The penultimate season finale tricked us with quiet. What do they come up with to top off this season with the San Marcos murders and the gruesome torture death of Guardo? They dial the mayhem down to a dull roar, going instead for dialogue and a climax that plays to political intrigue rather than body count. Indeed, nobody got killed tonight at all, unless you count Diro turning off her father's life support.
Cruz Pezuela is certainly a sharp guy, and a hardballer - but he's not quite as much of a badass as he apparently likes to think. He makes the fatal error of letting his arrogance cause him to underestimate and, worse, disrespect Vic. Mackey's mostly concerned at this point with saving his job. Pezuela throwing him The Picture and support with Aceveda would tend to make him less than totally concerned with whatever corrupt stuff the contractor might likely be into on the side. But he can't help himself it seems from saying that he knows Vic is a good, effective cop, but make no mistake that "You are nothing more than a fly on one of my many shits." Right there was a bad mistake. Then Vic sat down, lowered his voice, hung his head and apologized. That effusive display would tell a veteran Vic watcher that Pezuela's eventually going to be going down. "He spoke to me like I was one of his errand boys" was Vic's understated expression of the scene later to Aceveda.
The Kevin Hiatt character in his eight episode run was only so-so as a dramatic character, carrying plot function as a place holder in the job of Vic's intended replacement and as a pawn in the various personal dramas around the Barn. However, he was at his most interesting in tonight's denouement as they cash the character in. Particularly, the minor Spook Street gang initiation story that proved to be his undoing in the Barn was an interesting display of character, and of why he was not capable of doing Vic's job.
It wasn't that he's a screwup or incompetent or stupid. No, they conjured up a perfect storyline to show simply and precisely the limits of his vision and understanding. Despite a clear and convincing explanation of the badness of the idea from seasoned team member Ronnie Gardocki, Hiatt insists on burning Burnout - a good informant - and busting a routine and non-threatening gang initiation. This version of gang initiation basically consists of the older members beating hell out of the new recruit. This was not any threat to the community, but Hiatt insists on showing up to interrupt the proceedings.
His point was essentially a reasonable forward thinking liberal sentiment about intervening now to stop the recruits before they actually become gang bangers. It's better to put extra effort to nip it in the bud and steer the youngsters on the right path before they start doing bad things. That's certainly a worthwhile goal. Note also junior Strike Team member Julien Lowe's vocal support for Hiatt in this argument.
But like many liberal ideals, it just doesn't mesh with reality. If a kid's determined to join a gang, just busting up the initiation ceremony won't stop them. It just diffuses the problem. As Ronnie explains, "These assholes banging on each other keeps the rage in house." So after they bust up the initiation, they have to prove themselves some other way. Thus, one of the kids whose initiation they interrupted bashes a random old lady in the head with a lead pipe. Ronnie and Vic eventually have to clean up Hiatt's misstep.
This wasn't a big calamity, but it was the last straw with Captain Wyms. Besides his clear ineffectiveness in the San Marcos investigation, this was the clear proof to Claudette that Hiatt couldn't handle the job. As much as she doesn't like Vic personally, she showed good integrity in her judgment that he was right about Hiatt.
But she pegged her firing of Hiatt on his undisclosed sexual liaison with the lower ranking officer Hanlin. Now this was a convenient excuse for getting rid of him, rather than saying that he was just generally not quite up to the job in the absence of any particular specific overt screwup. The Spook Street initiation story showed a general lack of understanding, but busting up a gang initiation would not look good in the paperwork as a reason to fire him. Plus, I'd take it that it was a good chance to slap down some distasteful behavior that she might other times have felt it necessary to tolerate.
Not that it was anything but directly contrary to his intent, but the evil elf Billings seems to have actually done Dutch a favor by pushing Hiatt and Hanlin together. For starters, both Danny and Dutch come out looking particularly good as that plays out. Note how understanding Danny was with Tina about the incident, despite her interest in Hiatt.
Tina gave a choice revelation while talking to Danny about this. Danny expressed some skepticism about her statement of concern for Dutch's feelings. I mean, come on, you were all girly with him, looking for the benefits of his mentoring and influence when he never had a chance. No, no says Tina, "He had a chance. He just never took it." That statement puts a lot of her behavior in a substantially different light.
