Season 4, Episode 7 "Hurts"
Air date: 4-26-05
Vic seems headed back to better graces as a character. For starters, he is pretty well trying to play straight. He's not on any dealer's payroll, or running any kind of scam. He's turned down a couple of offers of immediate cash for nothing already this season.
Moreover, Vic looks more sympathetic because it seems the whole world conspires against him. Start with Councilman Aceveda, who managed to get him removed from the big Russian mob case just as he was moving in to arrest the kingpin.
Then there's the little matter of Shane, who Vic has seen on his surveillance tape agreeing to kill him on behalf of the evil druglord Darth Antwon Mitchell. Shane agrees only under severe duress, and it's hard telling what would have been going on in his mind- what he even thought he intended to do.
Then, of all people, Dutch is moving in for the coup de grace in Vic's humbling. Aceveda's ruining his career. Antwon and Shane are ready to absolutely kill him. Meanwhile, Dutch is moving in on Corrine.
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Their date scene was all to brief. Or to put it differently, the writing was a model of economy. I'd guess that scene clocks in somewhere under two minutes, but it covers a lot of ground. The date was simple dinner with the family. They're bonding over their empathy for the poor abused seven year old they both were dealing with, as cop and nurse respectively. Note that Nurse Corrine reported the abuse not to general 911. Nor did she contact her almost ex husband. She called Dutch's cell phone.
Mom was about to lay one on him after dinner when little Megan came tugging at his pants, wanting him to read her this book again. Was it intended to be a reflection of Dutch's character when he was reading to the child about a "bumbling, stumbling, sweet as honey bear."? Dutch is obviously happy for the bounty of childish affection. Indeed, he seems to be getting more out of this autistic child socially than we've seen with anyone else, including Daddy Vic.
The last shot of the scene showed Corrine gazing down worshipfully at Dutch dangling Megan on his knee. From that look, he wouldn't be able to keep Mom off him if he wanted to.
Now, Dutch has made absolutely no gesture indicating that pursuing Corrine is partly payback for Vic's history of abuse and schoolyard humiliation. The writers, however, are setting that up discreetly. Note how Vic has had some kind of public ridicule for Dutch in about every episode this season, including the Subaru crack tonight nicely shoehorned into the setup for Dutch and Danny's seizures.
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Julien is certainly playing at the top of his game. He has emerged as the voice of conscience, the role Claudette filled back before she disappeared up her own belly button.
The framing of the shots gives us Julien's viewpoint when Vic with the smoking car put out a request and a reward for whoever could use seizure to bring him a replacement pimp ride. That much more, we're seeing it through Julien's lenses as Danny busts down some black kids partying with some weed, and trumps it up into an excuse to invoke asset seizure on the car. With minimal physical gestures from the actor - it's mostly written into the dialogue- you can almost see the smoke pouring out of Julien's ears as Vic just creamed all over his fancy new ride to be.
All of this pays off nicely as he finally breaks down the situation for Danny, arguing eloquently that they'd probably just pushed this kid into drug dealing by their actions. We caught you smoking a joint, so we're going to take your car. Is that right? Really, the way this played out with Danny shopping for a new Vic-mobile, in practical terms they're just carjacking.
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On the other hand, Julien arguably crossed the line into prickness making his counterpoint. He treated a white boy on a minor traffic stop what he figured was approximately equally to what the black party boys had gotten. He insisted on considering a corked up part of a $400 bottle of wine leftover from lunch to be an "open container" under the law. So he's arrested for that. Which means he has to search the car, and what's this- a couple of bootleg DVDs. Therefore, by seizure law logic, we're going to assume that you're trafficking in bootleg DVDs, and using the car to do it. Julien then put seizure on the car. The guy would be welcome to hire a lawyer later and try to prove that he was NOT using the car to traffick.
This is some kind of reach into abusiveness. However, a handful of bootleg DVDs constitutes just about as much evidence of trafficking contraband as the maybe ounce of weed that the black kids had.
It made for quite an interesting statement. Julien was purposely cruel and abusive, and intended to be seen as such.
Which led naturally to Captain Rawling making a heartfelt gesture of personal empathy- and politely said that they just weren't going to be able to work together, so she's putting him in for a transfer.
But of course, Julien does not WANT to transfer out. He wants to stay and fight. I bet he'll hold his own.
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The foster child storyline turned out real interesting in the details, and really tough as a statement about foster care. They set up this foster couple as fairly evil, with, as Dutch called it, the "Closet o' Horror" where they'd keep children locked up for hours. Nor could they even protect a seven year old girl in their care from being raped, and having Drano poured down her throat. This foster couple sucked pretty bad.
