The Shield
“Family Meeting Part 2”, Season 7 Episode 14
Requested By
tito_lee_76 and cutcutpastepaste
What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s about a corrupt cop named Vic, played by Michael Chiklis.
I know nothing about the series itself but I unfortunately heard one thing about the finale. Vic is offered an immunity deal in exchange for [something], and so he takes the opportunity to list the 1,080 evil things he’d done over the course of the series, all of which they’ve never heard of, and all of which he will never have to pay for - to the prosecutor’s mounting horror.
Previously On
Dead guy on the floor. Lloyd Denton shot somebody in self-defense. Dutch gathered evidence on Rita’s son. Rita called Dutch many times, but he claims she never called him. Lloyd made those calls and then killed his mother to frame Dutch. Claudette Wyms wants to arrest Vic. Vic calls his friend Ronnie and says, “Code red!” A woman shoots another woman. “Arrest Vic now”. The cops are watching Corrine, warn her! She’s arrested. Vic wants his ex-wife’s charges dropped in exchange for providing info about the cartel.
“I shot and killed Terry Crowley,” Vic admits in the interrogation room. He’s got full immunity for anything he confesses to1. They need to take down Beltran and his drug empire. Vic sets up a sting but only Beltran’s subordinates show up. Shane makes a deal. Ronnie works for ICE. Corrine has turned on Vic. A woman and child are in bed, dead.
This is the longest Previously I’ve had in a while, and it was pretty rapid-fire. I missed at least a third of what happened.
Recap
At an outdoor rally, “Robert Huggins” is running for mayor, using lots of silly rhymes and obvious cliches. The police arrive: There was a noise complaint, you have to stop using that megaphone and blasting music. Huggins refuses to comply and the police arrest him - which he knows is only going to increase his popularity.
“Ellen Carmichael”, attorney representing “Steve Billings”, shows up at the police station and asks to talk to a detective whose name I don’t catch. I don’t follow their conversation at all, mostly because the detective has no time for her; he keeps telling her he’s working on a case and will talk to her later. But you don’t care, Steve is paying you by the hour anyway, right?
Vic calls a politician and tells him he’s setting up another sting on Beltran. You need to tell “Chaffee” to come in and make the arrest, and I know you’ll want to be there yourself for the press conference so get ready.
A friend of Huggins bails him out of jail. On his way out, Huggins asks an officer for police protection. Why? He’s gotten threats: “I threaten the criminal/police codependency that runs the prison-industrial complex.” The officer isn’t impressed.
Finally, the detective (whom I’ll call Detective until I learn his name) makes time for Carmichael, and I learn what’s happening. Steve is suing the city for some head injury, and Detective’s report on the incident all but accuses Steve of lying about it.
Carmichael is worried that as soon as the city’s lawyers see that report they will squeeze Steve in the countersuit. I don’t know why Detective cares what happens to Steve, but apparently he does. So he agrees to alter his report so that it says the minimum necessary: enough to ensure Steve doesn’t win, but not so much that Steve will be bankrupted in the countersuit. In return, Carmichael will persuade Steve to drop the lawsuit. Hmm. Is she telling the truth, or tricking him into undermining the city’s case?
Meanwhile, Huggins interrupts a rally held by Aceveda, the politician who Vic called. “New Paradigm party, vote for me and I’ll set you free,” he says at the beginning of every sentence, almost as a tic. They debate a bit, but there’s no substance to it.
A rookie cop on patrol tells her partner that she’s reached the one-year mark, after which she is no longer a rookie. She hints that she wants a cake in celebration.
Back at the rally, Huggins interrupts Aceveda again.
Aceveda gets the cops to kick him out.
Vic and his friend stake out a drug delivery. “No way of knowing who else is inside,” they say to each other, “So let’s go in with no backup anyway!” Friend will distract the one or two guys with Beltran, while Vic goes in to get the boss himself.
Friend makes a deliberate noise and then shoots one of the guys when they come to investigate. Beltran grabs a gun of his own and fires off a few shots at Vic, but he’s a bad shot; Vic gets Beltran in the leg. He grabs Beltran and demands to know where the drugs are, then calls out to Friend - “Ronnie!” - to make sure he’s okay.
That’s when the ICE squad show up. “We can’t make an arrest without the narcotics, where are they?” says the woman in charge of the raid. She’s pissed off at Vic and Ronnie for being useless, but a few moments later her officers find all the drugs in the other room.
We fade out on Vic hanging his head in apparent despair. I don’t get it - did he not want Beltran arrested? Was he hoping there were no drugs and trying to deliberately sabotage the investigation with a baseless arrest?
Steve gives a celebratory announcement in his office: The department has agreed to settle! I can’t give the details because of the confidentiality clause, but I’m “sitting pretty”! He doesn’t seem to be making that up, so Detective is pissed off. Why is Detective here? Ah, this isn’t just an office, it’s the police station; Steve works for the police.
So yes, Detective is mad that the lawyer fooled him, using his watered-down report to get her client a settlement. But that’s when the lawyer shows up and reveals: all Steve got was two days’ back pay. And there’s no confidentiality clause, he’s just making that up to save face. Detective believes her - without evidence - and she gives him her card. In case you, you know, need to contact me for any reason.
