The Shield [spoilers]

[Bridgeburners]

I just finished binge watching The Shield, and watching it for the first time. I wanted to share my thoughts, and then start a thread about it. (I'm sure there's an older thread on this, so forgive me for remaking it. But it's very hard to search for; in part because a lot of characters in aSoIaF use shields, and in part because most of the threads that show up for it in the "Entertainment" section are for the show "Agents of SHIELD".)

Anyway, I thought it was a great show and definitely worth a re-watch in the future. But certainly not The Wire or Sopranos quality, and there's a few reasons why. Let me start with what I considered to be the pitfalls of the show.

My biggest issue with the show, which I considered to be a massive flaw of the show, was Vic shooting the cop Terry in the pilot. Even though it's a single event, it is a monumental event that casts a shadow over the whole show and basically sets the stage for who Vic is. Now, I see where they were going with this. They wanted Vic to be an Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) type of character - he establishes right from the beginning that he's a piece of shit, but throughout the show he makes himself very sympathetic and easy to root for. I love that type of character; Al Swearengen is one of my favourite TV characters of all time. But in Swearengen's case, nothing he did throughout the show was inconsistent with the things he did at the beginning. In Vic's case, the way he behaved throughout the show was horribly inconsistent with shooting Terry at the beginning. I'm not saying he's a saint, or even a good person throughout the show. He does a lot of awful things throughout the show - the constant excessive force, shooting the Armenian gangster and engineering the scene to look like he was under fire - but he very clearly has a well established line. He would never lay a hand on someone whom he believed was not a criminal. The weirdest part about killing Terry was that Terry didn't even have anything on him, Vic just knew that he was investigating him. The only times Vic every went to the extreme of killing someone was when that person was already a criminal and had enough information on Vic to put him away. Yet Terry was completely innocent and had absolutely nothing on him, he was just checking on him. If Vic were morally consistent in this regard, he would have been able to kill any innocent cop that was taking a close look at his dirt, like Wagonbach, or Claudette, or Cavanaugh. Yet the mere suggestion of Vic killing someone like Wagonbach just seems absolutely insane, given what we know about him.

My second biggest issue, though this may not be a big deal, is the contrivance of Wagonbach's cases. Particularly his ability to catch a killer just by psycho-analyzing them, or even by making a profile of the killer before they even have a suspect. I remember a particular case where, simply from a psychological profile alone, he ruled out all black and brown people from being a serial rapist... even though they didn't have a single suspect or witness at that point. And when he does have a suspect, he tends to figure out a lot of exactly what happened just by reading the suspect. Now I'm certainly not an expert on criminal profiling, but I would be absolutely shocked if it were anywhere near as effective in real life as they portray in the show. For a show that's supposed to be gritty and realistic, it certainly has this fantasy-land feeling you get from shows like CSI or Law & Order when it comes to Wagonbach's cases. For context, I consider Wagonbach to be my favourite character (him or Ronnie from the strike team... or Antwon Mitchel). But this was one part about the show that bugged me.

Another minor gripe, though not very serious at all, is that sometimes the show juggled too many plots, or had too many "case of the episode" scenarios that only did harm to the main narrative, in my opinion. We could be on a season finale with a major plot point hanging in the line, and then Dutch Wagonbach gets this random strangle job case, where the wife strangles her son and blames it on her neighbour, or some shit like that. And the whole time you're thinking "I really, really want to go back to Vic, I don't care about this!" 

Anyway, one of the things I loved about the show most is how immersed you get with Vic and how important his next task is. You really get the feeling that the case he's working on, or (more often) the trail he's trying to make cold, is so bloody important that if he doesn't spend every waking moment putting his effort in this, everything will turn to shit. That's why you get this feeling of anxiety when the captain tries to sidetrack him on another case, or more often when his ex wife is trying to get him to spend time with the family. Any time he's with the family you're thinking "no! You have that important thing to do, you can always hang with the family later!" But there's never a "later" because something else always comes up. Going dirty always leaves so many loose ends that you have to tie up. And that's when you realize how bloody hard it is for a guy like Vic to actually spend time with the family like he's supposed to, and why it's so easy to alienate them. And then, the show really strings us along, making us think "okay, he only has to tie up this one last loose end, and then he can stop being dirty without worries and have all the money he ever needs". But that just never happens, either because there's a loose end that never occurred to you, or Vic lost control and did something stupid, or Shane did something even stupider and Vic has to clean up his mess, etc. And this shit happens for 5 seasons (the seasons after the money train robbery) and we keep getting strung along until everything inevitably falls apart. This show does an amazing job investing you in this process.

