THE SHIELD
SEASON THREE NOTES
Season 3, Episode 6 “Posse Up”
Air date: 4-13-04
Poor Officer Tommy. He not only lost his (ex) wife and son, but in such a way that he gets a whole pile of guilt heaped on his conscience, which would make it FAR worse.
You can see how a good man would get himself drug into something like this. The ex-wife took a valuable coin collection that had belonged to his Dad away from him in the divorce. Then she was trying to sell off what he clearly regarded not even as valuable property but as family heirlooms. As Vic noted, exes have special ways of pushing your buttons.
Obviously in retrospect a bad idea, but you can see how it seemed reasonable to just have somebody go in when he knew they would be gone and take something that by rights was his anyway. He just didn't realize at all how bad the guy was, and he comes back later and murders the wife and child. Damn.
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Vic's scene with Soren, the crack head who killed the cop's family, was interesting. Besides the fact that this jerk had killed a cop's ex-wife and child, he would co-incidentally screw the cop by being took in to tell his story.
Therefore, knowing that he's got TWO MINUTES where he's got the guy trapped in a shed before the backup arrives, Vic directly tries to talk the guy into suicide. His very first words to the guy- indeed ALL of his words- were about how absolutely unbearable prison life is. "Me, I'd eat a bullet right now." Vic spends every bit of his two minutes trying to talk the guy into taking himself out.
So there is where Vic drew his own line. He could have just shot the guy- who was said to have a gun, though I didn't see it in three viewings. Vic could have just shot him and claimed self-defense- but he wouldn't do that. Point-blank trying to convince the guy to blow his own brains out, however, was cool. I guess I'd give Vic this point.
Unfortunately, Vic is no Hannibal Lecter. Granted, Hannibal had all night to whisper suicidal encouragement to Migs versus Vic having just a couple of minutes, though.
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In all of this story, Julien had the most interesting and nuanced decisions, and probably the most correct choices of conscience.
First, he was loyal to his old partner. He went out on a limb to find the guy who killed his family. He risked discipline at work by going AWOL, and didn't flinch even when Danny threatened to tell on him. "I'm going to see this through."
Just hours before, Julien had been at the crime scene. He saw the bloody scene of the butchered bodies. He'd known the little boy. He also knew that bringing the guy in alive would be bad for his old partner. He had clear peer pressure coming from Vic, the cool guy in the schoolyard, to take any excuse to just take this worthless crackhead OUT.
He took on the physical danger of going up to the perp's door, but he stopped short of killing him. He never explained it to anyone, but he clearly made a conscious decision to bring the killer in alive and let Tommy face the consequences of his actions.
Julien explained later to Vic that he hadn't had a shot at the perp, but from our point of view he briefly but clearly did. Like Vic would a minute later, Julien had the opportunity to shoot the armed perp and claim self-defense- but the guy was just not going to give him a legitimate excuse.
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Shane got screwed with- ever so gently- throughout the episode, though he ultimately gained back a (by this point in the season badly needed) bit of audience sympathy.
He had to go help find some guys who were beating and robbing homosexual prostitutes. This assignment would be something of a blow to his ego for starters on grounds of being relatively petty stuff for an elite crew like the Strike Team.
Besides which, being the Georgia redneck that he is, he's not that interested in the welfare of homosexuals generally, much less homosexual prostitutes.
On top of which, he's there under the command of a black woman. Most likely intuiting his redneck foolishness, Trish, the black woman in question, was busting his chops- gently, and with good humor. Most notably, she picked HIM out of everybody on the team to be the one required to go undercover as a male prostitute himself.
Shane: You got ME on salami patrol? Why not one of these guys?
Trish: Not gay enough.
Funny thing with that, but Shane did look pretty credible in the role, just by walking around with his shirt unbuttoned. Woo-wee, what a pretty boy! Trish and Lem had good fun making fag jokes to him from their stakeout via earphone.
Hanging out on the street with the hustlers, he eventually found himself getting drawn into a conversation about cars, and specifically the fancy tires and rims on the car of a john. This set up the best one-liner of the show, from one of the hustlers: "Looks like our breeder knows a thing or two about rim jobs." Rim shot, please. Wait- scratch that. Oh, never mind.
Anyway, from that point on, Shane started acting in a more empathetic, and thus sympathetic, manner. He started bonding with one of the hustlers, talking about cars they'd had in high school. It was kind of sweet, really.
He also started some bonding with Trish. For one thing, he praised her on the scene for her fine physical effort in knocking down a perp. "Nice tackle." He even got to taking the gay jokes at his expense with good humor, sharing the joke as Trish was reporting back to Claudette at the Barn on their performance.
Trish: That one's a natural undercover cum guzzler.
Shane: I heard that, bitch.
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Vic retains audience sympathy most of the time even when he's out of line by having some at least plausible justification for his actions. OK, he's violating the constitution left and right, but to the end of suppressing a really evil banger.