Aceveda shows up at the ICE raid and gives a media interview, taking credit for running the investigation that took Beltran down.
Meanwhile, CCH Pounder (I have to scroll up all the way to the Previously to remember her character’s name, Wyms) is interviewing Lloyd, the kid who killed his mother. She acts all confident: “I know Dutch didn’t kill your mother. I know you did it. I’m officially informing you you’re a suspect and now can’t talk to you without a lawyer present because you’re a minor.” But as soon as she leaves the room, all that confidence vanishes.
Detective comes into her office, and she puts the mask back on. She calls him “Dutch”, and reveals that she’s stopped taking her medications because they’ve finally stopped working in their entirety. She’s dying - not today, but eventually.
Meanwhile, the former rookie and her partner are responding to a call (how are they still on duty? We saw them driving around that day). They find Huggins has been shot and is being loaded into the ambulance; Former Rookie accompanies him to get any info she can out of him. He says that “Big Staxx” shot him, then gasps out “new paradigm” a few times and dies.
Vic comes into the ICE office, and everyone stops and stares at him. In a side room, he finds Ronnie sobbing: Shane killed himself, after killing Jackson and Mara in a murder-suicide. Vic is in shock.
“At least we’re clear now,” says Ronnie. What the hell? Who is Shane to Ronnie that he’s both sobbing and relieved at the death of that entire family?!
Ronnie continues: We now don’t even need the immunity that ICE gave us because the testimony of Jackson and Mara and Shane is what we were afraid of.
That’s when Wyms comes in - so this isn’t the ICE office, it’s the regular police station - and tells Vic she needs to ask him questions about the “Vendrell case”.
They go to an interrogation room, where out of habit Vic sits down on the interrogator side of the table. Wyms corrects him, then confronts him with Shane’s suicide note. It begins with “I guess any pain can go away if you take enough painkillers” - which must be very difficult for Wyms to read. He insists that Mara and Jackson were innocent, and the only guilty people were himself and Vic: Vic led but I kept following. That doesn’t mean I’m innocent, we’re both bad but we made each other worse.
The content of the note is emotional, not factual; nothing that can be used against Vic in court, not really. “You must be very proud of yourself,” says Wyms, for all those drug busts over the years. She lays out pictures of Shane and his family on the table, then gets up and leaves him to grapple with his conscience.
The door is left wide open, but Vic stares at the pictures. They’re clearly affecting him, even as he doesn’t want them to. He stands up, his face contorted in barely contained fury, and smashes the interrogation room camera.
But as he emerges, Wyms has prepared another bit of theater with which to torture Vic: Dutch and some officers put Ronnie under arrest for being an accomplice to an Armenian train robbery(?), the murder of Terry Crowley, and everything else they’ve done over the last few years. Because Vic’s deal only gave him immunity, not Ronnie2. Ronnie is pissed off: We were going to run, together!
“You can go now,” Wyms tells Vic.
Vic goes to the ICE office and demands from his new boss: “Where are my kids?” She says he’ll be told when they’re safely relocated. Vic tries to offer up a Vietnamese drug gang, but she’s not interested: surrender your weapon, you don’t need it anymore. Here’s your desk, write a report by 6pm today. You’ll have to write five such reports a week and there are mandatory drug tests.
Vic is thrown by all this, but she explains. As a condition of his immunity you have to work for ICE, but we don’t have to give you fieldwork. You’ll wear a suit and tie. Label your lunches, don’t change the temperature without authorization. Call human resources if you need anything. Don’t like it? If you back out, you lose your immunity and can go to prison.
This is prison, in every way but name.
Meanwhile, Vic’s wife and kids are brought to their new home under witness protection.
Dutch enters Lloyd’s interrogation room and asks him why serial killers are so common in LA compared to the rest of the country. Lloyd guesses the reason: they move there to become famous.
In another room, Tina’s no-longer-a-rookie celebration is interrupted by a report: shots fired downtown, everyone needs to respond.
And back in the ICE offices, Vic puts pictures of his kids at his desk.
He overhears sirens out his window and looks wistfully out at the cop cars responding to the call.
The camera slowly lingers on Vic’s face. He opens a locked drawer in his desk and pulls out a gun. But suddenly his face changes from despair to resolve, he holsters hs gun, and he walks out.
Lingering questions
Lloyd so quickly guessing why serial killers come to LA shows he understands the criminal mind (I was trying to think of reasons to do with climate or state differences in data labeling), but it’s no more evidence than they already had. Will they successfully prove he did it? How? What about the evidence against Dutch?
Where is Vic going with his gun? Vigilantism? Suicide? Something else? Will he survive his “sentence”?
What will happen to Ronnie?
Who was lying about the settlement, Steve or Carmichael? The scene structure clearly wants us to believe Carmichael, but I can make a case that she lied to Dutch so he wouldn’t find out that she took advantage of him to get her client a payday.
Did “Big Staxx” really shoot Huggins? Was it at Acevida’s bidding?
