TL;DR: Mayor of Kingstown Season 4, Episode 7 turns the series into a full-blown chess match, elevating the crime thriller stakes with chilling character shifts, devastating betrayals, and some of the tensest plotting Sheridan has ever crafted. Callahan’s escape, Mike’s unraveling, and the cartel’s tightening grip all collide in an episode that proves nobody in Kingstown is safe — especially the ones who think they’re in control.
Mayor of Kingstown Season 4
Every time I think Mayor of Kingstown has pushed moral ambiguity as far as a prestige crime series can go, Taylor Sheridan slides another piece across the board and proves I’ve been playing checkers while he’s running a grandmaster opening. Season 4, Episode 7 — fittingly titled My Way — isn’t just another tense hour of shivs, shadows, and corrupt alliances. It feels like the moment the show officially transcends its crime-drama label and transforms into a psychological chess match where every move comes preloaded with emotional booby traps.
This is the episode where all the quiet plotting erupts, not loudly, but in that unnervingly deliberate Sheridan way that feels like a fuse burning under the floorboards. Merle Callahan finally slithers out of Ad Seg; Nina Hobbs’ façade cracks into something painfully human; Cortez sharpens his knives; and Mike McLusky continues to accelerate toward the moral event horizon he’s been orbiting since the pilot. The cruelty isn’t just personal now — it’s systemic, karmic, and eerily inevitable.
What I love about this chapter of Mayor of Kingstown is that it plays like a continuation of last week’s all-timer while also opening new fronts of conflict. It reinforces something I’ve always believed about this show: Kingstown isn’t a setting, it’s a pressure cooker. The real drama comes from watching who explodes and who evaporates first.
I’ve been watching Richard Brake play psychos for decades, but his turn as Merle Callahan hits a different gear. There’s something reptilian about him — predatory patience mixed with a tactical stillness that makes you uncomfortable even when he isn’t speaking. Episode 7 is the moment his methodical plotting finally bears rotten fruit.
The man wastes zero time; the second he’s dragged out of Ad Seg, it’s like he already has a blueprint in his head. One conversation here, one misdirection there, and suddenly he’s sliding into Anchor Bay’s slipstream like he was never locked up to begin with. Sheridan stages the escape not as a Michael Bay-style prison break but as an unnerving procedural that showcases how monsters often get free not by overpowering the system, but by understanding its soft tissue.
What’s wild — in that trademark Mayor of Kingstown way — is that Callahan could have taken Kyle with him. There’s a chilling alternate timeline where Mike’s younger brother becomes collateral damage simply because Callahan decides he wants a souvenir. Kyle barely survives the episode emotionally intact, and honestly, he only survives physically because Mike plays one of his last remaining political cards with Nina.
But the thread that really made my stomach flip was Cindy. Callahan clocks her immediately. Attention, affection, proximity to Kyle — he collects these details with the detachment of a biologist labeling specimens. Later, when we meet Cindy’s kids, the realization hits: Callahan doesn’t just escape prison; he extends his reach. By episode’s end, I’m not convinced he wants to kill Mike at all. He wants to unmake him.
Sheridan is clearly staging Callahan as a slow-motion catastrophe. A villain you don’t hear coming until he’s at your pillow, smiling.
There’s a moment in Episode 5 where Tracy tells Mike she doesn’t believe he can fix anything, and at the time, it felt like emotional exhaustion. Now it reads like foreshadowing. Tracy may become yet another lightning rod for Mike’s bad luck — or worse, collateral damage in his ongoing war with the forces he insists he can outmaneuver.
Here in Episode 7, the writing shifts. It suggests Tracy’s storyline might be transforming from domestic tension into something tragic. When Kyle warns Cindy to stay away from Mike because he destroys the people closest to him, he may as well be narrating the McLusky family arc. If Callahan doesn’t go for Cindy first, Tracy is the next most logical fracture point.
That’s the terrifying magic trick of this episode: Kingstown is full of tough men with guns, but the show keeps reminding us that the softest targets bleed the most.
One of my favorite dynamics in the series is the uneasy détente between Mike and Frank Moses. Lennie James brings such composed volatility to Frank that even his quiet scenes feel like they’re vibrating under the surface. So when Mike decides Frank is the pawn he needs to sacrifice to get Kyle home, I felt the narrative floorboards creak.
This is the most desperate Mike we’ve seen. His lines are gone. His rules are gone. His self-justification engine is in overdrive. He’s the guy trying to plug one leak with his hand while three more burst behind him. That makes him dangerous, not just to enemies but to allies — and Frank has always lived in that moral grey space where betrayal is just a change in weather.
Enter Lamar, the wildcard whose loyalties evaporate the moment the cartel whistles. This revelation makes Mike’s plan instantly feel like a pre-written tragedy. If Frank wasn’t the person who ordered Bunny’s hit, then Mike’s move isn’t just reckless — it’s suicidal. He’s killing an alliance he still needs, and Bunny is unknowingly signing his own death certificate by backing the play.
This is the brilliance of Season 4: Mike thinks he sees the whole board, but Sheridan keeps slipping new pieces onto it, each one already in motion. Frank is too smart, too patient, and too ruthless to be “handled.” If he survives Mike’s betrayal, he becomes a nuclear warhead planted squarely in Mike’s path.
Of all the brutal gut punches this season has delivered, Ian killing Robert hit the hardest. Robert was no saint — far from it — but watching Ian stage his death was like watching a man carve out the last chunk of his own soul.
Ian has always scared me more than the organized criminals. Criminals operate within a recognizable logic. Ian follows whatever twisted internal compass tells him “this is the only way out,” and that is far more dangerous. He’s the embodiment of what Kingstown does to people: it warps them until survival and self-destruction become indistinguishable.
The scene is devastating precisely because it isn’t loud. No dramatic score, no operatic monologue — just grim necessity. A quiet execution of a friend who knew too much. Ian doesn’t just cross a line here; he erases it, the same way Mike has been doing all season.
Nina Hobbs’ arc took a surprising turn, one that recontextualizes every decision she’s made. Instead of the cold bureaucrat facilitating cartel pipelines, she turns out to be another pawn under threat. Cortez’s presence looms like a specter — unpredictable, brutal, and terrifyingly single-minded in finding the rat who cracked open the latest drug run.
Kevin had better start wearing emotional Kevlar, because Cortez doesn’t strike me as a man who lets questions go unanswered.
And then there’s CO Breen, descending into full unhinged meltdown. The man feels like a pressure cooker that’s going to blow in the worst possible scenario. Sheridan is clearly saving him for a late-season explosion, and I’m both terrified and morbidly excited.
By the end of Episode 7, Mayor of Kingstown stops pretending its characters have control. They’re all pieces now — some knights, some pawns, some bishops disguised as fools — but Sheridan is the one sliding them across the board.
The beauty of My Way is that it never feels chaotic. Every twist is a consequence. Every betrayal is a balance correction. The show is operating at peak form, marrying tension with tragedy in a way few TV dramas ever manage.
And if Mike thinks he’s closing in on checkmate, the cruel truth is this: someone else is already several moves ahead.
