The main self-contained storyline this week was excellent, but particularly
gruesome. The setup was just existentially horrific. So a woman
has been shot dead in traffic, and there's Dutch with his rubber gloves
examining the body. He gingerly picks up something to examine it in
full view. "Umbilical cord," Claudette explains from out of
frame.
So someone has not just murdered this pregnant woman, but ripped the baby out of her. They're of course frantically searching for the missing child. Then they find it dead, beaten and abused. What kind of monster would rip a baby out the womb to take it in an alley and beat it to death?
What makes it so excellent though, is the mitigating explanation. A couple of guys and a girlfriend get cut off in traffic, so the guy just opens up and shoots her. As the girlfriend explains, "She almost killed us, so it was self-defense." It's only as the mortally wounded woman staggered out of her car that they realized she was pregnant. It only went from a run of the mill dumb murder to something truly horrific because the girl was struck with some very damaged idea of conscience to insist on trying to save the baby. Girlfriend's explanation that they were going to give the baby to her cousin who was barren after multiple youthful abortions was an especially effective note of sad pathos.
But obviously these violent fools are not the least bit smart enough to take care of a baby, let alone one just ripped prematurely from the womb. So when the child isn't breathing, they start trying to do "the stuff you see on doctor shows." The child ends up de facto beaten to death by stupid crude attempts at CPR.
The subpar trainee officer Tina in the middle between Julien and deskbound pregnant Danny continues to bear fruit. Julien is quite tough and unforgiving with this person he is trying to train- and with good reason. Tina is dangerously incompetent, rushing into the holding cage still wearing her gun. As Julien chastises her, that's one of the top obvious stupid ways to get yourself or a brother officer killed.
The best part, though, is how this sets things up between Tina and Danny. After the incident, Tina's run off crying in the back room. That Danny goes to her then is itself evidence of sympathy, but she can't just pat her on the head and tell her that it's ok. It's not, and it would be dangerous to pretend otherwise, and completely impractical. The only thing she really can do at some point is to more gently re-state what Julien is saying- and tell her that she absolutely HAS to buck up if she's going to last. You go back out there all teary and puffy eyed, and those male cops will never, ever respect you. She's obviously right.
Yet, understandably, Tina lashes out at Danny, and how she's supposedly being hateful with the new girl because big pregnant Danny and her stretch marks aren't Miss Thing in the office anymore. Which leads to Danny's final brutal but accurate assessment closing the scene, "It's bitches like you that make this job hard for the rest of us."
Meanwhile, Vic's making moves to lawyer up, and of course he's got JUST the candidate. The attorney Becca Doyle showed up last week, working pro bono for a previous client who was actually innocent this time. Roping her into some emergency help with a perp in a kidnapping case, she had forced Vic to let loose a particularly wicked old gal involved in sex slavery and killing. Just the person to get Vic off.
Vic's early setup this week with Becca really underscores nicely the continuing contradictions that make the Vic Mackey character so interesting. Vic's a big, fat liar. Explaining to an attorney highly skeptical of taking his case, he makes a good, plausible explanation about political machinations with Councilman Aceveda trying to cover his ass. They're about halfway true, even.
But it's true lies, though- or perhaps "lying truth." Yes, it would be politically useful for the city and the councilman personally to hang the Strike Team out to dry, just as Vic said. But he's got the woman roped in to defend him without explaining that they're after him because he murdered a fellow police officer. The devil is in the details, as it were.
But for all that wickedness and deceit, Vic has a perhaps somewhat twisted, but very strong sense of loyalty. The attorney wants to represent just Vic himself. Things like this inevitably devolve into every man for himself, she explains, and he needs individual representation. NO, Vic explains. It's all or none. We'll survive together, or we'll go down together.
Now, the point of pressure from IAD is that they have Lem on the hook for a brick of heroin, which point has allowed them to force him to wear a wire. Thing is, Lem didn't see Vic's murder- and didn't even know of it for years, until the last few days when confronted by IAD. Vic could just accept that Lemansky is screwed. But no, he's committed to protecting him. Too bad he wasn't that concerned with avoiding putting him in this position in the first place, but still.
Meanwhile, Kavanaugh from IAD shows a bit of the authoritarian whip hand here today. Now, it's one thing that he's sweating Lemansky. Lemansky's a dirty cop more or less legitimately busted with pounds of heroin. But now Vic's ex-wife has figured out who he is and confronted him as he's coming to her with the continuing LYING cover story about his non-existent autistic child. Within seconds, he's threatening HER with prison for obstruction of justice if she even tells Vic that IAD has approached her.
I'm pretty curious about this. Could this be anything like a credible threat in the real world? The creators of this show are usually pretty good with legal realism, but this sounds really questionable to me. You come up to me on the street acting all stupid like this, and then threaten me with prison if I tell my spouse?
Meanwhile, Vic is playing Kavanaugh like a Stradavarius. He had a real simple trick at the beginning of the show that no one seems to have gotten, even Lem who certainly should. Rolling with Lem and his wire, Vic makes a big point of casually stopping by the office to see Councilman Aceveda, who he explains to Lem has been giving him "reports." It's no such thing, of course, and with Lem sitting in the car out of earshot, he's giving Aceveda some line about trash pickup in the district, just to have something to say.
The point, of course, was the taped audience. There's Kavanaugh later listening to this tape, hearing Vic talk about getting reports from Aceveda. He's planting seeds of distrust between Kavanaugh and Aceveda.
Then he's playing Kavanaugh again at the end of the episode as he rolls in unexpectedly while he's confronting the snitch Emolia. Kavanaugh comes in on him, and he's already on seconds notice concocted a reasonable story about why he's there, and at that one that will be backed up by Emolia's phone records if he checks it.
I particularly appreciate and despise Kavanaugh's emotional manipulations with Lemansky on the whole birthday thing. See, the guys have forgotten his birthday- as if guys give a damn about such things. But Kavanaugh is showing consideration and attention, picking up on his fishing talk on one of the wired conversations, and giving him some fishing lures for his birthday- and of course talking about his teammates have disregarded it.
In practice that can't really mean anything. Lemansky's
relationship to his mates is based on stuff a lot deeper than stupid fishing
lures, but it's the thought that counts- the evil, manipulative thought of
Kavanaugh in trying to play him this way.
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