“The Shield” — Spanish Practices (Season Finale)
Wow, a ninety minute finale and never a chance to catch our breath. Sadly, I would have preferred some breath-catching time. Last night’s lose-end-wrapping marathon was fun to watch, but came off as little more than an exercise in writing plot. The problem is The Shield has always been such a visceral experience, actually seeing the cogs in motion comes off as misguided if not boring. More after the jump…
The biggest problem, as I see it, is this: The Shield doesn’t handle conspiracies well. I suspect that this is because The Shield is a show that comes from the gut, not necessarily the mind. The characters are all making decisions in the moment (with the exception of Dutch, but he tends to fall prey to snap decisions in his personal life) and then the drama comes from how they deal with their horrible decisions.
When they try to infuse a huge political conspiracy (and it seems it’s always based on shady real-estate deals, right?) it doesn’t mesh with the tone of the series. Vic Mackey is a man who has murdered a police officer. Seeing him teaming up with a congressman to bring down the mob seems like a huge diversion from the story we’re suppose to be exploring.
It’s hard, as a fan of The Wire, to take seriously any other show that attempts to connect the dots in a big unifying way. The Wire can pull this off because it’s a show about those connections. For them, characters are added later. The Shield on the other hand is about character, and taking these characters that we’re extremely familiar with and deciding to plop them down in the middle of an intricate political power game is far too convenient and pales in comparison to what’s being done elsewhere on television.
It wasn’t just the conspiracy that felt tacked together. Everything in Tuesday’s episode had the feeling of being “written” as opposed to feeling “real” — the way the series usually earned its cred. There was Billings’ plan to set-up Dutch from last week, which at the time played brilliantly, but this week seemed like its only purpose was to bring together Dutch and Danny (a relationship I would have bought had it not been for all the well placed plot devices needed to make them the show’s Jim and Pam).
Hiatt started doing his own thing and ruffling feathers. This, despite the fact that he happily played along earlier in the season. Now it seems his actions were simply needed so he could be kicked out of the barn just in time for the season to end and for Vic to find a way to keep his job.
There was Billings coming to work to say he’s suing the department for three million dollars in workman’s comp after breaking up a fight and hitting his head. This one was actually pretty funny and had a legitimate season-long build, but he ends up breaking the news to Claudette just as everything else is going down. The whole thing reeked of piling it on.
The episodes best moments involved Shane trying to keep the Armenian mob from killing Vic’s familly — so he locks them in a trailer in a junk yard. It was crazy. It seemed rushed and unplanned. It ended with Shane shooting an assassin in Vic’s livingroom and then making yet another foolish deal with another mob boss to cover his ass (for now). In other words it is exactly the type of actions you expect from characters on The Shield: messy.
