‘Mayor of Kingstown’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: Jeremy Renner's Mike McLusky Can't Contain the Chaos

Mayor of Kingstown is back with a vengeance. Jeremy Renner's hard-boiled criminal go-between Mike McLusky returns to an even more broken and battered Kingstown still reeling from last season's climactic prison riot. All the inmate gang leaders are dead, leaving a power vacuum at the prison that threatens to suck up and spit out everyone on the outside — messengers and civilians included.

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Directed by Stephen Kay (Get Carter) and written by series co-creator Taylor Sheridan and Sons of Anarchy scribe Dave Erickson, Episode 1, entitled "Never Missed a Pigeon," hits all the right notes. We're reintroduced to our favorite Kingstown players with the show's characteristic verve and violence, and a few new thematic bursts give color to the dark threat hanging over the show's sophomore season.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Mayor of Kingstown Season 2, Episode 1.

The Aftermath

The episode opens with Mike leading a blindfolded Iris (Emma Laird) out to the middle of a lake, where a souped-up sailboat (the spoils of some drug bust) awaits them. Showing Iris with a blindfold on, being led from behind, is both a shameless fake-out and a rich bit of texture. Why did Mike blindfold her? At first, we assume it's to prevent Iris from knowing the boat's location. As it happens, he really just wanted to surprise her. 

The music swells, Iris has her Titanic moment at the bow of the boat, and Mike delivers a monologue in voiceover, just as he did in the Season 1 premiere. It's a reflection on memory, aging, and the difficulty of overcoming the past. He says that his late father advised him to keep a journal of only happy memories in order to forget the painful ones. "But minds don't forget so easy when the horror that we witness and endure takes root," Mike says. "Only madness and dementia can remove it."

We cut directly to Captain Kareem Moore (Michael Beach), leader of the Kingstown prison guards, huddled in the basement of his home. He's obviously suffering from PTSD after being badly beaten and strung up during the riot. Speaking of which, Kingstown's new, makeshift prison is an outdoor encampment of tents and beds cobbled together beside an old ironworks. It looks more like a Hooverville than a prison, with guards patrolling from rusted bridges. Bloods and Crips beat each other to death in the yard, and the guards let it happen because there's a power vacuum at the prison. Every inmate gang leader died in the riot, so the yard, the chow, the gym — whatever currency the inmates can control — are all up for grabs. 

Kingstown is in flux, which makes for excellent viewing. The show told us in Season 1 that it's better for everyone if power is fairly evenly distributed among the warring factions. Now, we're seeing the consequences of no leadership structure play out. And it's not pretty. 

The war between the Bloods and Crips has migrated from the prison to the street, where a drive-by shooting ends with one gangster dropping a murderous pit bull through the sunroof of another gangster's car. It's the kind of outta-this-world violence that's become one of the show's signatures. 

The Genie is Out of the Bottle

From here on out, it's clear that Mayor of Kingstown is back, baby. And so is her toughest son, SWAT Leader Robert Sawyer (Hamish Allan-Headley). On a tip from the rival Bloods, Robert leads a raid on a Crip cookhouse, unaware that the shop and the drugs belong to Bunny. Big mistake: Bunny's been a friend to Mike and the cops, and he's the only gangster keeping the peace at the moment. 

Detective Ian Ferguson (played by series co-creator Hugh Dillon) is back and balder than ever, chewing gum (*fist pump*) and taking names. He screams in disgust while pumping the gangster-eating pit bull full of bullets and then tells Mike, "We gotta get that genie [presumably, mass chaos] back in the bottle." Stunning. One of the smartest things this show does is let Hugh Dillon just cook. Absolutely no notes.

Dianne Wiest's fearsome Miriam McLusky returns with her signature professorial gravitas. The women's prison is under lockdown, and Miriam's lecture on self-reliance ("Each day, you will choose whether prison will one day just be a part of your past or be your only future") is not landing, what with the heavily-armed Corrections SWAT stalking the classroom like "stormtroopers." It's pretty clear which side Miriam thinks is the evil empire. 

Kareem is undergoing a mandatory mental health screening before returning to duty. We learn that two other prison guards told the Bureau that they were sexually assaulted by a group of inmates during the riot, and they witnessed Kareem being sexually assaulted as well. Kareem denies it, and the doctor clears him for duty. But on his first day back, the other guards arrange for Kareem to take his vengeance on three inmates — probably his attackers. He goes wild, beating them to death with a baton and the butt end of a rifle. 

