The Shield - Season Six, Episode "Chasing Ghosts"

The first scene of the episode would seem to be a final encore for Anthony Anderson's Antwon Mitchell character. The opening images are of a prison search, with a long row of prisoners in the hallway having to drop their pants as officers put on the rubber gloves. Then one of the officers politely knocks on a closed door, which turns out to be Antwon Mitchell's "cell." He had boasted previously when he was on the street and making Vic's life hell about how good prison living was for him, and now we get to see the nice cell and the hot hooker curled up and purring. That, plus searching the cell block obviously doesn't include searching Antwon.

Vic has come to see him, figuring that he was the one who had Lem killed. Having tortured and executed Guardo, Vic has figured out that he'd had nothing to do with it. Must have been Antwon. Vic makes a "fool" of himself, as even he described it later trying to scare Antwon. But Antwon enjoys this very much, and definitely enjoys Vic's anguish. Chasing ghosts hasn't done you no good. Particularly, he's amused by the near omnipotence that Vic seems to think that he has, like he can sit in prison ordering the murder of cops. If he thinks that, then "you've lost your last clue."

This leaves Vic stumped, but Ronnie pulls up a curious quote from a few episodes back when Kavanaugh was framing Vic for Lem's murder and had an arrest warrant out for him. Ronnie and Shane were thinking on what to do for Vic. As Ronnie remembers the conversation, Shane came up with something like what if he said he had a grenade from the bust, and it went off accidentally? Shane was almost found out there, but Vic was re-assured when Ronnie discreetly got a careful recount of the grenades still in evidence, finding all 73 grenades counted at the scene accounted for. Vic was particularly glad, berating himself to Ronnie as an "asshole" for thinking such thoughts. Which left him back at stumped.

Meanwhile, Ronnie noted that Shane was over whatever kind of crazy depression funk he'd been in, and feeling his oats. He was particularly pleased to brag on his pregnancy sex with the wife. Confession, acceptance, and reconciliation with Mara obviously cured his funk - even with everything still hanging out there. Shane's every bit of his old self.

Heck, he's even positive with Julien, whom he's never liked for several reasons - starting with Julien reporting them for stealing drugs from a bust in the first season. But he's right happy with Julien now. "Good job, eagle eye. I knew they bumped him up for a reason."

But that old self was unsettling to Vic, with Lem's murder unaccounted for. He's checking out real estate prices, and utterly unconcerned with helping find Lem's murderer. Indeed, they need to just "put it in the rear view mirror." I particularly liked the faux-philosophical edict that Vic should "Stop asking questions that there are no answers to."

Vic senses something off there, but is wavering. "Maybe Shane's right. Maybe we've got all the answers we're ever going to get." They seem to be done. Still, Shane's nonchalance is unsettling. Note two or three very quick unsettled looks exchanged between Ronnie and Vic in more public settings throughout the episode as Shane is just way too damned cheery.

Meantime, their VIP murder case was just a perfect kind of setup for Vic's political machinations. Twenty year old Emily Martin, daughter of city controller Robert Martin, came up horribly butchered in a very bad part of town. Thus, a common murder gets top billing, elevated to being a Strike Team case. Everybody is anxious to catch the killer, no one more so than her powerful Daddy, and thus councilman Aceveda. But they're extremely sensitive to public embarrassment and disgrace added on top of the horrible loss of the daughter. Dad quickly cuts off detective Hyatt when he very gently begins to ask Mom about what the girl was doing in this part of town.

Meantime, of course Captain Wyms assumes the political pressures involved, though no one is even going to be fool enough to bring such a thing to her. She repeatedly and in varied ways tells the Strike Team to ignore the VIP pressure, and just bring her the truth - period. As a new guy on the team, Julien is less strident, but pretty much on the same page, naturally. As Vic noted, with the city controller on one side and Claudette's moral code on the other, they were screwed no matter what.

