TL;DR: Tulsa King Season 3 Episode 9 delivers one of the strongest chapters in the series. Samuel L. Jackson’s assassin brings gravity and charisma. Dwight’s liquor empire expands. Tyson builds a drug business. The Dunmires destabilize. Two assassins fall. Russel and Dwight reunite as violent allies. The episode sets up the finale with pure mob-cinema fuel.
Tulsa King Season 3
There are episodes of Tulsa King that feel like comfortable mob boots: familiar, sturdy, dependable. Then there are episodes like Season 3, Episode 9 — the kind that swagger into the room with a leather trench coat, a silencer, and Samuel L. Jackson solving crossword puzzles between assassinations. The show doesn’t ease Jackson into the story. It fires him out of a cannon straight at Sylvester Stallone, and the impact sends the entire season into a higher orbit.
This episode is the one where everything clicks. The alliances, the grudges, the whiskey wars, the side hustles, the assassins lurking in motel shadows — it all converges with the kind of energy that feels both cinematic and chaotic. The hour unfolds like an old-school gangster novel someone spilled energy drinks on. Every scene hums with tension and momentum. Every character walks as if carrying a whole history on their shoulders. And at the center sits Dwight Manfredi, navigating assassination attempts and borderline-legal business deals with the serenity of a man who has been tired since the 1980s.
Episode 9 is the moment the season goes from solid to explosive.
The cold open is a masterclass in controlled brutality. Newark. A parking garage. Samuel L. Jackson perched in a van, calmly filling a crossword book while waiting for his target. He moves with the ease of someone who has lived too long in the shadowy corners of American crime. One smooth lie to hotel staff, one quiet hack into the surveillance system, one bullet placed with mathematical precision. Then the slice of pizza. The most casual flourish imaginable, like a signature on a masterpiece.
Once back at his rundown R&R Electrical Supply safehouse, Russell goes through the ritual only veteran killers understand. Clean the weapon. Settle the mind. Stare at a photo that reminds him he used to be something besides a ghost with a gun. The drop-in from Vince confirms that Russell is being pulled back into a world he no longer wants. Quiet Ray is calling. And refusing that call only ever leads one way.
The stage is set for one of the season’s best character arcs.
Dwight and Agent Musso enter Episode 9 already mid-negotiation, and the air between them is thick enough to bottle. Dwight’s refusal to hand over Deacon’s location lands like a judge’s gavel, and the information he does offer has enough weight to destabilize half the Midwest. The negotiation is classic Manfredi. No dramatic speeches. No bargaining feints. Just a simple demand for a federal liquor license, delivered with granite certainty.
This license becomes the lever that shifts the entire Tulsa alcohol ecosystem. Montague whiskey levels up. Distributors shift loyalties. Cole Dunmire, wearing a shirt so hideous it should be treated as a crime scene, stares in confusion at pallets of returned product. Jeremiah Dunmire feels the ground shifting beneath him, and by the time the axe swings into the still, his façade of control is already crumbling.
Tulsa’s whiskey turf war escalates with the inevitability of thunder rolling in.
Russell eventually walks into Bred-2-Buck like a retired legend revisiting old ground. The smile he gives the bar. The settled posture. The visible ease of a man who has seen every angle of life and death. Then Dwight walks in, and the entire saloon shifts. Their handshake is a fusion of old respect and old ghosts. Their conversation lands in that rare intersection of threatening and affectionate that only mob veterans can pull off.
Russell admits the truth. Quiet Ray put a contract on Dwight. And if Russell had taken the job, there would be no conversation in this bar. No jokes. No whiskey. Just a corpse in expensive shoes.
The trust between them rebuilds in real time, grain by grain. This is two wolves sizing each other up while remembering they once hunted together. This scene alone carries more gravity than most entire episodes of mob television.
Between the assassinations and liquor politics, the series folds in the perfect comedic pressure valve through Tyson’s storyline. The rave revenue surges. Bodhi receives an envelope so fat it could pay rent in Manhattan. Tyson’s hunger for success starts to resemble an entrepreneurial fever dream as he pushes Bodhi toward an ecstasy manufacturing partnership.
Their back-and-forth is the kind of lovable mob-adjacent chaos this show thrives on. Bodhi plays the anxious chemist with the weight of an entire bar on his shoulders. Tyson carries the eager energy of a man who finally sees a lane toward real money. Their dynamic continues to be one of the most compelling, grounded aspects of the series, especially as steroids of ambition begin pumping through Tulsa’s underworld.
Russell’s refusal to take the hit sets off Quiet Ray in spectacular fashion. His meltdown is less kingpin and more furious uncle discovering Wi-Fi stopped working. The tantrum is destructive, petty, and completely believable. And like every unhinged mobster with too much pride and too little vision, he escalates. New assassins are dispatched toward Tulsa. The temperature of the season spikes again.
This decision forces Russell into the hardest moment of the episode. He approaches Dwight’s home prepared to kill him. The gloves go on. The gun comes out. The steps creak under his boots. The weight of decades of violence hangs around him. And then the threshold breaks him. He cannot do it.
He rings the doorbell instead.
The dinner invitation becomes a lifeline.
Two old killers sit across from each other, sharing whiskey and truth. Russell confesses the desire to leave the life behind. Dwight offers an unexpected kind of counsel, the type earned only through loss and pain. The bond solidifies. The plan shifts. What started as an execution becomes an alliance.
Their partnership moves straight into action. They identify the motel where the killers are staying. They strategize. Russell breaks down the physics of dead weight with the clarity of a man who has hauled too many bodies. Silencers go on. Doors get kicked in. Shots crack like punctuation marks. Two hitmen fall before they even know death is in the room.
The entire sequence feels like a love letter to 90s action cinema, powered by two actors who know how to inhabit violence with weight and worn history.
Jeremiah’s emotional eruption reaches a new height. His breakdown in the woodshed, the axe slamming into the still, the confession of generational tragedy — it’s a man wrestling with the ghosts of his own making. The final image of him abducting JoAnne signals the beginning of a catastrophic final play.
The game board is nearly full.
Episode 9 of Tulsa King Season 3 is a powerhouse of character work, mob tension, and violent elegance. Samuel L. Jackson’s arrival injects new electricity into the story, while Stallone delivers one of his most grounded performances of the series. The whiskey war escalates, friendships evolve, and assassination plots detonate with precision. The stage is now primed for a finale packed with fire and consequence.