I consider myself someone who is very much against police abuse. And yet, this show comes up with so many scenarios police abuse gives the best possible result. A prime example being in the pilot, where Vic's unique "interrogation method" gives them the location on a girl who would have died if they didn't get to her. And there are just so many examples later in the show of Vic being able to find crucial information for a case extremely quickly, where you just know that a cop who does it by the books simply couldn't have found. It really makes you question your stance on things, or shows you cases where the legal process is flawed. But at the same time, you have Claudette reminding you how incredibly important those legal barriers are, because of how horrible it is to convict or torture a suspect who is innocent. I've never seen a show address this level of moral ambiguity better than The Shield.

Before watching this, I knew that the Shield had a reputation for having what people consider to be a godlike finale. I'll say that it wasn't my favourite episode. Actually, the finale of season 5 (the one where Shane kills Lem) stands out to me a lot more. But it's still pretty good. Maybe I had too high expectations, given what I've read about it.

Anyway, these are my first impressions. Maybe I'll think of more to say about the show later.

[RedEyedGhost]

Here's the last thread started about it - right around a year ago coincidentally.  Maybe a mod will merge these two.

[Bonesy]

Just ANOTHER DAAAAAAAAAAAY

[briantw]

I think you have to look at the point of killing Terry more so than the act itself.  Killing Terry was effectively the "no turning back" point for Vic as a person and character.  That single act had a domino effect that impacted the remainder of the series, particularly in season four and beyond.  You almost forget about Terry in seasons two and three, but his murder comes back in a big way and basically destroys all the people involved.

As far as the finale goes, it's considered to be so good because most shows end so poorly.  Vic may not have gone to jail, but he still lost everything.  There was a satisfying arc from start to finish, and ultimately everything came back to killing Terry in that first episode.

[Bridgeburners]

I think you have to look at the point of killing Terry more so than the act itself.  Killing Terry was effectively the "no turning back" point for Vic as a person and character.  That single act had a domino effect that impacted the remainder of the series, particularly in season four and beyond.  You almost forget about Terry in seasons two and three, but his murder comes back in a big way and basically destroys all the people involved.

As far as the finale goes, it's considered to be so good because most shows end so poorly.  Vic may not have gone to jail, but he still lost everything.  There was a satisfying arc from start to finish, and ultimately everything came back to killing Terry in that first episode.

I understand the plot reason for killing Terry but that doesn't invalidate what I said at all. Unfortunately, I didn't forget about that through seasons 2, 3, and 4 (you're thinking of 5 btw) and, all the while I was watching those I was thinking "this isn't the guy we were introduced to in episode 1". It's not even that he had a hard time doing it. Look at the scene itself, it shows Vic standing over Terry's body and shaking his head, like what he just did is simply routine. This is clearly not the character that we follow through the rest of the show. The whole thing felt very clumsy, like the writers decided to change their mind about character they were writing about party way through the show. I get that they needed a "no turning back point" if they wanted to follow through with the way the last three seasons went. But they simply could have done that more cleverly. Shane killing Lem, for example, was a perfectly executed way to get one of the strike team to kill an innocent cop. I found that completely believable, given what we knew about Shane. I'm not saying it had to be identical, just more well thought out. Either that, or they should have made Vic's character more consistent with what he did in the pilot.

[RumHam]

I understand the plot reason for killing Terry but that doesn't invalidate what I said at all. Unfortunately, I didn't forget about that through seasons 2, 3, and 4 (you're thinking of 5 btw) and, all the while I was watching those I was thinking "this isn't the guy we were introduced to in episode 1". It's not even that he had a hard time doing it. Look at the scene itself, it shows Vic standing over Terry's body and shaking his head, like what he just did is simply routine. This is clearly not the character that we follow through the rest of the show. The whole thing felt very clumsy, like the writers decided to change their mind about character they were writing about party way through the show. I get that they needed a "no turning back point" if they wanted to follow through with the way the last three seasons went. But they simply could have done that more cleverly. Shane killing Lem, for example, was a perfectly executed way to get one of the strike team to kill an innocent cop. I found that completely believable, given what we knew about Shane. I'm not saying it had to be identical, just more well thought out. Either that, or they should have made Vic's character more consistent with what he did in the pilot.

