Season 6, Episode 9 "Recoil"  

Air date:  5-29-07

Vic starts this show with bad news on the job front.  This big city controller whose dead daughter's reputation he'd improbably managed to save just can't help him.  His juice just isn't enough to overcome Vic's "mountain of ill will."  He's apparently a dead end, with no other relief in sight.  But help's going to fall in his lap.  Patience.

Vic managed to, at least in an immediate sense, solve the San Marcos murders.  This necessitated the first friction between Vic and Hiatt, with Vic having to work against him with Claudette and deceive him as well.  Aceveda's business backer Pezuela managed to conjure up an employee who'd heard a bit of obviously ill-advised jailhouse bragging which led them to Rincon, one of the butchers of San Marcos.

But by trying to be legal and responsible, Strike Team leader Hiatt absolutely vetoed him from leaning on Rincon hard enough to make him talk.  Vic was immediately ready to go to one of his standard playbook moves, taking the guy into enemy gang territory and threatening to put him out on the street or even absolutely hand him over to the Mexicans.  Can't be getting a coerced confession, or playing that dirty said Hiatt, directing Julien to drive them back to the station.  At that point, Vic correctly figured that a regulation legal interrogation was a lost cause, and handed that to Hiatt.

By way of the broader argument for keeping him on, late in the show Vic argues to Captain Wyms that Hiatt can't handle the job.  "He's a sheep, not a shepherd."  He's just not ready for the job.  His ineffectiveness with Rincon sure looked like evidence for Vic's opinion.  He couldn't get anything out of the guy.  Hell, he was skittish even about Vic busting up the guy's stereo as they came to arrest him.  He'd not be likely to be able to even get this guy, much less get the other two butchers who helped him.

Vic went entirely behind the backs of Hiatt and Wyms to get the job done.  He promised Rincon that he'd get him off entirely if he'd give up his buddies.  He ingenuously managed to show him that he'd convince the Mexicans that he wasn't really involved, and that his jailhouse talk was just empty bragging.  He wired himself up so Rincon could hear him convince the Mexican gang leader that he wasn't involved.   Of course, after he got the other two, Vic immediately told the Mexican the truth. Vic obviously had no desire to actually protect this ugly mass murderer.

One side note reflecting backwards from the revelations on San Marcos tends to retroactively mitigate some of Vic's bad behavior, a kind of thing that has happened a lot in this series.  Specifically, it becomes clear that the horrible butchery of San Marcos was all specifically ordered by Guardo.  Probably the most gruesome, sadistic thing Vic has ever done was the extended torture and eventual merciful assassination of Guardo.  In theory, we all broadly knew that Guardo was a murdering gangster - but we hadn't really seen specifics of his wickedness.  Thus, seeing him tied up and beaten with a chain over a murder that we know he didn't commit might almost made him look sympathetic, like a martyr dieing for the sins of another.  Knowing that he absolutely commanded the gratuitously gruesome, gut churning mass murders of San Marcos pretty well takes him out of the running as any kind of Jesus figure.

The way Vic deals with the other two San Marcos butchers reflects his ideas on being a shepherd - a particularly brutal idea of sheep herding.  The Mexicans are ready to absolutely go to war.  They'd just had the shootings at the Salvadoran street fair a few days earlier.  Vic judged, probably correctly, that simply catching the murderers would not stop the violence.  The Mexicans needed blood NOW.  But even at this critical juncture where Vic needs to solve these murders to save the Barn and his own career, he's determined to come up with a solution that will tamp down the bloodshed on the street.  Claudette or Hiatt either one would have regarded that as just something they couldn't help, and they'd deal with whatever new retaliations against the Salvadorans came up. 

Vic, however, was willing to make the extremely illegal and high-handed move of absolutely turning two of these murderers over to the Mexicans.  He went through some particularly elaborate moves to cover his tracks in this.  There's a whole scene where he calls Hiatt and Julien to roust a bar on a supposed tip that the other two San Marcos murderers were there.  Then afterwards we see Vic and Ronnie pulling the tied up thugs out from where they'd been stashed, and delivering them to the Mexicans - along with an explanation that he'd had to lie about their partner's non-involvement.  Seeing these dozens of vengeful Mexicans dragging the Salvadoran murderers out of the van and set upon them as Vic and Ronnie drove off, I was distinctly reminded of the CGI demon spirits from Ghost.  Grim scene, man.

