In what was almost certainly the series finale for ‘Mob City’ (TNT hasn’t yet announced if the show will return, but ratings have been poor), most of the loose ends get tied up. However, there’s also plenty of set-up should the series continue. Did the show go out with a whimper or a bang? Read on to find out!

Episode 5 (entitled ‘Oxpecker’) opens with a flashback to 1944, where we discover one of the reasons Joe and Jasmine got divorced. Shown sleeping in bed, Joe awakes from a nightmare and starts choking his wife. It seems that Joe suffers some serious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from fighting in the war. Jasmine manages to snap Joe out of it before he can seriously hurt her, but we’re left with the impression that this has occurred all too often during their marriage.

Back to 1947, Sid has knocked Joe out. By the time he awakens, Sid has handcuffed him to a radiator. Sid’s offer to Joe is simple: provide him with the location of the safe house where the police are keeping the busboy, and he won’t have to hurt Jasmine. Before Joe can respond, though, Sid gets a call from one of his contacts. The safe house has already been discovered, and a couple of his men dressed as cops are already inside. They’ve called Sid so he can listen to the gunshots. Sid holds the phone up so that Joe can hear as the busboy is executed. While the cop known as “Fat Jack” is murdered at the scene, another survives and manages to kill one of the assassins and put a bullet in the leg of the other.

Jasmine arrives at Joe’s apartment to find Sid there and Joe still handcuffed. Sid has Jasmine call the police and then goes outside to wait for their arrival. Why is he turning himself in? Because it gives him an alibi for the murder of the busboy. He then tells the cops that Joe assaulted him and kept him hostage and that he wants to press charges. The next day at the courthouse, with the busboy now dead, all charges against Bugsy Siegel are dropped.

Jasmine is still having issues with Hecky’s former partner, Leslie Shermer, who breaks into Jasmine’s place and demands the key to the locker where she’s keeping the incriminating photographs of Siegel. Jasmine decides to tell her problems to Mickey Cohen, knowing that the police have bugged his office at the club. So, when Jasmine and Leslie go to the locker location, both Sid and his men as well as Joe and the police all show up to save her. However, the photographs that were supposed to be in the locker are no longer there. As it turns out, Joe has moved the pictures to keep her from danger. He later sends her out of town, but not before revealing to her that he killed Hecky. This results in numerous slaps to Joe’s face. Man, this guy really gets beaten up a lot!

In Episode 6 (entitled ‘Stay Down’), William Parker meets with the mayor to discuss his future. The mayor believes that the current chief of police is corrupt and will run against him in the next election. He wants Parker to help bring him down. Parker agrees, but only because he wants to see justice done, not because he wants a political favor. Heading to the hospital to meet the survivor of the safe house shootout, Parker tells him that he’s creating a new internal affairs office and wants the cop to head it up.

Joe still has the incriminating photos of Siegel and wants to use them to guarantee Jasmine’s safety. Ned Stax agrees to set up a meeting between Joe and Siegel, but Bugsy has some other issues to deal with first. His friend and partner Meyer Lansky (Patrick Fischler) has arrived in town with some bad news. Lansky and the other partners want Bugsy to shut down the Vegas hotel, and also suspect that his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, has stolen a million dollars from them. Siegel is upset when he hears that his partners are pulling out of his operation, but goes crazy when he hears that they’re accusing his girlfriend of stealing. He storms out of the hotel, where he comes face to face with Joe.

Ned tries to warn Joe that this is a bad time to talk to Bugsy, but Joe doesn’t listen. As a result, Siegel gives Joe a major beat-down in the front of the hotel. He also takes the pictures back, and then speeds off in his car. However, Joe isn’t done with Bugsy. Following him back to his Beverly Hills home, Joe waits outside with a rifle until he sees Bugsy enter a room and sit down to read the newspaper. Joe then opens fire on the famous gangster and hits him numerous times, including several shots to the head

Ned suspects that Joe may be behind the killing and meets him the next day, telling him that he’s only made things worse in Los Angeles by offing Siegel. Over at Mickey Cohen’s club, Lansky arrives to tell him that, while his organization was thinking about offing Bugsy, they never actually voted on it. In other words, he has no idea who killed Siegel, and he wants Mickey to find out who did and exact revenge.

So ends ‘Mob City’, a series that started out slowly, but actually turned out to be pretty decent. Not great…but decent. The best parts of the finale were the safe house shootout in Episode 5 and the killing of Bugsy in Episode 6, the latter of which is historically accurate as to how he died. (The killing was never solved, so ‘Mob City’ has a little fun by having one of its fictional characters do it.) By this time next year, we’ll probably have forgotten all about this show, but should it by some miracle get a Season 2, I think it has a chance to be semi-successful. At the very least, ‘Mob City’ was different than anything else we’ve seen on TV this year, and it deserves credit for that.