I had the same complaint when I watched it a year or so ago. In hindsight Terry probably should have gotten it in the first season finale, once he actually had something on Vic and was a fully developed character. But I'm guessing they felt they really needed to make a splash in the pilot to get the show picked up at all. 

Still a good show, probably should have been a season shorter. When it was firing on all cylinders it could really be something. 

[WarGalley]

I just finished binge watching The Shield, and watching it for the first time. I wanted to share my thoughts, and then start a thread about it. (I'm sure there's an older thread on this, so forgive me for remaking it. But it's very hard to search for; in part because a lot of characters in aSoIaF use shields, and in part because most of the threads that show up for it in the "Entertainment" section are for the show "Agents of SHIELD".)

Anyway, I thought it was a great show and definitely worth a re-watch in the future. But certainly not The Wire or Sopranos quality, and there's a few reasons why. Let me start with what I considered to be the pitfalls of the show.

My biggest issue with the show, which I considered to be a massive flaw of the show, was Vic shooting the cop Terry in the pilot. Even though it's a single event, it is a monumental event that casts a shadow over the whole show and basically sets the stage for who Vic is. Now, I see where they were going with this. They wanted Vic to be an Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) type of character - he establishes right from the beginning that he's a piece of shit, but throughout the show he makes himself very sympathetic and easy to root for. I love that type of character; Al Swearengen is one of my favourite TV characters of all time. But in Swearengen's case, nothing he did throughout the show was inconsistent with the things he did at the beginning. In Vic's case, the way he behaved throughout the show was horribly inconsistent with shooting Terry at the beginning. I'm not saying he's a saint, or even a good person throughout the show. He does a lot of awful things throughout the show - the constant excessive force, shooting the Armenian gangster and engineering the scene to look like he was under fire - but he very clearly has a well established line. He would never lay a hand on someone whom he believed was not a criminal. The weirdest part about killing Terry was that Terry didn't even have anything on him, Vic just knew that he was investigating him. The only times Vic every went to the extreme of killing someone was when that person was already a criminal and had enough information on Vic to put him away. Yet Terry was completely innocent and had absolutely nothing on him, he was just checking on him. If Vic were morally consistent in this regard, he would have been able to kill any innocent cop that was taking a close look at his dirt, like Wagonbach, or Claudette, or Cavanaugh. Yet the mere suggestion of Vic killing someone like Wagonbach just seems absolutely insane, given what we know about him.

My second biggest issue, though this may not be a big deal, is the contrivance of Wagonbach's cases. Particularly his ability to catch a killer just by psycho-analyzing them, or even by making a profile of the killer before they even have a suspect. I remember a particular case where, simply from a psychological profile alone, he ruled out all black and brown people from being a serial rapist... even though they didn't have a single suspect or witness at that point. And when he does have a suspect, he tends to figure out a lot of exactly what happened just by reading the suspect. Now I'm certainly not an expert on criminal profiling, but I would be absolutely shocked if it were anywhere near as effective in real life as they portray in the show. For a show that's supposed to be gritty and realistic, it certainly has this fantasy-land feeling you get from shows like CSI or Law & Order when it comes to Wagonbach's cases. For context, I consider Wagonbach to be my favourite character (him or Ronnie from the strike team... or Antwon Mitchel). But this was one part about the show that bugged me.

Another minor gripe, though not very serious at all, is that sometimes the show juggled too many plots, or had too many "case of the episode" scenarios that only did harm to the main narrative, in my opinion. We could be on a season finale with a major plot point hanging in the line, and then Dutch Wagonbach gets this random strangle job case, where the wife strangles her son and blames it on her neighbour, or some shit like that. And the whole time you're thinking "I really, really want to go back to Vic, I don't care about this!" 

Anyway, one of the things I loved about the show most is how immersed you get with Vic and how important his next task is. You really get the feeling that the case he's working on, or (more often) the trail he's trying to make cold, is so bloody important that if he doesn't spend every waking moment putting his effort in this, everything will turn to shit. That's why you get this feeling of anxiety when the captain tries to sidetrack him on another case, or more often when his ex wife is trying to get him to spend time with the family. Any time he's with the family you're thinking "no! You have that important thing to do, you can always hang with the family later!" But there's never a "later" because something else always comes up. Going dirty always leaves so many loose ends that you have to tie up. And that's when you realize how bloody hard it is for a guy like Vic to actually spend time with the family like he's supposed to, and why it's so easy to alienate them. And then, the show really strings us along, making us think "okay, he only has to tie up this one last loose end, and then he can stop being dirty without worries and have all the money he ever needs". But that just never happens, either because there's a loose end that never occurred to you, or Vic lost control and did something stupid, or Shane did something even stupider and Vic has to clean up his mess, etc. And this shit happens for 5 seasons (the seasons after the money train robbery) and we keep getting strung along until everything inevitably falls apart. This show does an amazing job investing you in this process.

