First off, Forest Whitaker as IAD Lt Kavanaugh is really good. Now, a lot is in the writing, and The Shield is as well written week for week as any scripted drama series in the history of television.
But Whitaker is bringing something into this that's definitely beyond the words that are handed to him on paper. As he plays it, this guy is just possessed. He's not really had much in the way of a big dramatic outburst, but after you watch him awhile you have to wonder what kind of crazed obsession is driving him.
For one thing, what's with this baroque dance Kavanaugh's doing with Corrine, Vic's ex-wife? He's coming up to her repeatedly at school as she's coming to collect her autistic children, conjuring up a whole totally fictional scenario about supposedly having an autistic son in the school. How much does she even know to be able to tell him? This extremely scrupulous IAD officer is spinning a lot of big, elaborate lies to gain the false confidence of a suspected officer's spouse for vague, general purposes. I'm sure he'd regard this as legitimate undercover work.
Captain Billings has rapidly become a beautifully excruciating character, so pathetic but so true. You can FEEL the "mediocrity flu" that Dutch so disdainfully ascribes to him. The subtle but universal contempt for this inept and weak-willed idiot seems almost painful to watch. They manage to imbue him with just enough legitimate pathos to make you feel bad about wanting to GODDAM SHOOT HIM.
He manages to work up this contemptible lie to himself about how good everything is going. He almost but doesn't quite understand the depths of the contempt of his colleagues, and thus doesn't quite know just how humiliated he really is.
You see what I mean about how it starts sounding like pathos? I don't WANT to have empathy for this fool, but the writers end up leaving me no choice. Bastards.
They're really wringing some good out of the Danny-Julien relationship this season. This young girly-girl trainee Tina Hanlon is bringing them a new dynamic, as Danny mediates between the former rookie she trained and the new girl.
For her part, Tina hasn't quite figured out that the female charms she uses to compensate for her mediocre actual performance just aren't going to get her far with Julien. To put it delicately, Julien is only interested in women by force of will.
And this one is a liability to the department. She managed to mismanage her way into a need to physically subdue a citizen, and then ends up overcompensating for her small size and inexperience by going nuts on the guy with her baton.
On several counts then, Julien was right to want to write her up and likely get her fired, washed out in training. She's arguably dangerous.
Danny's had to talk to Tina repeatedly, as the trainee obviously is looking at her as something of a mother figure. But she doesn't listen very good. She got hurt by a citizen ripping an earring off. Danny had told her not to wear them last week, not just as practical advice but as absolute code regulations. So Danny has to keep being stern with the young idiot.
But then, she has to argue for Tina to her training officer. The years of background invested in these two really works to dramatic advantage, as Danny reminds him of his less than impressive rookie moves. She leans on him pretty hard, but with love. It's good, solid character relationship stuff.
Indeed, this reminds me that actually this episode probably has less "action" than typically, certainly less than last week's season premiere. That's good by me. There's a triple murder, but we only see the aftermath, and never get even a good look at a corpse. The most direct action shown on the screen was the Strike Team giving a thug a good beatdown.
But the implications of some of it sink in on repeated viewings. This nasty Doomsday character killed a witnesses' dogs, and took their heads with him. The not very close shots of a couple of dead dogs weren't that especially disturbing. However, he eventually explains what he was doing. He had saved their heads to make soup, which he planned to force-feed to their owner. The original scene has more impact the second time, understanding where it's going.
As to the good being the enemy of the perfect in this episode as per the title, neither Dutch's case nor Vic's came out quite right. Dutch was frustrated that a preacher got away with attempted murder committed to get at a parishioner's wife. The perfect beat the good, and preacher man walks.
Vic, on the other hand, turned the trick, just that he kind of turned it sideways. Doomsday had committed multiple murders, and was just all round psycho, but they couldn't quite make that perfect case. So instead Vic got rough justice by having Shane bring in his Mexican hookup to turn the guy in to Mexican law enforcement with a planted handgun. Bye, bye, problem. Thus, they split the difference with Dutch, as the good here won out over the perfect.
The internal acting was pretty striking here tonight, the conscious ways in which characters are putting on little contrived acts for other people. Watch Lt Kavanaugh's little "you didn't know" performance for Lem, about the Crowley shooting. Man, but Kavanaugh's playing Lemansky like a Stradavarius.
But for putting on acts or faces, Lemansky was the king here, which brings out an awesome and unique dramatic climax confronting Vic while wired by IAD. Lem made a pretty fair sharp maneuver in the way that he managed to play both Kavanaugh and Vic. For one thing, he was slick enough in the clubhouse that I didn't quite get it the first time. Having been pressured into wearing a wire, he managed to get sick and have to leave just as Shane started talking about illegal stuff, ie setting up Doomsday with the Mexican contact. Nicely played.
Starting a fisticuffs with Vic at the climax and then ripping out the wire thoroughly played Kavanaugh in their chess game, as he had a convincing excuse. He accused Vic of lying, then started throwing punches, and the wire he had been forced to wear got tore up in the scuffle.
Which gave him a perfect strategic moment to pry some rare truth out of his boss. Caught Vic off guard enough that he couldn't quite muster up a convincing lie about having murdered their brother officer/snitch in the series pilot years ago.
That's quite a big moment right there, as we now have some years of investment in these characters and their relationships. Now Lem knows that Vic somehow had Officer Crowley killed. He was in the apartment at the time, and Vic's left him hanging out, feeling responsible for not having saved their fallen team member. Now these years later, he knows different.
Dang.
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