Dean White shoots a lot of moments in “Smoked” through windows and in reflections, part of The Shield’s house style of surveillance, beginning with the long scene of Lem meeting with Becca and Vic. It’s a slow, agonizing trip until he gets to them, broken up by the titles; The Shield usually moves so fast that this scene stands out even more. The meeting sets out the obstacle of the episode: the Team needs $100,000 for Lem’s bail and their accounts have been frozen.

The surveillance style continues with the Kavanaugh/Vic confrontation in the break room. This is the scene where Kavanaugh truly reveals who he is; his voice has the calmness of a supervillain, and the language, too–“the noose, tightening,” and a little pantomime with a tea bag. (His move earlier, walking Vic and Shane through the apartment where Terry died, and having Terry’s brother there to watch and call Vic out, was pretty damn dramatic too. Kavanugh will do anything now to raise the pressure.) He offers Vic one last deal–turn yourself in and I’ll let you pick the prison–and of course Vic isn’t having any of it. Vic looks at him like he’s Armadillo, or the white supremacists of early season three; Vic realizes he’s looking at someone who will go much farther than he will, telling Kavanaugh that if Lem goes to Lompoc, he’s the murderer, and that he doesn’t have the stomach for it. And Whitaker loads so much into his quiet reply, saying it not with anger but with pride, and the camera, so still on him before, gives just a little jump when he says “I didn’t use to,” like even our perception has been shocked.

Kavanaugh, in that moment, reveals himself as another classical figure in this most classic of dramas: he is Nemesis, the daimon you call up through your hubris. Nemesis isn’t an external enemy, she (it’s feminine) exists because of what you did. It’s not just a matter of Vic’s corruption poisoning others (I’d argue that Farmington is always corrupt, and always will be), it’s the specific things Vic has done. He’s had so many chances to admit he’s evil and walk away, but he kept escalating, kept taunting Kavanaugh, and Kavanaugh kept escalating back. (You can compare Kavanaugh to another Nemesis in another contemporary classical drama: the Joker in The Dark Knight.) Kavanaugh started out as a dedicated IAD detective, but now he’s something much more, and Vic’s seeing it, but not recognizing yet how he made him what he is.

There’s a thematic benefit to Kavanaugh going full Nemesis here. For almost five seasons, we’ve been watching the Team’s corruption from their perspective. It’s the storytelling strategy of The Shield to stay focused on them, and that strategy (as I’ve said before) is to sacrifice range for intensity. That means, though, although we see what the Strike Team does, and we can see that it’s wrong, we don’t see the consequences from the other end. Now, though, Kavanaugh has adopted the Team’s strategies and tactics, and he’s using them on our protagonists. We can see Lem and the threat of jail, in fact the threat of death, hanging over him. We see Corrine, her assets frozen, not knowing how she’s going to pay to feed her children. We see Kavanaugh intimidating and threatening everyone he meets. We get a sense now of what it’s like to deal with Vic and company, because Kavanaugh turns what they do back on them.

If you want to see how much Kavanaugh has become like Vic, watch his scene with Aceveda. Aceveda starts the scene by storming in, resigning his position as a reserve policeman in order to deny Kavanaugh leverage, and ready to launch an investigation of him. And Kavanaugh flips him right then and there–he wants Mackey to turn to Aceveda under pressure. Whitaker’s smile is so Vic as he says “walk out angry, Mackey’s watching.” (Mackey is watching, conveyed exactly by the shots, pans, and edits.) It works, too; the episode closes with Vic going to Aceveda, and appealing to him/threatening him, saying if he goes down “I will scorch the earth, covering the whole department, starting with you.” A neat touch here: Aceveda doesn’t give his usual smile when his political career is at stake. If Vic knew him better, he’d recognize that something wasn’t right.

The Tina situation comes to a crisis point in “Smoked.” She keeps making mistakes (this time, not recognizing an undercover cop) and it’s gotten to the piont where Julien and Danny want her gone, both emphasizing that it’s about safety over everything else. Billings reluctantly agrees (in addition to Tina being Latina, “she’s just so damn popular.” Keeping with the Mad Men comparisons, Tina is the anti-Pete Campbell) and starts the paperwork, and then a complication shows up: pictures of Tina in the locker room are floating around.

Enter Dutch. “Smoked” has scenes where you see two aspects of his character get played off: in the bathroom, we see the detective who can find out where the pics came from, and also the pathetic guy that everyone recognizes as such (“the way you keep staring at her, it would have been cruel not to”); and it’s so very Dutch that he puts himself above everybody else (“we’re not all Neanderthals,” he tells Tina) and then keeps the pictures. (He also gets a classic comedy moment when Claudette makes her return while he’s looking at the pictures: “what are you looking at?” “Nothing! Huh?” The “huh?” coming second is what makes it perfect comedy.)

The camera in the locker room was Billings’ plant (someone’s been ripping off the vending machines, or so he claims). Billings has many faults, but no one outside of Claudette can play Dutch better. When Dutch confronts him, he comes up with a deal to appease Danny and Julien, deflect (at the very least) a complaint from Tina, and keep Dutch quiet: put Tina under Dutch’s responsibility and have him train her as a detective. When Tina says “so I keep my mouth shut and I climb the ladder?” it’s an unnecessary line; the moment, just before, when she said “I see” told us that she’s been dealing with this kind of shit for a long time. (When The Shield makes mistakes, they’re usually on the side of being too clear.) She accepts, and we’re left to ponder the morality of it. Does she deserve the chance? Do Billings and the Barn deserve not to have Tina come after them? How much does Dutch’s puppy-dog yearning for Tina compromise him? Like everything in The Shield, it’s not going to be judged right now. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

The Team’s pursuit of $100,000 leads them to join Dutch and Claudette in an investigation of some high-end weed, and that leads to a scene as intense and elegantly staged as Kleavon’s arrival in “Rap Payback,” with Vic calling a tip in to Shane and Ronnie just before Dutch and Claudette act on it. There’s a perfectly timed moment as Shane and Ronnie run away frame left as Vic and Dutch break through a door frame right, and a demonstration of Vic’s survival smarts as he tells Dutch to cover the front, he’ll take the back. Our old pal and electronics expert Smitty (VJ Foster) delivers the bail money, and it feels like a strong, well-executed caper, but Vic gives a funny-but-disturbing closing line at the commercial break: “‘cause you’re the last honest guy we know.” The Strike Team is rapidly running out of allies; in the next scene, even Becca wonders if she’d be more help to Vic as a friend than as an attorney.

There have been better episodes of The Shield than “Of Mice and Lem”; I’d say next week’s episode qualifies. What I have not seen, on The Shield, in a movie, in a play, in whatsofuckingever any kind of timed fiction, is 45 minutes where two antagonists slugged it out with so much happening that every single scene was some kind of reversal or advance in their battle. Vic and Kavanaugh go fully at each other in this episode; they’re grabbing anything they can, any advantage one can get over the other, and spraying collateral damage all over Farmington. (If season 5 is The Raid, this is the final fight with Mad Dog.) Breaking Bad occasionally got to this level of intensity, but never this kind of pace; it’s one of The Shield’s unique claims to greatness that it’s drama pitched with the intensity and speed of an action movie, or even a videogame. There are scenes that should have REVERSAL! or BODY BLOW! appearing on screen when they happen.

For all the speed and intensity here, it’s still a drama; it’s still about the revelation of character. Again, The Shield does not portray character, it reveals character; it doesn’t use colors, or camerawork, or editing, or dialogue, or flashbacks to show who these people are, it only uses action. (This is why The Shield is theatrical rather than cinematic.) Also, for all the speed and brutality here, it still holds to plausibility. The events that happen here were all set in motion so long ago, and we’ve seen, step by step, how they lead to an episode like this, when there will be no time to reflect, calculate, or analyze. This is half of what The Shield and drama are all about, showing how people act when there is no time to do anything but live who you truly are. The other half is living with the consequences of what you do and who you are.

The episode opens with three scenes that reverse the story twice. We start right in Lem’s face, free on bail but crying, throwing up, and then he gets a visit from Kavanaugh, who’s back to his early-season style of happiness, thinking that the Team made itself vulnerable by getting Lem’s bail money. It’s a “social call,” quickly ended when Lem starts throwing up blood. Next scene, Vic pays a social call on Sadie, posing as a “friend of John’s,” and she quickly turns that into a revenge fuck. (You get a sense that this will turn into an episode of Everybody Fucks Vic by the way she offers him coffee.) Torres does so well playing Sadie’s mood swings (she does a lot of acting with her eyes), and Chiklis has been praised many times for the way he shows about four different reactions in three seconds, one of which is (guitar riff) I’m Fucking Gina Torres (He’s Fucking Gina Torres).

Then it’s over to Becca’s office (“I had an ex-wife thing,” says Vic), and Lem wants to make a deal and go to prison. “DA’s receptive,” Becca says; Kavanaugh’s investigation has been getting out of control and as Lem keeps pointing out, he took the heroin and the evidence is unbreakable. This way he still has some control over what happens, but more than that, “I don’t want to fight anymore.” The difference between Lem and Vic has never been clearer; at the end of “Smoked,” Vic told Becca that if she had to, make a deal that put Vic in Lem’s place, but Lem doesn’t say if. He wants this, he wants to make the sacrifice, he’s not trying to get away with anything any more. Kenneth Johnson plays these scenes so calmly; he’s almost completely still (and the camera stays very still on him), in contrast to Chiklis and the Goggins, both active, in motion, yelling. Ronnie has some of Lem’s calm and steadiness, too, when he says that Lem knows eventually he’ll break. There’s no judgment there, just an acknowledgment of the reality of the situation–given enough time, everyone breaks. Like Lem, and unlike Shane and Vic, Ronnie can accept. The writers and David Rees Snell create a strong sense of who Ronnie is with only a few gestures and details.

Vic goes to Antwon to deal for Lem’s safety (“I decide his quality of life”) and the deal is apparently straightforward: break the returning Kern Little and new guy Moses into a police storage unit to recover the last of the seized assets from last season. (The wheels just keep on turning. . .) The setup for the break-in is beautiful, done with some extreme long shots that show the urban landscape of a railyard. Kern is never in the same place as he was the last time we met him, and the Vic/Kern relationship is always changing. Kern’s rap career has failed, and now he and Vic are in the same desperate position. Moses plays peacemaker here, and that’s a clue that there’s another agenda in play.

It gets revealed during the robbery, as REVERSAL! Moses guns down Kern and the guard. Moses (L. Michael Burt in the best guest performance of these episodes) says “sure it’s part of the deal, the part Antwon didn’t tell you about” with complete confidence–he knows about the deal for Lem. (Antwon wants to install Moses over Halpern as the new leader of the One-Niners. Alive, Kern was a threat to that. Dead in a robbery of a police storage unit, he’s a martyr.) The Team can do absolutely nothing about it except hit Moses a few times, and then, so horrifyingly, leave Kern to bleed to death on the ground.

Goodbye, Kern, you were one of The Shield’s great characters, a wannabe-gangsta thug who believed in the promises of fame, fame through music and through violence, failed at all of them, and ended up used and betrayed by everyone, Vic and Antwon leading the list. Antwon’s play assures him of the only real fame he’ll ever have, that of the martyr, and that will only be among the One-Niners. (It’s like a contemporary version of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.) Goodbye to Sticky Fingaz too, one of the great performers here; he gave Kern a constant desperation, like he knew this would always be his fate, a Tony Montana who always knew that he was really Fredo Corleone.

Forest Whitaker plays another reversal in the following scenes. Showing up at the storage unit, he’s completely confident, walking the Team through another scenario of people getting shot like he did in the opening of “Smoked,” and almost getting it right. He uses his hands as effectively as Jason Lee telling a joke, and there’s a great long shot (and quick zoom) of him pointing at Vic and the camera that makes it look like we’re staring down the barrel of a rifle. Vic tries to walk away from it, and Chiklis has a neat little dramatic moment where he shows us Vic thinking “just walk away, just ignore it–fuck it, let’s do this”: “let me remind you of a few things you seem to have forgotten. I didn’t kill Terry. You’ve lost your leverage with Lem. And your ex-wife’s pussy tastes like sweet butter.” It’s one of The Shield’s best lines, merciless, vicious, Vic slamming Kavanaugh as hard as he can, the verbal equivalent of jamming a broken fluorescent light in his neck. (About 15% of you are saying to yourself “gosh, that seems an awfully specific reference.”) Advance Kavanaugh’s reaction frame by frame and you can see the moment where his heart rips in two.

When Kavanaugh confronts Sadie, it’s so different from their other two scenes together. She’s the one absolutely in control here (“what did he do? Well, he made me come. Twice”) and he’s not just hurt but enraged. He’s frightening at the end of that scene, because we can see the guy who trashed the hotel room is back. Torres, again, plays so much with her eyes, showing some fear but also showing that she’s not giving any ground to this man. Again, this is how fast things are happening in this episode: Kavanaugh was completely in command two minutes earlier.

Kavanaugh comes back to his (formerly Billings’) office and confronts Assistant Chief Phillips and the Chief (John Cygan), and finds out that yes, they’re shutting down the investigation–Lem’s jail term is enough. The supervillain of “Smoked” is gone, now replaced with an utterly broken and defeated man, and Whitaker delivers his speech, trapped on the word “piss” like a Paul Thomas Anderson character (I’m thinking Julianne Moore in Magnolia or Philip Seymour Hoffman in Punch-Drunk Love), not from rage but from agony. In interviews, Whitaker mentions the hate the fanbase had for Kavanaugh, and he seemed puzzled and genuinely hurt by that, and I hear that in this scene–”this guy! This guy, this guy is just pissing, he’s pissing all over us! He’s pissing on you!” It’s not a self-pitying “why am I the bad guy here?” but a hurt bewilderment that they don’t see Vic as the bad guy. Cygan and Nigel Gibbs (as Phillips) are so good in their reactions; when Kavanaugh says that Vic “screwed my ex-wife with the sole purpose of making this investigation look like a personal vendetta” it’s not that they don’t believe him, it’s that they’re both thinking “this will be a fucking PR nightmare if this gets out.” When the Chief tells Kavanaugh “you have 48 hours to tie up the loose ends,” it’s like Michael Mann’s films–it’s a moment that would be a cliché in any other work, but here it’s been so well prepared that it becomes archetypal instead. Kavanaugh is down to his last moments here.

Picking up on an idea from amb (this was in the “Jailbait”/”Tapa Boca” comments–the AV Club is apparently autoflagging comments with links right now), there are two Shields: one is the Tragedy of the Strike Team, the other is a looser, more procedural, but still story-oriented work starring Claudette and Dutch, with Julien and Danny in supporting roles. The two storylines cross over here, interestingly, as Claudette blows up at the Chiefs (with Billings offering she-has-a-point-there-type support until she turns on him, too) for letting Kavanaugh run loose in the Barn. Part of the collateral impact of this episode is that it leads the Chief to offer Claudette the captaincy of the Barn. Over a year ago in narrative time, she blew her chance on that, and now the Nemesis the Team brought down on the Barn leads her into the captain’s office. (So many stories play out here, all of them at once.) Amid all the chaos and boldly drawn lines in “Of Mice and Lem,” there’s a quiet, subtle moment at the end between her and Dutch. They’ve been at odds most of the episode because Claudette wrongly suspects Dutch of having revealed her lupus diagnosis. It was actually Billings, and she apologizes, and asks for his support. When Dutch says “you’ll do fine. Whoever sits up there has to have an active mistrust of everyone and everything in this place. I can’t think of anyone better suited to the job,” it can be read as an insult, Dutch’s version of “fuck you, Miss Never-Gonna-Trust-Anyone,” but I read it as sincere. What he’s saying is no more than true, and I think he’s recognizing Claudette’s skillz here. The ambiguity of the moment, for both of them, comes from the simplicity of the performances; because neither Pounder nor Karnes emphasize anything, because they don’t force a reading, there can legitimately be multiple ways to take it.

By the way: I’ve often cited the dialogue as the weakest aspect of The Shield, but my God this episode’s language is on fire. There’s no attempt to be artificially clever (which is so often what makes words sound false) but everything has been carefully and, more importantly, believably chosen, from Vic’s insult to Kavanaugh’s speech to Dutch’s use of the word active, implying that Claudette has to inquire about her officers, not just evaluate them.

