Major spoilers for Mayor of Kingstown Season 3, Episode 7 are ahead! If you aren’t caught up, you can stream the series with a Paramount+ subscription.
As new episodes of Mayor of Kingstown continue to drop each Sunday on the 2024 TV schedule, one of my biggest questions going into them will be surrounding how Kyle will react when he finds out that his wife Tracy was assaulted at work. At the end of Episode 7, she was approached by a male CO who works at the same prison as her, and he threatened and assaulted her. At the moment, Kyle does not know what happened to his partner. However, when I interviewed Taylor Handley, the actor who plays him, I had to ask how he reacted as the character when he read the script for the first time.
While Kyle has faced deadly situations in Mayor of Kingstown as well as major tragedies, I have a feeling what happened to Tracy will hit him harder than anything. During an interview with CinemaBlend, Taylor Handley, told me that he’s excited about the “conflict and drama” this interaction will create, as he explained:
Well, as far as me personally reading the script, I thought it was a fantastic way to take the character, because it's going to obviously create more conflict and more drama. And of course, conflict and drama are the things that happen in Kingstown. That's why people tune in, we need conflict and drama in our television shows in order to keep interested. So when I saw that personally, I thought it was fantastic.
From a behind-the-scenes standpoint, this makes perfect sense. Tracy is in danger because she was trying to help a prisoner who got pregnant during her time in prison. The nurse was getting close to figuring out who it was, and when CO Breen violently approached her in the parking lot, it became clear that he was the guilty party in this situation.
Now, we know there’s a dirty CO working in the women’s prison, he’s assaulting those who work there, and no one is doing anything about it except Tracy. Once Kyle and Mike find out what’s happened to her, I imagine they’ll try to take care of it in an intense way. That seems to be the direction it is heading based on Handley’s emotional reaction to reading the script, as he told me:
Now as the character a fire was stoked inside of me, and I wanted to, you know, jump inside of the pages and kick the living crap out of the guy as the character. Of course, things unfold a little bit differently in the next coming episodes as far as how Kyle is informed and notified [about] this. But it all comes really full circle to how he feels about Miriam, how he feels about his purpose in life. So when this situation happens, it kind of rips the band-aid off of what he's been trying to conceal, you know, about his tragedies.
While I had hoped Kyle and Mike’s mother’s death would help them change for the better and force them to confront their trauma, they’ve both compartmentalized their feelings. Plus, following that death and the birth of Kyle and Tracy’s kid, all of them have kind of submerged themselves in work. Hopefully, this truly terrifying situation will bring them back together, and they can seek justice for Tracy while also dealing with all the scary and sad moments they’ve had over the last season.
Taylor Handley teased that that might happen, and this terrible situation could act as a reckoning for Kyle and his family. However, as I noted, Kyle does not know what happened to Tracy, and it’s unclear when he’ll find out.
Will she keep it from him? Will Mike find out? How will she decide to handle all of this? At the moment, all these answers are unclear. However, she’s an incredibly strong woman, and I’m positive she will find a way to take this terrible CO down for all the bad things he’s done. I’m also sure that once Kyle and Mike find out, they’ll want to do that too.
We’ll find out more when Mayor of Kingstown returns for Episode 8 next Sunday on Paramount+.
