Why do we enjoy watching fictional criminals commit fictional crimes? I have a theory. I think we get deeply into TV shows like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire — and movies like GoodFellas, The Godfather, and Ocean’s Eleven — because it’s fascinating to see people solve complicated personal and professional problems when a conscience does not constrain them. If murder, theft, and deceit are options, can crooks just get anything they want? Or does the threat of an equally destructive retaliation push these villains to be more creative?
I bring this up because I’ve realized the biggest reason why Mayor of Kingstown always has trouble making the leap from solidly pulpy genre show to richly drawn TV drama. It’s probably because Mike McClusky — our antihero — is kind of a dope. He’s no Walter White. He’s no Michael Corleone or Danny Ocean. Heck, he’s hardly even a Tony Soprano. He has no clever schemes or ambitious long-range plans. Mike spends his days and nights managing one explosive crisis after another, and his go-to strategy, over and over, is to tell everyone involved — often in vain — to do nothing.
Granted, this is probably a more realistic depiction of what the life of a power broker with criminal ties is actually like. But does it make for an edge-of-the-seat, can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next story? Only sporadically.
The big Kingstown crisis in this week’s “Marya Was Here” involves a group of Eastern European teenagers who are in the process of being bussed across the Canadian border to become part of Konstantin’s stable of dancers and “hostesses” when a construction crew on the Kingstown bridge intentionally rams a forklift into the side of the vehicle, dumping the ladies into the river below. Before the plunge, one of the girls scrawls her name — Marya — onto the back of one of the seats. For the rest of the episode, we often see that seat in the background of shots, reminding us of the human toll of a gang war.
The tragedy deeply affects Iris, who sees herself in these poor drowned kids — and sees the uselessness of all the cocky, condescending, destructive men in her life. Her intense focus on this bus “accident” upsets Konstantin, who tells her over and over to look away from the news about it on the television, and then later — while in a druggy haze in his bedroom — hallucinates an accusatory Iris staring at him, and threatens to banish her.
But the flesh-and-blood Iris seems much angrier at Mike. In this episode’s most memorable image, she stands on the banks of the river where the girls died, staring coldly at Mike, standing off in the distance on the other side … as if asking him, “What good are you?”
Then again, maybe I’m just projecting my own feelings onto Iris because this episode certainly makes the case that Mike is very, very bad at the fake job he inherited from his brother. As always, Mike’s first recourse in an emergency is stasis. At the site of the crash, he tells Ferguson to label the incident an accident. He makes a similar request to Evelyn, asking her department not to investigate. Mike insists that justice in this case will come from outside the American legal system. And that’s a stirring sentiment, except … Mike has no idea who’s responsible for fork lifting the bus, so his vengeful promises ring hollow.
It is suggested to Mike — once again — that maybe he should be taking a harder look at Bunny Washington. Although he’s already started to take his thumb off the scale a bit by letting SWAT raid the Colombian drug-packaging house that was providing the Crips’ prison supply, all the other factions in Kingstown still think Mike’s too close to Bunny to see how he can be a threat to the city’s safety and security.
The dilemma Mike faces — and what maybe makes the whole idea of a peacekeeping Kingstown “Mayor” untenable — is that none of the gangs are ever going to be happy so long as Mike prevents them from conducting business freely. Bunny certainly isn’t happy. With the Aryan prison-guard organization, the White Knights going after Raphael, the Russians gunning down Rhonda, and Mike constantly asking the Crips not to retaliate, it sure doesn’t feel to Bunny like Mike has been doing him any favors.
The frustration erupts in this episode’s best scene, where Mike finds his way to the Crips’ secret weapons warehouse and confronts Bunny on two thorny topics: (1) Why has Bunny stopped answering his calls? (2) Did Bunny have anything to do with the bus incident? Bunny is so offended by the latter question that he effectively dissolves his silent partnership with Mike. He lets his old friend walk away from the warehouse unscathed, but with the understanding that they are now enemies.
So yeah, things aren’t going too well for the Mayor. But while all this tension and intrigue will undoubtedly culminate in some exciting moments over the course of this season’s final three episodes, “Marya Was Here” mostly leads to a lot of scenes of people talking about what’s wrong in Kingstown — and hardly any scenes of anyone taking action. There’s a lot of stewing going on but not much eating.
The episode ends with Mike back at the bridge, silently staring at the scene of the crime. What’s he thinking? There’s no way to know. Is he formulating a plan? Given what we’ve seen of Mike over the past two-and-a-half seasons, almost certainly not.
Solitary Confinement
It’s easy to get distracted by all the mayhem in misery in this Mayor of Kingstown season, so just as a reminder: This episode ends without us ever finding out who’s responsible for the bus getting tossed off the bridge. Wild-card theory: What about Milo? Sure, his boat blew up at the end of season two, but we never saw a corpse. (Another suspect: Konstantin’s right-hand man Roman, who notably received notification of the bus crossing the border not long before the forking.)
A few of this season’s running subplots only get a few minutes of screen time in this episode. The one that right now seems to be going nowhere fast involves Ferguson’s regular death row visits with Charlie, where the cop coaxes the serial killer into giving him information about past victims, which he can use to close cold cases and boost his career. The problem? Charlie may be running out of old murders to recall. All he wants to talk about now is the duplicitous SWAT teamer he killed on Ferguson’s behalf last season.
Evelyn runs into Kyle at a bar at the end of this long, exhausting day, and she is not at all happy to hear that he’s now working for the problematic SWAT boss, Robert Sawyer. She speculates out loud that Sawyer may be hooked on killing suspects, and though Kyle shuts down her rant pretty quickly, he himself has witnessed two consecutive raids where Sawyer seemed out of sorts due to the relative lack of violence. There’s a strong possibility that Kyle ends up working with Evelyn to bring down Sawyer. (Let’s just hope Ferguson doesn’t find out. Or Charlie.)
Speaking of McClusky-family whistleblowers, Tracy this week continues her mission to expose sexual abuse at the women’s prison. Unfortunately, her not-as-clandestine-as-intended conversation with a pregnant prisoner draws the attention of a suspiciously friendly guard, who later corners Tracy in the employee parking lot and reminds her that her sympathies should lie with the prison staff, not the prisoners. This raises a question: How little respect must Kingstowners have for Mike right now that they’re willing to threaten his sister-in-law?