Two more scenes and another reversal: Kavanaugh says goodbye to Lem, telling him that it was only a threat to send him to Lompoc, and Kavanaugh looks so defeated here, barely able to meet Lem’s eyes. His voice has a new tone to it: not the rage of the last few episodes, not the on-and-off charm of the early episodes, but something flatter, more hollow. There’s almost no emotion there, especially when he says at the end “I know.” He doesn’t act like he wants Lem’s friendship or forgiveness, but like he genuinely recognizes the kind of man Lem is, and he wants to acknowledge that. (“Not you. Not Curtis Lemansky.”) It’s entirely who Lem is that he can’t not shake Kavanaugh’s hand here. There are other characters here–Vic, Shane, and Aceveda among them–who can think entirely in terms of fights and tactics, but Lem always sees another person in front of him. Then it’s back to Lompoc, as Vic has to tell Antwon there were no goods in storage, and worse, Antwon tells Vic that Kavanaugh has started an investigation of the prisons, and it will cost Antwon privileges and trouble. Kavanaugh may have been bluffing, but Antwon absolutely isn’t; like Shane did last season, Vic discovers the price of making a deal with this man, the price of dealing with someone who doesn’t live by deals. My favorite Antwon moment in all The Shield is his pronouncement that no matter where Lem ends up, he’s a dead man–”it will happen, and you can set your watch to that inevitability.” A close second is Antwon the Logician’s response to Vic’s threat, as Vic says if anything happens to Lem, “my reach will get you shivved,” and Antwon coolly observes that if Vic could do that, he wouldn’t be talking to Antwon at all. It’s a quiet conversation until the end, filmed absolutely chaotically, with the camera coming in from both sides (again, violating the 180° rule) and then bouncing with the characters in the final near-fistfight.

With all this going on, there’s still time for the resolution of another case: whoever’s setting rat trips on the cocks of Farmington has escalated, moving to the kind with interlocking serrated teeth (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH). The investigation spins in several directions at once–Dutch and Claudette have to bring in the guy who got chomped a few episodes back, and although they try and be discreet, it leads to his wife finding out, and him beating the shit out of her. (Let me stress this: “leads to” is not the same thing as “causes” or “is responsible for.” The Shield is always about people making choices in a world where the past never goes away.) A gay community leader (or at least organizer) talks to Julien about putting up flyers, and their meeting goes about as well as you’d expect, but it does result in a suspect, and Julien interrogates him. It’s a terrifying scene, partly because the SNAP of the rat trap is both a threat and makes us imagine what happened (again, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH) but mostly because Julien and this guy share a Biblical, self-hating (certainly in Julien’s case) homophobia. The way Julien, shot from below so he looms over us, says the word “penis” is frightening, and a strong reminder that his story of dealing with being gay is in no way over.

Oh, also, we have a double episode tonight of Everybody Fucks Vic with special guest star Laura Elena Harring. In the words of Con Air, “on any other day, that might seem strange.” We also see a demonstration, triggered by the investigation and arrest of Rat Trap Guy, an image that reminds us for all the drama going on with our characters, they exist in a city that has its own people and its own agendas. In a single image, Vic and Becca in the alley while everyone else goes by, it conveys a scale of events like the entirety of the fourth season.

At the end, with no other subplots to visit, we come back to the bar, and the Strike Team isolated in the dark, shot from the angle of a security camera, and Vic reveals that the deal with Antwon fell through and Lem will have to go on the run, Vic’s face is desperate in the mirror, and the music shifts to the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm,” a song that doesn’t work in any other context but this, a ridiculous, operatic, and overly emotional song that completely fits here, where things have gone into a world beyond crazy (it’s like Mahler’s Piano Quartet in Shutter Island), and Vic is trying to explain and Lem’s in more pain and Shane and Ronnie keep firing questions and it’s the most terrifying moment of this terrifying episode and the entire show when Vic cries out “I don’t know! I don’t know!” because for almost 65 episodes straight Vic has lied and bought and cheated and tricked and charmed and fought and stolen and shot and threatened and fucked and killed his way out of trouble, he’s found a way out of every jam they’ve been in, but now Lem’s life is on the line and the clock is down to only a few hours now, once he’s in custody he’s in Antwon’s domain and it’s only a matter of time before he’ll be killed, and Vic has no idea what to do, no money to purchase anything and no allies beyond that table, and Lem’s groans are wordless now, an animal in pure pain. . .

. . .and with all of this Claudette assumes the Captain’s office after so much time, and Tina seems to be flirting more with Dutch than would be necessary, the physical and emotional distance between Claudette and Dutch already growing, and also Danny’s having her baby, Julien’s driving and even Jesus is falling down, falling down now. . .

. . .and the second scene in this episode was Vic at Kavanaugh’s ex’s home, and the second scene from the end is Kavanaugh at Vic’s ex’s home, and I have no idea where that’s going but there’s no way it can be good. . .

. . .and the first scene was Lem crying, and the last scene is Lem getting into a car, not crying, not groaning, not throwing up blood, but looking utterly dead, someone who has been through too much and has nothing left, no resources, no emotions, completely exhausted and defenseless, and the dawn is coming up, and Shane lighting a cigarette is a classic signifier of coolness, but here it means nothing, everyone is desperate and desolated, everyone is at the mercy of actions they took days or weeks or years before, and Vic drives Lem away, and there is one episode left.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

One of the most effective progressions (not exactly a plot) of the season is watching Vic and Kavanaugh get more elemental in their fight. It began with the two of them working through others (Lem, Emolia) to get at the other one, and then it got more about each destroying the other, then the ex-wives get pulled into the fight, and finally there’s the great moment at the end of “Postpartum” where they just flat-out charge each other and start throwing punches. You can argue that drama is a series of incidents meant to force characters into who they primally are, and that scene is the culmination of what’s been going on all season.

Another effective touch is the way Kavanaugh’s departure gets foreshadowed. In his farewell to Lem, you can see a touch of regret in the way he played Lem; he half-realizes that dealing with Antwon was a step way too far. I think Kavanaugh can see Lem is at peace here, and he knows that he is not. It sets up his exit three episodes from now, where he’s in jail but he can honestly say to Vic “I’m at peace. Are you?” There’s a layer of Kavanaugh here that’s still compassionate, he’s shoving it aside, and we get a sense in that scene with Lem of how much it’s costing him.

Well, now Everybody Fucks Vic goes on permanent hiatus. It was an iffy spinoff but it did end strong, with a great sense of Vic’s relationships with women and a way to up the chaos level of “Of Mice and Lem.” Looking at the last two guest shots, Sadie uses Vic to get back at Kavanaugh (to be clear, if Gina Torres used me for anything, I’d have my name legally changed to reflect that), and Becca regrets it about eight hours later. It says a lot about who Vic is that he gets laid a lot but doesn’t have the stable relationships that Shane, Lem, or even Dutch do. (Again, don’t tell anybody about the status of Everybody Fucks Vic–another consistent prediction about season seven was that Olivia would appear in the comeback episode.)

Also, Claudette now runs the Barn through the end of the show. There’s been a lot of good conversation here about that; I’ll just emphasize that 1) the Barn is in near-continual crisis for the rest of the series–in a few episodes, it’s going to be in danger of shutting down–and 2) Claudette is dying. Her illness is taking more of her energy and attention; there’s the season seven episode where we briefly see her house is a wreck and Claudette says she simply has no energy left for anything but work. (I know someone with lupus and that’s accurate.) She never really has any time to establish who she is as a captain; as the third act of The Shield gets going, she, like everyone else, is just trying not to get destroyed by all the events in the rush to the end.

Finally, on reflection, the vending machine subplot (in fact, all of Billings’ redecorations) has been so elegantly threaded throughout the season. It literally puts one more obstacle in the Barn for people to move around, it gives you a clear sense of what Billings’ priorities are, it triggers the crisis with Tina in “Smoked” (and her getting assigned to Dutch, which becomes a plot thread next season), and of course it leads to one of the funniest Dutch/Billings scenes next episode (“. . .I think this is kind of a gray area.”)

Previous: “Man Inside”/”Kavanaugh”
Next: “Postpartum”

And.  Here.  We.  Go.

FX has signed off on all the actors.  The Strike Team has been fully assembled.  Everyone in the main cast has a role to play.  Ronnie has, like, complete sentences.  Stories that were in play seven episodes ago get resolved and others get taken farther.  The Shield is now on its full game, comrades, and hang the fuck on for the next 70 hours or so.

In “Dragonchasers,” the actors now have control over their characters, and the writers have control over the story.  Michael Chiklis has said that when the screenplay isn’t well written, he feels, as an actor, he has to indicate more than he should.  In this episode, though, the incidents are all exactly in place and the actors don’t need to make any points, and we get the best acting of the series so far (and it’s gonna stay at that level).  Everything comes through without being emphasized–Corinne’s confusion, Shane getting duped, Julien just exploding with rage (on the rewatch, you just get sick with dread when you know what’s coming), Connie’s self-loathing (Jamie Brown is so fantastic).  One more detail, though, worth catching, because it shows you the level at which The Shield plays:  watch Chiklis in the observation room.  (Not the gag with the remote, which is brilliant.)  Everyone else is having a blast, but Vic stays absolutely dead serious, because he knows that Dutchboy is on to something.  Vic gives just a little hint of a smile when Shawn from Rockford (Shawn Ryan’s reference to himself) breaks.

Of course, it’s Jay Karnes who flat-out blows everyone away in this one.  (And he’s another example of how acting on this show gets subtler over time–compare him here to “Cherrypoppers.”)  He conveys things with just the slightest change in expression, even in stance.  Watch his smile in the break room, held just a little too long as he catches a clue no one else does; watch him after he reads the whiteboard, considering his options and then realizing the play is just to sit down and listen.  (When Claudette says “Dutch,” and he waves her off, it’s the subtlest moment of ownage possible.  He won the whole game right then, and his next move is just “tell me more.”)  Watch him walking out of the interrogation room, absolutely exhausted, and then the final, shattering moment in his car.  Either Karnes or the writers or Nick Gomez was smart enough to include an action in that moment:  he breaks down, looks around to see if anyone’s watching (the theme of surveillance is all through this episode), and breaks down again.  (Fun fact:  Claudette’s little cheering motion and bop on the head to Dutch was improvised, and it was equal parts Claudette celebrating Dutch and CCH Pounder celebrating Karnes.)

Another impressive thing about the writing (the structure of incidents, again) is that Dutch has to go against all his instincts to win this one.  We’ve seen, in “Pilot,” that he can role-play with suspects, but there’s none here; he has to be himself, and in the most naked way.  We’ve seen, in “Cherrypoppers,” both his tendency to bully suspects and his need to be the boss; here he has to let himself be bullied, and let other cops do their job.  It’s his job to keep Shawn from Rockford from leaving, it’s the Pasadena PD’s job to find the bodies.  Shawn from Rockford takes the Dutch role, using psychological insight to bully the interrogatee, and he pays for it.  (“You could have left.  Instead you chose to stay here and show off.”)

Nick Gomez works in The Shield’s house style seamlessly (he’ll be back in season 3); the direction never calls attention to itself.  (Watch for the smallest zoom-in on Shawn from Rockford just before he fully confesses.)  One thing that gets used a lot is the shot with something obscuring it, whether it’s a body or some architecture in the way.  One way that The Shield continually places us in the action is by understanding that we don’t get a clear view of everything if we’re actually there.  (Omniscient perspective is almost never part of this world.)  Another element of style we get is coming too close to the action;  the blanket party and the withdrawal are more horrifying because we are literally right in Julien’s and Connie’s faces for them.

The Shield’s full-tilt charging through stories works to bring us closer to the characters, too.  Compare Dutch in “Cherrypoppers” to Dutch in “Dragonchasers”:  in the former, we get him 1) blowing up at a suspect, 2) blowing up at Danny, and 3) apologizing to Danny, 4) admitting how much he wants to catch the killer, and 5) receiving the offer of a grilled-cheese sandwich.  Nothing bad there, but it’s still conventional, and it doesn’t add anything.  (We already know how obsessed Dutch is.)  Then look at the end of “Dragonchasers”:  1)  Dutch breaks down in his car.  That’s it.  And that’s the ending we all remember, and it sounds like it’s what hooked a lot of us into watching this show.  Storytelling isn’t just about show-don’t-tell, it’s also about show-what-we-need, and then don’t distract us.

“Carnivores” really shows how The Shield is a different kinda cop drama.  (Action-Adventure Drama and Legal Procedural Drama left for the day.)  Cop dramas are almost always focused on the cops vs. the criminals.  This isn’t a moral distinction; the cops might do good or bad things but their objective is clear:  get people into jail.  But The Shield plays a wider field; law enforcement really feels like a distant second or third to what the Strike Team does.  “Carnivores,” and many episodes of The Shield, feels more like a workplace drama where the workplace is all of Farmington, and Vic’s objectives are more those of a manager:  he has to deal with a hostile takeover by the Fruit of Islam, reschedule with an outside contractor (the guy who will get the drugs through customs), get one of his top earners (Rondell) out of the way because he’s just not producing anymore, evaluate the potential of a new employee (Tio), and, oh, use some of his resources to get Matthew into a school for autistic children.  (Of course Vic’s first instinct isn’t to say, well, fuck it, and find another school.  His first instinct is to try and find blackmail material.  That’s so Vic.)

Another way that “Carnivores” stakes out a separate territory for The Shield is that it (Raymond Chandler’s description of Dashiell Hammett) “gives murder back to the people who commit it.”  There isn’t a big investigation, there isn’t a great series of clues and deductions because most murder isn’t committed for the benefit of detectives like Dutch who “just like solving puzzles.”  As roktober noted last week, most murders are done by stupid, shortsighted people for stupid, shortsighted reasons.  Dealing with it is part of the everyday life of cops.  (Again, it’s a workplace drama.)

Finally, for those of you who are just starting The Shield, remember three words:  “admit you’re evil.”

SPOILER FOR SEASON 6 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER

“Dragonchasers” aired two weeks (I think) before Buffy’s season 6 finale, “Grave,” and the stories had a common element:  two men, who people don’t often realize are heroes, win by just standing there and taking it.  One of Joss Whedon’s great themes is how our heroism derives from our humanity (think of the line he gives Bruce Banner in The Avengers), and it was so great to see it played out in two different realities:  sometimes the most heroic act is to let yourself be hurt.  Sometimes you catch a killer that way.  Sometimes you save the entire world.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

“Dragonchasers” and “Carnivores” pick up on many things that came before, and set up many things that will come back later, both in terms of character and direct plot.  Shane, of course, always has trouble with the hotties; I always felt that when Shane says of Mara “she’s the first woman I’ve been with who’s better than me,” he had to be thinking of Tulips.  (Of course, Tulips will be back next season, and so will Connie, snif.)  We get the serial killer plot paid off, and we’ll see, next season, where Dutch’s arrogance over winning a case will lead him.   We also see a foreshadowing of next season’s Mackey/Aceveda alliance; we get a little hint of Lem’s relationship with Tigre.  We introduce Tio, who will be back next year.  We see just how far down Julien’s self-hatred is taking him (I don’t know which is more disturbing, the blanket party or his suicide attempt).  And we get further fraying of Vic’s marriage (I just realized, watching this again, he never actually denies that Connie’s child is his.  Hmmm) and we see here, and in next week’s episodes, what Diro says in season 6:  “we can’t protect those we love from the consequences of what we do.”  Again, this is what The Shield was truly best at:  everything counts, everything has a past and a future, and not in any kind of thematic or vague way.  What you do in the now means some specific thing will happen later.

“Admit you’re evil” is Tiresias showing up to warn Vic.  There’s his hubris:  his belief that with everything he’s done, he’s still a good person.  And this moment will come back again and again; really the first moment was in “The Spread,” with Shane reminding Vic that “we killed a cop!” and Vic denying it.  We’ll hear it next week, from Gilroy: “WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?” “Nothing you haven’t done.” We’ll hear it in the hilarious exchange with Army in the fourth season (“You made us look guilty!”  “YOU ARE GUILTY!” and the Strike Team’s why’d-you-go-and-bring-THAT-up reaction).  We hear it in Monica’s near-warning to Vic at the end of the fourth season, and Vic’s chance to take early retirement at the beginning of the fifth.  (He could just admit he’s evil, and walk.  Nope.)  We hear it in Lem’s agreement to jail time; we hear it in Shane’s defense of killing Lem, as Shane says:  I have done evil, so you could keep believing that you are not evil.  We hear it in the quiet, absolutely amazing moment (one of the best in the entire series) at the end of season 6’s “The Math of the Wrath,” where Ronnie tells Vic:  I knew about Terry, and you should have told me because I could have protected you better.  We hear it all through the last episodes as Ronnie tries to get Vic to just cut and run.  And most devastatingly, we see it happen at the end of “Possible Kill Screen,” all sins confessed, as Vic stands up and owns it.  (It’s comparable to Clint Eastwood in the last 15 minutes of Unforgiven.)  He admits it.  He has been asked to admit his evil, and after so much time, he does:

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?”
“I’ve done worse.”

