Summary
A terrifying Richard Brake performance really ups the ante in Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, with “Belleville” delivering the most sombre developments yet.
You could feel it coming, couldn’t you? All throughout Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, that feeling of impending calamity has been building, and building, and here in Episode 8, “Belleville”, it arrives. But the victim isn’t who you might have expected. Kyle has survived Anchor Bay for now, Bunny has woken up from his coma, and Mike, despite trying to juggle multiple plates at once, and all those plates being dangerous gangs, is still relatively unharmed. But poor old Tracy pays the price, becoming the first major casualty of the season, though one suspects not the last.
And just when Mike thought he had everything under control. With Bunny awake, his plan to entrap Moses is going pretty swimmingly, even if it means Bunny doing a convincing acting job and playing along with the false idea of getting revenge on the Colombians for the attempt on his life. But a blaring siren from Anchor Bay brings everyone back to reality. A prisoner is on the loose, and thanks to the previous episode, we know it’s Merle Callahan.
Merle is travelling with a pyromaniac who immediately establishes his villain bona fides by setting Shaver on fire. I do wonder if this season has perhaps the highest concentration of people being burned alive in any show ever. I don’t even think Apple TV+’s Smoke had this many, and that was literally about people being burned alive. We’ll come back to this dude in a bit. But just know he’s out there, since it lends a bit of tension to Mike’s misguided ideas of being the puppeteer.
On that note, part of Mike’s plan is to confront Lamar about his betrayal of Bunny and strong-arm him into taking out Moses’s right-hand man to win back Bunny’s trust. This is all part of a larger scheme that we haven’t been made totally privy to yet. I suspect the pieces will slot into place down the line, but part of the point of “Belleville” is that for all his deft maneuvering, Mike is losing control of the city’s internal politics. Thanks to Hobbs, he lost the prison, thanks to Moses, he lost the Crips, and now, thanks to Merle, he’s losing himself.
But speaking of Hobbs, she’s relatively on-side now. Her close shave with Carlos has renewed her self-preservation instincts, so she lets Mike know that the escapee is Merle, and then, on his request, agrees to line up the Aryans so Mike, Ian, and Stevie can interrogate them about Merle’s whereabouts and intentions. Torres is missing from all of this, and it’s very strongly implied that he’s dead after Hobbs sold him out to Cortez in the previous episode, but we haven’t seen any confirmation of that, so we shouldn’t get carried away.
In a very funny scene, Merle’s escape accomplice, Marc, gets particularly upset about the presence of a Black cop and offers to fight Stevie, only for Stevie to beat him half to death pretty handily. I forget, sometimes, that this is the Aryan Brotherhood, since Merle has generally exhibited a kind of garden-variety equal-opportunity villainy, and his biggest beef is with Mike. Speaking of which, Marc only reveals what we already knew, which is that Merle is going after Mike personally.
This is about the point that Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 8 takes quite the turn, since Merle is indeed going after Mike. He gets back to the office to discover that the Brotherhood has tossed it, then gets word that the pyromaniac has set his house on fire. The guy tries to take his own life in the flames, but Mike manages to drag him outside, only for him to reiterate the same idea as Marc. Merle’s coming for Mike, and he’s going to make him hurt.
But he doesn’t mean physically, at least not yet. Instead, Merle has gone after Tracy and her son, Mitch. He gets her to call Kyle, for no reason other than to torment him, and then pretty coldly explains to Tracy why she’s about to die. And even though Tracy — understandably — volunteers Mike’s life, since it’s really him who’s at fault, Merle is resolute. Richard Brake is absolutely superb here, truly menacing and frightening in his unbothered psycho demeanour. He’s a proper villain. Suddenly, Frank Moses looks like the least of anyone’s problems, and Lennie James has been great all season.
Merle makes good on his promise, albeit off-screen. He kills Tracy, but leaves Mitch alive. We don’t see it happen, but it’s confirmed later when we see Mike reeling from it. The idea that there was nothing he could have done doesn’t hold much water. And now, the hardest part of all — he has to tell Kyle about it. Oof. With two more episodes left, how much more stressful can this season get?