He often looks his worst when dealing with things on the home front, as he did tonight in his last scene with Corrine. Figuring out that she was dating Owen, Matthew's therapist, he went into bully mode, looking for some excuse to insist that she fire him.
You can understand why he wouldn't be pleased to have a new daddy in the house, but this shows Vic operating on the basis of his own ego to the clear detriment of his young song. Matthew has autism. He's been struggling. Until this therapist came along, he barely even said a word. Owen has clearly made remarkable progress with him like no one else has been able to. Yet, Vic's ready to push the guy away because he's doing it with the ex.
He responds by checking up on Owen, and conjuring up a 15 year old bust for supposedly selling weed back in college to throw up to Corrine. Owen has to go! Why, Vic can't have someone like that alone with his boy. As if Vic would give a rat's ass about someone having sold weed 15 years ago after his own shenanigans with crack dealers even in just the last year.
This little argument with the ex certainly does not constitute Vic's most extreme or abusive behavior, but it shows him in a particularly bad light. Kicking a dope dealer's ass might not be nice, but you can usually at least halfway make excuses for it. Trying to screw things up for his autistic son out of petty sexual jealousy like this, however, just looks small and spiteful.
On the other hand, a bit of culpability here might be reserved for Corrine for not volunteering the news to Vic. Her first reaction when Vic confronted her was to ask if Cassidy had told him. Considering that she's about ten years old and obviously has her own issues, it's pretty crappy for Mom to put her in the position of not telling Daddy about the new boyfriend.
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The writers went out of their way to make the rival Wilshire division look like jackasses. First off, their Captain Griggs went out of his way to screw with Tommy, a mere uni, whose family was just murdered. He's determined to screw Tommy cause he's got some minor professional beef with Tommy's boss, i.e. Aceveda. His detective wasn't very sympathetic either.
Also, Wilshire division exhibited incompetence, or lack of ambition, or something stupid. Noting that there was a crack house directly across the street from their double homicide,
Vic: Anybody check that rock house over there?
Wilshire detective: We knocked. No answer.
What kind of nonsense is this? A double homicide- of a COP'S family- and "no answer" was enough to dissuade them from checking out the neighborhood crack den?
To top it off, the Wilshire cops were apparently too thick to notice or pay attention to a list of license plate numbers posted on the refrigerator. Did no one see them? Was a whole house full of cops too dumb to recognize that they were license plate numbers? Cops of all people should have recognized that. Would it not occur to them to look up and interview the people associated with license plate numbers posted on a murder victim's fridge?
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In this episode, Danny distinctly and unnecessarily turned into a SNITCH. It's understandable that she avoid doing anything to get herself re-fired. She certainly owes some loyalty to Aceveda. If she saw positive criminality among her colleagues, it might be reasonable for her to want NO part.
Going to Captain Aceveda as she did tonight, however, was just plain SNITCHING. Vic and Julien were AWOL hunting down a guy who killed a cop's family. There was no obvious reason why this was necessary for her.
Particularly considering that Julien is HER partner, and that he was going out to help his own former partner, this little tattling incident seems significantly disloyal of her. Considering their history, she might not feel much loyalty due to Vic, but ratting on Julien looks pretty bad on her.
You can take some idea of Vic's estimation of Danny's relationships from Vic's (mis)calculations, as expressed to Julien, "Danny's not going to say anything. She wouldn't do that to me. She sure as hell wouldn't do that to you."
Of course, no one likes a snitch, including the authority figure getting snitched to. Note how Aceveda was crappy with Danny when she brought him the info, as if SHE was responsible for her partner's (marginal) misbehavior.
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Captain Aceveda's assistant turns out to be named NINA. They started walking her through the set the first episode of the season, building up to a few lines of dialogue last week. Only this week, episode 6, have they actually given out her name, but they did so at least several times. Note how the first use of the name seems set up to get our attention, absent but being named as the person responsible for a crappy note on the break room refrigerator. Not having known a character by that name, regular viewers would presumably be expected to find their interest peaked.
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The money train story being drug out from last season is rapidly growing stale. Enough already. Maybe they're building up to some amazing payoff, but this business about the marked bills really dragged this episode down, and didn't particularly advance the storyline. They invested probably a good solid 10 minutes of airtime tonight just to figure out that Aceveda keeps his list of serial numbers for the marked money in his office safe.
They absolutely did not need all this rigmarole just to figure out that Aceveda's keeping the list in his safe. For starters, where else would it be? That would be the obvious place.
The Money Train stuff at the end looks distinctly like padding- first time I would say this about anything in the whole series. All the machinations with following Nina around, and sending Lem to the evidence room where she's working- what did any of that add? It wasn't much action, didn't generate any memorable dialogue, wasn't particularly revealing of character. What was the point?
Fast forward. Cut to the chase, already. The climax of this episode obviously came with busting Soren, the crackhead who killed Tommy's family. The last quarter of the show was seriously anticlimactic. This was probably the weakest ending ever.
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