Iris is playing a dangerous game.
Iris is doomed, right?
Let me be clear: I don’t have any advance knowledge of what will happen to Mayor of Kingstown, so I promise I’m not spoiling anything by asking this question. But I did spend most of the last 10 minutes of this week’s episode (titled “Iris,” ominously enough) half-expecting to see the slippery ne’er-do-well get herself killed. I thought it might happen on Konstantin’s yacht, where the mobster is suspiciously nice to her — while still, in a quiet voice, ordering her around. Or it could’ve happened at her fleabag motel, where she talks on her burner phone a bit too loudly, without checking first to see if Konstantin might’ve planted a henchman inside. But no. Iris is still alive at the end of this week … albeit clearly on borrowed time.
“Iris” continues this season’s pattern so far, which has seen a mostly okay place-setting episode followed immediately by a more exciting task-driven episode, and vice-versa. Since last week brought a thriller, this week — until that last 10 minutes — lands in someplace more sedate.
Much of the action in this episode happens with Mike on the sidelines. After days of simmering tensions (or weeks? … months? … the passage of time is pretty nebulous in Mayor of Kingstown), Bunny has decided to go after the Russians for poisoning his drug supply. As soon as Mike has confirmation from Evelyn that the tainted dope has Russian origins, he scrambles to find Bunny, who won’t answer his calls. Mike keeps insisting to Evelyn that he can stop any violence before it starts. (He says “I’ll fix it” like three times to her as he hustles out the door of her place.) But how can he intervene if the men with guns — big guns, the kind procured from arms dealers — won’t talk to him?
Mike does get an audience with Konstantin, but the Russian is unmoved. Even how Konstantin talks to Mike — answering his urgent pleas by calmly and condescendingly saying, “Breathe, Michael… you must always remember to breathe” — signals that the Mayor has no jurisdiction here. When Mike all but orders him to stop messing with the Crips’ product, Konstantin shrugs and talks about how business demands competition. “If someone can’t keep up, well, that’s for them to remedy,” he says.
Even after Konstantin and Mike are almost gunned down by Bunny’s lackeys — a “remedy” of the most extreme kind — the Russian doesn’t blink. Mike trots out the old cliché about how “an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind,” but Konstantin is holding to a higher ideal than mere pragmatism. Tellingly, he describes Bunny’s crew as “these street animals” and “these creatures,” and later, while talking to Iris, he compares himself favorably to Milo by noting that while the former boss was willing to “surrender,” Konstantin knows “the source of our rivers … where courage comes from.”
In other words: Konstantin’s a big ol’ racist whose new alliance with the Aryan Brotherhood against the Crips isn’t one of convenience so much as one of honor.
Which brings us back to Iris. Konstantin adores Iris, and not just because she once got him out of a jam in New York City. We find out in this episode that Konstantin actually gave Iris her alias, because she reminded him of the plant, with its “leaves shaped like swords,” symbolizing the sorrows of the Virgin Mary. “Her suffering softens our evil hearts, gives us hope,” Konstantin says before telling Iris, “When you walk into a room, you pierce the soul of any man.”
But here’s the problem. When a dude like Konstantin sees a woman like Iris as a symbol and not a person, he’s likely to be awfully disappointed — even violently so — when she ultimately reveals herself to be human, with goals and flaws counter to his own plans. It’s only a matter of time before he finds out that Iris is working undercover for Mike and Ferguson, gathering intel about the Russian/Aryan connection. And the tragedy of it all is that I don’t think Iris is lying to Konstantin when she says after their night of drugs and pillow talk on his yacht that it was “the most fun I’ve had in a long time.” I think Iris is finding it intoxicating to be both a mob moll and a confidential informant — so much so that she may not be able to sense when trouble is coming.
As I noted up top, the Iris scenes add much life to what is otherwise a fairly flat episode, with many repositioning of the main characters. The biggest non-Iris events in “Iris” involve Kyle and Tracy, as Kyle finally gets transferred to SWAT and his wife goes back to work as a nurse at the prison. But even in these subplots — which will surely matter a great deal by the end of the season — Iris intrudes.
When Mike hears about Kyle’s promotion from Ferguson — and sarcastically mutters, “day keeps getting better” — he drops by his brother’s house to congratulate him warily. But Mike also shows up to warn Kyle about Iris’s new mission and to let him know how dangerous it would be for her if Konstantin ever realized how close she has been with the McClusky family.
“I’ll tell Tracy,” Kyle says with an understanding nod. “We never knew her.” This is how Iris’s erasure begins.
Solitary Confinement
• It’s not clearly relevant to the plot — at least not yet — but there’s a nice scene in this episode between Mike and Bunny’s cousin Rhonda (Nona Parker Johnson). Rhonda’s beauty parlor is expanding, thanks to Bunny’s investment and the shop’s overall popularity with a community that could use a little beauty. Rhonda tells Mike about how her cousin, for all his faults, at least provides bootstraps for people in their neighborhood “with no boots.” And she insists she’s not worried about becoming collateral damage in Bunny’s war with … Oh hell, I just realized. Rhonda is doomed too, right?