Was this a right move on Vic's part?  It was absolutely done for good motives from Vic's part.  He wasn't acting from personal outrage, nor was he doing it to cover up some misdeed or get out of something, as when he assassinated Margos.  His purpose here was clearly intended to represent his best Solomonic judgment of the greater good of keeping the peace.  But he did that by, for all purposes, simply murdering these two (richly deserving) characters.  It wouldn't have been any more a murder if he'd put a bullet in them himself.

Also, notice the evolution of Ronnie Gardocki in this.  As we get towards the end of the series, I start to realize that I probably would identify with Ronnie the most directly of any Strike Team member.  He's been the calming voice of reconciliation and moderation.  He's not particularly been on any grudge runs, or getting overly greedy.  He's gone along with some breaking of rules and a little practical graft.  He's willing to make modest practical compromises of rules, but has mostly been something of a voice not of tender conscience like Lem, but of a practical moderation.

But look where that practical moderation has gotten Ronnie.  Having been compromising some here and there, he's all the way in with Vic now.  He's belatedly now accepted conspiratorial association for Crowley's murder, and he's been directly involved with three absolute assassination murders in the last few weeks.  Those would be Guardo, and the two Salvadorans he helped Vic feed to the Mexicans tonight.  

Then there's this Mexican businessman Cruz Pezuela who has been working on Aceveda to get the San Marcos murders solved.  Surprisingly enough, all that seeming textbook civics of the concerned citizen wanting to protect the community is nuanced by some presumably highly dirty personal business interests.  We don't yet know just what the deal is, but the San Marcos murders turn out to have been business related.  The Mexicans have some kind of big business going down, and the Salvadorans were pissed over getting cut out of the picture. 

Vic figures out that Pezuela's connected to all this because the Mexican bureaucrat who lost an arm at San Marcos was his old college classmate.  For starters, that's a connection for Pezuela wanting personal vengeance for his friend, besides whatever the business interest is.  Also, this bureaucrat and the legitimate contractor Pezuela start to hint at some nice nitty-gritty connections between legitimate business and diplomacy and highly dirty business.  That's just the kind of mechanics that The Shield excels at.

THE PICTURE!!!   I just KNEW that damned thing was going to show up.  SWEEET!  Besides Pezuela's practical calculations in giving that picture to Vic, note his total visceral disgust with Aceveda for not "standing up to his attacker like a man," though obviously that would have been absolute suicide.  Besides his practical considerations with trying to basically pay Vic off to stop digging at the San Marcos back story, he WANTED to destroy the guy for this display of un-manliness.  Are Latinos generally really as stupid as this over issues of "manhood"?

Steve Billings certainly is a creatively evil little elf in his spite, planting just the right bugs in Hiatt and Hanlin's ears to push them into bed.  You can see a clue to Hiatt's neanderthal ideas on women with his initial display of a lack of interest in dating a co-worker, "I don't make a habit of banging chicks that know where to find me in the morning."  Still, you could see that little spark of competitive interest being lit as Billings invokes Dutch.  Obviously, studly man Hiatt would hate to think that Dutchman was getting hot pussy that should be his.

But Billings was really peaking in his evil psychology with his approach to Tina Hanlin.  He didn't just invoke a general competitive interest against Danny Sofer, but fabricated just the right quote disrespecting Tina professionally.  "Sucks about Sofer not letting you have a run at our killer."  Tina might or might not have felt competitive if she thought Danny was just generally trying to be sexy and lure Hiatt in, but Billings frames it that Danny was running her down professionally.  Supposedly, Danny's blocking her out from participating in interrogating a murderer that they'd brought in for the competitive female purpose of making her look like a "screwup" to Hiatt.  Tina Hanlin is not insecure and thus not particularly competitive about proving that she's sexy, but she'll fight you over her professional reputation.