This doesn't worry Vic so much though, cause it's just the kind thing he's good at. There's always a solution. "First we figure out the truth. Then we figure out what to do." The truth turns out to be that Miss Emily was a heroin addict. When Daddy cut off the money he knew she was using for drugs, she started trading sex for drugs. When she went from one guy called "Snail" to his dealer, Snail caught her in the hallway and went all OJ on her. It wasn't that difficult to track down this loser.

So what to do for all this? Councilman Aceveda didn't want blowback, so he suggested a media leak, if this had to come out. That way, the horrible story of the dope whore city controller's daughter would come from the newspaper, and Daddy would have someone besides him or the Strike Team to be mad at. Vic's been on the other end of that scenario with Aceveda.

Vic helpfully comes up with a better idea. When they bust Snail, Vic insists on taking him in alone. Hyatt wants to rough the guy up some on general principles, cause he had shot at them. Can't be letting him come in after that without at least "mussing up his hair." Julien was not much in favor of that, but really especially didn't want Vic left alone with him for fear of much worse. He displayed his objection ever so politely, "I'm not comfortable with that" as he moved bodily toward intervening.

Vic, of course, had only the best motives - keeping the shit from rolling onto the rest of the team if this comes out. After all, he's facing forced retirement at the end of the month, so there's nothing else they could do to him. Still, it might be possible to come out of this. "Maybe there's a compromise to be made. But you guys are not the ones to be compromised."

Vic naturally already had the compromise figured out - and it was a perfect little Machiavellian move, classic Mackey. It still pretty well served justice. They caught the murderer, and he confessed to the killing. They just tweaked the details a little so that Snail and the dealer were explaining that she was a good girl who was just there trying to save poor Snail, and he went nuts on her for preaching at him.

This led to a brief private meeting between Vic and Daddy tying it all up. Only thing is, Vic can't control the medical examiner's office, which is going to come up showing heroin in her system. But Daddy can handle that. Oh, and by the way, Vic's got a review hearing about this forced retirement coming up. "I'll see what I can do." Beautiful work from Vic in turning this from a bad situation for everybody to a win for Aceveda, the Strike Team and especially Vic personally. The murderer is put away, and the Martin family is spared public humiliation. Plus, Vic's got a new very powerful friend likely to save his job. "It must be good to be king" Vic says to the city controller as he walks away.

Dutch got cut off from accomplishing anything today in a classic demonstration of his impotence against Vic. Guardo's girlfriend Nadia showed up at the station distraught over the missing boyfriend, identifying Vic and Shane from photos as having held her in "protective custody" while looking for someone supposedly trying to kidnap her to get at Guardo. Knowing that Guardo is the main suspect in Lem's killing, Dutch correctly intuits that Vic hunted him down and killed him. Not wanting to accuse him of murder without proof again after the Kavanaugh business just concluded, he goes to some elaborate effort to set Vic up to walk into an ambush interview with the girl with cameras rolling.

This was a clever and subtle move for Dutch, and it made a good drama point stretched out across most of the length of the episode with her sitting in interrogation waiting and Dutch trying to maneuver Vic into walking into his little trap. Vic was busy with the Martin case, and blew him off all damned day, building tension for Dutch and viewers before finally walking into the room.

But of course, this didn't phase Vic in the least. Indeed, the look on his face when he finally saw Nadia suggests strongly that his basic emotional reaction was annoyance that they had thought they'd so ridiculously underestimated him. He'd obviously anticipated the likelihood of the girl showing up at HQ, and had a perfectly reasonable cover story to explain what he had done. Did Dutch really think he was going to get Vic on something this obviously predictable? This left him looking the least bit shady, but within a perfectly defensible explanation. Still, it ends with Captain Wyms' judgment that "this escapade looks like another reason why you should go." But it's nothing she can really use against him.

Vic, however, has rather less control over his family, as the storyline with his daughter makes clear. Cassidy has had minimal screen time, but she steps out in this episode as rather a new force. For starters, Cassidy is not the eight year old child of the pilot, but a rapidly budding teenage hottie. But more significantly, she's smart and suddenly scrutinizing Daddy. A Lexus/Nexus search has her ticking off a list of all Vic's accumulated press accounts of brutality and murder, and she absolutely wants NOTHING to do with her evil Dad. Mom is standing there playing lawyer for Daddy, explaining how you can't believe everything that you read in the papers. That's fair enough, as is her pointing out that the IAD cop accusing him of murder is now in prison for trying to frame Vic. OK fine, but that doesn't begin to explain all this long list of stuff. Vic might not be prosecutable for lack of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but that lawyer crap isn't going to cut any ice with his daughter.