Previously: “Cupid & Psycho”/”Throwaway”
Next: “Two Days of Blood”/”Circles”

Ask to see a hero and I’ll show you Claudette Wyms.

For everything else that happens in “Man Inside,” the Claudette/Kleavon battle dominates it. The episode starts with Dutch formulating strategy, still thinking they’ll play him together, and Claudette goes into the interrogation room and blows right by all of that: “between San Antonio and here you’ve killed at least eight women, including one last night. Your sister’s missing 24 hours, we think you killed her too. Let’s start talking.” For the rest of the episode, Claudette and Dutch are boxer and coach (this is a comparison that Emily Lewis et al. make on the commentary track). Dutch comes up with the strategy, first finding Kleavon’s weakness in that he can’t handle a black woman standing up to him, and later, when Julien and Tina find Fatima, faking a picture of her dead body to break Kleavon. Claudette executes the strategy, because she’s the only one who can, the only one who has the emotional leverage over him. CCH Pounder conveys Claudette’s progressing sickness with the simplest move–she doesn’t do anything, doesn’t even freeze. Her eyes go scary blank and her whole face slackens, and of course Kleavon can catch it; Pounder’s acting is so good she can wordlessly convey Claudette recovering and trying to find her place.

Claudette’s whole character, her whole career really, has been defined by her will. She’s only been able to get where she is, and to do what she does by being relentlessly strong and never giving any ground, and now, horribly, her body is failing her will. She keeps pressing Kleavon, and getting to him, but her body simply can’t support her will any more. She goes out on the balcony and says to Dutch, in tears, in her most nakedly open and vulnerable moment on the show “I can’t do this. I can’t! Look at me.” (Has Claudette ever said that to anyone?) Like the end of “Dragonchasers,” Dutch looks around to see if anyone’s watching. The camera keeps moving around Dutch, and Dutch keeps moving around her, both blocking any way for her to escape. Dutch profiles her as well as he does Kleavon, knowing that he has to push her as hard as she’s pushing Kleavon, saying you have to do this, if you don’t, he comes after you, he comes after Fatima. There’s a great, tight shot with only Dutch’s face and arm and the interrogation room door as he says “so you get back in there and you close him!” She does, and the moment at the door with her little smile (“thanks for the push,” as James Ellroy would say) is beautiful.

She’s back and she keeps pushing–no Dutch-style circling the conversation and no one’s going to come in with evidence, there isn’t any. All there is are two wills locked in a room together, a scene that goes to the fundamentals of drama. All Claudette has is her knowledge of the seam in Kleavon’s character, between his love and hate of Fatima, because her body is literally breaking down in front of him as her nose starts bleeding (a brief, disorienting internal edit there), and Dutch, seeing his fighter hurt, comes in and tries to call her to the corner. And I have not ever seen, nor do I expect to see, a more heroic moment in fiction than Claudette saying “no” and the look on her face. (I remember that moment as dramatically heightened, the door closing very slowly, but The Shield doesn’t stress its great moments that way. Just the shot of Claudette blocking the door from closing says everything that needs to be said.)

Ask me what a hero does and I’ll say “a hero does what is right,” and if there’s any word in that sentence after “right,” we’re not talking about a hero. That “no” and that look from Claudette says she’s going back in, she’s going to break Kleavon, and if she bleeds more, if her vision gets blurry, if God and Kleavon’s eight dead victims show up and say STOP!, fuck all that, she’s still going to do it, and if she dies right there, she’s still going to do it. She has done the heroic thing, committing to action and accepting any and all consequences of that action. It works. Ray Campbell is phenomenal here, bringing all his will into play too against his sickness, trying with all his strength not to say what he’s going to say, and we can see in his performance the seam become a hairline fracture, and the fracture become a full-on break as he confesses–“she was nothing! Those others were nothing!” Pounder’s performance doesn’t let up there, because you can see Claudette trying so hard not to be relieved, not to let up until she gets a full confession out of him. It works, and in the universe of The Shield, everyone pays. Claudette breaks herself, passing out and crashing down the stairs (the sight of that through the window of the admission cage is one of the most horrifying moments on the show; it happens at a distance, so it looks like it actually happened and we just were in the right place to see it. It’s one of the many ways The Shield perfectly stages events to make them look not staged at all) and leaving the episode to end on Dutch’s horrified face.

Drama cannot be limited by realism. One of the great things about fiction is its capacity to inspire; to show us not simply what we are, but also to show us what we are capable of. One of The Shield’s great assets as a drama is to show us a world that is fully morally populated, one that has heroes, tragic heroes, villains, bystanders, everything. The creators and cast were willing to make these people more than examples; they made them characters with wants and goals and flaws, and set these characters in collision with each other. Claudette remains one of the great inspirational characters I’ve found in stories, right up there with Lars von Trier’s Bess, Quentin Tarantino’s Jules, and Mark’s Apostles. She and The Shield are a reminder of the full range of humanity, and a demonstration that great drama can horrify us, can make us cry, can inspire us, can give us nightmares, but what a great drama can never do is depress us. What great drama affirms, at every moment, is that what we do matters.

Ask to see a hero and I’ll show you Curtis Lemansky. Throw a grenade near any of his buddies, like in “Kavanaugh,” and Lem just goes full Steve Rogers on it and sends it flying back. (By the way, two guys playing catch with a live grenade? That’s maybe the fourth or fifth most intense thing in “Kavanaugh.” That’s what The Shield is like.) Lem is just too damn instinctually good for the Strike Team, and of course, Kavanaugh will grab that and use it, just like he has since “Extraction,” combining sympathy and threat: “you think [Vic] would have picked up that grenade and saved me? That he would save you? I’m giving you one last chance. Give me Vic.” Lem won’t do it; the same instinct (not principle, instinct) that made him grab the grenade keeps him from selling out the Team. Heroes are in danger precisely because of their heroism; doing what’s right makes you incredibly vulnerable if you need to do something wrong to save yourself.

Ask to see a hero and I won’t show you Vic Mackey–but then, as good a definition as any of “tragic hero” is “one flaw away from the real thing.” Vic will do what is right–sort of. To some extent. If certain conditions are met. And so forth. (It’s a version of Kavanaugh’s 98% principle.) You can see that most clearly in his scene with Becca early in “Man Inside”; Kavanaugh continues his strategy and brings Ronnie in, making sure he drops the knowledge of the $65,000 on him. (A nice, quick Shield moment: the cut to Becca there, letting us know she didn’t know. Jay Cocks said that a reaction shot isn’t a cut to a reaction, it’s when the cut itself implies the reaction. Another nice touch: I think the Dude would have told Kavanaugh in that scene “man, could you make your posture a little more professional?”) Vic hasn’t told Becca about that, and she confronts him on it. Chiklis’ performance in this scene, and the writing, is extraordinary, as Vic goes from denial to pride to self-righteousness to honesty to fucking begging in about 90 seconds; it’s the entire arc of Walter White and then some in a single scene. Vic says that the Team stole money “because it was easy,” and that he needs her help to get a second chance “because I can do better.” However, the words “Armenian Money Train” and “heroin” and “I knew Terry was undercover for the Feds” are never mentioned; another chance for Vic to admit he’s evil goes by. By episode’s end, Vic makes something of peace with Corrine, telling her to get her own lawyer and to reveal everything she knows about the money, but also planting a story with her about how he got the money by taking extra overtime and “that’s all you know.” Vic will come clean this far, and no farther; it’s not making “amends,” as he says. He’s also placing Shane, Lem, and Ronnie in greater danger by doing this. Without knowing it, he’s following the rule Shane laid down in “Jailbait,” and violating the rule he stated in the same episode, placing family before team.

Picking up on a discussion from “Jailbait”/”Tapa Boca,” I think we can see pretty clearly here that in Vic’s moral calculus, Vic always comes first. He explicitly chooses family over team here, but implicit in this action is that he will not sacrifice himself. We saw it before in “Back in the Hole,” where he confesses far enough to save Shane and nail Antwon, but not far enough to risk himself. (It’s the nature of tragedy that what he did broke Rawling’s trust in him and furthered IAD’s pursuit, which is why everyone’s at risk right now.) Vic always talks about how they’ll all stand or fall together, he acts to protect his family, but all these actions have a limit: Vic sacrificing himself is just not on the table. The one exception we’ve seen is in season two’s “Scar Tissue,” where he was ready to take the fall over Armadillo, and he was saved by Lem and Shane there. Since then, he’s been able to get away with everything, so when he says to Becca “I’ll deal with the danger later,” he clearly thinks that he will be able to deal with the danger. He still has the hubris to think he can get away with it, so this isn’t really putting anyone ahead of himself.

From the point of view of investigating and building a case, Kavanaugh’s mention of the $65,000 was a stupid move, but at this point he’s using these interrogations to try and fracture the Team. It’s working, too; Vic reveals to the Team that he gave the money to Corrine, and everyone’s pissed at him about that. Twice in the episode the framing places Ronnie, Lem, and Shane on one side of the frame and Vic on the other, and the scenes are shot at eye level so we can see how much shorter Chiklis is–they’re almost crowding him off the screen. By the end of the episode, the three of them are meeting separately from Vic, and Ronnie wants everyone to have their own lawyer. Kavanaugh correctly noted that Ronnie is the one who’s too smart to have the kind of vulnerability that Lem, Shane, or Vic do (Lem still has a heroin charge hanging over him, and Shane and Vic can be targeted for undeclared income), so when Ronnie says that the strategy of is to have four lawyers investigating Kavanaugh instead of just one–well, it might be true. It might also be that Ronnie is ready to cut loose. In “Kavanaugh,” the $65,000 issue gets jacked up another notch as Dutch tells him about the Armenian Money Train. Dutch now thinks that the Team did the heist, and here’s a tiny and unsurprising SPOILER: that’s going to matter.

A lot of critics and writers have called this The Shield’s best season so far, if not its best overall. That’s true, but what’s often missed in that description is why it’s the best. It’s not like Team Shawn Ryan said “gosh, things have been pretty decent around here, but let’s do a great season now”; it’s that they got to a point in the overall story where the chaos and acceleration of season five could plausibly happen, and in fact had to happen. (On the rewatch, it’s clear that every season is exactly what it needs to be.) There are so many events from previous seasons that have kept going, not just the two major plot landmarks of Terry’s death and the Armenian Money Train, but smaller details along the way: Jackson (Mara and Shane’s child), the return of Antwon Mitchell, the two autistic children of Vic and Corrine, Aceveda’s rape by Juan and having Antwon kill him. Even the detail in “Kavanaugh” of Guardo arming the Salvadorans with grenades comes from Rawling and the Team’s takedown of Bonilla at the end of last season. After 54 episodes of preparation, we’ve arrived at the point where Kavanaugh starts investigating and all of these details from the past can (again) plausibly go off, one after the other, and it’s only accelerating as the season moves on, a nonstop yet exactly-timed shitstorm of ownage and emotional detonations, like some hybrid of The Raid and Magnolia.

Everyone gets pulled in. Everyone gets desperate or close to it. There’s less and less time to think, only time to act according to your character. Kavanaugh raises the pressure on everyone, including Aceveda in “Man Inside.” Kavanaugh starts suggesting that Aceveda leaked the information that Terry was undercover, and worse for Aceveda, warns him that he’ll start investigating the death of Juan. Kavanaugh continues his campaign of letting people know that he knows, and pressuring them with it, and Aceveda is the perfect target for that. Everything is happening at once, Aceveda goes from discussing reward money with Vic and Reyes (the officer from Olympic heading up a new task force, played by the great character actor Paul Ben-Victor), to seeing Kavanaugh, to seeing Lem, all done with the swinging camera. He goes straight to Lem, and he’s desperate, almost charging into the observation room after him and offering to “broker a deal. . .one year! One year for all the shit you guys have done!” Kavanaugh’s drive has infected Aceveda, but Vic’s self-righteousness has infected the Team, because now it’s Shane who’s saying “this is about keeping our badges.” It’s another chance to admit you’re evil, and it goes by.

Unique in the entire run of the series, “Kavanaugh” starts away from the main cast, with, well, Kavanaugh. In just a few details and shots, we get a sense of an extreme and unhealthy level of self-control and isolation; again, everyone pays, and whatever makes Kavanaugh so fanatical costs him something. This is where we start to see that. There’s a long shot of him in his home with only the kitchen light on and Whitaker halfway out of the light, shot from above. It’s a David Fincher type of shot, showing not just where he is in the space, but his relation to it–this is a man who’s alone, and barely in the light. Somehow, also, a guy who brushes his teeth before and after his morning ramen has an extreme need to keep himself disciplined. (If you’re into that kind of thing, Kavanaugh shutting off the news from Syria as he wakes up tells you The Shield is not into that kind of thing. This is not a show where the primary focus is on anything but its characters.) The whole sequence closes off with an elegant clue as to the source of Kavanaugh’s need for self-control: a wedding band, perfectly centered in a square, two years after his divorce. He puts it on.

Anthony Anderson is back, and his Antwon and his performance are more powerful than ever. Anderson has such a strong physical presence that confining him to chair gives him even more impact; his voice still has the swaggering cadences of Respect! so it seems like he should be moving. In prison, he’s somehow even more secure as the ruler of the One-Niners, getting anything he wants. Kavanaugh wants information from him, and Antwon states the terms of the deal: make sure the Strike Team does their time at Lompoc with him–make sure, in other words, that he can kill them. Kavanaugh refuses, and Antwon correctly notes that time is not on his side; Antwon is not someone you can bullshit.

“Kavanaugh” and Kavanaugh are all about being caught between loyalties and identities. Shield style communicates this so well, with the camera shifting focus or panning between all the people Kavanaugh attends to over the course of the day. Kavanaugh is a crusader after a dirty cop, but he’s also a cop himself, and the latter identity forces him to team up with Vic and Emolia to pursue a cache of grenades. He also has to continually make sure Emolia is never alone with Vic, and almost pulls it off until Emolia and Vic get isolated after Lem tosses the grenade. (The sound editing there is perfect–we can hear the urgency but not the words in their voices.) Kavanaugh’s biggest source of identity confusion, though, is between being a cop, being a husband, and being an ex-husband.

Gina Torres gives another one of The Shield’s great guest performances as Sadie. One of the remarkable aspects of her work here is that she tamps down her incredible physical presence; she makes herself somehow look smaller and less imposing. She also can slide between extreme moods the way disturbed people do without ever making it seem like different personalities. (When she says at the hospital “don’t keep asking, because at some point I’m gonna say yes,” we believe it, and when she’s begging him at the end, we believe it, and we believe it’s her both times.) Dutch finds out she has a history of mental illness, and it turns out that the rape she reported at the beginning didn’t happen, and she injured herself to get Kavanaugh’s attention.

All the aspects of John Kavanaugh come together in the interrogation room, as Sadie admits what she did and breaks down. All season, as many commenters (medrawt in particular) have noted, Kavanaugh has been getting right into everyone’s personal space and into their lives, and now it’s his turn as Sadie and the camera do the same thing, getting into that space where The Shield lives, where we’re too close to the characters and at an angle that no one you’re not having sex with should ever be. (Only The Passion of Joan of Arc comes close to what this show does.) It’s an utterly horrible scene, the kind where you desperately want to look away but The Shield gives you no other place to look. Both Torres and Whitaker play this scene fully, with their bodies (at one point, they seem to be a second and a half from fucking on the table) and faces, even with their breath. Earlier, when he believed she fought off a rapist, Kavanaugh was her husband, asking her to come home, but now he pulls back to the identity of the ex and the cop, telling her she’ll be charged with filing a false police report. “I’m an Internal Affairs lieutenant, that’s who I am.” (It’s heartless, and if you’ve ever dealt with someone mentally sick, you know it’s necessary.) And all the time, Vic and Lem are watching this (Ronnie clued them into the fact that Kavanaugh still wears the ring last episode)–“at least we found his weak spot.”