Danny and Dutch had a really good moment of realization and reassessment talking about the Hiatt/Hanlin liaison. Dutch took it that his interest in Tina was an indulgence in a silly infatuation rather than any real love interest. For her part, Danny figured that she was never that interested in Hiatt, but was more just wanting to see if she could still "get her girl on" now that she's a mother. "It serves us both right for succumbing to our shallower instincts," says Dutch with just the right tone of good humor.
Hiatt's idiot post-coital behavior ends up causing both women to re-appraise ol' Dutchboy. After he got some, Hiatt couldn't be bothered to so much as speak to Tina even to the extent of saying a few friendly words in the office. This contrasts with the graciousness of Dutch's re-assurances to her when she spoke to him about the incident. Thus, the quiet look of hurt and longing later as she notes the obvious emotional intimacy and bonding of Danny and Dutch inherent in just their body language from across the room as they're simply going about business. At this point, it seems clear that Dutch actually could have Tina if he wanted.
Even besides setting up the final Danny and Dutch scene, the Miracle Joe storyline was an especially excellent use of a few minutes of screen time. It turns out that there wasn't much of a crime in his death, but it made a good statement about the callousness of the street. Some schmuck turns out to be collecting protection money from panhandlers, which is pretty bad - but no, he didn't kill Joe. After surviving every kind of indignity of a homeless man in a big city, he'd just had a heart attack. In a little sign of her own cumulative resentments, Claudette suggested that maybe Joe just figured that this place wasn't worth sticking around for. What looked like a murder was merely one more stupid indignity. Some punk ass little bitch dumped his body in the doorway of a convenience store just to spite the owner and disrupt his business.
But ol' homeless Miracle Joe had been a positive and much beloved character on the street, and among the police. He'd carried on about his nephew Jimmy Barnes, whose childhood photo he'd carried around for years. By way of pursuing his own closure, Dutch hunted down the grown man who hadn't seen his uncle in a dozen years. Jimmy had a beautifully poetic speech explaining how Joe had dropped whatever else he was doing in life to come nurse his diseased younger brother (Jimmy's father) for years, and never got over his death.
This set up the last scene for Dutch and Danny, which is one of the tenderest and most emotionally rewarding moments in the whole series. Danny comes into the locker room in the evening to find an embarassed Dutch crying his eyes out over poor Joe. It's the little things that get to him. He's laughing through his tears as he notes, "Give me a serial killer, and I'm fine."
Consolation turns into a long gentle kiss, dissolving into simple holding. The setup and execution here was perfect, after years of dancing around each other. Their re-evaluations after the Hanlin/Hiatt business set it up, and mourning Miracle Joe gave them the right moment. The way it played out was just right. It was unmistakably romantic, but not really sexual at all in that moment. After six seasons, they suddenly but totally naturally seem like an old married couple with years of bonding. Looks like Dutch is going to end up raising some of Vic's offspring one way or another.
That is, if dumbass Shane doesn't managed to get them all killed. Still he made a pretty good save in that regard tonight. They got a couple of particularly good scenes with Shane kidnapping Corrine and Cassidy absolutely at gunpoint. It was for their own good, since he knew Diro had killers coming to assassinate them because he'd run his dumb mouth about the money train.
Corrine understandably reacted really badly when he showed up demanding that they come with him and shut up. Is he going to kill them? She freaked out, and it took kidnapping at gunpoint to get her in the vehicle and headed off for safety - locked up in an old semi-trailer in the middle of nowhere where no one could hear her screaming.
Shane was doing probably about the best thing he could do at that point, in fact, considering how badly he'd screwed the pooch. But despite a couple of apologies in the middle of it, he's being a complete jerk in going about it. For one thing, he won't explain what this was all about. For another, he blames it on Vic. Thus we get to "You know who you married. That's the only explanation you need."
Shane bought some time on his Armenian problem, but he surely hasn't solved it. That's essentially been kicked down the road for next season's big conclusions. He stole evidence out of the locker against Resian, which gets that guy off the hook. Plus, he told him where Diro and her father were. So Resian gets out of going to prison, and gets to take over the mob. But he still knows about that money train, and even setting in jail he tells Shane that he'll proceed to kill them and their families if they don't protect his business and generally serve him. More people are going to die over this - just not yet.
Here's one totally speculative way this could work: Soon enough, Vic will figure out that the Armenians know about the money train business. He could turn this back on Shane. Note that the only connection that they have between Vic and their money is Shane's word. But Vic could tell Resian that it was all Shane, and he had nothing to do with it.
