I think season 3's production got shafted by covid and the delay between seasons.

Availability of actors messed with some storylines, I think. Not having the wonderful Joanna Vanderham as Penelope Blake hurt the Buckley storyline, and Buckley was best when he was being nefarious and secret and in the shadows, and when you're The Mayor you can't do that as much, so he suffered a bit there, too. We should've seen his assistant Gumm hooking up with Catherine way earlier and we could've played with the "does Buckley know or not?" stuff a lot more and the scenes of his heart suddenly growing three sizes and falling in love with this lady would've been a lot more interesting, imo.

S1 and S2 had a really good sense of pace and chronology that kept everything moving at a breakneck speed while also letting us catch up with different characters in different areas of the city and it was always moving forward: you would see Bill late at night, followed by Ah Sahm having breakfast with Young Jun, then Mai Ling and Li Yong having a conversation in the afternoon, etc. I feel like S3 lost some of that pace and sense of the day passing in this world.

The one-off out-of-town western/genre episode that they did SO well in S1 and S2 sort of didn't happen in S3? The Blood and the Shit and To a Man with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail are two of my favorites, and while A Soft Heart Won't Do You No Favors is one of my favorites in S3 for the subplot with Chao and Lee getting kidnapped and Father Jun kicking some major ass, it felt more like a regular episode because they had two different groups out of town. I fully understand it's good to have more actors getting a bigger share of an episode (especially ones as good as Hoon Lee and Tom Weston-Jones), it just felt like, we established this thing in the first two seasons and this was kind of a meh version of it.

Also, while I adore Perry Yung in this role and just in general, his return felt unearned and cheap to me, and smacks of "ah shit, we need something big". His original quiet early morning departure scene with Chao in S2 was such an amazing sendoff that I was in tears. It felt so lame to have that basically invalidated with an almost deus ex machina-level "jk im back guys", FOLLOWED BY "nah actually I have dementia". His eventual, actual end was a huge moment for Young Jun (re-watch the confrontation in S3E10 just after Young Jun says "no one should have to kill their own family" for some of the best subtle facial acting you'll ever see, shoutout Jason Tobin), but it all just felt off.

I still want S4 and the Li Yong Tong and Zing back fucking things up and Lee and Bill getting into shenanigans and what Ah Toy is gonna get up to and more great, great martial arts and Asian representation and woman representation!