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 6/10. There were quite a large number of plots happening in parallel: Vic and Ronnie’s drug busts; the mayoral election; Steve’s lawsuit; the interrogation of Lloyd for killing his mother; and even a couple more that were only briefly touched on. Most of these were given the attention they deserved, being revisited multiple times and most importantly progressing as plotlines rather than just being touched upon. And I loved the way they intersected with one another.
Unfortunately, there are a few places where it fell down. The Lloyd plot was revisited multiple times but never moved past where it was when the episode started: the police know he did it but can’t prove it. Huggins acted like a kooky novelty candidate rather than a genuine threat to Acevida, so his assassination didn’t feel like a momentous event that changed the outcome. And the existence of at least three unexpected surprises in Vic’s immunity agreement strained credulity; did neither side have a lawyer present when it was drafted?3
Writing: 8/10. Excellent writing across the board. The conversion of a cushy job at a federal agency into a fate worse than prison for Vic was very well handled. The writing of Huggins perfectly hit all the right notes to make him the kind of paper-thin populist chanting meaningless slogans that you want to hate - and his death scene in the ambulance turns that prejudice on its head.
I’m of two minds regarding Shane’s suicide note. I can’t decide whether that line about pain, clearly inserted by the writers to give Wyms pause, is out of place and out of character. But that’s not really a question I can answer, knowing nothing about Shane.
The rest of that scene is excellent, especially the buildup and dismissal of expectations: Will Shane say something that finally forces Vic to pay for his crimes? No, the suicide note is unfinished. But it hits him hard anyway.
Production: 6/10. The hardest category to score this week, because of how strongly different aspects of the production pointed in different directions.
The acting was top-tier. Absolutely top-tier. Michael Chiklis is a master of facial expression, and you could see what was going through his mind in the interrogation room and in his cubicle prison. Same for CCH Pounder, shifting from gravitas to vulnerability and back again on a dime. The actress who played Tina, too, did a phenomenal job with her “yeah, yeah, heard it all before” demeanor. And I genuinely wanted to punch the grandstanding Huggins in the face.
The rest of the production wasn’t as effective. The direction was kind of blah, and there were some questionable editing decisions (like cutting away from, then back to, the meaningless Acevida vs. Huggins debate in the church).
The worst part was the shakycam. It’s clearly an intentional part of the series’ aesthetic, but they massively overdo it, almost to the point of nausea. I don’t need the feeling of constant motion while watching somebody read a letter. It doesn’t add excitement, it’s just distracting.
Also, and I don’t know if I’m imagining it or if it’s just a problem with the version I watched on Amazon4, but there’s something very 80s about the film quality, unbecoming of an episode released in 2008.
Characterization: 6/10. This may be overly generous a score, influenced by the strength of the performances. There is some depth to Wyms, Vic, and Ronnie, and I liked the reveal that Huggins wasn’t just chanting empty slogans but was expressing the sort of deeply seated beliefs that don’t dissipate even as you lie dying. But I didn’t get much of a window into anyone else’s personalities beyond the superficial.
Accessibility: 4/10. Oh man. It took a long time to get a grasp on what was happening, and there’s clearly a lot I still don’t know.
I don’t know who Shane was or how he was related to Vic and Ronnie (Ronnie’s son, is my guess, or possibly brother-in-law). I don’t know anything about the train robbery or the murder of Terry Crowley. I don’t know how important Beltran is in the criminal underworld, how prominent an antagonist he was during the series, or whether his arrest is worthy of a finale. I don’t know anything about Lloyd or his mother. This is definitely not a finale designed to be watched in isolation.
Closure: 4/10. The main plot is closed out, as Vic and Ronnie are finally made to pay… after a fashion. Though that is undermined a bit by the uncertainty of what Vic is setting out to do as he leaves the ICE offices. None of the other plots are truly resolved.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I didn’t want to watch Breaking Bad. Not because the show was of low quality - of course it wasn’t - but because I have trouble watching irredeemable people doing irredeemable things for an extended length of time. A three-hour film where the Karma Houdini gets away with everything at the end? No problem. But seven seasons of waiting for a comeuppance that never arrives? I might make it to season three, at the most.
So a series like The Shield was always going to face an uphill climb, trying to persuade me to try it out. I could start it from the beginning anyway (as I’m doing now with Succession, truly an excellent show) and just drop it when I can’t take it anymore. But with limited time on my hands, I’m going to place the bar for such a series very high. The Shield’s writing and acting clear that bar, but the shakycam is truly nausea-inducing and the quality of the plot isn’t there.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
This is a huge relief. It means that the scene I knew about has already happened and I’m going into the finale (mostly) cold.
How did Ronnie fail to notice this so far? And why did they wait until now to arrest him, if they had Vic’s statement?
And who’s to say there aren’t more surprises lurking? Given the multiple agencies involved, did Vic make sure to get immunity from both state and federal charges? I would normally assume that he did, but given everything else he overlooked…
Writing this footnote a week later, I’ve had time to check other sources. Amazon’s version of this show is of decidedly substandard quality. Don’t watch it there.