If I spend a lot of time in these posts recounting plot, that’s because The Shield does plot so well, and plot is the primary component of tragedy; you’d think by now I’d have learned that when you think things can’t get any crazier, they get twice as crazy. Last season, the gun pointed at Lem got loaded, and Kavanaugh chambered and cocked it in “Extraction.” Now he pulls the trigger. (I saw the end of “Trophy” coming, but this one completely surprised me.) All day, he’s been bouncing between Sadie and the Barn, and keeping the two distinct in his mind, but in the interrogation room, he forgets where he is until Sadie’s “everyone sees what I am. Everyone sees me” snaps him back to awareness. He charges out (I love Vic’s “yep, saw you with the crazy, and damn right I’ll use that” smile) and arrests Lem, commandeering everyone in the Barn he can to do it. (The Barn goes as quiet as it did when Antwon got marched in.) Whitaker’s skinniness, his mismatched eyes, and most of all his contained-hysterical voice make him seem truly demonic. On any other show, this is the season finale, the sort of thing NBC would advertise with a DON’T MISS THE SHOCKING LAST MINUTES! commercial. Here, that’s not even close to the end. Here we have one more scene, as Kavanaugh visits Antwon again, ready to give him what he wants, and we still have three episodes to go.

THE  SPOILERS DISTRICT

There’s a subtle piece of misdirection going all through season five (I’m not even sure “misdirection” is the word, because I don’t know if it’s intentional): Ronnie looks more and more like the one who will break. He’s always been the most pragmatic of the Team’s members, he’s careful, and next episode he’ll suggest that Lem might be talking. It’s a great touch that what he’s doing can be read as rationality or the hint of disloyalty. That he doesn’t flip, that he never considered flipping, shows such understanding of who Ronnie is–rational, merciless, but also loyal. We’re a season away from his biggest revelation of who he is–letting Vic know that he always knew Vic killed Terry–but what makes that moment work so well is that it’s completely consistent with everything we know about Ronnie. That rationality is why Ronnie’s fate is less formally tragic than the others’, but more painful. We can see how Shane’s and Vic’s flaws brought them down, but Ronnie should have made it. Ronnie isn’t tragically flawed, he just made a mistake, extending twelve more hours of trust to Vic than he should have.

Watching the end of “Kavanaugh” fucking hurts because I realize that Lem has maybe four days left to live, tops; more details are getting put in place. If Ronnie is a piece of misdirection, it worked, because with the arrival of the grenades Shane now has possession of the murder weapon. (Next season we find out that Shane took the grenade before he logged them all into evidence. EDIT: as thefncrow noted, I am most likely wrong here.) Shane already knows that desperate measures might be needed in the future if he’s going to save his family.

I don’t think Vic consciously puts his own interests above everyone else’s, and that’s part of what drives the tragedy. Vic takes risks because he always thinks he can get away with it, but he doesn’t do what Claudette does in “Man Inside” or what Lem does in “Of Mice and Lem” (two episodes hence), which is to deliberately, definitely get hurt. Claudette makes herself sicker (and most likely shortens her life) in pursuit of justice, and Lem decides to go to prison. I have no doubt that Vic would risk both, nor do I have any doubt that he’d try and get out of both. That’s not putting others above yourself, though; to link up two clichés, if you want to take a bullet for someone, you can’t try and dodge it.

Fascinating that Vic has three big confessions in the course of the series, all to women; on the first two (to Rawling and to Becca) he holds back. It’s only when Olivia Murray can give a grant of total immunity, give him the freest pass possible, that he’s able to confess everything. Right there is the whole arc of a tragic character: only when he’s caused the maximum amount of destruction can he truly recognize who he is. What makes so many of the events in The Shield happen is that Vic doesn’t recognize; you can really see that in this season and in season seven, but it goes through the whole series. One way you can define Vic’s tragic flaw in “Man Inside”: he still thinks a second chance is possible; he thinks there’s a way to say “I can do better” without falling all the way down first. Vic passes up or talks the Team out of chance after chance to walk away with lesser damage, because he’s always sure that he can get away with it (hubris) and that he deserves to get away with it (self-righteousness), until finally everyone and everything except Vic’s bare existence has been destroyed. Again, this is part of classical tragedy; it’s why the conclusion of classical tragedy isn’t reversal but recognition. Unlike the rationalists of the Enlightenment, the ancients knew that there were things about who we are that we don’t know about, and drama is a series of incidents constructed to bring the protagonist into a confrontation with himself. (This idea comes back in the modern world; you can see strict Freudian and Jungian therapies as ways of getting people to recognize themselves without going through all the unpleasantness and damage of tragedy.) We’re seeing Vic’s (and Shane’s) reversal here, but he hasn’t yet been brought to recognize that he created all of this, and how.

Speaking of recognition: Kleavon’s return in season seven was one of its most plausible and welcome developments. Kleavon was just too smart not to be a jailhouse lawyer (he shows up with full documentation, as I remember) and to use Claudette’s illness as leverage to get out of the death penalty. It also allowed Ray Campbell to show a new layer to his performance, showing us a Kleavon who was at peace with himself. It was different from what we saw in season four, where he was always concealing something; he was confident then but also damaged. Season seven’s Kleavon was actually relaxed because he was fully honest with himself, and for the first time could be honest with others about himself. That made his last moment with Dutch just perfect, looking at the tape of Kyle and saying he’d seen that look before. “Where?” “. . .the mirror.”

Previous: “Trophy”/”Rap Payback”
Next: “Smoked”/”Of Mice and Lem”

Shawn Ryan and Forest Whitaker made this the key to Kavanaugh’s character: this is a man who feeds on defeat. It’s not simply that every time Vic escalates, Kavanaugh escalates back; it’s not a matter of you-just-pissed-him-off. It’s that when Kavanaugh gets completely humiliated as he is at the end of “Trophy,” he somehow gets stronger, calmer, more powerful. His affability and charm get burned off and he retreats within himself, giving away less, his smile looking more and more like a shark’s. Even the moment at the end where Kavanaugh keeps listening to Vic saying “we’ll beat IAD again next year” feels like a deliberate self-torture, a mental flagellation, or maybe even a bizarre way of psyching himself up. Then when he blows up and trashes the motel room, it’s scary because there’s such precision in the movements, like his earlier kata with the pen. (Whitaker has actually trained in martial arts, I think as far back as Ghost Dog.) It’s like his spirit has gone absolutely berserk but it’s still filtered through a disciplined body. Whitaker consciously chose to lose weight throughout the shooting of the season, and you can already see the effects in “Trophy,” but in “Rap Payback” it’s really apparent, the cuddly guy who we first met in “Extraction” disappearing and replaced with someone feral but still under tremendous self-control.

Mr. Nowalk, loopcloses, Aceveda, and others have noted that Kavanaugh doesn’t know what he’s up against in the early episodes–but with “Trophy,” he gets it, and with “Rap Payback,” the battle is joined. Perfect Circles observed last week that “this season is like a fucking John le Carré novel,” and that’s exactly right, because in “Rap Payback” Kavanaugh pulls a classic George Smiley move: stop keeping things secret, stop investigating and waiting for the target to do something wrong, and go on offense. (In The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley says “we declare an interest in his affairs,” and Connie says “light a fire on his doorstep and see which way he runs.” Smiley, though, was more likely to find the target’s one weakness and go after that rather than engage in Kavanaugh-style all-out assault.) Raise the pressure on everyone–Corrine, Danny, Aceveda, Vic, Shane, the Team, the Barn, everyone. Put Terry’s picture up where everyone can see it. Take over Billings’ office (goodbye couch, you were good). Threaten Danny over her affair with Vic and then reveal it to Corrine.  (The rest of the Corrine/Kavanaugh scene deserves its own essay.)  Have the Strike Team’s clubhouse doors removed, for the sake of fuck. Make everyone come in and sign off that they’re under investigation, including Aceveda. (Great detail: of course Shane will go in without a lawyer.) Raise the pressure on everyone and someone will break. (“Even his IAD buddies are surprised by this move,” Becca says.) Compare the end of “Trophy” with the end of “Rap Payback,” and you can see it’s already working: the team that was in their private space and celebrating with some Southern Comfort has been forced out in the open, gazing up at the man they’d completely defeated one episode ago, and not knowing what he’s gonna do next. Neither do we.

Everything in “Trophy” goes the Strike Team’s way. I don’t know if we were meant to be faked out like Kavanaugh; even on the first viewing, it seems just a little too easy the way the Team is walking right into Kavanaugh’s trap. It seems a little too easy that the Team wouldn’t know the clubhouse was bugged–Vic says at the end that Ronnie sweeps the clubhouse for bugs every day, and in fact we saw him do that in “Enemy of Good.” Benito Martinez’ face generates a lot of the tension in this episode, because he seems like he can never quite believe this will get the Team. What’s important, though, is it’s absolutely believable that it would fool Kavanaugh, because partnering up with the Russians to maintain quality control on illegal prescription drugs is just what the old-school Strike Team would do. (In a very season four moment, Aceveda points out that a lot of Farmington’s residents can’t afford the drugs legally.) When Kavanaugh comes charging in to arrest the Team, and Vic reveals what’s going on, the staging places Whitaker dead center in all of it and he just doesn’t move at all as everyone just swirls around him. (Vic does a nice kiss-of-death moment of laying his hand on Aceveda’s arm on the way out.)

For all the triumph of “Trophy,” Vic commits one major fuckup: he doesn’t tell Becca what he’s doing, having a conversation with her in front of Kavanaugh’s microphone as part of stinging him. He’ll continue to not tell her things in “Rap Payback,” leaving out that little detail that, oh yeah, Kavanaugh’s investigating him for the death of Terry Crowley. Vic’s hubris and his self-righteousness are converging here, and it’s causing trouble for Becca. He still thinks he can get away with anything, and he still won’t admit he’s evil; he won’t even admit how evil others think he are. At the end of “Rap Payback,” Becca doesn’t look at Vic the same way she used to, and she says “right now, I have no clue about who the hell you really are.” It’s an echo of the end of “Back in the Hole,” where Vic got out of a major jam on the surface but lost Rawling’s trust in the process. (There’s a brief callback to her in “Trophy” when Vic says “she was trying to warn me, I didn’t listen”; MRobespierre2 correctly noted that somehow she’s now called Rawlings.)

Where the Vic/Becca partnership runs into trouble, the Dutch/Claudette relationship heals, with Dutch deciding to stop pestering Claudette about her health (I’M SORRY. I’LL STOP.) and Claudette opening up to him: she’s had lupus for 15 years and she’s going through a recurrence right now. Touchingly, she says to Dutch “I just need you to be you”; it’s a rare moment for Claudette to show any kind of need, and we can see Dutch’s gratitude. It’s a good thing too that they get their partnership working, because in the next episode, oh shit, Kleavon’s sister Fatima shows up with a bloody shirt.

Dutch doesn’t trust Claudette enough, though, taking Fatima home and doing an impromptu search where he finds Kleavon’s death kit, and can’t do anything else because oh fuck Kleavon shows up. What follows is a supremely effective suspense scene, made all the better by The Shield’s absence of inflection in the shooting style. (It helps, too, that there’s no background music.) There’s the perfect timing of Kleavon coming in through one door as Dutch hides in the closet and an amazing shot of Kleavon and Fatima foregrounded with Dutch framed in the background. Most of all, there’s Ray Campbell’s incredible performance, first in the way he effortlessly bosses Fatima around (just that scene in the kitchen tells you how Fatima has been able to overlook what he does for so long) and then later, with Fatima missing, the way he paces the interrogation room. CCH Pounder matches him, displaying Claudette’s iron will, and it looks like that will pushes Kleavon to break and kill another woman–and cut her hair to resemble Claudette’s. Season five just ramps up on all fronts.

Tina continues a mix of learning and fucking up here; the fuckup is promising a Mexican that he won’t get deported if he testifies against a woman who made him dig a grave. (Favorite guest performances this week from Jennifer Echols and Ernestine Phillips as the housemates; Phillips in particular perfectly embodies the Shield “shit just happened” attitude to crime.) But “the Dutchman’s got a plan,” and he has Tina and the guy just stand outside the door of the interrogation room as an assist in breaking Shonda. Tina can charm Dutch, but not Julien; her attempts to do the latter result in a disastrous moment as she tells him she’s cool with Julien being gay. (Billings let her know but left out the little detail about Julien’s self-hating homophobia. Speaking of whom, he’s pretty damn useless in these episodes, bossing Danny around, ignoring tips about lethal drugs, and way more concerned with interior decoration than anything else.) That’s about the last thing you ever want to say to Julien and it leaves her in a worse position than before.

A few more goodies in these episodes: Tina’s eye-roll at Dutch’s lame joke on seeing the dead, wrapped body, shot so that we can see it but he can’t; in “Rap Payback,” wannabe gangsta Casper’s rise with Bop Street (“can’t argue with the free market” is a very Wire-like line); Kavanaugh just before the raid in “Trophy,” his face filling half the frame, and then the quick zoom-out to show the rest of his crew getting ready; the LA-style urban-rural interface where the Team finds Kang in “Rap Payback” (he’s the one who tries to escape and gets slashed on a barbed-wire fence); and the camera floating between Vic, Shane, and Becca in the clubhouse conversation in “Trophy,” occasionally locking on one of them. It’s the same strategy Tarantino used at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, but so much more intense here. Also, an overall storytelling move that traces its origins in cop shows back to Hill Street Blues, maybe to Barney Miller: the overlapping and colliding plots. There’s always so much going on at the Barn, and all at once; what The Shield does is crank up the speed of that, so that scenes don’t really end but get stepped on by the beginning of the next scene.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

So many things in these episodes set things up for or get referenced later: the Vic/Kavanaugh standoff at the end of “Trophy” anticipates them fighting at the very end of the season; Vic and Danny’s conversation about their child (at that moment, I’m pretty sure they both know but neither is ready to say it to each other); the rat trap (there are 19 others out on the street) and the guy (Joe Carmano) who doesn’t want his wife to know about it; the vending machines, not yet revealed to be Billings’ (one of the funniest lines in the entire series is Billings’ “I think this is a gray area”); Claudette getting under Kleavon’s skin; and most touchingly, Claudette saying to Dutch “I just need you to be you,” which anticipates her last line to him, when she knows she’s going to die: “you just keep doing what you do. It means a lot.” A lot of commenters (K. Thrace and more recently amb among them) have noted that Dutch and Claudette are the examples of good cops in the Barn; they’re the example of a good relationship too.

Previous: “Jailbait”/”Tapa Boca”
Next: “Man Inside”/”Kavanaugh”

Drama, as we’ve seen in these episodes, isn’t about portrayal, but rather revelation. It’s about taking the characters to places where they reveal things that might even surprise themselves. When there are revelations, there’s always the risk that trust will be put in jeopardy, as other characters find out things that they didn’t know before; it’s why so many dramas set up their reversals in terms of changes in trust. These two episodes are nearly perfect in their dramatic form, and in pushing relationships to the point where they transform, possibly irrevocably.

“String Theory” begins this with the death of Carl and Scooby. (Go back through the season, they’ve been there from the first scene. Scooby is the one who shot the dog.) The scenes about them–their disappearance, the cops meeting on the dark street (this sequence, opening the episode, is beautiful, with long shots of the neighborhood and the city, and the sounds of wind and chimes), finding the bodies (the information comes through a hooker), meeting Carl’s wife–show how The Shield solves the problem of showing the impact of the asset forfeiture program but still keeps the focus on the police. We see the impact by seeing the blowback; Carl’s wife says “what you’re doing here in Farmington got him killed. You need to know that.” It’s not a subtle moment, and it shouldn’t be. It’s not a lesson for the audience; it’s a reversal that Rawling has to recognize.

Rawling (and by extension, the police) have gone much farther than simply losing the trust of the community. They’ve made what Machiavelli considers the greatest mistake a ruler can make, they’ve created hatred among their subjects “by being rapacious and aggressive with regard to [their] property” and are now susceptible to conspiracies among the people (The Prince, chapter 19). Rawling now has to face a world where everyone is a potential enemy, and by the end of “String Theory,” it’s breaking into a series of battles between citizens and police, with four squad cars shot at (including Aceveda’s and Danny’s), Farmington police trashing a store, and signs saying TWO DOWN WHO’S NEXT?

It’s something we’ve now seen in all four seasons, especially in the last two. The Shield really doesn’t endorse the Vic/Rawling styles of policing; like all great storytelling, it simply shows the consequences. The consequences are that yes, you can catch bad guys this way, but you also create chaos and destroy order. You can put away Antwon for 13 years by planting drugs on him, as Rawling’s former partner (and lover) did, but he’ll come back on a mission of vengeance. You can start seizing people’s houses, but then cops put in bids on cars and you have a community that hates you, with no one who will help but a homeless guy with his synapses misfiring. You might achieve the (very dramatically satisfying) goal of justice, but you’ll destroy the classical goal of a society, which is order.

