The Shield had its fifth season premiere on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 on the FX network. They've done another excellent season opener, proving again that they're the tightest scripted drama show ever put on a television.
They're bringing it all back home this season, which is obvious from the first seconds of "previously on The Shield" which go back to the pilot. The central conflict of the series was largely laid away after the first couple of shows. Into seasons two and three, Vic Mackey was scheming away, keeping a couple of steps ahead of IAD and focusing on some supervillainous Armenian mobsters.
The fourth season largely was injecting a dominant outside story based to a significant degree on the hot season long pairing of Glenn Close and Anthony Anderson as guest cop and robber, with the original Shield crew almost in support roles. Great stuff.
But last night it all came back to square one, as as a long, circuitous IAD investigation comes back to look at Vic's original sin from the pilot. In the first episode of the show, Detective Mackey flatly assassinated a brother officer, Terri Crowley. He was a snitch, and most folks would not find him very sympathetic. Still, that's absolutely first degree murder, and there's no statute of limitations on that. At some point, presumably the eventual end of the series, Vic Mackey has to answer for killing Detective Crowley. Now we're refocused on the original crime that won't, can't just go away.
We have one main new character, IAD Lt. John Kavanaugh (Forest Whitaker). He slopped into getting hooks into Vic's subordinate Kurtis Lemansky. Lemonhead is on the hook for, nominally, stealing a kilo of heroin late last season.
Which leads Kavanaugh to the Strike Team, and the hint of police Captain now city councilman Aceveda's suspicions about Crowley's death. As the boss of the snitch Vic killed, Aceveda feels some lingering guilt over having put him in that line of fire. Kavanaugh manages to paint the councilman an attractive enough picture of the political benefits to coax him out of information about the deal with the federal Justice Department that got Crowley killed. It's on.
The challenge for a season opening episode of a serial drama like this is most of all to hit the ground running. They have to effectively put across a fair amount of exposition, starting with resetting the officers' situations- and yet keep the action coming, and maintain the visceral nature of a good, gritty cop show.
Filing under "should have seen it coming," they promoted Billings from last season to replace the fired Close character. They foreshadowed this in the opening "previously on" segment with a bit of Dutch a couple years previous talking about refusing the superiors' offer to be their "yes man jellyfish." Thus, they have now promoted the absolute pussiest detective ever on the series. Even the less than highly macho Dutch absolutely beat this punk up in the parking lot last year. In short, Billings was the absolute lamest jellyfish they could find.
Meanwhile, Officer Sofer turns up this season opener six months pregnant- and not saying who the father is, which naturally results in a betting pool. She's working in the office, leaving her regular partner Julien to train the new girl Tina, a young Latin girl who certainly ups the babe quotient on the show- and openly intends to use that to compensate socially for her obvious professional deficiencies.
First up, she's bringing it all back home for the show by carelessly contaminating a crime scene. Thus, there's Julien standing by listening to Claudette give her the same lecture about "that's how murderers go free" that she gave Julien over a churro vendor's cart in the first season. Long time viewers might almost get slightly sentimental, if they happen to remember the background.
Then of course, there is the Lem situation. Lt Kavanaugh manages to show up out of the blue to take him into custody. In the subtlety of their effect, they managed to show up just as Lem is stepping out of the shower. He's wet, wrapped only in a towel, vulnerable.
Yet the action kept coming. Here's a basic statement of the impressiveness of the writing by Kurt Sutter: They accomplished quite a bit of re-setting and exposition of the season to come- and managed to have TWO separate riots before the opening credits. The first scene opening the season was a black/Mexi race brawl in a funeral home. The effect was darkly comic, with people crashing into the coffin and sending the corpse sprawling out across the floor.
There was the less funny BIG race riot at the high school, which resulted in a couple of people getting dead. It sucked, but it made an ingenuous setup for Vic to have good, necessary reason to absolutely turn a fire house on black kids running crazy and violent. Then we get to watch Councilman Aceveda have to defend Vic for it.
Also for the action quotient, Vic's got a new torture method. It's so simple, you wonder why he didn't think of it before. Get you a suspect handcuffed to that metal table in the interrogation room- and hit that table with the suspect's confiscated taser half a dozen times until he co-operates. Yee-haw!
Other than that though, really the boys are starting out this season clean and at least momentarily largely reformed. That is, they're not absolutely taking kickbacks from dope dealers.
Yet they're starting out up against it. And you can't really pity poor Vic, cause if you just blow somebody's brains out like that, you've just got it coming to you if it's half a lifetime away. Oh, and coming from the other side, the mayor and council are moving to push Vic into early retirement- unaware of the IAD investigation which threatens him with far worse.
In the meantime, a stupid 12 year old Mexican kid named Cisco absolutely murdered a random black dude sitting in a barber's chair to fulfill a stupid "kill clock" for his no-count daddy in the pen. Barber stabbed him with his scissors, and Vic went to some efforts to save him in the back alley. At that point, it would have been better all around for Vic to just let the kid bleed out- but Vic's too damned nice for that.
But the show also has a high degree of comedy as well. The best comedy tonight involved Cisco's older, teenage brother, who had also tried to kill some random Negroes to fulfill this complicated gang grudge for Daddy. Walking around that upper catwalk- handcuffed- he went nuts and tried to throw Claudette off the balcony.
But then it gets really funny, cause Dutch gets to him first. He's, uh, overcompensating with his arm wrapped around that kid's neck. It took Vic and Shane both to keep him from killing this big dummy. It was pretty comic, particularly for long time Dutch Wagenbach fans such as myself.
But then the piece de resistance. As they pull Dutch off the kid, he goes sprawling on the floor, and vomits off the balcony- directly onto the jellyfish Billings.
Interesting way they ended. They did a typical Shield ending montage, with largely silent actions cut together across a moody acoustic ballad. But then after an hour of show, and a typical ending- they cut back for five extra minutes for one more scene. It's suddenly back to intense dialogue, Kavanaugh with Lem in custody, putting him on notice of what he's got on him and what he wants.
So far, it looks like this Kavanaugh guy is totally clean- and that's what's really dangerous to Vic. He can handle gangsters and crooked cops- but a smart, determined righteous man could be the end of Vic.
Should be another heller season.
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