Dwight Manfredi (Sylvester Stallone) wants to go legit, and “Tulsa King” spends most of its Season 4 premiere showing why nobody around him is built for it. “W.W.D.D.” streamed on Paramount+ on Friday, October 16th and opens with Dwight renaming his operation Friedman Enterprises, an anagram of his own last name. The liquor license is in hand and the Montague bourbon is selling well enough that the next step is national distribution. His order to the crew is simple: keep it legal on paper and get creative. The crew hears the second half louder than the first. By the last scene the cost of all that ambition lands somewhere Dwight never thought to guard. It is the biggest swing the show has taken in four seasons.
Season 3 ended with Dwight killing Jeremiah Dunmire (Robert Patrick) and walking away with the liquor business. Terence Winter ran the first season and is back as head writer and showrunner for a 10-episode run that drops on Fridays through December 18th. Paramount+ renewed the show for a fifth season in New York before this one even premiered. The official synopsis promises “a crushing personal loss” on top of corrupt politicians and dangerous new enemies. That phrase turns out to be a warning rather than marketing copy. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Tulsa King” Season 4 and the ending of “W.W.D.D.”
By the last scene the cost of all that ambition lands somewhere Dwight never thought to guard.”
Mitch Keller (Garrett Hedlund) takes “get creative” as permission. Mitch Keller’s Car City is finished and he sends his men across the state to buy junker copies of the exact makes and models on his lot. Then he offers a nervous DMV clerk named Paul up to $150,000 to register the wrecks. Paul balks when he hears that Mitch will burn the junkers and claim the insurance as if the pristine cars went up in flames. The money wins and by the end of the hour the burning has started. It is fraud with a business plan attached and also the funniest thread in the episode. Hedlund told Us Weekly that Mitch will do “whatever’s necessary to fearlessly do his part” this season.
Tyson (Jay Will) and Spencer (Scarlet Rose Stallone) hear “legit” and keep selling ecstasy anyway because the money is too good to quit. Bodhi (Martin Starr) warns them off and gets ignored. A rival dealer named Santiago tells them the nightclub is his territory. Goodie (Chris Caldovino) answers with the question that gives the episode its title: what would Dwight do? His own answer is a deal where Santiago pays them a cut. Tyson and Spencer hear a robbery instead and Goodie goes along as backup. They find a huge stash of pills at Santiago’s house. On the way out a bag of pills spills across the floor. Santiago appears with a gun and Tyson shoots him.
Santiago survives the shooting. In the hospital he gets a visit from a British man who wants to know who took his pills. He is English Dan (Richie Stephens). The scene is short but it still hands Dwight a new enemy he never chose. Tyson has done this before by treating Dwight’s example as an excuse for the opposite of what Dwight asked, and the pattern is wearing thin. Goodie had the right answer to his own question and nobody listened. Now a bigger supplier is asking where his product went.
The bigger business problem is in New York. Quiet Ray Renzetti (James Russo) controls the Northeast. Montague cannot go national without his territory. Dwight offers Ray a 25 percent stake in exchange for distribution rights there. Ray takes it on the condition that he can send his own man to Tulsa to watch his share. Then he calls the bosses together and announces that he is the new head of the Invernizzi family with Vince (Vincent Piazza) as his capo. Dwight is introduced at the same table as the head of the Manfredi family of Tulsa. When someone asks where Luca is, Ray answers with a bowling bag. Luca had objected to the new order and his severed head comes out of it.
Bill Bevilaqua (Frank Grillo) is out of federal custody and playing both ends. He warns Dwight not to trust Ray and then walks into Ray’s apartment to give Ray the same warning about Dwight. “I wouldn’t trust that prick to water my cactus,” he tells him. Grillo told Decider that Bill is “an opportunist, period.” He singled out the bowling-bag scene: “There’s a moment between Bill and Dwight when that head drops on the table.” He also said the cowboy hat Bill wears into Ray’s apartment is his own call. “I choose when Bill wears the hat,” he said. He changes Bill’s voice to match the room, too. “In New York, he sounds more Italian. In Tulsa, he sounds a little more Midwestern.”
Back home Cal Thresher (Neal McDonough) has the governor’s office and a lieutenant governor he does not trust in Amanda Clark (Gretchen Mol). She keeps bringing him a tech company’s push to build AI data centers on Oklahoma farmland and he refuses to hand the farmers’ land to a tech mogul. Thresher also signs the Fennario ranch back over to Margaret Devereaux (Dana Delany) for $100. In return he asks her to fly with him to a governors’ conference in the Mariana Islands and she agrees without much enthusiasm. When Dwight comes by the office with Margaret, Amanda will not shake his hand.
Before the trip Dwight takes Margaret to dinner at a new Italian restaurant where they trade jokes about their anniversary. The man who serves their wine introduces himself as Leonardo Timpone, a role TVLine credits to Rhys Coiro. Timpone takes a keen interest in Dwight. The next day he turns up at the Bred 2 Buck with a whole case of the same bottle, sold to Dwight at a discount. Bodhi takes the delivery, and something about the wine bothers him right away. That night the family celebrates at the bar without Margaret and everyone drinks it. Bodhi starts digging into the brand even though he cannot say what is wrong yet.
The ending comes fast. Everyone aboard Thresher’s private jet is unconscious, including Margaret, the governor and both pilots. Air traffic control calls the cockpit and gets nothing back. Then a crying Joanne (Annabella Sciorra) wakes Dwight in the middle of the night. “The plane that Margaret and Thresher were on went down somewhere over the Pacific,” she tells him. The episode never shows the crash or a body and it does not say what knocked everyone out either. The wine is the obvious suspect and Thresher’s stand against the data-center money is the other. Neither is confirmed on screen because the premiere leaves that mystery for later episodes.
Off screen, nobody is pretending they survived. Stallone told Entertainment Weekly that he “wanted people’s jaws to drop” with the twist. He said he had “gone as far as I could go in that relationship” short of a wedding and compared it to taking Adrian out of “Rocky Balboa,” which he said took about seven drafts. “New government, no girlfriend, grief, and just constant reminders that it’s your fault, because you brought her into politics,” he said of where it leaves Dwight. McDonough told TV Insider, “I thought it was a great idea. I wasn’t upset about it at all.” Losing his co-star was harder for him and he recalled thinking, “OK, I can see Cal dying, but why Dana?” Winter told the same outlet the goal was “to put Dwight in the most vulnerable position he could be in, not just from a danger standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint.”
The damage is political as much as personal. Amanda Clark is next in line for the governor’s office, and Stallone summed up Dwight’s new problem in five words. “Someone who hates his guts.” Dwight also walks with a cane this season. Stallone said it started when he “hurt my back before filming” and he chose to write it into the show. “This has to be a ploy, something Dwight’s planning far ahead, like a chess game,” he said. The hour has flaws. Tyson’s subplot is the show repeating itself, and ScreenRant’s season review argued that the series “almost completely disregards the most important things that happened in the previous season.” The ending works anyway. A silent cabin, an unanswered radio and one sister waking Dwight in tears do more than any shootout this show has staged. This series usually lets Dwight win and this time it opens by taking from him. Episode 2 arrives Friday, October 23rd.
What Do You Think? Was it the wine, the data-center money or one of Dwight’s old enemies that brought that plane down? Is Bill Bevilaqua setting Dwight and Quiet Ray up to destroy each other? Can Dwight stay legit for even one more episode with Amanda Clark next in line for the governor’s office?
Catch up properly: every Taylor Sheridan series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Sheridan-verse timeline.
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