Much of the revelations and consequences about these episodes center around the Shane/Antwon/Strike Team plot that’s been going all season, and blew up at the end of “Cut Throat.” When the Strike Team comes back at the beginning of “String Theory,” it’s to hear Shane’s confession, and their reactions are a great little anthology of their characters. Shane is in so much pain as he says these things–for the first time in the series, he’s truly humbled. Lem is instinctively enraged, Vic stressing his friendship and trust with Shane in a leader’s mode, arguing that he knows Shane better than anyone. Ronnie, ever pragmatic, wants to hear more before deciding.

“String Theory” is all setup, with two searches moving at different paces: the Strike Team has to retrieve Angie’s body and the Barn has to find Carl and Scooby, and then find their killer. The first search is quick and the second agonizingly slow, with each search making the other more intense. Each search runs into snags and mistakes–dump over a portable toilet and there’s no Angie underneath (that shot of literal shit literally flowing everywhere is so depressing); Roger, the witness to Carl and Scooby being taken, has lost most of his mind, and Dutch and Claudette have to work him carefully to dig out what he knows. (Some great acting from Joel Stoffer; there are scenes where Roger is clearly trying to say what he knows, and can’t find the way to do it. Also, some geek pedantry from me: although he’s supposed have been a particle physicist–hence “string theory”–most of his language suggests a background in geology.) Dutch and Claudette keep missing details, too, like the jeweler’s name and the initials on the back of the necklace. (It’s a really effective moment when the original owner of the necklace gets hauled in and we find that it was stolen, he reported it, and no one gave a shit until now. Once again, the Barn has lost the trust of Farmington, and with good reason.) And, crucially, Lem reveals to Rawling that Antwon will be flying in from Vegas; one of the things that makes The Shield so good in its storytelling is that when people make mistakes, they make mistakes in character. Lem can only lie if he’s had a chance to get ready for it.

With cops headed to the LA airport to get Antwon and bring him in for questioning, Vic diverts him to Burbank and picks him up, and offers to deal with him. When he brings Antwon in, Rawling says (again, with her smile) “I’ve got a couple of aces up my sleeve,” and it’s chilling, because why wouldn’t she? We realize, in that moment, that we’ve been tracking Vic and Shane keeping things from each other all this time, and keeping things from Rawling, so why wouldn’t she keep things from them? (The writers carefully planted this idea in “The Cure” that Rawling doesn’t tell everything.) At the end of “String Theory,” we head into the interrogation room with Rawling, Antwon, and Vic, three characters in a small room, all holding secrets, with a great closing moment of Rawling saying “Thanks for coming in, Antwon” and a closing shot of Vic shifting his gaze to Rawling. Shit just got real.

“Back in the Hole” was The Shield’s first extended episode, at about an hour of actual time instead of the usual basic-cable standard 47 minutes. (The producers would use this sparingly–there are only three more extended episodes, all at the end of seasons.) “String Theory” had a double search; this episode has a double interrogation, of Antwon and Kleavon, the suspected killer from San Antonio. (There’s also the continuing search for Angie’s body.) The interrogations often put three characters (or elements–when Shane is in the room with Antwon, Shane’s gun is the third element) in the room, which create a lot of opportunities for expressive editing. These are scenes where every look and cut counts, and it matters that you have such incredible faces (Close, Chiklis, Karnes, Pounder, Goggins, Anderson, and Campbell) to cut to. One thing that editor Hunter Via does here is cut to the third person in the room listening/witnessing, and we’re led to wonder “what’s he/she thinking or planning?” It’s another way that The Shield uses the elements of film craft to advance the story. (The skill here compares to the great three-character conversation towards the end of Seven, the one that takes place in the car.)

We’ve seen, all season, how far Rawling is willing to go; here we see she’ll go even farther, throwing down pictures of Antwon’s son getting fucked in a prison shower, taunting him with memories of being a child while his sister was raped, and threatening to transfer his son to Folsom (incredible reactive acting and tears from Anderson here, and it looks like he actually punches that wall, hard–there’s a mark there), and continually coming back to the line “who killed our cops?” A criticism of The Shield that’s not just shallow, but wrong, is that Vic is the cliché of the cop Who Will Do Anything to catch the bad guy, but one thing The Shield actually does is repeatedly confront Vic with characters who go farther than him. Antwon fires back with Rawling’s past, her affair with the cop who planted drugs on him, and hints about Shane and Angie.

With Vic stuck in the interrogation of Antwon, the rest of the Team (Army has now been deputized into them) continues the search for Angie, which runs into a comic and believable fuckup–Pitarrio gave up that she had been moved and buried in Griffith Park “by the horses,” but he didn’t mean the stables. Lem goes back and finds out he meant by the merry-go-round (“you know, the horses that go up and down!”) Some great touches in that scene: when Lem starts throwing punches, you know it’s gotten serious; the way Onahoua Rodriguez as his girlfriend raises her hands (you can see she’s done that before, a lot); and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot where she sees Lem take the heroin as collateral, per Vic’s instructions.

The team goes back, but they’re too late. Antwon passed the information through his lawyer to his people to reveal Angie’s burial (although it’s flat-out stupid that Antwon would think covering the camera would keep anyone from hearing that, I’ll give it a pass because as Vic recognizes, his people would have likely done this anyway) and the cops are already digging when they get back. (Painful and effective staging as one by one, the other Team members drive off and leave Shane alone.)

Shane has now been brought to a moment of recognition, the classical moment of self-revelation, where you discover that you have authored your own misfortune. He’s in the same place Vic was two seasons ago in “Scar Tissue.” Shane’s plan is simple–he’ll kill Antwon, since if he’s going away for murder, why not have it be him? The Shane/Antwon/gun scene in interrogation is even more tense than Rawling/Antwon/Vic, with Shane’s taunts getting more and more vicious (and the shots of the gun emphasizing what might happen). Goggins does things with his accent that are amazing; one thing that always happens is it gets more Southern whenever he’s in the presence of a black man, and he uses that.

“Back in the Hole” keeps the same idea as “Scar Tissue” but reverses the characters, with Vic bailing out Shane, and Vic does something absolutely unprecedented: “you don’t get out of this by getting dirtier.” They’re going to confess to Rawling, all of it, and use the tape of Antwon ordering the hit on Vic to bring down Antwon. It’s a revelation of Vic’s character on multiple levels: it’s partly based on the genuine trust he’s established with Rawling, and the way he wants to work with her, something he never did or could do with Aceveda; it’s also based on calculation, that Rawling wants Antwon badly enough that she’ll go for it; it’s his way of bringing the Strike Team back together (“so we survive it together or not at all”); and it’s Vic, once again, coming up with a scheme no one else could.

While all this has been going on, Aceveda brings Sara to a motel room. He’s drinking, he’s been traumatized by seeing Carl and Scooby stabbed to death, and he crashes down even farther with her, pulling his gun on her and playing the role of Juan–it’s a great bit of dialogue or acting that he yells “you ever suck a dick?” and then pauses before “like a cell bitch?” as if some part of his brain reminded him to complete the line. Calling back to the end of “Mum,” he drops the gun and throws up–remember he couldn’t make himself throw up after being raped.

I cannot praise enough the writing of Sara here, or Abby Brammell’s performance, which is a case study in how to craft a minor character with maximum impact. When she shows up, she’s both professional, and professionally warm, re-establishing the rule with Aceveda; after he attacks her, she’s scared but she also recognizes how much his anger and violence are rooted in pain. (It’s something she’d have a lot of experience with.) She is never a victim here and she clearly has her own code, so when she says to him “you’re a good person” and he lashes back with “a good person wouldn’t be here with you,” Aceveda’s the one I see as an utter asshole. (His GET OUT! is the most out-of-control moment in the whole scene.) So when Aceveda comes home to Aurora, there’s no sense that everything has been put right, any more than Julien’s no longer gay. There’s just a sense that whatever happens now, happens with Aceveda at home. By the way, I’ve noted that Aurora gets a lot of shit from fans and from Mr. Nowalk, but she is absolutely loyal. She simply has a limit in that she couldn’t offer Aceveda the sympathy he needed. I don’t have a problem with that because any marriage is about knowing your partner’s limits, and accepting them; and also because, as David Mamet sez, drama is about people bravely contending with themselves.

The other major event of this episode is the Claudette/Dutch/Kleavon interrogation, and it’s as great as the others. We see, piece by piece, Dutch and Claudette put together what happened, and put together how they’re going to break Kleavon; we see how each beat impacts him, or doesn’t (Ray Campbell does such subtle, effective things with his face; I will repeat ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER’s observation that even his role in Breaking Bad was beneath him.) There’s some great staging, too, with Dutch and Claudette often in the same posture (hands on desk, facing forward) as they go after him.

In the end, it’s Dutch who has to go up against him (Claudette catches the slightest change in Kleavon’s face) and it’s scary as Dutch details the experience of killing; he reveals that he’s been thinking about this way too much. Honestly, the way Dutch rapturously says “you used gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, but also for a surer grip” is more disturbing than most of Hannibal, because it’s something happening in a real space. Dutch gets so lost in his imagining of killing (another great beat of staging–he’s not looking at Kleavon) that he starts bungling the details of his and Claudette’s story (and Claudette catches that immediately) and blows it. Campbell very smartly doesn’t play the moment as AHA! but as his brain finding a logical detail to focus on rather than remember strangling the woman. Kleavon goes home, but Dutch and Claudette have damaged his sister Fatima’s trust in him–“deep down, you know we’re right.” And they know that once the trust is damaged, the relationship can never be the same again. (Great work by JJ Boone at the end, and really all throughout–she’s trying so hard to hold on to that trust.)

We see the same thing with Rawling and the Strike Team. Vic’s plan works–confronted with the tape (and Rawling lying that she ordered it), Antwon confesses to ordering the hit on Vic and killing Angie and he’s going away. Even if he doesn’t give up the details on Carl and Scooby, claiming to Rawling he doesn’t know and taunting Vic by saying he does know. The Team is back together and doing great (“after what we pulled off today, a polygraph’s a piece of cake!”), with plans to go shake down Farmington for information, “Strike Team-style,” which means, of course, more antagonism and bad blood among the citizens.

There’s a cost, and they don’t know it yet: they’ve lost Rawling’s trust. The drama has pushed people to actions they’ve never taken before, and it’s also taken bonds of trust and broken them. It comes out in the action and the performances. Pauline Kael once called Alec Guinness (God rest ‘em both) “a peerless miniaturist–the eyelids drop a millimeter, and the meaning changes.” Glenn Close, here, does the same kind of acting. After Vic’s revelation, her face is just a little tighter, her voice three percent colder. It all sets up the crucial beat at the end–the IAD officer has found nothing, but she tells him to stay on Vic. “Are you sure?” “I wish I wasn’t.” Rawling began the season not knowing if she could trust Vic. Now she knows she can’t.

THE  SPOILER DISTRICT

This season is a master class in careful plotting and setting things up. (Kleavon, of course, will be back, as will his sister Fatima, and the line “now get in there and close him!”) Mamet noted the similarities between playwriting and running a long con; the common element in both cases is giving information without appearing to do so. What Team Shawn Ryan here has been doing is building to moments that are strong consequences from the characters’ choices, but don’t look like anything at first glance. Almost as a throwaway line, Vic tells Lem to make sure he gets some collateral; and the shot of his girlfriend seeing Lem take the heroin is almost literally a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. That heroin, of course, will be the leverage that Kavanagh uses against Lem at the beginning of next season.

The other thing that makes that happen is Rawling directing the IAD officer to “stay on Mackey.” A lot of people have complained that Vic always gets out of whatever jam he’s in, but to do so misses how tragedy operates. For Vic not to get away with things isn’t tragedy, but failure; what makes him a tragic figure is that he seals his fate by succeeding. That’s demonstrated so clearly here. Vic’s plan to turn things around by coming clean is, in part, his attempt to put his past behind him, and I believe it’s genuine. What makes it tragic is that’s the act that breaks Rawling’s trust in him, which leads to the IAD officer getting the brick of heroin, which sets everything else in motion. Because Vic will not admit he’s evil, because he tries to be good, he sets in motion the acts that will bring everyone down. (If Shane kills Antwon, he goes to jail, and Mara, Jackson, and Lem are all alive, Ronnie stays out of prison, and Vic is most likely still on the force.)

Previous: “Hurt”/”Cut Throat”
Next: “A Thousand Deaths”/”Judas Priest”

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of The Shield is its quality of mercilessness, in its characters, in its storytelling, even in its style. This is not a show where conflicts get shoved aside or sublimated into something else; this isn’t a show where a protagonist gets to pause, reflect, and say “and those consequences. . .they’re coming.” That’s a great line, and a great moment (if you don’t recognize it, I won’t spoil it), but on The Shield, the consequences are never coming, they are already here, and characters aren’t anticipating those consequences, they’ve already happened and everyone’s trying to catch up.

The mercilessness hits in the first seconds of “Tar Baby,” with the sounds of a woman screaming and pleading through a rape. (The use of the credits cutting between the action has never been more effective; it gives a reason to break the action into glimpses while the sound keeps going.) It’s only gradually revealed that this is Aceveda and Sara, and it’s a performance on both parts, as Sara coolly and professionally gets him to back off. (“I told you, no bruises.”) Somehow, when the sex starts up again, her cries are no less scary. There’s an equally cool and professional moment from her as she appraises his “gift” and insists on a receipt next time, and another one from him as he leaves, rejecting the moment of sympathy she offers him. There’s no implication from Sara that this is a romantic relationship, just a sense of kindness, and Aceveda rejects that too.

The asset forfeiture program continues in these episodes, and Rawling shows no mercy in applying it. The Shield’s characters aren’t supersmart or supercompetent in the mode of action heroes; they’re limited in their actions, but within those limits, they’ll pursue their ends all the way. When she explains the program to the community in the church, or to reporters, she might throw in a joke but there’s no attempt to hide what she’s doing. (It now extends to arresting gang members if they hang out with each other, another tactic used by the non-fictional LAPD.) If she has to go into a church looking for drugs or suspects, she’ll do it, and hope it turns out well. Rawling also shows no mercy in protecting her detectives; when she finally has the showdown with the ADA over Claudette and Dutch, Rawling’s completely willing to start tanking cases if they’re not taken off the bench. (Neat little reaction from Anna Maria Horsford as she realizes that’s exactly what will happen.) Close works that smile of hers overtime in these episodes; she always lets you know that she’s using you, and she always does it in the most friendly way possible.

When Rawling opens up to the community about the asset forfeiture program in a church at the beginning of “Tar Baby” (a church will play a role in “Insurgents” too), we see Aceveda’s plan revealed. He got her to call this meeting so he could publicly denounce the program, and in front of the community. (Sorry, Captain, but you just got Aceveda’d. BOOM!) Great, tricky Shield staging in the church with Aceveda, Antwon, Rawling, and Julien at the four corners of a squashed diamond; it creates a lot of opportunities for pans between the characters, with the camera following the attention of the crowd. Aceveda’s goodbye line to Rawling is pretty merciless too: “Learn to do what I say and we’ll be just fine” (there’s another character who could say that, soon enough).

“Tar Baby” centers around a takedown of a drug operation. It’s set up with some excellent camerawork, following the surveillance of Vic and Lem as they identify who’s who; this sets up, among other things, the great moment when Vic appears behind one of the lookouts. The raid itself feels slower and more professional than a lot of scenes like this, with everyone knowing what to do and executing it. Rawling continues her professional and merciless work, as she declares an emergency to evacuate the block in the search for Freebo, and a father gets into a fistfight with Julien as a result. It’s another day of occupation, of the LAPD getting into the homes and into the faces of civilians, and it nets “the largest cache of black tar heroin in Farmington history.” Rawling knows all this, and accepts it. Julien doesn’t, and that sends him to collaborate with Aceveda. (Aceveda reminds him of what happened last time; Julien might be married, but his homosexuality doesn’t stop having consequences.)

Maybe there’s some mercy in the arc of Dutch and Claudette here. Claudette finds out about Dutch’s deal, because of course she was going to; there’s no universe in which she doesn’t eventually realize what’s going on. Their story here takes them through a fight (“it was my fight” “AND YOU LOST!”), silence, and maybe it’s reconciliation we see in “Insurgents,” with the camera cutting between them isolated in the listening post, surrounded by a lot of negative space, especially Claudette. Shawn Ryan has called Dutch and Claudette “a non-sexual love story,” and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here: two lovers who’ve betrayed each other, who acknowledge that, and realize that they still do love each other. CCH Pounder loads so much exhaustion into the line “I can’t believe you sold me out” that we realize how much it cost Claudette to freeze out Dutch.

