Since Taylor Sheridan is roughly the same age as I am, and since — like myself — he seems to like TV westerns, I’m going to assume he’s watched his fair share of Gunsmoke. I’m also going to assume this because episodes of Mayor of Kingstown often open with what I’d call a “Gunsmoke speech.†In Gunsmoke’s early seasons, episodes would sometimes begin with Marshal Matt Dillon walking around the Dodge City cemetery known as “Boot Hill†while musing in voice-over about justice, courage, mortality … y’know, all the stuff that the Voice of Mike McLusky pontificates about in Mayor of Kingstown.
In this week’s episode, “Guts,†Mike’s Voice gives a Gunsmoke speech about how incarceration leaves an indelible stain on convicts, which can spread to their families. Being locked up — and/or having a loved one locked up — can expose the lengths that people will go to survive and how easy it is for them to keep making those awful choices after they’re released. (Also, according to Mike’s Voice, maybe this is a good thing? Honestly, his Gunsmoke speeches tend to drift from their original point.)
We hear these thoughts while watching scenes of visiting day at Kingstown Prison, where Crip inmate Big Hush (Jock McKissic) is enjoying a bag of potato chips brought to him by his girl, Sharon. Then the camera looks inside the bag, where several baggies of dope are hiding for Hush to swallow. After visiting hours are over, Big Hush is walking with his buddies when he doubles over from the pain in his stomach. His guys sneak him into a secluded area and watch him die. Then they then cut him open to remove the drugs.
“Guts,†to me, is an example of Mayor of Kingstown operating at exactly the right level of ambition and execution. The episode is credited to screenwriter Regina Corrado, whose earliest writing credits are on Deadwood — an impressive first gig for any TV writer. Like a lot of the Mayor of Kingstown creative team, she was also heavily involved with Sons of Anarchy, where Sheridan was an actor.
Sons of Anarchy, at its best, didn’t try to make any grand statements about right and wrong, men and women, community and individualism. (At its worst, it tried way too hard to do all of that … just as Sheridan’s shows tend to do.) A good Sons of Anarchy episode had a rawness and a sense of immediacy. It was about morally compromised people making life-or-death decisions on the fly, rarely thinking much about the long-term implications.
So it goes with “Guts,†which has an impressive momentum, building in intensity as more inmates — and even some dopers on the street — start keeling over dead from spiked opiates. ADA Evelyn Foley has to reluctantly ask Mike for help, saying they’re dealing with “a narcotic Neapolitan†seemingly designed to kill people with a mix of legal and illegal pharmaceuticals. Making matters worse, after Sharon gave Big Hush the potato chips, she turned up murdered in a car parked right outside the prison. There’s nothing accidental happening here. Somebody poisoned this supply on purpose — likely as a direct challenge to the Crip kingpin Bunny, and by extension Bunny’s friend and protector, Mike.
What makes this kind of crime story especially spiky for Mayor of Kingstown is that Mike is neither a crime boss (at least not according to his lawmen chums) nor a cop. He’s not Bunny’s rival, and he has no duty to bust his pal for drug-dealing (nor any legal authority to do so). So these two can speak honestly about the OD crisis in Kingstown. Bunny initially takes a “Hey, that’s life†attitude toward Big Hush’s death and insists that business should go on as usual. But as the morgue starts filling up, he asks Mike to do whatever he can. Mike’s solution is something Bunny’s unlikely to like. (“I can make it right, but you can’t bitch about it later,†he warns.) He orders the prison’s Crip point man Raphael (D Smoke) to work with one of the other dope-smuggling gangs to find a new supplier.
It’s the matter-of-factness of all these negotiations that makes this episode work. The clock is ticking and trouble is multiplying; there’s no time to be coy or euphemistic.
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some hurt feelings. This episode is peppered with scenes that show some concerning ramifications already starting to settle in. Some of these moments are just quietly poignant, as when Mike and Ferguson tell Sharon’s drug-addict brother that her sister has died, and he mourns for a moment before reaching for his spoon and needle. Others may matter more long term — like the way Mike’s pet prison guard, Carney (Lane Garrison), keeps complaining about all the shit work he’s asked to do. (I mean “shit work†literally … as in he has to pick through a prisoner’s full toilet to look for drugs.)
Carney, though, still defends Mike to Warden Kareem Moore (Michael Beach), who used to be a McClusky ally but lately has been trying to position himself as wholly unaffiliated: not a friend to the gangs, not automatically helpful to the police, and certainly not beholden to Mike. When Carney argues that it takes a Mike McClusky to save lives in Kingstown, Kareem yells in reply, “What lives are getting saved?!†This is a question everybody should be asking in Kingstown. What good is a fixer who never really fixes anything?
The episode ends with the drug deaths tapering off, Bunny on the lookout for a saboteur, and Mike visiting Evelyn at her home to resume their secret affair. The situation is normalizing — at least until next week’s episode.
Yet even more than the poison-drug story line — and the Voice of Mike McClusky’s thoughts on prison itself as a kind of poison — I’m haunted this week by a subplot that is introduced in this episode and never intersects with the main story. Paula Malcomson (another Deadwood and Sons of Anarchy vet) plays Anna Fletcher, a woman who asks Mike to try to get the prison sentence extended for Greg Stewart, the young man who murdered her son, before his impending parole. Anna pops up throughout the episode as a kind of nagging conscience for Mike, asking about his mom and whether the cops ever caught and punished her killer. Finally, when Mike acknowledges defeat and says he can’t help her, she hands him a wad of money … over his objections.
Then she murders Greg, shooting him dead while he’s waiting for the bus that’ll take him away from prison. Anna clearly knew she was going to do this when she paid Mike — and maybe he did too. To echo Kareem: What lives are getting saved?
Solitary Confinement
• So much of this episode was given over to the bad-dope plot that three of this season’s developing subplots barely got any screen time. The Aryan mastermind Merle pops up in just one scene, when he orders a hit. The unlucky prisoner is in the middle of a family visitation when his killer puts a bag over his head and suffocates him. So far, Merle is staying off the McClusky radar, but with splashy moves like this, he won’t stay in the shadows for long.
• Iris also remains a potential troublemaker. This week, she gets pulled over for running a stop sign while driving Miriam’s car (with no license); but she refuses to give her name or her fingerprints to the police, so Mike and Kyle don’t even know where she (or their car) is.
• Lastly, there’s a new story line in play in this episode, as Kyle tells Sawyer he’s tired of working in the Homicide division, where all he can do is clean up messes and not stop them from happening. He wants to join the SWAT team, but Sawyer disapproves. This is a potentially dramatic new development, though I confess that during the whole scene I was distracted by Kyle and Tracy’s newborn baby, chilling out in an infant swing. For a moment, I wondered if the story had zoomed ahead a few weeks, because tiny babies shouldn’t be put in swings right when they come home from the hospital. As always, TV shows tend to treat “baby†and “child†as an amorphous concept rather than as complex and varied stages of human development.
• My favorite moments in Mayor of Kingstown are the casual exchanges that have nothing to do with the story — like in this episode, when Ferguson tells Sarah at the diner that the day’s special is delicious, and she replies, “Eight sticks of butter and a Crock Pot, baby.†Or when Bunny’s getting a mani-pedi from one of his ladies and snaps, “Don’t Mary Magdalene me†when she tries to wash his feet — to which she replies, “Christ did the washing.â€