But it wouldn't be enough for Billings to get Hiatt and Hanlin to hook up.  No, he goes to some effort to swipe Hanlin's cell phone so he could stake out her home and use it to summon Dutch with a text message from her - just in time for him to look through the window and catch them in the act.

The gay murder story was a little weak.  It was purely a garden variety crime of passion, with little in the way of interesting characterization or novel machinations.  It seems more back engineered as a plot frame on which to hang the Billings and Wagenbach story.  Still, they spend a minimal amount of time on the story, for maximum benefit to the internal cop dramas.

For starters, Billings just goes into complete stupid insensitive jerk mode at the crime scene with the body laying right there.  Start with a classically stupid Billings crack about a "homo-cide."   Understandably, this display causes Dutch to insist on Billings taking the job of notifying the family rather than making Tina do it.  But he doesn't want to be stuck with this.  "The folks probably don't even know that he switched sides."  Besides being petty and stupid, that de-humanizing sentiment is particularly hateful when the guy's laying there murdered at their feet.  So this scene gives us an especially sour display of the loser Billings, and provides the impetus for his whole Hiatt-Hanlin setup.  The interrogations of the murderer do not reveal much of an interesting character or motivation, but act mostly as a useful engine for more Dutch/Billings contrast.  Billings is pretty much right when he expresses the opinion that this is just a mundane crime of passion.  Man gets the hots for a nice piece of ass, and can't deal with rejection, so he kills him.  We might actually sympathetically share that sentiment of skepticism over the killer's whining and moaning.  "All I wanted was to love him, and have him love me back."  Shut the hell up bitch.

But Dutch is much more sympathetic to the guy, wanting to hear his explanation and give him a chance to vent.  That's a little on the weenie side, but you can appreciate Dutch's place as he's looking out the window of the interrogation room window at Tina down below as the guy's carrying on about just wanting to love him. 

Then there's Shane Vendrell.  You might not would have thought it possible for him to get any stupider than some of the stuff he's done previously, notably becoming Antwon Mitchell's bitch in season four.  But tonight he did without a doubt the stupidest thing he's ever, ever done in life.  He told the Armenian mob daughter Diro that Vic was the one who ripped off the big Money Train.  You know, the one that had them whopping off people's feet left and right.  Did he not think that this would set the Armenians off on a killing spree again?

It's that much worse because it wasn't even from a point of necessity for self-preservation, or any kind of thing like that.  She was just trying to disassociate from Shane after Vic told her old stories about Antwon.  Shane was just pissy about losing his payments from her because Vic's talking against him to her, so he blurts this out - like he didn't have anything to do with it. 

You could almost see how he got his guard down a bit to do something this stupid with Diro.  She's a nice, basically soft spoken girl next door from just the look of her.  She comes off like and really is to a substantial extent motivated largely by a desire to be a loyal daughter.  She's not particularly a greedy gangster, but a good girl just trying to protect what her father has built.

Also, she's so far not been seen with her soldiers.  She seems and substantially really is absolutely physically vulnerable.  She went to her home alone early in the episode, and would have likely been killed if she hadn't had the sixth sense to walk away from the door and wait for Shane.  She hasn't so far been much on even personally carrying a weapon.  "You're going to get killed without me" Shane says to her at one point. In her looks, her talk, her bearing - her concept of herself - she's just a dutiful daughter honoring and protecting her father.  So you can see how a guy might not be thinking about how dangerous she is.

But for crying in a bucket, Shane Vendrell should goddam know better.  Yes, she's just a dutiful daughter - to an especially evil Armenian mobster who was having bunches of people not just killed, but tortured and horribly butchered.  How many feetless bodies did Shane have to deal with from this?  She hasn't been running around surrounded by big beefy bodyguards, but she's commanding a small and ruthless army.  She wasn't shy about having a couple of guys balls chopped off just a couple of days earlier over robbing a couple of hookers. 

So of course as soon as Shane blurts out that it was Vic who robbed her father, she immediately determined that she had to respond.  "I must finish the job.  There is no middle ground."  OF COURSE she wasn't going to just let that couple of million dollars go.  Thus we're left set up for an ugly reckoning which will be coming up right away.




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