I consider myself someone who is very much against police abuse. And yet, this show comes up with so many scenarios police abuse gives the best possible result. A prime example being in the pilot, where Vic's unique "interrogation method" gives them the location on a girl who would have died if they didn't get to her. And there are just so many examples later in the show of Vic being able to find crucial information for a case extremely quickly, where you just know that a cop who does it by the books simply couldn't have found. It really makes you question your stance on things, or shows you cases where the legal process is flawed. But at the same time, you have Claudette reminding you how incredibly important those legal barriers are, because of how horrible it is to convict or torture a suspect who is innocent. I've never seen a show address this level of moral ambiguity better than The Shield.

Before watching this, I knew that the Shield had a reputation for having what people consider to be a godlike finale. I'll say that it wasn't my favourite episode. Actually, the finale of season 5 (the one where Shane kills Lem) stands out to me a lot more. But it's still pretty good. Maybe I had too high expectations, given what I've read about it.

Anyway, these are my first impressions. Maybe I'll think of more to say about the show later.

You're sentiments mirror my own. Vic never does get quite as bad as he does in the pilot and even then, killing a cop doesn't jive with his loyalty or actions through any of the coming seasons. His resourcefulness, cunning and political connections also beg the question of why killing Terry is even necessary considering Aceveda has nothing on Vic other than suspicion. The writers clearly wanted to make a big splash at the very onset and I'm okay with it in hindsight. 

I consider the Shield's finale to be the best ever while the show overall falls a hair short of great. The only flaw in the finale was that I didn't think Dutch, Claudette, Julian, or Danny had enough screentime / closure to their character arcs. This seems minor in hindsight and understandable considering the finale was already over an hour, but it was my initial reaction once I lost the gut-punched feeling of the episode. I really wanted more of a transformative arc to Dutch though. There was talk in one of the other threads of a scene that got cut from the finale where Dutch had a hostage in his basement.. thereby him turning into a serial killer. Not sure how I would have felt about that, but amusing nonetheless. 

The show overall, as you mentioned, had too many case of the day episodes and I thought some of the villains were written off far too early and easily given how much hype was made out of them (Armadillo and Dezerian come immediately to mind). The show did find a way to inject fresh air into it that other shows never seemed to be able to pull off. Glenn Close's season was good, Whitaker's addition was great and Antwon Mitchell was an entertaining villain. 

The most interesting thing about the Shield was something I didn't learn until after the finale. The Strike team was based on the LAPD's Rampage / Crash unit. Reading about David Mack (who Vic Mackey is based on) and the corruption of the LAPD was just.. surreal.. even knowing the history of that particular department. Even more fascinating / morbid is that David Mack robbed 700K, never gave up the money, and is free now.

[Martell Spy]

The most interesting thing about the Shield was something I didn't learn until after the finale. The Strike team was based on the LAPD's Rampage / Crash unit. Reading about David Mack (who Vic Mackey is based on) and the corruption of the LAPD was just.. surreal.. even knowing the history of that particular department. Even more fascinating / morbid is that David Mack robbed 700K, never gave up the money, and is free now.

 

Yeah same here. I only looked those details up just a couple years ago and was pretty amazed. Btw, I think there was a Crash reference in GTA3 to the corrupt cops in that game. I didn't get the reference until just now.

The Shield is I think my third favorite show of all time, although it did have it's flaws. I still do a watch through now and again. I'm still reeling from Ronnie's fate. When are we going to get our Ronnie spin off? He's still alive, maybe?

I think the 5th season was the absolute best and some of the most gripping TV I've ever seen. I had a lot of nostolgia for the early seasons due to the strike team later being broken down and missing them as a team, but I felt the early seasons also had some of the clumsier moments. . The lame side cases mentioned. I was almost never bored when Vic and the strike team were somehow involved,. And while I loved the Dutch and Claudette characters, it was only when they had a lamer case that I got bored with the show. I think it was the Tivon case that was their greatest imo. The later seasons were really good, in particular Shane's final adventures.