This would be credible because there is one known bit of evidence clearly connecting it to Shane. At the time, there was the subplot about part of the cash being marked money for a federal sting. The Armenians tortured and executed several unlucky and unconnected gang bangers who accidentally ended up with some of this marked cash. But also, Shane's evil mother in law had been connected with some of this money by the feds. If Vic points this out to Resian, that would likely get Shane and his family massacred. Therefore, Vic might not would be likely to want to do that. But if that's what it would take to get them off of wanting to hurt HIS family, he might.
Early in the episode, Shane is unsuccessfully trying to talk Diro out of killing Vic's family. Leave the family out of it. But she's having none of it. "We can't separate the ones we love from the decisions we make." Plus, she was ready to kill Shane and HIS family for selling her out to Resian.
Yet their final scene was gentle, and full of an odd grace. Shane could and perhaps should have just let Resian kill Diro and the old man, but he didn't. He went to the hospital to warn her that the assassins are on the way. She already knew that she had lost control of the business due to Shane springing her rival, but she didn't really care. It really was all about Daddy, and she thanked Shane for the warning. At that point, all she could do was turn off her father's life support herself (as the doctors had recommended days earlier) and flee with her life. But she'd done all she could for her beloved father, and she seemed if anything maybe glad to be shed of the responsibility for the business. Plus, she leaves him with a heavily portentous warning, "Your sentiment will destroy you."
Interestingly and unusually, Vic isn't nearly as alarmed after the fact about Shane kidnapping his family as perhaps he should have been. After the girls showed up safe, Vic took it that Shane was just screwing with him a little to try to bluff him. He took that outlook even despite the bunches of blood in Corrine's home from the assassin that Shane had shot. I bet when Vic gets stopped long enough to think about all this, he's going to be really crappy with Vendrell.
But of course Vic is pretty seriously distracted at the moment because he's hours away from his final review board hearing and forced retirement. After the whole season of setup, this review board hearing took an interesting left turn. It all turned out to be (from a dramatic point of view) a setup for one of Vic's best displays of nobility, the kind of thing that makes you have to root for him.
The only shot he turns out to have is a cheesy politician move suggested by Aceveda. His shot is to play to the board member with a beloved autistic grandson by bringing in his autistic children to the hearing. Vic isn't a bit thrilled with this idea, obviously. But Corrine dutifully showed up with the children in tow, all dressed up nice and ready to support Daddy. But when they call them in, Vic just cannot bring himself to use his children as pity pawns like this -not even to save his career. So after all the maneuvering and buildup, Vic walks out the door without talking to the board at all. After these six seasons of following Vic Mackey, there's a lot of sacrifice and even integrity to this simple act.
There's some fair nobility from Vic tonight also in his dealings with Aceveda. He started out in the first scene of the show relishing the idea of humiliating Aceveda with The Picture besides using it to save his job. But once he starts seeing how dark Pezuela's dealings are, knocking him down becomes more important than saving his own career. For the sake of getting the help he will have to have from Aceveda, he gives up his own grudge and his precious photographic leverage. He doesn't just give it to him though, but goes to some effort to trick Pezuela into giving him the original memory stick and all copies of the photo.
I find that a bit incredible. There's just no way to know that you're getting everything. Why in hell wouldn't Pezuela have a digital copy stashed away for hard times? But the show seems to be saying that this is it for The Picture, the end. In any case, it appears that Vic has given up every copy that HE has, thus sacrificing his leverage and his long running desire to hurt Aceveda.
Consider the curious nature of Vic's final act of the season. He gets hold of this Aaron Bolez, the ex-military intelligence guy that Pezuela's got out spying for him. Vic busts him, and seizes a bunch of prime blackmail material on all kinds of judges and councilmen and such. Jackpot! This would obviously give him leverage 100x more than that stupid picture of Aceveda. But instead of stashing that away and rubbing his hands in glee, he calls Aceveda to come take it.
So then, instead of a big bang and a bloodbath to finish the season, we get to ponder what kind of high political payoff we should expect in the show's final season from this scary box o' blackmail. We also get to ponder the soul of the crookedest cop on television giving up his interest and entrusting his fate to his enemy for the larger goal of pursuing justice.
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Heather Havrilesky - Salon review of "Spanish Practices"
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