An aside: there’s a procedural aspect to The Shield, but it’s not a procedural like Law and Order or its many spinoffs and predecessors. What makes it different is that the actual details of the crimes take very little of our time or attention; crimes usually get dealt with quickly here and are part of the working life of the Barn. The focus is always on the emotions and behavior of the characters here, within and without the Barn. In “Tar Baby,” Lily Knight gets a great beat as she confesses and realizes that she’ll have to say goodbye to her father (“just. . .be gentle”; much negative space around her too) Crimes aren’t puzzles here to be solved, but stories of what people do. It’s part of the broad moral universe of The Shield that people do horrific things for a variety of reasons.

Lem is also a place of mercy in the world of The Shield. Four seasons in, the value of Lem in the story becomes even greater. He’s the guy who never should have been on the Strike Team in the first place, a decent, empathetic man who became a cop out of a need to care rather than to dominate. It makes sense that this guy would work with kids; he’s protective as he introduces Angie, who will lead them to her mom, which leads them to the location of the drug operation. (Excellent, quick work from Bree’ana Banks as Angie and Fylicia King as her mom.) Kenneth Johnson plays Lem as someone instinctive rather than calculating (this is an especially strong contrast to Vic), someone whose first thought is to protect people, and that has always brought him into conflict with the other members of the Strike Team.

All of this is setup for the terrifying final moments of “Tar Baby,” where the season turns. The drug operation was Antwon’s, and Shane couldn’t warn him in time. All through these first episodes, Antwon has been all menace, all threat; whatever he’s done has been offscreen. (He wasn’t announced as a villain the same way Armadillo was in the first seconds of season two.) Shane has been acting like a boss this whole time with him, always demanding, always cocky. Now, finally, as Vic would say, Antwon doesn’t step aside, he steps up, and shoots Angie dead. (Two bullets from Shane’s gun, two from Army’s.) Leaning over Shane (and we see him from Shane’s perspective), the line is so good and so brutal, because there’s so much conviction and even delight in Anderson’s delivery: “one time, doing time, for a long, long time.” (It has the same cadence as his opening speech on Respect! but slower.) The problem with your mercilessness is that you have limits, and one day you’ll run into someone who doesn’t have your limits. And now what do you do?

If you’re Shane, now you don’t know what to do. Part of what makes Walton Goggins a great actor is his ability to play not just extremes of emotion, but all the shades in between. All through “Insurgents,” Antwon shows no mercy; Shane’s a “bitch with a badge doing my bidding.” Shane’s desperate, and trying so damn hard to conceal it, Everything he’s saying is just slightly heightened, trying to convince Army (and himself) that there will be a way to fix things. Of course, now, it’s not just Antwon he has to deal with, but an enraged Lem who comes after him after Angie’s disappearance, and (although Shane doesn’t know it yet), Vic and Ronnie, who’ve bugged his car.

The density of The Shield’s plotting, as ever, creates great scenes, because there are moments when all the plots pile on top of each other. Outside the church in “Insurgents,” Vic and Ronnie are trying to grab one of Antwon’s men, Burdice, and Shane and Army can’t let that happen because of Angie. So Army runs their car into Burdice’s and tells him to shut up, outside of Vic and Ronnie’s sight but within Shane’s. (We’re seeing here that Army knows the stakes too and is going proactive.) All this in sight of the reverend, who tells Rawling “stay out of my church!” The scene takes 30 seconds and collides three plots and seven characters.

The Garage Sting’s surveillance cameras open and close these episodes, appropriate and effective for a series that’s all about people watching people. The opening is, let’s be clear, classic Shield–what we all (justly) remember is hungry like the WOOOOOOLLLLLLLF, but Dutch’s awkwardness is even more painful, and the blow-off line “I have to be in Kansas City” has got to be one of the worst humiliations ever. The moment gets followed with Vic telling Dutch to be “hungry. Like a wolf”–blink and you’ll miss the precise staging of Shane and Ronnie watching. It gets further followed in “Insurgents,” with Vic yelling at Dutch that he took Vic’s daughter to the hospital “just to make me look like a prick in front of my ex!” and Dutch quite calmly saying “I’m sure your ex doesn’t need any help from me in seeing what a prick you are.” (That he has a date with Corrine had to help him there.) Love Vic’s reaction–what happened to the guy whose best line used to be “pussy said yes plenty”? (And another moment when plots collide, as Rawling calls him away before he can do anything about it.)

The closing of “Insurgents” shows us just how crazy things have gotten; a season that started with the pace of The Wire has now gone full Shield. Surveilling Shane’s car reveals to Vic and Ronnie just how far Shane has gone with Antwon. Lem has to come back, but under Vic’s terms–he’ll have to conceal what he knows about Shane. Shane isn’t running things anymore, he isn’t even pretending to, he’s just trying to find Angie’s body and scramble out from under Antwon’s control. The remnants of the Strike Team are now set up against Shane; there’s no attempt anymore to bring him back. The conflicts are all drawn clearly for us, and we know how little these players will back down. It’s on.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

New viewers don’t know it yet, but they’ve met the greatest serial killer in all of fiction: Kleavon. Most contemporary serial killers are descendants of the 19th-century tradition of the criminal mastermind: killers who create elaborate, complex schemes and carry them through, and who exist largely so that the main character of the detective has a worthy scheme to figure out. More recently (Thomas Harris is the best current example), serial killers have been loaded with complex psychologies. Their schemes are just as complex but now they have backstories for what they do, and what they do has some kind of meaning; the detective now has to figure out not just the means of the scheme but the purpose too. (It’s to Bryan Fuller’s great credit in Hannibal that he takes this idea and runs with it as far as he can possibly go, turning the entire show, including the surface of sounds and images, into a dense psychological fantasy.)

Kleavon has none of that. He has exactly two defining attributes: he kills women who remind him of his mother, and he’s smart enough to not get caught. That’s it. That’s the benefit of The Shield’s focus on drama: it throws away anything that doesn’t advance the plot, and then lets the actors take the character from there. It’s not a paradox that because we know less, the character becomes more realistic; drama isn’t meant to show us a complete person, it’s meant to show us a person at the moment of drama. (One more time, from Aristotle: the subject of drama is action, not character.) Kleavon isn’t there to demonstrate some psychological theory or to give Claudette and Dutch a puzzle to solve; he’s one more person in the story. Because of that, like all The Shield’s characters, he comes off as a real person.

From his first scene, Ray Campbell is phenomenal; he’s the smartest person we’ve ever seen in the interrogation room, and he lets us know that Kleavon is going to be next to impossible to break. That scene felt a lot like John Carroll Lynch as Arthur Leigh Allen in Zodiac, and I wonder if Campbell used the same idea as Lynch did: play the scene like you’re innocent. (Of course, Kleavon is innocent of this particular crime.) He feels as professional here as Rawling or Claudette; you can’t get any purchase on this guy, so we know in later seasons what it will take to bring him down; his actual breakdown in season 5 feels like the human equivalent of an iceberg calving off a glacier, a small crack in his character widening slowly, then quickly, and then falling apart.

I’ve written how The Shield is three-act (seasons 1-2/3,4,5/6-7) tragedy, but another way to read it is as two cycles: seasons 1-4/5-7, with both cycles driving to a conflict between the two main characters, Vic and Shane. You can read these cycles as a structure of incidents that push these two men to a point where only one can win (where, maybe, only one can survive), and that moment is almost here. In the first cycle, they are able to reconcile and that reconciliation sets up the second cycle, which ends with complete disaster. There’s also a nice touch that the two cycles are marked by two generations of cops: seasons 1-4 have Danny training Julien, and seasons 5-7 have Julien training Tina.

Lem, more and more, appears as the pivotal character of The Shield. I mean that almost literally, in that he’s the character who people revolve around and try to get him to turn their way. He’s less of an agent than Shane or Vic, because he’s not trying to scheme, just trying to do good, and he keeps getting caught up in other people’s schemes. Last season and this season have been laying more and more groundwork for the end of season 5, in that we keep seeing Lem and Shane brought into conflict, and Vic trying to resolve it. It’s all heading toward that moment when Lem and Shane will be at a point where there’s no reconciliation or resolution possible, and Vic won’t be there.

Previous: “Bang”/”Doghouse”
Next: “Hurt”/”Cut Throat”

David moves into position in the City Council, Monica guns up the asset forfeiture program, Dutch tries to move him and Claudette into being detectives again, Shane continues to work his way closer to Antwon, and Vic tries to manage all of these changes; everyone in “Bang” and “Doghouse” tries to gain or regain control, and winds up meeting Control’s closest friend, Compromise.

Already, this is The Shield’s most expansive season, with more players, more issues, and more settings, and this season uses The Shield’s genre of cop drama to explore the theme of control. That’s uses the genre, not challenges or critiques or (God help us all) deconstructs the genre. The Shield plays by the rules of a cop drama, which stays mostly with the cops as they attempt to control a city. This is a larger agenda than just solving crimes; Hill Street Blues, with its ever-busy station and multiple plots and fronts, is the definitive source of this kind of show. Because it focuses on the cops, of course things like the rights of suspects are only obstacles to control, which is the goal of the protagonists. (“It’s like Sherman’s March through the hood,” Claudette says of the asset forfeiture program.) When Rawling says “our job is to distinguish between the criminals and the citizens,” she’s articulating her mission, and also the mission of the cop drama. She’s also going directly against the concept of rights, because rights apply to all citizens.

Control, not the inalienable rights of the citizenry, is the fundamental classical principle of government. Michel Foucault, as usual, nailed the difference between classical and modern governing when he said that the fear in modern government is that one would govern too much and the fear in classical governing is that one will govern too little. What makes The Shield so effective at portraying Farmington this season is that it shows how far that desire for control has gone, and what means the police are now using. It stays a cop drama, but now the cops’ methods have expanded.

Last week, zedhed noted how “Farmington cannot have a saviour” and how effectively The Shield portrays Farmington as a district gone completely to shit. (Not even hospitals are safe here; they can’t afford a metal detector.) The modern institutions of jobs and of rights have fallen apart in Farmington, to the point where Rawling’s question “do you even worry about yourself? About being killed?” gets the answer “when it’s time, it’s time” from Choppa; the idea of an inalienable right to life has no application if citizens do not expect to live. (Over on The Dissolve, Nathan Rabin discussed Menace II Society, a work on the same territory, emotional and geographical, as The Shield and noted how its characters knew they were going to die, and that made them ungovernable.) Unlike The Wire, The Shield doesn’t diagnose how the institutions fell apart or give the history to them; there is no interest in how Farmington got that way, or how it can be fixed. (Farmington is the setting of The Shield, but Baltimore is very much a character in The Wire.) There is only the dramatic question: who will most effectively control Farmington–Rawling or Antwon? Already, we know that both of them will use whatever means necessary to do so.

One of those means is compromise, a necessary element of both life in a district like Farmington and in a drama. No one in an inner city has control over everyone; no one has access to everyone, so if you want to do anything, at any level, you have to compromise. We can see this happening in the pursuit of the Stay-at-Home Rapist Oscar in “Doghouse,” with collaborations between Farmington and gangs, Vic and Antwon, even Vic and Dutch. (Cops and criminals in pursuit of an even worse criminal is a storyline that goes at least as far back as M, the first serial killer movie.) Sudhir Venkatesh, in his writings on the sociology of the inner city, has always noted this need for compromise; he has stated the Grand Theft Auto series, because of its need for players to compromise to get anything done, is a much “less sensational” work on the inner city that most media and many academic portrayals.

Compromise also comes from the definition of drama. It’s only an omnipotent protagonist who doesn’t need anyone’s help, and omnipotence is dramatically boring because we know what will happen; we just don’t know how. If the protagonist can solve problems without anyone’s help, it’s an adventure, not a drama; this is why adventures have so many heroes who have to go it alone, dammit! No one in The Shield, though, can get what they want without someone’s help (although there are characters who won’t compromise, more on this in a moment).

The compromises start at the beginning of “Bang,” with a meeting between Vic, Ronnie, and Lem having to deal with the problem of Shane. “Never goddamn ends!” Lem says, and he’s right; Shane is an even bigger threat to them because of what they’ve done, and because Shane has a family. He has something that can be threatened. (In fact, “Bang” shows us how far the police will go in threatening families.) So begins Vic’s two-episode journey to turn Shane back into an ally, if not exactly a friend.

He succeeds, but at the same time, Shane is getting closer to Antwon, and he’s doing it by becoming even more of a Vic. Shane’s learned the (literally) Machiavellian principle of being both loved and feared; you follow up beating Antwon’s right-hand man with an offer to Antwon of tips on what’s gonna get raided. He’s gotten to the point, in “Doghouse,” where he doesn’t need to threaten anymore. On Vic’s end, he’s learning to treat Shane more deferentially, and Shane treats Vic like he’s doing favors for Vic (Shane’s little “I’ll ask around” in response to Vic’s request tells you so much about how their roles have changed.)

The result of all of this compromising is that Shane gets back on the Barn’s anti-gang unit, but as Vic’s equal, not a subordinate, and he’s going to pass information on to Antwon, and Vic knows he’s going to do it. (That’s the “theory” in “Doghouse” that Vic wanted to test.) We’re now at a John le Carré-level of an ambiguity of multiple agendas–everyone is a kind of double agent, and everyone is wondering what does he know? How much is he pursuing his own agenda, and how much is he pursuing mine? Is the damage he does worth the good he does? (Monica already has to ask “are you gonna burn me, Vic?”) Vic’s last play in these episodes, then, is to find the thing Antwon won’t compromise: his son. (Well, one of them; Antwon has a lot of kids. Him smuggling his semen out of prison, twice, is one of those Shield touches that’s completely bonkers and also believable, and it’s matched by his declaring a park a drug-free zone so his kids can play safely. It’s the sort of thing a warlord would do.)

The backbones of both episodes are a series of compromises to catch (or at least take out of play) a murderer (in “Bang”) and a rapist (in “Doghouse”) and both run into the limits of compromise and control. Make a bunch of gangbangers part of the pursuit of the Stay-at-Home Rapist, and they go out of your control and go after a Chinese guy with his own flower truck; collaborate with Antwon to give up a suspect and he does–he gives them up to the Spook St. gang to kill him themselves, and you demonstrate that you don’t have the control, Antwon does. (“Antwon showed the street he’s got more juice than we do.”) Sometimes, too, you find that no compromise is possible, because no one wants it; Julien discovers this when he goes to a kid who ran away from being photographed. Nothing Julien offers will move this kid, because Julien’s a cop, and that’s the end of the story; The Shield, so often, shows us the moments when there just are no options, the limits of control.

Meanwhile, the DA offers Dutch a compromise: start doing us some favors and we’ll start letting you have some real cases. (Anna Maria Horsford is, as ever, great as the ADA. There’s no bullshitting this lady.) Dutch takes it and doesn’t tell Claudette, because “what if I promise to control her?” I can’t have been the only viewer who said “yeah right Dutch,” because Claudette is too good and instinctive a detective not to know what’s going on when they’re sent after a guy with three (3) marijuana plants in his backyard, because he’s gonna testify for the defense and the DA wants him unavailable. Even Dutch is pissed. They’re thrown a double murder case at the end, though, so just maybe this worked.

Also meanwhile, Aceveda’s back in the Barn. There’s some nice work here by Benito Martinez; he looks out of place but not less powerful, and it’s clear than Aceveda is maneuvering to get some control over the Barn through the City Council. (Martinez also gives Aceveda a specific tone of voice when he’s lying and wants you to know it.) He pitches to Rawling that she needs to explain the asset forfeiture program in public; Aceveda’s power has always come from working with people to achieve his goals rather than trying to control them. (This is as good a definition of “politician” as opposed to “cop” as you can ask for.) She agrees.

Many have noted the similarities between Vic and Aceveda, and for all the glib critics who see Vic Mackey as some kind of super-alpha-male, note how much of what he does is based on compromising and doing things for others; he’s far more of a compromiser than, say, Walter White. I’ve noted before that Chiklis is a chameleon as an actor, continually changing his attitude, expressions, and stance depending on who he’s with and what Vic wants from that person. It’s both a subtle and necessary performance; if Vic couldn’t compromise, he wouldn’t have lasted as long as he has.

