All My Friends …They Died

Wouldn't it be funny if Mike McLuskey's unofficial reign as “Mayor of Kingstown” was ended by someone with a real job who actually does this job?

This season, the town's new prison guard, Nina Hobbs, proves to be a formidable foe for Mike as she adopts a radical strategy: following the rules. Mike can no longer just walk in whenever he wants simply because he thinks his problems are urgent. Visiting hours are visiting hours. A meeting with the boss requires an appointment in advance. It's a wild concept that Nina brings to life: the operating room like normal business.

In this week's episode, “People Who Died” (named, I believe, after great song by Jim Carroll), Nina allows Mike to storm in one last time so she can vent her annoyance. She promised to keep Kyle safe and secure, and now he's doing just that. Given this, what possible reason could there be for Mike to be in her office? Oh yeah, because Mike's prison guard buddy Doug Carney has just been killed. But it happened at his house, Nina is cooperating with the police, and Mike is not an officially authorized representative of the KPD, so… What does he want??

Mike seems puzzled by Nina's stony resistance. Even after he reminds her of the influence he has over local law enforcement, and after he warns her that a war is brewing in the city between the Columbian and Crip gangs that will eventually spill over into the prison, Nina remains unmoved. If anything, she's openly angry at Mike, noting with no small amount of horror that she knows he's bypassing the right channels to manipulate her staff and prisoners.

Look, I know Mike is supposed to be the hero of this show, and I know Nina has villainous tendencies that become more obvious with each passing episode. At one point, she plays a sympathetic boss who hands out pamphlets to her employees on how to cope with grief after Carney's death. She then apparently ordered her lackey, Torres, to plant a burner phone and a bag of drugs in Carney's locker so that police could find them during the investigation. (The KPG can't be fooled. As Mike points out, Carney couldn't “walk and chew gum,” so there was no way for him to have a secret criminal enterprise.) The episode ends with Nina taking the pills and making sure her gun is handy. She's definitely a problem.

But it seems like Mike is more likely to get involved in bigger troubles than to maintain the promised peace. Savvy locals may be starting to understand this. When Mike asks Bunny if he has any information about Carney's murder, Bunny allows Mike access to his inside man among the prison guards: Kevin Jackson (Denny Love). After Mike tells Kevin that he should be on call at all times, Kevin nervously asks, “Is this what killed Carney?” You're asking the right questions, kid.

So Mike's influence in prison may be waning for now. And his influence on the Kingstown drug trade may be just as tenuous now that Detroit mob boss Frank Moses has taken Bunny under his wing.

I'm still not entirely sure I trust Frank. (Bunny says he trusts him “about 60 percent,” to which Frank chuckles and says, “Sounds about right.”) Yes, Frank seems to be very open about his business, sharing with Bunny – in the episode's most exciting scene – his method of smuggling drugs out of Canada by hiding them in trash shipments. (“It’s not hard to make something that doesn’t matter disappear,” explains one of his people.)

And yes, Frank openly praises Bunny's interest in the finer details of the drug trade, saying, “The dealers, they feel comfortable. The bosses pay attention.” However, whenever Bunny turns away from Frank to take a call from one of his subordinates about the everyday violence and ugliness in their industry, Frank has a somewhat contemptuous expression on his face. He doesn't like that most of Bunny's activities involve prisons or murder. “You rebrand and expand,” he insists. I have to wonder if Frank is actually inviting Bunny to the big party or setting the stage for a hostile takeover.

In this episode, Frank really tries to make Bunny's life easier by doing some of his dirty work. When a refrigerator full of body parts appears in the Crip's territory, the Detroiters offer to take responsibility for responding to the Colombians, who are most likely responsible for the dismemberment. Frank's team, wearing body armor and flamethrowers, drives into the crumbling Colombian headquarters building. They cause great harm. But they also suffer when Cortez coolly leads his men out of the secret passage and then finds a place where he can ambush and execute the attackers.

To be fair, this loss is in Frank's column. But I still blame Mike a little for pushing the KKE to release Cortez. last week's episode. Plus, it doesn't look like Mike is on any kind of winning streak. His other current projects are not going any better.

Take Kyle, who finally got so fed up with the chronic pain from his injuries that he swallowed the painkillers that Merle Callahan snuck into him in last week's episode. (He later discovers that the drug supply was replenished while he was away from the cell.) Kyle also has some inspiring conversations with Merle about what it means to be a noble man in this evil world. If Mike loses influence on his own Brother … well, he might as well give up the role of pretend mayor altogether, right?

Mike has insisted all along that Kyle must serve time in prison to protect Kingstown's fragile criminal justice system (or more accurately, the “criminal justice” system). But Robert Sawyer, one of the people supposedly covered for Kyle's selfless act, shows no gratitude. He is still angry at Kyle for shooting him. He also drinks too much, his family appears to have left town, and he openly threatens ADA Evelyn Foley, who is technically on his side in the fight for law and order. (“You live there in your glass house and throw damn rocks at everyone, and you don’t expect anyone to throw them back,” he hisses at her when they cross paths outside the courthouse.)

Over the past few seasons, Evelyn has been a cautionary tale about what happens when principled people fall under Mike's influence. Like Nina in prison, Evelyn would rather do things by the rules: bringing order to Kingstown by putting criminals and dirty cops behind bars, rather than letting Mike decide who is allowed to break the law. Instead, she continues to obey Mike when he says that his path will lead to fewer dead bodies on the streets of Kingstown.

And now one of these corpses may soon belong to Evelyn. They say you can't fight the mayor's office. But perhaps you can if the mayor's office does not resist.

• To this day, I remain disappointed by the plot of new guard Cindy Stevens, who spends most of the episode dispassionately fretting over Carney's death. Did you do it? Mayor of Kingstown did the team really hire Tony winner Laura Benanti just for this?

• I loved this episode's opening montage of the seething, sinister Marvin Gaye.Problem man” In the montage, we see Cortez in what appears to be his only daily public appearance in Kingstown, eating silently at a local diner and then leaving a tip under a bottle of XXXtra hot sauce, carefully placing the used utensils on a plate.

• To be clear, I think Mayor of KingstownThe writers are aware that their protagonist is fallible. He should be a regular guy with good intentions, not a super genius. But the show's central premise also seems to be that Kingstown's problems are so intractable that only a man like Mike, with no official affiliation, can mitigate the worst possible outcome. I think they are very, very wrong about this. But it's still fun trying to predict how things will go wrong every time Mike gets involved. Sometimes I'm surprised! In this episode, for example, I was amused by the fact that Mike has to take time out of his day, when everything else is going down the tubes, to yell at (and shoot at!) the Aryan drug dealer standing on the wrong corner. It never rains, but it pours.