Final reckoning approaches for Vic Mackey and 'The Shield'
What's below are some thoughts on the final season of "The Shield" (there aren't any spoilers here, just a few vague hints about themes that develop during the season). For a feature on the show, go here. For more stories and interviews with the cast and creator, go here.
"The Shield" (9 p.m. Tuesday, FX) certainly owes a certain debt to the world of noir fiction. There’s that terse, knowing dialogue, the unblinking examination of greed, desire and compromised ideals. There are the abrupt, rat-a-tat titles of individual episodes: “Blowback,” “Breakpoint,” “Grave,” “Parricide.”
So it seemed apropos to have recently come across this phrase in James M. Cain’s classic noir novel “Mildred Pierce”: A man is described as “a jumble of sorry fictions.”
That’s Vic Mackey. As Season 7 begins, this corrupt cop keeps trying to sell his usual line: He’s only trying to help the poor, gang-ridden Farmington district. He’s only trying to help himself and his rogue Strike Team out of their many jams. Mackey (Michael Chiklis) says he is just trying to give Lem, his dead colleague, justice. He’s only using his handy box of blackmail files in order to catch a crooked developer who’s doing the dirty work of a drug cartel.
And on and on and on. Mackey is an addict, but he’s not hooked on drugs; he’s addicted to his fictions, and to the thrill and the danger of getting into—and out of— terrifying situations. There are moments every season—but especially during this hurtling seventh season—when the viewer thinks that Mackey is truly jammed up for good. Even Mackey will look scared and look down, lost in thought.
Then he’ll look up again, a sly grin breaking across his face. He has figured out the win-win scenario. That’s what he really lives for—cooking up another scheme that will kill two birds with one stone, or three birds, or whatever bird Mackey needs dead at that moment. The scheme he has thought up will benefit everyone and free him from the trap he’s in. Until the plan goes terribly wrong.
Mackey is a serial fabricator, a narcissist addicted to the idea that he’s doing something noble. He’s unable to see that his need to be the hero is going to drag down every single person around him.
His family is falling apart; his oldest daughter is old enough to have lost all respect for her dad and has no problem with making that clear through her actions. He’s got troubles with a fellow cop, Danny, who had a son by him but knows Vic well enough to keep the child far away from his daddy.
As for the troubles with the Strike Team, well, Mackey’s convinced he can fix that unfixable problem too. He cooks up schemes that have various L.A. gangs going to war against one another—with a little help from the blackmail box he stole from a corrupt property developer, Cruz Pizuela.
Vic’s latest batch of sins will be covered up by the gang war, the Armenian gang’s threat to his family will go away and everything will work out fine.
Except it won’t, of course. Nothing ever does. The jams just start coming too thick and fast. There’s dissention in the Strike Team, to say the least. The wound of Lem’s death can’t ever be healed. Shane, fixated on survival, looks at Vic and fears getting dragged deeper into the deep hole that Vic’s been digging for years.
Ronnie looks at Shane and Vic and finally knows that he’s probably not going to emerge from their shenanigans unscathed. He becomes a different man.
What will become of Mackey—will he ever change, will he ever see through his sorry fictions and thus begin to truly atone for the bad things he has done?
That has always been the question. And we won’t know until the final frames of “The Shield” roll by. All I can say, at this point, is that the first eight episodes of Season 7 are tight, unrelenting, complicated, fierce, wonderfully acted. In other words, it’s business as usual on “The Shield.”
The weekly cases that Dutch, Billings and Claudette are involved in are more welcome than ever. The thoughtful rhythms of those investigations and their precise, surprising glimpses into the human heart are absorbing in their own right, but those forays are also necessary release from the pounding intensity of the ongoing Strike Team stories. Thank goodness this season, Billings' injured ego is funnier than ever. You'll need the comic relief.
I’m lucky to have seen those first eight episodes, but two months is too long to wait to see the final act of “The Shield.” But the end, when it comes, already feels as though it’s going to be fitting.