The Shield, Season 7: All Things Must Pass

In 2002, a gritty cop drama called “The Shield” stormed out of nowhere, landing an Emmy and a pair of Golden Globes and putting FX on the map as the HBO of basic cable.  The future looked impossibly bright.  This would be “The Sopranos” of cop shows, with Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey playing the morally gray (bordering on pitch black) main character ala James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. (Chiklis even sported the Emmy and Golden Globe hardware to prove it with a clean sweep of the 2002-3 best actor awards.)  By the time the finale of its seventh and final season aired on November, 25, 2008, to an initial audience of just 1.9 million, however, it was plain to look back and see that the rookie season was the peak of the series, at least in terms of hype, awards and gushing critical praise.  (For the uninitiated, the first season is well worth picking up – it’s an adrenalin rush in television form.)

Even if the awards abruptly stopped flowing in and the show never gained footing with a huge audience (though it was always big by FX standards,) many devoted fans greatly appreciated the ride well after the first season. The plot rocketed along, burning bright and hot, following Mackey and the strike team along their path of murder, betrayal and greed.  From ripping off the Armenian money train, to Julien’s (Michael Jace) aversion therapy, to Detective Dutch Waggenbach (Jay Karnes) strangling a cat, to Police Captain and future Mayoral Candidate David Acevada (Benito Martinez) suffering a prison style mouth rape, to Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins) dropping a grenade in fellow strike team member Curtis Lemanski’s (Kenny Johnson) lap, “The Shield” was loaded with the kinds of grit and dirt cop stories you couldn’t find in the squeaky clean worlds of “Law & Order” and “CSI.”  Season Seven faced the tall task of tying up a bunch of loose ends and bringing all of those stories to a close.

TV Casualties Rating:

Created by: Shawn Ryan

Starring: Michael Chiklis, Walton Goggins, CCH Pounder

Season Premiere: 09/02/08

DVD Release: 06/09/09

Nielsen Rating: 1.9 million viewers

Metacritic Score: 85/100

Picking up immediately after the sixth season, the final act continues to revolve around the conflict between Mackey and Vendrell in the wake of Lem’s murder by grenade.  They start out in a reluctant alliance that quickly explodes into a full out blood feud, leaving both men jobless and scrambling to avoid prison in different ways.  After walking the line for so many years and, with a lot of good luck, avoiding any real trouble, Mackey, Vendrell and their long time strike team partner Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell) finally tumble over it into the land of no return.  Death or imprisonment looks extremely likely for all three from pretty early on.

Other characters, like Acevada, Julien, Danni (Catherine Dent), and to a lesser extent Dutch and Claudette (CCH Pounder,) see their stories take a backseat to the strike team.  This has been the case for the series since the first season or two, and looking back, I think it may have been a mistake.  The show did work best when the audience was truly invested in all of the characters as both police officers and people with personal lives.  The show veered from showing us many of those non-strike team characters outside of the office and lost a lot of variety, and maybe even humanity, for it.

In most other respects, in fact, the last season is more of the same – in a good way.  The show always centered around the intrigue of the web of strategy between opposing gangs, the cops and the semi-crooked strike team kind of playing all sides.  The twists and turns of those plot elements remain strong and as always are told at the breakneck pace of the pilot’s opening chase scene.  Pretty much the entire cast kicks ass here as usual, nailing both the funny scenes and the intense ones.  Goggins has to cover the most territory this year, and he rises to the challenge.  Chiklis, Karnes and Pounder are always awesome.

So does story of the strike team ultimately pay off?  Justice was never easy or simple in “The Shield.”  Nothing was ever quite black and white.  The story of Vic Mackey and the strike team climaxes with a lot of justice, though – some literal, some poetic and some rough.