Cassidy: I don't want to learn about life from you. You have nothing to teach me.
Vic: I'll teach you respect.
Cassidy: Respect has to be earned.

Vic doesn't have anything he can say to that. For all that though, what's mostly really bothering her is that she's figured out that he's fathered Danny's baby. This brings up a good short scene between Vic and Danny, and her objections that she's taken on this baby alone and didn't want the department or his family involved. She didn't plan to have Vic's people in the mix. Reflecting the better wisdom of his fatherly experience, Vic responds that parenting just doesn't proceed according to plan.

The payoff of this is Vic bringing Cassidy to Danny's house to meet her infant brother Lee. Danny is admirably open and understanding, freely offering details of name and birth. But no, Cassidy doesn't want to hold him. She just wanted to see. Rather than quite reasonably being insulted or pissy about this, Danny smiles and shows her best motherly understanding. That's alright, maybe another time.

The new "face of the department," poster girl Officer Tina Hanlin is back, and with new status and complications. For starters, instead of doing nice safe PR for the department, she's asked to be put back out on the street. She wants to be a cop, not a mere poster girl. You have to give her credit there.

Immediately though, she runs right back into her old personality conflict with now Sgt Danny Sofer, who's going to be stuck with her as a partner for the moment, and who begins by calling her out for a small display of attitude. Officer Hanlin ain't all that impressed with her new stripes, however, as she's not a dumb trainee anymore and now has friends higher up. OK, she'll watch the attitude - but she expects the same from Sgt Sofer. That seems fair enough.

But beyond that, her presence of course riles things all up socially. The center of that is the obvious interest immediately struck when she meets Hyatt. This is disconcerting to Dutch, of course, because he's interested in Hanlin - who hasn't been returning his phone calls while she was out playing poster girl. But it's also a burr to Danny, interested in Hyatt.

Plus, her return re-ignites tension between Dutch and his partner Billings, who immediately has several less than clever digs at Dutch's interest. Dutch has lost all patience with Billings on this count, and invokes the stupid vending machines belonging to Billings still there from two seasons ago. Dutch is picking up the phone to call IAD about these machines, insisting as the conditions for not doing so that he remove them and shut up permanently on the Tina theme.

Then as the movers are there, Dutch relents. Hey, you can keep the machines. "What, so you can have them as leverage to use against me?" Well, yes, Dutch readily admits. It's a perfect gesture of the petty venality of the Billings character that he chooses to keep the machines there, consciously and explicitly accepting that he's handing his enemy/partner a stick which he has demonstrated that he's perfectly willing to beat him with.

The writers of the show are really good at subtle subterfuge, as with the scene where Vic sees the long delayed final autopsy reports on Lem. Dutch is reluctant to show them to Vic, as the autopsy photos are particularly gruesome. Lem was "eviscerated from the waist down." Besides, there was nothing substantive in the lab reports, no fingerprints or DNA evidence. But of course Vic had to see for himself. We get only very limited images from the autopsy photos, but that just makes it that much more horrible imagining what Vic must be looking at.

Oh, and the reports also contained Kavanaugh's final full-disclosure report, part of his plea deal, which Vic is looking at quietly for the last few seconds of the scene. It wasn't until the third viewing that I noticed the little look of a light bulb turning on that crossed his face while he was reading.

This set up the big final scene of the episode where Vic confronts Shane in the night at the scene of Lem's murder, given away by a tiny detail of Kavanaugh's report that neither Kavanaugh nor Dutch would have known had significance. Lem showed up late to meet Vic and Ronnie the night of the murder, explaining that he had to shake a tail. Kavanaugh's report made clear that he hadn't had one. Busted.

