My Way”, but the real question is who is really in control. Mike McClusky thinks it’s him, since it usually is, but he might well be a pawn in someone else’s game — a game he doesn’t even realise is being played.
And that brings us to Merle Callahan. Here, he formally pitches Kyle for the first time. After the Aryan Brotherhood saved his bacon during his brief stint in general population, he has proved that he can protect Kyle better than his own brother can. If he wants to survive his stay in Anchor Bay, all Kyle has to do is accept Merle’s hand, just as Mike did before him. But lessons have been learned since then, and Kyle’s self-preservation instincts don’t outweigh his morals. So, he turns Merle down.
Merle is pretty adamant that he’s going to escape from prison and go after Mike. It seems like a pretty outlandish pipe dream at the start of “My Way”, but by the end, the Aryans have spirited him away. It only took him being in gen pop for about five minutes. It’s impossible to say whether Hobbs knew what his associates were cooking when she finally agreed to banish him from Ad Seg, but it’s clear Mike didn’t anticipate it. And that oversight might come back to bite him.
Speaking of Hobbs, Mike is furious with her for trying to have Moses hit by the Colombians while he was in police custody. That act has burned a lot of Mike’s goodwill with Moses, and he doesn’t like being kept in the dark — yet another example of him being a pawn on the board instead of the king he likes to think he is. But Mike is definitely developing a strategy. When he briefly visits Evelyn, who immediately assumes he had something to do with her star witness disappearing, he mentions that he can giftwrap the real whale for her. If she cuts Kyle loose, he’ll give her Frank Moses. Seems fair enough.
But there are still lingering obstacles, of course. A familiar one in Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 7 is Sawyer, who has begun to fixate on the idea of Mike being the root cause of all his problems. We’re supposed to feel a pang of sympathy for Sawyer, I think, watching him pretend to his wife that he’s doing okay, and watch his son play in the park before going home to an empty house. But he’s just too delusional for me to care. He still earnestly believes that he never put a foot wrong and was always simply doing his job. When he suggests to Ian that they should take Mike out, Ian realises that he has reached the end of the road. He’s spiralling and is going to do something drastic if he’s left unchecked, which he confesses to Mike.
Since that can’t happen, Mike strongly implies that Ian take care of the Sawyer-shaped problem they all have, which he does. I had to watch this scene a couple of times, since it wasn’t entirely clear what was going on, but Ian gets Sawyer incredibly drunk, drives him home, and then stages his suicide. With him asleep in the driver’s seat, Ian lowers all the windows and shuts the garage door as it’s filling with noxious fumes. I think we’ve seen the last of Robert Sawyer. I can’t say he’ll be missed. Although, having said this, Ian didn’t exactly make sure the deed was done. If Sawyer wakes up, he’s going to have a lot to answer for.
With his long game for Moses established, Mike pushes him to take some revenge on the Colombians. He does it by burning the fuelling truck full of drugs being delivered to Anchor Bay, albeit after relieving the vehicle of its narcotics. This puts Hobbs in a difficult position, popping pills out of stress and leaning on Torres to find out who was responsible for tipping off the Colombians about the trucks. When Mike meets with her again, he finally has the upper hand. But it isn’t just him she has to worry about. When she gets home, she’s jumped by Cortez, who threatens her daughter’s life if she doesn’t reveal who made the mistake with the truck. It turns out that Hobbs only talks a big game. When the chips are down, she literally wets herself and immediately rats out Torres as being responsible for the truck mishap. Cortez is going to pay him a visit next.
At the end of “My Way”, Mike gets a call from Bunny’s sister to let him know that Bunny’s awake. And he’s already focused on revenge. Mike delivers the bad news that it was his new business partner, Moses, who tried to take him out. But they’re going to keep that quiet for now and work together to take him down legally. That way, Kyle gets released. After that, Bunny can do to Moses whatever he wishes.
Is it just me, or is all this beginning to sound like a bit of a pipe dream?