Disasters and Shrapnel

Mike and Bunny (the incomparable Tobi Bamtefa) reunite on the roof of a cell phone shop — prime turf Bunny recently stole back from the Bloods. Bunny's understandably pissed about the raid; he called a truce with the cops, and they've broken it. Mike urges him to pick new inmate gang leaders, but all the heirs-apparent were killed in the riot. Bunny warns that leaders rise by bagging a trophy, so gangsters will be "badge-hunting," or trying to kill a cop, in order to take power. 

Mike and the guys meet for a coffee-fueled post-mortem, and the outlook on Kingstown's future is not so good. There is no AdSeg (basically, maximum-security solitary confinement) at the new encampment. The Mexicans are positioned to take over the yard; the Bloods and Crips are at each other's throats; and the whites were hit the hardest during the riots, having lost Duke on the outside and their commanders on the inside. The inmates burned medical and dental records and destroyed prison servers, so the cops are still trying to identify bodies. But one thing's certain: Aidan Gillen's chilling Russian mobster, Milo Sunter, was not identified among the dead. 

Stevie (Derek Webster) knows that Mike was involved in Duke's death. Stevie destroyed Duke's cell phone, but the data is on a server somewhere. At some point, the authorities will learn that Mike is the last person Duke called. Stevie needs to know what to "sweep off" Duke's case, and Mike tells him to scrub "everything." But can Stevie access the cell phone data? Doubtful. 

The Coroner's Office is overflowing with still-unidentified bodies, and District Attorney Evelyn Foley (Necar Zadegan) is dealing with a "jurisdictional clusterf***." The prison death count is 197 (plus 33 dead guards), and there are 724 active criminal investigations resulting from the riot. She's seen all the bodies, and none of them are Milo Sunter, the "most notorious criminal in Michigan." Mike urges her to issue an escaped inmate alert: "This is the disaster, Evelyn. Everything else is shrapnel."

"Never Missed a Pigeon"

Mike has a curious exchange with an elderly man, who attaches a small scroll message to a homing pigeon to deliver to his son in Detroit. (Real owl mail / raven mail vibes here.) He misses calls and texts, but he says he "ain't never missed a pigeon." It's a strange title drop, and it could mean a few different things. "Pigeon" is slang for a young, pretty woman. It can also mean a gullible person, or someone who's easily duped into doing something that harms himself. This could be a hint that Mike's weakness is indeed young, pretty women like Iris. But in poker, "pigeon" means drawing a card that sets you up to win the game. My bet is Iris is either Mike's downfall or his secret weapon. Milo might still be playing Mike by leaving Iris alive (and in Kingstown), or Iris may have some information Mike will need to best Milo once and for all.

In any case, with news of Milo's escape, Mike is desperate to get Iris into Witness Protection. She's taking it badly. If she's in WitPro, she and Mike can't have any contact with each other. He arranges for two FBI agents to pick her up, and she reluctantly goes with them. 

At long last, we see Kyle McLusky (Taylor Handley), who's taken an officer job upstate. He's patrolling the waters of Lake Huron, between Michigan and Canada, with a senior officer. They board a suspicious-looking vessel, and Kyle treats it like a drug bust. But the poor Canadians are just trying to jump the tariff on their imported maple syrup. 

Miriam buys a bottle of Red Label after a hard day's work, and a teenage boy mugs her outside the liquor store. She volunteers in the prison, but this is the first time we've seen Miriam assaulted, and she's gracious about it. Eventually, her assailant is bagged and badly beaten for "resisting" arrest, according to Ian, who warns that the kid will end up killing somebody. But Miriam refuses to press charges, telling Ian, "No, your gang will kill him first."

Iris is at a safe house in Kingstown with the WitPro agents. When she overhears that Milo has likely escaped prison, she ditches. She's convinced that Mike is the only person who can protect her, and she's not exactly wrong. Milo managed to get to her the last time she was under the protection of federal agents.

The episode ends with Iris back in Mike's office, demanding to know the truth about Milo. He comes clean: The guy is very evil, very smart, and very much at large. 

Aiden Gillen's Milo Sunter looms like a shadow over the entire episode, but where is he? Well, he owns land in so-called bear country, where Mike dug up the serial killer's school bus. One of Milo's goons said last season that the mobster had a metal case containing $200k buried on that property. All eyes are on the prison right now, so Milo may have been able to slip onto the property (which is an active crime scene) and recover his money undetected. 

New episodes of Mayor of Kingstown Season 2 stream weekly exclusively on Paramount+.

READ MORE: 'Mayor of Kingstown': Everything to Know About Season 2 of Taylor Sheridan's Gritty Drama