Photo: Paramount+
This penultimate episode of Mayor of Kingstown’s third season opens with a moody montage of prisoners on the move. Raphael’s headed to the courthouse downtown for a hearing. Merle’s being shipped from the prison hospital to a real hospital so the doctors can try to stop the seemingly endless flow of bloody vomit he’s spewing. Charlie’s on a field trip with Ferguson, heading into the sticks to dig up the remains of one of his victims.
This opening sets the tone for the very good episode that follows. After weeks of characters sitting tight, biding their time, and talking about what they’d like to do — without actually doing much of anything — this action show finally delivers some action.
As is often the case with the Mayor of Kingstown, an unexpected crisis sets the plot in motion. Raphael, taking advantage of lax security measures (perhaps intentionally) during his courtroom appearance, slips out the door and makes his way to his lady’s house to spend a little time with his son. Mike, who lately keeps seeing ways to turn every troubling incident to his advantage, puts a call into Ferguson when he hears that Raphael is in the wind. The message? KPD shouldn’t “look too hard” for the fugitive. Mike believes that if he plays this right, “I can solve all our problems in a day or two.”
My one major beef with “Home on the Range” is that the particulars of Mike’s plan are never fully clear — which matters for how this episode plays out. But the broad strokes make sense. Essentially, Mike uses Raphael’s escape as a pretext for talking to every major Kingstown player, and to each of them, he makes slightly different promises about how the Raphael story will end. Each of these pitches is rooted in the idea that Mike is 100 percent eager to help the person he’s talking to get what he or she wants most.
That math does not add up.
Mike’s big day of meetings begins before he gets the news about Raphael. First, he visits Merle, where he lies about how much harm the KPD is doing to Bunny’s business. (Mike says he “brushed Bunny Washington off the plate.” Merle is irritated by all baseball metaphors unless they’re referring to Al Capone clobbering his enemies with a bat.) Once he hears that Raphael is in play, though, Mike pivots and comes up with a possible way to solve his Merle problem. He’ll have Raphael murder Merle, after which the escapee will give himself up to …?
Well, here’s where the plan gets a little hazy, as Mike keeps offering his friends and enemies more than he can reasonably give. He forges agreements with …
Bunny! … whom Mike appeals to as a fellow local, telling him it’s time to “clear the table” of outsiders and let a true Kingstowner handle the rackets.
Evelyn! … who is already stressed about the potential consequences of her police corruption probe when Mike arrives to “tee up a win” for her by delivering Raphael with “no static, no scratches.”
Sawyer! … who resents being told by Mike how the Raphael capture is going to go down.
Konstantin! … to whom Mike offers Bunny and his armory, which he expects the Russians to sell for a tidy sum (to be shared with him).
Is Mike being square with Konstantin? I’m guessing not, given that their conversation ends with him tersely telling the Russian to stop calling him “Michael.” But then Mike’s play with the Russians remains pretty vague in this episode since they’re apparently uninvolved in the whole Raphael/Merle scenario.
I say “apparently” because the whole “Raphael murders Merle then surrenders to the brave men of KPD’s SWAT team under the watchful eye of the diligent ADA Foley” scheme goes haywire before it comes to full fruition. Merle kills a guard and escapes from his hospital bed, leaving Raphael no choice but to give himself up with a lot less fanfare. (There is at least no violence in the arrest, though there are some dicey moments when SWAT yells at Raphael to “comply fucking faster”). This is hardly the big win Mike envisioned.
So does this mean we’re done with Mike McLusky’s rebranding as Wise Can-Do Dude? Perhaps so. He comes off as awfully cocky early in this episode, telling Iris, “I’m going to fix this … make it right for everyone,” and, “When I get done there’s gonna be no one left to follow you.” But that promise ultimately falls flat in the closing scene, as Roman gets ambushed by a familiar figure, cautioning, “There are no clean lives, not for the likes of us.”
Hey, what do you know, it’s Milo! As guessed in this space, Milo did fake his death last season and has ever since been lurking in the shadows, waiting to exact revenge on Iris and others. He’s the wild card Mike didn’t account for. (In fact, when Iris mentions that Konstantin’s worried about Milo, Mike blames the Russian’s drug habit for his paranoia.)
Even with the lack of clarity on Mike’s big plan, “Home on the Range” is riveting, thanks to the urgency everyone’s suddenly bringing. The time for “sit tight” is over. It’s time to get the hell up.
Yet the episode still has time for quieter, subtler scenes, serving as welcome grace notes. One of these is between Iris and Konstantin, where he reiterates his offer to keep her safe and staked for life. She rejects him again while reminding him that he’s been seducing and exploiting her since she was 16. “How many flowers have you picked?” she asks. “How many girls have you named?” Stung, Konstantin shoos her away, but he later tells Roman to “disappear” Iris anyway, with all the comfort and frills he promised.
The other well-crafted, well-acted, low-key scene has Raphael playing the piano while talking to his son about history and legacies. He tells Trey not to grow up too quickly, giving his son permission to stay a child a little while longer. When Trey responds by quietly pleading, “Don’t let them kill you,” it breaks his father’s heart. That’s the kind of thing he didn’t want Trey to have to think about. But it’s the kind of thought no one can stay sheltered from for long in this miserable city.
Solitary Confinement
• Roman’s rueful realization that he and Konstantin will probably never return to New York got me thinking about how little we’ve really learned about ol’ Konnie and his sidekick. They showed up in town after Milo disappeared and started making moves right away. Ever since, we’ve only picked up pieces of their past, mostly second-hand from Iris. There’s nothing wrong with that storytelling choice, necessarily. But it sure looks like Konstantin and Roman are heading towards a terrible fate, and it’s hard to attach much weight to that given how truncated their arc has been.
• The sex-pest prison guard Breen puts in his transfer request while still showing bruises from Mike’s beat-down, which leads to the women’s prison warden calling Tracy in and warning her that unlike her late mother-in-law Mariam, she actually has to work alongside the institution’s bad apples. Tracy tried going through official channels. She tried going through unofficial channels. The lesson the warden wants her to learn? Don’t try.
• Bad news for Kareem, who hasn’t been the Kingstown warden that long but is already getting forced out due to an overwhelming number of shady incidents. The tipping point for the board of corrections is the grenade attack, which clearly had some insider assistance, given that the assailants knew when and where the Aryans would be on work detail. Kareem hollers in disbelief at the demand that he quit or be fired, but the man telling him what’s-what gives the advice I would give anyone in Kingstown. Go somewhere else. Do something else. “This,” he says, “is not the end of the world.”
• The Charlie subplot comes to an inevitable end. Charlie describes his memory of his crimes as “like boxes, all stacked up,” and that when the boxes fall, “bad things” happen; and so, because Charlie keeps opening the “man on the porch” box and edging dangerously close to revealing Ferguson’s involvement with a cop-killing, the detective pretends his prisoner lunged at him, then shoots him dead. It’s hard to feel a lot of sympathy for a murderer, but still … damn, Ferguson. How can you use and discard a human being that way?
• Bunny stops at a local restaurant and tells his flunky to get him three biscuit sandwiches with chicken and gravy, extra crispy. Ever since I heard this line, I’ve been hungry.
• About 90 percent of the time, Kingstown looks like an absolute crap-hole, but y’know? The neighborhood around the courthouse seems nice. Maybe that’s why no one leaves.
So maybe Mike isn’t the brilliant strategist we thought he might be. Vulture – Entertainment News from New York Magazine