Mayor Of Kingstown season 3 episode 6, "Ecotone," starts with Rhonda (Nona Parker Johnson) opening up her beauty salon. She tells two of Bunny's (Tobi Bamtefa) dealers to move away from the entrance. Once inside she gets ready for her day.
A gang of Aryan Brotherhood members then drive by the dealers. They fire at them, killing one and shooting up Rhonda's beauty salon as they speed away. The surviving dealer looks inside the store to see Rhonda on the floor, bullet wounds in her head and body, dead.
With retribution almost certainly on its way from Bunny, here's what else happens in "Ecotone."
What will Bunny do?
Bunny is already there when Mike (Jeremy Renner) arrives at the scene of Rhonda's death. Even though it's incredibly dangerous for him to be out in the open, Bunny refuses to budge. Mike warns Bunny this is exactly what Konstantin (Yorick van Wageningen) wants him to do. Bunny eventually departs as Mike warns him not to be baited by the Russians or Aryans.
Later, Mike visits Bunny at the funeral of an elderly man from the neighborhood who died in his sleep. Bunny reflects on the fact that the man somehow survived living in Kingstown and died of natural causes, admitting he can't imagine he'll have the same fate.
Mike wants to manage Bunny's options for retaliation. First, he asks Captain Moore (Michael Beach) to put Merle (Richard Brake) into solitary confinement. This gives Carney (Lane Garrison) 48 hours to find his drugs and figure out how he's getting them into the prison.
Mike then wants Ian (Hugh Dillon), Kyle (Taylor Handley) and Robert (Hamish Allan-Headley) to search Cavo. Kyle and Robert want to go with a shoot first, explain later policy, but with Iris (Emma Laird) working undercover against Konstantin, Mike insists they can't, they're only to serve a warrant.
While getting the warrant signed, Mike tells Evelyn (Necar Zadegan) about the Russians and Aryans trying to take over Kingstown.
Tracy tries to make an impact
Officers ignore pregnant inmate Cherry Maxwell (Natasha Marc) as she's about to give birth, making Tracy (Nishi Munshi) furious when they won't loosen the handcuffs so she can do so more comfortably. The doctor's only concern is to the baby, rather than the mother. Correctional Officer Breen (Matthew Del Negro) has to pull Tracy out of the operating room because she's so furious over it.
Tracy meets with Warden Tanya Michael (Tara Karajan) and explains that Cherry must have been raped by an officer. Tanya promises to look into it, but insists Cherry has to name who did it, otherwise she won’t be able to find out. Tanya tells Tracy to also make the complaint as an anonymous tip. Not just for her own safety from correctional officers, but so that the investigation can proceed quicker.
Kyle returns home to find Tracy playing with Mitch. Miraculously, they both have 24 hours off. She decides against telling Kyle what happened with Cherry, while he keeps his own SWAT stories to himself, too.
Best laid plans
A struggling Raphael (D Smoke) asks his wife for updates on his son Trey. When he tells her to tell Trey he's proud of him, he gets emotional. She holds his hand, but correctional officer Thomas (Benny Mora) and other Aryan spies jump in and accuse them of trading contraband. They pull Raphael away violently, while officer Kevin Jackson (Denny Love), who is working for the Crips, looks on frustrated. Later, we see an upset Rafael punching the wall in his cell.
Elsewhere, Mike calls Iris at Cavo and discreetly warns her over the phone that SWAT are coming in an hour, so she should be on lunch. But Iris says that'll look too suspicious. SWAT raids Cavo, doing so without firing a weapon. But Robert does elbow Iris in the face. Kyle arrives to put her in handcuffs safely. When he calls Mike, he mentions Iris' injury, which infuriates him.
Back in the prison, Carney figures out that one of the inmates working as a prison mechanic is helping to get the drugs in for Merle. Aryan police officers then confront Carney, savagely beating him. A beaten Carney calls Mike to tell him the Aryan Brotherhood have taken over the auto body shop.
Iris gets dirt on Konstantin
Ian and Stevie (Derek Webster) interrogate Konstantin without a lawyer present. Ian tells Konstantin the baby lived after he murdered Tatiana (Gratiela Brancusi) and threw her son in a dumpster. Konstantin shows no remorse.
Mike scolds Iris for not leaving Cavo when he told her to. But she knows her role there — she's Konstantin's arm candy. If they compromise that, Konstantin will kill her quicker than he did Tatiana, insisting she's not special.
Iris does have information, though. She tells Mike that Konstantin has girls coming in from Europe over the Canadian border. He's going to chip them, send them to major cities across the US so they can model and then pay him back. But they never earn enough money to pay their debt.
Mike meets Merle
At the prison, Mike tells Merle he should have warned him about his partnership with the Russians. Mike says Kingstown needs a balance and Konstantin is disrupting that. But Merle compares prison to a border zone. It has an ecotone, a region of transition between two biological communities, where forest meets the field, mountains meet the desert. It's richer in life there, more abundant, and where predators feed.
Mike asks what Merle's going to do when Konstantin has no use for him. Merle says that won't happen as long as Konstantin is still being fed. Merle only does business with predators. He then asks Mike to show him who he is by hitting Bunny, as he's the one upsetting the ecosystem. He calls Bunny prey, rather than a predator. Merle tells Mike he has a decision to make.
New episodes of Mayor of Kingstown premiere on Paramount Plus on Sundays.