There are really two characters here who won’t compromise. One is Rawling, and it’s always a great Shield experience when Vic meets someone who will go much farther than himself. For Vic, the asset forfeiture program is a means to an end, to get Choppa to give up the shooter; once that fails, there’s no point in going through with it. Rawling has committed to the program, though; it’s not leverage for her, it’s something she’s going to see through to the end, success or failure, and nothing, not a mother screaming at her or the threat of bad publicity, is going to make her back down. (“Either it works or it doesn’t. To make exceptions to put a prettier face on it sounds more like Aceveda than me.”) The word “reformer” almost always gets preceded with the word “liberal,” but Rawling is an authoritarian reformer. “Bang” is where Glenn Close steps up and delivers on the strength that the first two episodes promise; the scene at the beginning where she’s addressing the Barn and goes off her prepared notes sets up the entire arc. Her voice and face lock into place, she plays this conviction rising within her. (See also the scene where she chews out Dutch. She’s six inches shorter and completely dominates him.) She closes out “Bang” with two words (“take it”), a signature, and the Mackiest of moves, throwing on her sunglasses and walking away.

The most fascinating uncompromised character is Sara, though, the hooker Aceveda meets and (it looks like) pursues. Abby Brammell is one of The Shield’s great finds; her eyes are as wide-set as Ellen Barkin’s, and like Barkin’s, they give her this incredible toughness. Her face is angular and unique in a way that seems European; from the first shot (so simple and effective that Aceveda is talking politics but keeps looking at her), she’s marked as someone from a different world. In her apartment, he tries to take control, grabbing her, and she takes control, detailing exactly the monetary and physical rules of her relationship with Aceveda, and her voice isn’t hard, but there is no doubt that these are the rules. Just before this, there’s a fantastic moment with her on the couch, as the camera moves from an overhead shot to a level shot; it’s a Sergio Leone move in reverse, and it has the same effect of letting us know that Shit Just Got Real. (It’s also the exact perspective of someone going from standing over her to getting on his knees.) Martinez is equally great her, in David Mamet’s “invent nothing, deny nothing” school of acting; at the end of that scene it looks like at least four different emotions has piled up on his face. He doesn’t know where this is going, and neither do we.

Media and self-promotion play a role here too, whether it’s the videos in “Bang” (“I do weddings and confirmations too”) or RAGA (“righteous angel, glorious ass”) in “Doghouse.” What other way can you assert yourself here except by fully tagging a billboard or an interrogation room? What chance do you have of getting out of Farmington, other than to get yourself fucked on camera? It’s something that ties The Shield to its specific location and plays out all through the series. (For now, remember this line: “everyone comes to Los Angeles to get famous.”) Speaking of media, here’s your Billings moment of the week: showing up at the crime scene in “Bang” and dropping a one-liner (“See no evil, hear no evil”), Law and Order-style. (Detective Billings, I knew Lenny Briscoe. Lenny Briscoe was a friend of mine. You, sir, are no Lenny Briscoe.)

It all comes together, as it so often does, at the end of an episode. “Doghouse” closes in the Barn, with Vic surveying everyone, all the players, seen at a distance, some through dirty glass (again, The Shield is all about surveillance, all about people watching each other). Structurally, the team that blew apart at the end of last season is back together, and Vic is back running things; structurally, he’s back in control. But Chiklis’ face tells us the opposite: what being back in control really means is that you are now compromised on all fronts, you are now dealing with everyone who has different goals than you. It never goddamn ends.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

The plot keeps moving with the Vic/Ronnie/Lem meeting at the beginning of “Bang.” The team’s not coming back together out of friendship, but out of the need to watch Shane; the consequences of previous actions keep advancing people to the next actions. We can see two things here that play out later: in addition to the risk Shane poses to everyone, we see Lem’s continual discomfort with this life. He’s never been fully on board with the Strike Team’s corruption, and it keeps getting worse through the whole series. By furthering those two elements, this brief scene throws forward to the final, horrific moment with Lem and Shane next season.

Watching the expansiveness of this season sets up such a contrast with next season. Beginning, really, with the last minutes of season four, the story contracts–we move away from all the political issues, all the policy conflicts, and focus on our main characters, as it should in tragedy. It’s the universal nature of tragedy that removes it from politics. Tragedies might be about people in high places, but it’s really not about how they govern; that’s something external to the drama (remember that part of Hamlet where Shakespeare got into the history of the Denmark/Poland conflict? Nope, me neither, just that line tossed off about “did smite the sledded Polack upon the ice.” Doesn’t cost the play anything). For one season, not only did The Shield restore the Barn, it restored the show to another genre. The nature of tragedy, though, is that you can’t stop it, and The Shield has to go back to its story after this season.

Previous: “The Cure”/”Grave”
Next: “Tar Baby”/”Insurgents”

The Shield did something in these episodes that was like a Sopranos season, where the major plot finishes in the penultimate episode. “On Tilt,” though, isn’t meditative like a Sopranos finale (meditation is never the storytelling mode here), it’s a series of characters running stopgap actions and doing damage control, and almost none of it works. Vic, Claudette, the Strike Team, Dutch, Aceveda, Corrine, the DA’s office, everyone confronts situations where the consequences are too far gone for anyone to set straight. It’s the bleakest episode of the series to date; the good fortunes that ended last season have been reversed, and then some.

Aceveda won’t back Dutch’s investigation into Vic, and Vic lets him know ‘you’re back on my shit list, with a bullet!”; the ADA is barely interested in Claudette’s investigation; Dutch separates himself from it, with Claudette’s, not exactly blessing, but understanding (more on this in a moment); Dutch broke up with Kim some time ago; the prisoner Claudette’s trying to free (amazing performance by Ray Stoney, who has the exact hopelessness of someone who’s spent most of his life inside) can’t offer her anything to help; Julien knows he can’t do anything about the prostitutes outside André Benjamin’s door (can anyone else make the line “hosed the hoes” work? If there is, I don’t wanna know), so he’ll just move them down a block, “then when someone calls with a problem, we’ll move it again”–this is no longer the idealist of season one, this is someone who knows the limits of what can be done; I’m not quite sure what’s going on with Aceveda and the hookers, but I doubt it’s law enforcement (and he’s stopped wearing his wedding ring); the whole Barn has turned against Claudette (Vic’s “that’s only because I didn’t think of it first!” is one of his most vicious and honest moments); Cassidy is coming to stay with Vic, and absolutely no one plays that like it’s a good idea; the Strike Team lost all but $195,000 of the money they stole; Lem is on his way out (and Shane is fine with that); and the Strike Team itself will be gone without him. There have been struggles and tensions in all three seasons, but here it seems every basic relationship of the show is crumbling.

Amidst all this, there are a few hopeful moments. Claudette and Dutch come back together, with a real sense of the two of them against the world. Danny will be reinstated as a full police officer. That’s almost it for hope this episode (there’s one more thing to cover). Also, DETECTIVE WAGENBACH! PLACE THE KITTEN ON THE DESK AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY. I SAID SLOWLY!

With everything collapsing like this, the Strike Team’s ownage still registers, but it feels completely inadequate against everything else. It’s not so much a Pyrrhic victory, just the sense that they got away with their lives, and nothing else. They make a huge heroin bust, and everyone’s applauding, but the focus is on Lem and Ronnie quietly shaking their heads–no Margos. Vic’s showdown with Margos is no showdown at all, as Margos drops the gun and Vic calmly, pragmatically shoots him twice. We spend some moments looking at Vic’s face–is that remorse? Like Dutch in the last shot of “Strays,” whatever it is, it’s not victory.

The theme of bleakness and isolation continue as we go into the last act, as Vic goes to the safe house and he and Stana Katic placed in isolated frames-within-the-frame. He tells her she can leave, that he–and then, wait, what? Seriously? Now we get another episode of Everybody Fucks Vic? Because she’s just so overwhelmed by Vic’s amazing Margos-killing masculinity and so thankful (the DVD chapter title for this scene is “Gratitude,” I shit you not) that she just jumps him right there? I have no explanation for this, unless Frank Miller snuck into the writers’ room and planted it in the script. If there was a more stupid moment in the entire series, I don’t remember it.

Back to what The Shield does right: Claudette. She could have a thankless, useless role; Righteous Cop on the side of the innocent is just as much a cliche as Corrupt Cop (But He Gets Results You Stupid Chief!) Claudette works mostly because the humanity CCH Pounder gives her at every moment; there’s a genuine despair in her face that we’ve never seen before when Aceveda tells her she won’t be the new captain. (It’s something she would never admit to anyone, but she wanted that job for its own sake.) It’s also because the writers never treated her as someone who just fucks people up because they needed an antagonist; she’s a person and a player in an ensemble. One of the things you can see in these last two episodes is how Aceveda is constantly trying to get her to back off; he wants to see her as captain too and knows she won’t back down. In the end, like the Strike Team with Margos, Claudette does succeed, and like them, she survives, and that’s all.

With nothing else left, the season comes down to the last scene with the Strike Team, which plays out so much like the Shane/Tavon fight, with everything going OK until Shane just can’t let it go. S.A.M. has pointed out that I underestimate the psychological depth of The Shield; there’s a strong insight here that all of Shane’s rage against Lem has actually been rage against Vic, and with Lem gone, it erupts. Vic forever and only moves forward; if Terry is a mole for the Justice Department, he kills him, and the next day it’s “Terry failed to clear the room.” If Vic sees an Armenian money train, he plans and carries out a robbery, and if that causes who knows how many people to be killed, he doesn’t look back, and if he loses all but $65,000 of the money, he doesn’t look back. Shane feels the weight of events, he feels the cost of Terry, of burning the money, and he can’t forgive, not himself and not Lem; that Vic ignores Terry and forgives Lem is an insult to Shane, and Vic can’t see that. In their fight, it’s scary the way these two know exactly what buttons to push (Shane’s weakness is Mara, and Vic’s is his family); you can see how the deeper the love, the more opportunities there are for hate. This season ends as the first season did, with Vic, a man with a badass leather jacket and a gun, alone. This time he’s lost both his families.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

That’s it for the Armenians for a few seasons. Several commenters have noted how they turn from this Big Bad in the second and third seasons to a few not-very-competent criminals in the sixth and seventh, but on the rewatch, it looks like the writers played fair. Margos was sent to Farmington to get the Armenians (whoever he didn’t kill) “back to basics”–that is, running heroin, and that went pretty badly. It makes sense that they’d move their operations someplace else, and in season 6 Diro is trying to rebuild them. One of the storytelling rules of The Shield is that it suggests a larger world without ever visiting it; our focus stays on the main characters, in Farmington.

One way to make an idealistic character work is what the show did with Claudette. Another way is to give the role to André Benjamin, and get the fuck out of the way. I wished we could have had more of Bobby Huggins’ New Paradigm mayoral campaign throughout the series, because he’s just so damn funny and kind of sweet in every moment. Benito Martinez sez that acting with him is a challenge, because when he gets the crowd on his side, he actually gets the crowd on his side, and you have to get them back. (Martinez said he almost did in the church scene in “Family Meeting,” but not quite.) Of course, his fate tells that although this is a world where ideals can survive and grow, idealists usually don’t have the same fate.

The Strike Team invites Lem to an isolated meeting at night, and he’s so worried here. Two seasons later, they invite him to another isolated meeting at night, and he’s not. The difference between the two is that here, he knows he did something wrong, and two seasons later, he knows he didn’t do anything wrong. And it’s the second meeting that gets him killed. In another repeated moment, Vic and Shane’s last fight, in “Family Meeting,” partially reprises this one. Shane was always right about Vic, and Vic was never right about Mara. This fight, so devastating, barely registers compares to that last one. (“Who you got, Vic?” is just about Vic Mackey’s epitaph.) This fight is one more step in another ongoing set of stories for the whole series–the Mackeys fall apart as the Vendrells come together. The unified action of tragedy here means a lot of events happen twice–once as portent and once as devastation.

Previous: “Fire in the Hole”/”All In”
Next: “The Cure”/”Grave”

Tom Doolie wrote an excellent long comment on the morality of The Shield, arguing that it holds to a “ticking time bomb” attitude towards police–that what they do to get information is justified:  “It’s just presented as a given that the pros know when someone’s guilty and when further lives are at stake.”  It should absolutely be read by anyone who’s seen the whole series; it’s posted here at the end of the comments on the series finale, so spoilers abound.

I don’t see the show this way, nor do I have much interest in the parallels with the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and for a simple reason:  I do not see The Shield as the story of four cops who commit crimes.  I see it as the story of four criminals who work as cops.  There are indications right at the beginning that we should see them this way; they are already dealing when we meet them, the pilot closes with Vic gunning down a cop, and of course, Aceveda calls him “Al Capone with a badge.”  (The criminal is Vic’s essential identity in that line; Aceveda doesn’t call him “Joe Friday with a record.”)  The Strike Team (especially in these first three seasons) is like Dudley Smith in the last three novels of James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, White Jazz)–they are managers of a city, containing and dealing with crime, and using that to gain power and money for themselves.  (This is why “Co-pilot” felt so wrong, as it tried to return the four to “good cops who stepped over the line.”)  As the series moves on, and especially in this season, we’re seeing the consequences of their criminal activity and how they have to deal with that.  (When Vic jams someone into a barrel of oil, he’s not doing it for any other reason except to save his own ass.)  We’re also seeing (more on this shortly) the ethical challenges and actions of the non-criminal cops, and that’s much more about the morality of policing.

As for our criminals:  many of us have noted similarities between Heat and The Shield–the LA setting, the importance of action (Tom Sizemore sez that Heat, and really all of Mann’s films, is about the moment when you have to decide, and that decision will determine the rest of your life), but the one that’s so striking this week is Mann’s understanding of what living outside the law is like.  (Again, not for nothing is it called The Life.)  One such understanding is the risk that those you love pose to you (and the risk you pose to them), all conveyed in Heat’s stone-brilliant line “you want to be making moves on the street, have no attachments, have nothing in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat coming around the corner.”  Another understanding is that when you commit a crime, there is a huge apparatus out there, made up of the LAPD, the Treasury Department, the Armenian mob, the FBI, the not-as-dumb-as-you-wish-he’d-be Dutch, the ever-psychotic Margos, and others and they will not ever go away, they are out there and waiting for you to fuck up.

All things considered, the Strike Team did pretty well in terms of Not Fucking Up, but that doesn’t do it.  You have to be perfect to get away with this.  Looking through the season, I can only find three mistakes, all believable:  they didn’t realize the money was marked; Mara took the money; and Vic gave away one word (“Smogjumpers,” the name of the bar O’Brien visits).  That’s enough to bring everything crashing down around them.  (That the Treasury Dept. has a mole is a fourth element, but that’s not the team’s fault.)  This is one of the basics of storytelling.  The story has to be plausible, and the more mistakes and twists you add into the story, the more you risk plausibility.  When we criticize a story as being “too twisty,” that’s what we mean.

Look again at Vic saying “Smogjumpers,” and you can see how well The Shield structures the incidents (Aristotle’s phrase, again), how much it gets from a single action.  Vic shouldn’t know that detail, which tips Dutch that Vic is–somehow–involved.  (Perfect acting by Chiklis and Karnes; The Shield is, in the best sense, a comic book, all bold outlines and strong action, and in that moment, you can see the thought balloons over their heads, ? over Karnes and !!! over Chiklis.)  Vic has a respect for Dutch that goes back to “Dragonchasers”; he knows that all Dutchboy needs is one clue to bring you down.  Dutch goes to Aceveda, but Dutch doesn’t respect Vic’s mad criminal skillz the same way Vic respects him as a detective; Dutch thinks Vic might be shielding the robbers, but not that he did it himself.  Aceveda puts the word out that someone might be moving cash, visits Shane about the Cletus van Damme storage locker, and now the Team has to move the cash.  All of this set in motion by one little mistake.

For all the problems with pacing this season, these two episodes are masterpieces of storytelling craft, as they accelerate and finish off a story that’s been going on all season.  Not only that, but that story isn’t the one in the foreground; there’s been another story going on all season and it’s only now we really see it.  “All In” ends with most of the money train stash going into the furnace, but what these episodes are about, and what the entire season is now revealed to be about, is the breaking of Lem.

Lem has been nervous all season, from the stress of the money train coverup and the fracturing of the Strike Team, but in these two episodes he commits (he commits, he’s the necessary player in both) two violations.  This is where the old morality of The Shield comes in play; one of the things Lem does isn’t even a crime, but both go against something very deep.  You can see (Kenneth Johnson is so fucking good here; he plays Lem as in constant pain, especially when he’s standing by the furnace with the poker; he’s simultaneously cringing and ready to swing) that something breaks in Lem and leads him to torch the money train cash.

