Dec
2
This blog contains spoilers, so if you don’t want to know that Vic lives, too late.
I’m doing this lookback a week late, I know. I don’t get cable. My mom records the show and sends me the tapes because she’s cool like that. At any rate, the tape of the final three eps arrived last night.
I’d decided to not read any episode recaps or spoliers for the last two episodes — “Possible Kill Screen” and “Family Meeting.” I trusted series creator Shawn Ryan not to let me down. I’ve been retarded for this show since its debut in 2002. It’s one of those rare TV series that I can actually get into and isn’t canceled after a season. It’s an even rarer TV series in that there’s an appropriate sendoff rather than the network deciding not to renew it for another season.
Detective Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, has an arc, going from the dirtiest cop in the fictional Farmington District of Los Angeles to riding a desk as another empty suit at ICE. His closest friends on the force are either in jail or dead, and his estranged family is in witness protection. The deal he has with ICE guarantees him immunity from every crime he committed under color of authority, even executing a cop who was informing on him in the first episode. But he’s still in his own prison, chained to a desk. And on that desk are photos of his children, all three of which he’ll never see again. Clark Johnson, who directed the final episode, allows Mackey’s isolation to play out, as he remains in the office long after everyone else has gone home, late enough that the lights go out automatically and leave him in the dark. It’s quiet scenes like these that you rarely see on television, and Chiklis conveys so much without any dialogue — the weight of seven seasons’ worth of transgressions crushing down on him.
I also enjoyed Chiklis’ performance in the penultimate episode. As part of his immunity deal with ICE, Mackey has to confess to all his illegal actions. Anything he doesn’t own up to he can still be charged with. Seated at a microphone across from Agent Olivia Murray (Laurie Holden, who has the most awesome left eyebrow on network TV), Mackey spills his guts about everything. But there’s a moment before he starts talking — a long, drawn out moment — where he just sits there. You can see the wheels turning. Mackey’s a criminal mastermind. You almost half-expect him to get up from the table without having said a thing, completely convinced his every act was justified. He is a bit of a sociopath. Nonetheless, he starts giving himself up to this poor woman, knowing that nothing he says can come back and haunt him. Murray obviously had no idea what sort of a man she was bringing on board. At the end of it all, she says to him, “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?” It’s an amazing bit of television.
What’s so fantastic about the show, what kept me enthralled for the past seven seasons is how a nogoodnik like Vic Mackey remained empathetic. Yes, he swung from hero to anti-hero and back again multiple times, often within the context of one episode. Part of me was convinced for awhile, somewhere around season five, that he’d redeemed himself for murdering another cop. The bad things he did always seemed to serve a greater good — protecting the men on his Strike Team, providing for his family, keeping the streets safe. It isn’t until the last episode when his former partner Ronnie is arrested and hung out to dry because he wasn’t part of Mackey’s deal with ICE that you realize the character is at his core a self-serving bastard.
“The Shield” isn’t a redemption plot, but a testing plot. Everything he’s been put through didn’t make Vic Mackey go from Beast to Human. Instead, he went from Leader to Tyrant, and that was in the pilot. He now never has to answer for the crimes he committed and has destroyed everyone in his circle. In the end, he still has his freedom from prosecution, but life as he knows it is over. He’s now just another bureaucrat who has to put his name on his lunch in the breakroom fridge. It’s a bit of an unceremonious ending for a man whose name is Victor. And that’s what I like about it.
-Brad Lohan
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