Not only that, but Vic connects the timeline with the correct grenade count. That meant that Shane had generated the contingency plan of killing Lem with a Salvadoran grenade even before Aceveda's lie that Lem was taking a plea deal. To me, the point about Aceveda's story is not that critical - though it was the immediate impetus that pushed Shane to murder Lem. The basic underlying point was the same: Lem wouldn't go into exile, but if he got caught he was very likely to be killed by Antwon or pushed into snitching. But it was a big point to Vic that Lem hadn't in fact done that, and might not.

Of course, this leaves quite a lovely confrontation between Shane and Vic. Shane was curiously confident, having stewed and figured out his justifications and arguments to Vic in detail. Of course, he's going to start with Vic's murder of Terry Crowley in the pilot, which is just exactly the same thing. Except that it's really not the same at all. Theoretically, yes Vic murdered a "team member." But Crowley was not a long time loyal partner who was in trouble as Lem was, but a snitch pushed into the team specifically to destroy them for the sake of his own career advancement. Whereas Lem had not broken faith with them, and besides having saved their lives a time or two, he was in trouble specifically for stuff he did to save Shane's bacon. That's SO not the same.

Further, Shane's got several different baroque variations on how he killed Lem for the family, his wife and child and Vic and Ronnie as well. He took the sin and heartache on himself to save Vic and Ronnie, too, after all. He was protecting them. Rather noble and manly of him, really.

Vic of course ain't buying that self-serving crap, as well he shouldn't have. Lem never cracked, and they don't know that he would have ever been turned. Shane was scared for his own ass, and panicked. "Lem was strong, and you were a coward." That seems pretty close to the real truth.

Shane was confident, however, that he was not a coward. He is a big, tough cop, and volunteers to deal with the possibility of getting shot every day. But that's a lower kind of small courage. A lot of folks can summon up a moment of will to hold their breath and walk into the line of fire. This situation with Lem was a whole different kind of test, a test of heart and faith in his partner. Shane couldn't help but assume that Lem would turn rat, like he knows that he would do in the same position. He wasn't brave enough to face down his own fear, and so he murdered his partner. He even did it in a cowardly manner, dropping a grenade and walking away with his back turned rather than looking him in the face and shooting him between the eyes as Vic did to Terry.

"I had the chance to pull the trigger on you once before and I didn't - and now Lem's dead because of it."

Shane's ultimate argument is that he just did what Vic would have done. He's just a mirror image of Vic. Well, yes and no. Shane is Vic's Frankenstein monster. He's sort of like Vic, only a stupid and cowardly version. Shane has all Vic's worst traits of corruption, brutality and self-serving avarice. But he lacks Vic's intelligence, courage, loyalty and underlying nobility. As it applies here, there's no way in hell Vic Mackey would ever have murdered his loyal partner Lemonhead. He'd have taken his chances on prison or taken a bullet himself before he would kill Lem.

But Shane doesn't see all that, limited by his own low intelligence from seeing that his partners are not the same as him. Thus, he's sure that Vic will do the easier thing, and talk himself into accepting his actions. Besides, he's got a lot more on Vic than vice versa if it all melts down, so he's sure that Vic's not going to turn him in.

This shows that somewhere down in his gut though, Shane has some idea of the differences between him and Vic. Otherwise, he would have definitely been afraid in a manner that he just wasn't. Given his guilt and betrayal AND the threat, if the roles had been reversed in this scene, Shane would surely have killed Vic for his own protection. It would obviously be MUCH more justified, and responding to a more real threat. Lem was obviously resisting ratting on his partners, where Vic here WANTS to see him busted and says so.

But Vic just doesn't have the will to kill his partner, as deserving as he is and as convenient as that might be, and as bad as he wants to do it. Partly, that's obviously his continuing regret for not just wrongfully murdering, but horribly torturing Guardo just days before.

This leaves Vic in the final seconds running Shane off, with the demand that he not be seen again, leading to the final exchange of the show as Shane heads for his truck. Vic: "If I see you again, I will kill you." Shane: "Goddam hypocrite."

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