First, the team has to get rid of O’Brien’s body, and Lem is the one who knows where to burn it.  This scene is what The Shield does best:  desperate acts.  You can hear panic in Chiklis’ voice–the bodies will be discovered in a matter of hours, so he has to stay a fugitive, forever, and you hear utter anguish when Lem says “goddammit, I know where to do it.”  It’s one of the most shocking moments on the show when they burn O’Brien; in the old morality of The Shield, the violation of a corpse is much worse than the violation of a suspect’s civil rights.  Burial is one of the oldest and most deeply human activities; there’s evidence of burial rituals from 50,000 years ago, even some evidence of Neanderthal burials that go back over 100,000 years.  It’s something we did before we wrote, before we cultivated, before we domesticated animals; before all that, we made a promise to each other that we would not let each other die unnoticed.  (Joan Didion, someone who also understands old moralities, writes about this brilliantly in the little essay “On Morality.”)  The Strike Team, and Lem, violates that, and to save their asses, they have to.  They destroy O’Brien’s body and no one will ever know what happened to him, not a friend, not a family member.  It feels like more than a crime, because crimes go against the laws of society; this feels like it goes against what it is to be human.

Second, Lem has to lie to Tavon, telling him that he hit Mara (hit a pregnant woman, for fuck’s sake).  Lem was Tavon’s friend from the beginning (note how these episodes build on almost three years’ worth of previous events), he was always visiting Tavon in the hospital, there was trust there and now Vic gets him to use that trust against Tavon (against a guy who was just in a coma).  Tavon, twisted again, crying at the end of the scene breaks our heart, and it breaks Lem’s too on the way out the door.  There is nothing Vic won’t use to protect himself, but here, it backfires on him.  That scene feels like it finally destroys Lem and sends him on the path to burning the money.

Fun fact:  Chiklis is incredibly funny on the “All In” commentary; in the hospital scene, when Vic says “though Mara did have some bleeding for a couple of days” Chiklis says “I’m going to hell.”  And he relates that the day before they shot the final scene, he told him wife (small boy voice) “I have to fight Kenny tomorrow and I’m scared.”  Kenneth Johnson is a big dude (now, there’s your Jack Reacher) and I find it completely believable that he can carry three guys into a wall.

Meanwhile (this is The Shield, so all this is going on and there’s still a “meanwhile”), Claudette gets into some moral conflicts of policing.  But first she gets to do some work with the Decoy Squad again (fantastic beat of jurisdictional fuckup in the “Fire in the Hole” teaser, as Walon and Vic collide–“no you get out of here!”).  Nicki Micheaux brings it, again; she shows how Trish has accepted what happened to her because of Claudette, and she shows how that means she doesn’t forgive Claudette.  CCH Pounder gets some great reaction shots here, and the wonderful scene in the mirror as she rehearses and changes her voice.  (I’m a total sucker for scenes where actors change characters as we watch; check out The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A History of Violence for some great examples.)  The sting works, and we get one more great supporting performance by Mo McRae, playing him with an exact mix of evil and professionalism.  (He coerces 8-year-olds into having sex; also, he’s clearly concerned with framing and color values.)

It’s in “All In” that things get very tricky for Claudette, as she pursues first a murder, but then it spills into a case of a public defender who’s been an Oxycontin addict for three years.  In Shield style, the moral dilemma is set up here in the clearest of terms:  pursue this case and “criminals will go free” (in Dutch’s words), and Claudette will be incapable of leading the Barn.  This is where we see the real moral debate over policing, not with the Strike Team.  What gets demonstrated here are the limits of Claudette’s approach; she will absolutely, always, follow her conscience, and that will limit her ability to actually do anything.  Dutch is wonderful in these scenes, and he shows how loyalty works among cops:  he tries to talk her out of this, and he won’t defend her position to Aceveda, but he won’t stop her either.  This is still in the realm of actions where you stand by your partner.

Additional greatness:  the opening of “Fire in the Hole,” in the Mackeys’ burned kitchen; it’s a neat piece of everyday surrealism to see the burned surfaces with foam dripping everywhere.  Another great effect comes at the end of the episode, when Vic closes the furnace door and the image goes almost completely dark; The Shield used lighting and objects within the scene to create visual effects like this.  Another classic Shield scene is in the Strike Team clubhouse in “All In” when Lem reveals that Tavon is talking.  The dialogue in this scene bounces from character to character, everyone getting one line or just one word before someone else jumps in, and every line reveals something to someone.  Another bit of revelation:  Dutch told Julien that Claudette is dating a contractor (oh man, the look between Claudette and Dutch is priceless) and Julien wants the contractor to do work on the destroyed café.  (Again, Julien has come to learn how things get done.)  In that storyline, we get more banter between Taylor the Fence and Danny; this story never came off as funny or as interesting as it should, although I fully intend to call my single-malt “three-oh” from now on.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

If you see the Strike Team as criminals, then the four members split up neatly in terms of how conscious they are of being criminals.  Lem believes he is a cop until his dying breath.  Ronnie has always known that he is a criminal.  Shane begins by believing he is a cop, and comes to recognize (again, the exact, classical word) he is a criminal in season 6; Vic only recognizes it in the very last scene, if indeed he recognizes it at all.

So much of the end of season 5 (the final reversal) gets set up here (the first reversal).  Lem burning the money tells the rest of the team something crucial:  the extent of his conscience.  They learn that Lem is completely capable of doing something destructive to all of them because he feels it’s the right thing to do; they will all remember that in the final hours of season 5.  The shot of Lem by the furnace with the poker, facing Shane with gun drawn, is an absolutely heartbreaking piece of foreshadowing, because here Shane will put the gun down.  (We also get a moment of Lem watching birds.)  Maybe Shane remembers that exact moment in the second before he drops a grenade in Lem’s lap.

Claudette is really the focus of The Shield’s moral investigation into police, not Vic or the Strike Team.  Her rise throughout the series keeps hitting walls because of her conscience, and more importantly, because of her commitment to it.  If there is a message in the series about the ethics of police work, it’s her line in the sixth season:  “the truth may not lead us down the path we want, but it’s the only way to fix this place.”  The Shield may have started with an old-school cop whaling on a pedophile with a phone book, but it ends with the good cops running the Barn.  The righteous path is long, imperfect, and it destroys good people, but in the long run and on balance, it works.

Previously: “Strays”/”Riceburner”
Next: “On Tilt”

The major throughline of this season is the fallout from the Money Train, and that continues; but second to that is the story of Claudette.  She has risen to power and responsibility in the Barn, commanding the Strike Team and the Decoy Squad, and she runs into a major obstacle in “Cracking Ice,” as she well and truly fucks up, missing a detail that Walon filed about a mole in the department, blowing Walon’s cover and nearly getting him and Trish killed.  What makes this compelling is that it’s not gratuitous, and it’s not something that reveals Claudette as an incompetent.  It’s a simple mistake.  Again, one of the character strategies on The Shield is that no one is immune from mistakes just as no one is immune from ambition.  Claudette has a different morality from the Strike Team, but it doesn’t make her superhuman; the writers’ decision not to put her in Aceveda’s slot immediately is paying off here.  Claudette can’t suddenly become boss of the Barn any more than the Strike Team can start living the good life.  (Throw your hands up.)

“Cracking Ice” moves so fast that it starts in the middle of the action, with Trish’s distress call; “Safe,” in comparison, feels slow for The Shield, and not in a contemplative way, but like 39 minutes of show in 45 minutes of broadcast time.  With so few extras, it made me wonder if FX mandated a lower-budget episode (or if, per Brandon Nowalk’s review, they blew the majority of the budget on exterior footage).  (Aaron Sorkin ran into the same problem on the second season of The West Wing and came up with their best episode, “17 People.”  Here, not so much.)  The opening exposition of narcocorridos slows things down even more (between that and Ronnie’s Journey tickets, this episode is an unintended intertextual festival with some other great TV dramas). There are some good threads and scenes here (Corrine showing up, and the ending with Aceveda), but they’re running parallel to each other, not coming together yet.  It’s a middle-of-the-story episode that’s more static than it needs to be.  (Some nice three-character zigzag compositions, though, one with Ronnie, Lem, and Vic in the van, and another in the Barn with Dutch, Danny, and Julien; also, a good shot of the truck meth lab, in desaturated tones and seeming to stretch to infinity.)

One of the pleasures of “Cracking Ice” is seeing Nicki Micheaux step up and make Trish a full character.  (You can especially see this in comparison with Natalie Zea’s Lauren, who is more important to Vic, and much less defined as a character.)  So far, Trish has been there to crack wise with Vic and be our main contact with the Decoy Squad, but this episode shows her on the job and playing layers of fear, cockiness, anger, seductiveness, and a necessary resolve at the end, when she’s in Aceveda’s office and trying to put it all behind her.  (Great reactive work from Gareth Williams as Walon in this scene.)  In the best Shield style, you get a sense that that kind of moment, when the job is done and you have to forget whatever ugly thing you had to do, is a necessary and continual part of undercover work.  The episode also uses her sexuality effectively:  why yes I do want to see Nicki Micheaux in a sex scene; no, not this sex scene.

Another pleasure here is the camerawork and staging of the aborted takedown of the 12s.  Over in the CZ yesterday, I was reflecting on The Wages of Fear (what do you mean you haven’t seen it?   Rent or stream that puppy right the fuck now.  You’ll thank me) and commenting that action scenes do not need physics-defying CGI or wire-fu to work; what they need is a strong sense of spatial and temporal relations and what is possible, and what is not.  This scene is one of The Shield’s most intense, with multiple characters converging on a diner, having to do it in such a way that no one notices, and two reversals of the action, as 1) Vic tells Walon his cover’s blown and he’s about to be killed and 2) Walon telling them not to grab the 12s from the diner.  One of the things that this sequence does right (that is often done wrong) is that we can see that everything that’s going on, but an observer on the street wouldn’t notice a thing.

Meanwhile, Shane and Mara continue to have the closest relationship on this show.  One of the best moments here at revealing character is Mara’s repeated calls to Shane–it’s when she starts spotting that Shane drops everything and races home.  (Another wonderful moment is Shane and Lem on the couch playing videogames and Mara saying goodbye to her two boys; both Goggins and Kenneth Johnson have the ability to look maximally goofy, and they’re not afraid to use it.)   You see it especially in contrast with Vic’s relationships; he has become literally distant from Corrine (more on this in a moment) as she reaches out to him (once again, it’s his children he really cares about, not her) and his affair with Lauren runs into something of a major snag.  So far, Shane is succeeding on exactly the point that Vic failed:  he’s managing to be both a corrupt cop and a loving, not just a providing, husband.  (Shane’s attempts to provide a diamond ring for Mara on the cheap give us some more great comedy of corruption:  “yeah, but you gave me the sign, right?”)

The Shield’s storytelling method creates some challenges for the actors that wouldn’t exist on other shows.  We will not get an episode that’s about, or even partially about, Corrine’s loneliness; no Corrine-goes-to-Paris-and-reflects-on-the-futility-of-existence scenes, sorry.  What we get is a brief scene in “Safe” with her showing up at the station, and a fantastic shot of her exiting, hiding that she’s nearly in tears, with a tiled floor marking out the negative space between them.  That’s all the time we have for that storyline, so the burden of making these emotions count falls almost entirely on the actors; they have to have an impact and quickly.  It’s a pretty damn big challenge, and Cathy Cahlin Ryan can at least handle it, although she’ll be even better later in the series.

“We’ve always been a team.”  Yes they have, and with $7000 missing from the Money Train stash, the team is showing some cracks.  (“Cracking Ice” turns out to be a perfect title.)  We’re well into the second act and we know enough about these characters–we’ve seen enough of what they do–that their actions are completely comprehensible.  Ronnie and Lem are immediately above suspicion.  Ronnie reported the money, and he’s just too pragmatic to do this, and Lem is too instinctually good.  Suspicion does fall on Vic and Shane, then; we (and the rest of the team) have seen how impulsive Shane always is, and how impulsive Vic has become.  Last season, the Strike Team was so strong that Shane and Lem went and saved Vic on their own.  At the end of this episode, they have suspicions of each other, and nothing has been resolved.

Corresponding to the cracks in the Strike Team are some new alliances, with Vic reaching out to Walon to create a Strike Team/Decoy Squad entente, and, even more interesting, Vic taking a tape of Aceveda beating a suspect. . .and giving it to Aceveda.  (I did not see that one coming.)  Something we’ve seen throughout these seasons is the shifting relationship between Vic and Aceveda; because they don’t have an emotional bond, there are many more possibilities for how they can treat each other.  Here, with Claudette stepping into place as Vic’s major antagonist, Aceveda is someone more useful to Vic as an ally than as an enemy; Vic would rather Aceveda owe him a favor than extort one from him.  It’s another new moment in the story.

Elsewhere:  “Funny later.  Not funny now.”  You have any other character besides Dutch protesting that he needs child pornography on his laptop for work, and it’s an obvious lie; with Dutch, it’s the obvious truth.  It’s not less creepy, though; it’s about Dutch getting way too obsessed with getting into the minds of criminals.  But it’s the same kind of instinct that leads him to that quiet conversation with Claudette at the end of “Cracking Ice,” as they speculate on whether or not the Cuddler Rapist has escalated to both murder and ejaculation.  Oh, and I’ve gone right by Tommy’s suicide; it plays out devastatingly on Danny’s reactions, and in mirrored and windowed images, with a great isolating shot of Danny from the side at the sound of the gunshot.

Lastly, Benito Martinez has really emerged as this season’s most valuable performer.  Since his rape, he’s lost his charming politician’s veneer; he plays Aceveda as being in nearly constant pain, with (as K Thrace and a lot of commenters have pointed out) no ability to use his politican’s skills to relieve it.  At the end of “Safe,” his brother (or cousin?  I didn’t catch it) opens with the questions that have to be ringing in his head all the time:  “You couldn’t stop them?  You couldn’t do anything?”  It’s not just pain he’s carrying, it’s guilt over that (and as ZoeZ pointed out, it’s undeserved guilt).  Whatever else I think of “Safe,” that’s a stunning ending; what makes it land so hard isn’t the words (“If it were me, I’d kill them.”) but David’s reaction.  He hadn’t thought of that.

THE SPOILER DISTRICT

Usually I’m happy to see Natalie Zea show up (and that sweater is a nice character choice), but she deserves better than a guest role on Everybody Fucks Vic.  Part of the problem is how Lauren’s been written–there’s not much personality there, not much for Zea to play.  An even bigger problem is her boyfriend Hunter.  I buy that there’s a history there that Vic can’t match.  That would be enough of a complication, but the writers really put an effort (here and in later episodes) to show how Hunter is a weak loser (I actually think he’s shot in soft focus in “Cracking Ice”) compared to Vic’s real manliness.  (It’s one of those moments where the shallow criticisms of The Shield are right.)  Dutch, next season, is a much more interesting and believable challenge (not exactly a rival) to Vic.

Lem has an ulcer and it seems like he’ll have one for, oh, about the rest of his life; he’ll be coughing up blood by the end of season 5.  There’s something about Lem that goes beyond any question of morality; he literally does not have the stomach for corruption.  The Shield is always so strong about the physical damage this life takes on you, from David’s healing scar to Lem’s ulcer to Claudette’s lupus.  Some of this show’s sense of consequences take a long time to play out, because some of them can be dodged or schemed against; but some of the consequences are there all the time, and Lem’s body is one of them.

At the beginning of season 3, I was expecting the story of the Money Train cash to be all about greed, as each member of the Strike Team sought to grab most or all of the stash for themselves.  It’s a measure of discipline on the part of the writers that the team comes apart, but not over individual greed; they fall apart over the sheer stress of trying to survive having taken the money.  The writers recognize that having stolen seven figures’ worth of cash from the Armenian mob is enough of a problem without everyone trying to take it all.  These episodes have a couple of neat little foreshadows of what happened, and what’s going to happen:  Mara has said that her mom needs money or she’ll be thrown out of her apartment; and Lem has suggested just cashing out at “30 cents on the dollar” and making the money someone else’s problem.  (Lem will finally cash them out at about 3 cents on the dollar.)  Vic’s response is fantastic–“I want a dollar on the dollar!”  It’s that wonderful kind of greed where it’s mixed with righteousness–dammit, I am entitled to all the money I stole.

Previously: “Mum”/”Posse Up”
Next: “Slipknot”/”What Power Is. . .”