Yet the ultimate explanation underscores very strongly that this house of pain was not even near to being the bottom of the barrel. Indeed, the about 11ish year old foster child tried to kill the seven year old with the Drano because she's afraid that younger girl will report having been raped, which will get this foster house shut down- thus bouncing her into perhaps some far worse household. "At least he doesn't touch me."
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The most interesting thing about the 17 year old foster brother/rapist was actually the brief scene of his mother telling the cops where to go looking for him. "He sucks fag dick down on 4th Street" for drug money. Like she's any better. She sent her greetings via the cops.
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Captain Rawling has shown herself to be quite a hardass, and indeed a fairly authoritarian figure. Yet she elicits great sympathy as she's turning her wrath on very deserving characters. The line she took with the children's services case worker and then his supervisor have to make you love her. Hearing her story about her childhood friend went a long way to explain her. She was about out of her tree to arrest the foster child's case worker for neglect, but damn it seemed just. That she's willing to escalate with the supervisor would earn the captain the undying gratitude of nearly anyone who has any experience with any branch of child services.
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Captain Rawling was picqued over the doctoring of the church raid video that was circulating in the media, claiming that it wasn't an accurate representation of what happened. However, that was real video of them busting in on the congregation with guns. They may have dubbed in a few extra terrified screams into the soundtrack, but the tape's accurate.
However, even as sensitive as it would be to bust into a church like this, seems like they wouldn't have that much of a publicity problem for the cops, videotape or no. They did, in fact, come up with 12 kilos of heroin hidden in the church. Seems like that would be considered to justify this raid most fully.
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Antwon Mitchell really expresses himself in an interesting manner. This evil brother certainly has flava. He's not even pretended to be religious, but he talks an evil inversion of black preacher/civil rights talk, often even in private conversation. The very cadence and dynamics of delivery have that feel, and he's constantly invoking it his choice of words. Thus, he asks Shane to murder his mentor- yet speaks of this as a chance for "liberation," to throw off "the shackles that bind you." This despite the fact that he himself is the oppressor from which he needs liberation. He's almost getting into Harry Powell territory there.
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They got some beautifully strong dramatic tension and interesting physical choreography on the scene of observing the Byz Lats bootleg cigarette buy. Vic has seen the video of Shane agreeing to kill him, and here they are off alone together in the dark. Vic was obviously more concerned with keeping Shane in front of him and in line of sight than he was with a few cartons of cigarettes. Shane has a particularly good instant as he looks over at Vic, then blinks and looks away in an internalized little panic attack.
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It took several viewings and musings to ponder through Vic's final strategy with Russians, but mostly it seems to be simply a case of getting it done- even if he doesn't get any credit. The department overhead (under pressure from Aceveda) had taken this case away from him, and even humiliated him by assigning him to the desk work of transcribing videotapes. In defense of that exercise, it was Ronnie doing just that that got the name Vic needed to hunt the guys down and prevent them from killing a bunch of poor Mexicans by torching an apartment building.
Vic's not on the case, he wouldn't want to have to explain the deal he made to find the bad guys, and these other schmucks had already screwed up and let this guy loose once today.
So Vic figured out where the main boss was, and slapped a hood over his head before he could even see who had him. He left Kosorov and his arsonists hooded and cuffed, waiting for some random unis to find them. He got the bad guys off the street. He'd been following this guy for awhile, and badly wanted to clean his plate- even if he got no credit for it. However, Captain Rawling's little smile at the explanation of how they'd been found suggests that she intuited who was responsible.
That getting the information gave Vic a good excuse to screw Shane's setup and make him look bad was just gravy. Yummy, delicious gravy.
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Woo boy, did Vic put the hate on this Halo guy, Shane's Byz Lat CI. On one hand, it was convenient business for Vic to give up this snitch to get the info he needed on the Russian thugs. However, he went out of his way to make it as bad for him as possible. That is, he told the Byz Lats boss how Halo had bragged about de-flowering his 14 year old sister. Far more maliciously, Vic actually embellished the story to make it even a little worse than it actually was, with Halo's particularly nasty supposed "ass" comment.
On top of which, Vic tells the guy to do whatever he wanted with that info, and that he'd make sure it didn't blow back on him. In other words, after you murder this guy, I'll cover for you.
This Halo guy just picked a bad time to brag on taking advantage of a 14 year old girl, what with poor dead little Angie hanging over the crew- not that this fellow would have had any way to know that.
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This isn't particularly one of the top closing scenes in the history of the series, but it does have a subtly interesting ending. So Vic's feeling all downtrodden, and he's all agitated, walking the street late in the night. Finally, a police car stops and shines a light in his face, leading to the last line of dialogue, something like "I'm a cop. Now get that light off of me, and leave me alone."
In itself, this line is not especially scintillating. However, it resonates much stronger if you take it as a reflection of Vic's general attitudes, and particularly the grief and at least temporary demotion he's gotten because of the publicity from the church raid.
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