Merle Callahan’s escape from prison and rampage in Kingstown rattles everyone, but it’s Mike who has the most significant “reckoning” coming his way.
Photo: Jeremy Parsons/Paramount+
I’ve been waiting all season for a Mayor of Kingstown episode like this week’s “Belleville.” Whatever this show’s flaws, it has always proved capable of delivering — even if only once or twice a year — a taut, tense episode where some crisis unifies the action and propels the story. And that’s what we get here: an electric 40 minutes (only 40 minutes!) in which Merle Callahan’s escape rattles all of Kingstown.
One small detail in “Belleville” that means a lot: the alarm that blares from the Kingstown prison, heard across the city, warning everyone to be wary. Even Sarah at the diner reflexively reaches for the gun under her counter when she hears the siren. Right from the start of the episode (or at least after the cold open), nearly all of the characters are connected by a mutual concern.
It matters, too, where we hear the escape alert. Merle himself gets annoyed by it, wailing in the background when he drops by Kingstown’s Aryan HQ. He doesn’t stay there long — especially since he knows the Kingstown cops are well aware of where the Aryans hang out. But Merle does feel obliged to teach a lesson to Todd, the guy running the gang on the outside, who has been bending over backward to accommodate Mike. His punishment? The arsonist Pete McDonough, who escaped alongside Merle, sets Todd on fire.
We also hear the alarm at the prison, where Warden Nina Hobbs is, understandably, frazzled. The previous night, she was threatened in her own home by the Colombian hit man Cortez. Then she comes into work and finds that her Colombian intermediary, David Torres, has called in sick and that the guards she thought she had under tight control have let one of her most incorrigible inmates slip by. She has little patience left when Mike shows up and offers a helping hand, saying, “I’m not your enemy, I’m your future.” She sighs and replies that the future doesn’t exist. All she cares about is getting through today.
This day won’t be easy for anyone. The breakout removes Nina’s one point of leverage with her new Kingstown neighbors: that she’s good at running prisons. She was already unpopular with Mike and his buddies. Now she looks weak, to boot.
Instead, it’s the KPD that reasserts dominance by rolling into Nina’s facility and questioning the Aryans. The racist gang’s spokesman gets cocky, calling Ian’s Black partner Stevie “boy” and baiting him into taking “a crack at the Lord’s chosen.” Stevie, though, promptly beats this bigot’s ass, while noting that the Aryans don’t fight so well one-on-one. They need to swarm.
And this is precisely the danger Kingstown is facing with Merle on the loose and his minions ready to mobilize. Ian and Stevie’s triumph at the prison aside, they and Mike know that if they don’t find Merle quickly, something awful will happen — or at least more awful than Todd getting toasted. A reasonable escapee would flee to Canada. But Merle is a stubborn ideologue, which is why as soon as Mike finds out he’s escaped, he calls his secretary and tells her to leave.
He’s right to do so. When he drops by the office later, he finds it trashed and covered in Nazi graffiti. Before he can call in the cops to get a crime-scene tech on the case, he gets a call from Ian, who says that the firebug Pete has set the old McLusky family home ablaze. Pete’s still there, too, waiting to give Mike a message, saying that Merle is going to “reckon” with Mike, but is “gonna make you hurt first.”
I’ll get to the nature of that hurt in a moment, but first, there is one knock against this episode. I said that it’s tight and focused, which is mostly true. But before the siren sounds across Kingstown, we do get a moment with Bunny, who is being visited by Frank when Mike stops in to see him. Mike and Bunny have had it with Frank’s disingenuous promise to “go biblical” on Bunny’s would-be killers, and so amid all the Merle-related chaos of the day, Mike finds time to threaten Frank’s mole, Lamar. Later in the episode, Lamar proves his loyalty to the Crips by gunning down one of the Detroiters.
The Detroit mob’s duplicity in Kingstown is a major part of this season’s story, so it makes sense that the writers would want to check in with Frank and LJ. But it does slow the episode’s momentum a bit to have Mike involved with the Frank story line. He has more important matters to attend to.
On the other hand, perhaps the Detroit distraction is meant to add an extra note of tragedy to what happens at the end of “Belleville.” The title refers to the town in Ohio where Kyle’s wife, Tracy, and their baby have been hiding out. Merle — who can “walk through walls,” as he warned Kyle last week — finds Tracy with no problem and then calls Kyle in jail to let him know where he is.
What follows is one of the best scenes in the series for Nishi Munshi as Tracy, who was underused as a character during her run, but who always added a righteous jolt whenever she did appear. I liked Tracy a lot. She saw through everyone’s bullshit — Mike’s especially — but also cared enough about the McLusky boys to try and make a go of their messed-up Kingstown life.
The past tense in the preceding paragraph is no typo. Although we don’t see Merle kill Tracy — and though she pleads her case passionately to him — we do hear the gunshot. (We also hear a baby crying, so we know he didn’t kill little Mitch.) Before the murder, Merle says, “You know who I’m punishing, and you know he deserves it.”
That is a dark, dark ending to an intense episode, and even though the outcome is dreadful, it does feel earned. It hits hard, especially as it comes after weeks of Mike blundering along, while his closest friends and relatives have been wondering why they always follow his lead. Mike has fucked around and … well, you know how the rest of that goes.
There is a brief coda to this episode, set days later, after Kyle has tried to kill himself. Ian tries to reassure Mike that Kyle will survive because he knows his son needs him. Then Mike echoes what Nina said earlier: “All we do is survive it.” But I’m not even sure that’s true anymore.
• By the way, there is a “Bellville” in Ohio, spelled without the e, but the best-known “Belleville” in the U.S. is in Illinois. (It’s where Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy met and founded Uncle Tupelo!) I’m going to assume Belleville, Ohio, is a fictional town. Or a misspelled one.
• It’s time for our weekly “How did this show sideline Cindy?” report! In this episode, she gets one meaningful scene, when Nina questions her about Merle’s behavior in Ad-Seg and then warns her to avoid manipulative men. “If you ever step out of your prescribed role — ever — you’re in for a world of hurt,” Nina says. So it’s really more of a Nina scene than a Cindy scene. Hope you get more to do next week, Tony-winning actress Laura Benanti!
• I don’t know why, but I found it incredibly charming that when Mike brings Bunny some Dairy Queen, a delighted Bunny reacts with, “You hit the Q?!”
• This episode is so short and (mostly) to the point that Ian gassing Robert with car-exhaust fumes last week goes completely unmentioned. There’s one ominous shot of Robert’s garage early on, but I guess no one has found the body yet.
• Even though I complained about the pace-disrupting Detroit mob scenes in this episode, I did enjoy getting another world-weary conversation between Frank and LJ, who reminisce about seeing Freddie Hubbard in concert in Rochester 40 years ago and marvel at how long they’ve been in the game. “I think we need easier times, Frank,” LJ finally says. “There’s got to be a finish line.” Well, there are two episodes left this season, so …
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