Breaking Bad 5-11: The Confession

If Community is, as I argued earlier, an attempt to address the difficulties of making a sitcom in the age of postmodern irony, Breaking Bad is at least partially trying to solve the problem of making a serious drama in a world which is so predominantly absurd. Walter White wants to be Scarface, but he is always hamstrung by the ridiculous accouterments of late capitalism – purple coffee machines, Roombas, cars that bounce, etc. Nowhere is this more in focus than the scene in “The Confession” where Walt and Skyler meet Hank and Marie in a cheesy Mexican family diner. The conversation is the stuff of high drama, with terse insults, implicit threats, questions of morality, and the hefty weight of a shattered family. And then there's the hapless waiter who keeps poking his head in asking if the mortal enemies would like some guacamole (they make it at tableside, you know). And there's the general atmosphere of the restaurant, as silly as the conversation is serious. Breaking Bad creates humour through these juxtapositions, but it also highlights both the everyday inanity of the world around us and the over-the-top seriousness of Walter's personal drama. Walter is a man who could never honestly laugh at himself, but for as much as Breaking Bad draws us into the drama of his situation, it also makes him laughable.

This is highlighted in not just the Mexican restaurant scene but through the show's visual style. Breaking Bad is constantly shot at weird, almost distracting angles, as if to jar us and remove us from the action. Towards the start of this episode, we get a birds-eye view of the Whites' bathroom. This angle reduces the everyday beauty and grooming products to abstract geometric shapes, thus turning an ordinary bathroom into something absurd. The preponderance of these circles highlights the ridiculousness of our consumption-oriented lives – who really needs all of those kinds of face cream, much less Walter and Skyler White? Walter is the central spoke of Breaking Bad's critique of capitalism, showing how the desire to be an entrepreneur and a self-made man leads inevitably to monstrousness, but shots like this add a more subtle layer of criticism.

In the scene above, Walter is desperately looking for some way to disguise the cut he received collapsing in the bathroom. “The Confession” as a whole is about this type of illusion, most notably the ever-increasing web of fictions that Walter conjures up in order to hide and excuse his actions. Even when he isn't actively lying and trying to cover up his criminal activities, Walter is always playing a role, always trying to game someone, whether it be convincing his son that he's an affable family man or convincing his array of partners that he is a respectable businessman. At this point there's very little of Walter's life that isn't some kind of lie

So it's no surprise that, when threatened by Hank, Walter conjures up another elaborate story. This is the titular confession (or one of them), a videotape that implicates Hank as the mastermind of the whole meth operation. This is perhaps the apex of Walter's performances: he seems more honest sniveling about how he hates being under Hank's thumb than he does when portraying something close to the truth. Perhaps recording this tape allows Walter to take on his favourite role, that of the victim buoyed along at the whims of circumstance. Or maybe he's getting out some real, repressed guilt and sadness over what he's done. Or maybe he's just become a consummate liar.

“The Confession” also shows us Walter at his worst. In one scene he comes into the car wash, looking for a gun hidden in the ice tray of a pop machine. He mumbles something about having to check the latch on the machine, and makes a lame excuse to leave. Walter is not convincing to anyone here, and he seems at his wits' end, his storytelling prowess completely exhausted. What's striking is how these lies are just unnecessary. Walter owns the car wash – he can poke around there wherever he wants, without needing permission, and it isn't as though he needs to lie to Skyler any longer about his criminal activity. But Walter is almost addicted to spinning stories, needing to come up with a benign reason for everything he does. He keeps things from people just out of habit, or just to revel in his power over others.

This is something Breaking Bad takes from The Shield: the endless web of lies and schemes that eventually build up a momentum all their own. Walter White, like Vic Mackey before him, believes that he is in control of the violence and deceit that surrounds him, but in reality he is simply being carried along by the tide of events. In “The Confession” we get to see Walter cool and in control, but we also get to see him in a panicked rage, traumatized by the ability of other humans to act in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. If the fifth season has revealed anything, it's that Walter is ultimately a pawn to much larger forces than him, which refuse to let him stop what he has started. The Madgrigal conglomerate is one of these forces, and you can maybe count the neo-Nazis among them too, but there also seems to be a kind of entropic force that is propelling all of these individuals to a violent collision.

Setting is crucial to Breaking Bad. The city of Albequerque, already rendered a little ridiculous by its name (or maybe just the associated Weird Al song), is depicted as the epitome of late capitalist grandeur and absurdity. It is a plastic city of suburbs and tenements built in the desert, a futile attempt to impose civilization on the natural forces of chaos represented by the desert[1]. The desert haunts every street of Albequerque, and this is reflected in the show's cinematography. In several interior scenes it seems as though the desert is right outside, about to burst through the windows of the complacent civilians.

The desert is also the setting for a crucial scene in this episode, in which Jesse finally confronts Walt and begs him to “Stop playing me for once”. Over the course of the series there have been many rendezvous in the middle of the desert, and they're generally the site of business dealings between Walter and the various gangs he is involved with. The desert is where all of Walter's stories dissipate and raw power reveals itself. It is, so to speak, the desert of the real.

But Walter is blind to the encircling forces of chaos. He sees the desert as just another tool to be used: a convenient space to cook meth undisturbed or to bury a couple barrels full of cash. Even this late in the series, with his double life unfolding all around him, Walter still believes he can put everything in order through his intellect alone. And so when Jesse offers him a possibility to speak honestly – downright pleads for him to do so – Walter just continues with the sales pitch, telling Jesse that assuming a new identity far away is what's best for him.

Walter adopts his fatherly aspect for the talk with Jesse, which is the same persona he takes on in his rare chats with Walt Junior. This is the good-natured “Mr. Chibs” family man Mr. White that we saw at the beginning of Breaking Bad. The scene is shot like a family drama, the adult and wayward child leaning against the bumper of the car, sun gleaming warmly off Walter's forehead.

This is just an illusion, a mask that Walter puts on when it is convenient, but the same could be said for the growly, threatening Heisenberg. At this point Walter White is an identity without an authentic self beneath it. We know that he does care for Jesse – he's done too much to save him over the course of the series for it to simply be a relationship of convenience – but Walter couldn't be honest towards Jesse if he tried. Bryan Cranston's acting is skillful enough that every side of Walt (the sitcom dad, the growling antihero) seems equally real and unreal, up to and including the patently false repentant Walter of the “confession” he makes to Hank.

Perhaps there is something genuine in Walter's speech to Jesse. Getting away from Albequerque and in particular away from Walter White might ultimately be best for Jesse, even if it would tear him away from what's left of his meaningful relationships (Andrea, Brock, maybe Badger and Skinny Pete). But what really comes through in the speech is Walter's own longing for the new life that he promises Jesse. When Walt says “Maybe it's time for a change”, it appears for just a moment to be the realization that has been eluding him for the entirety of the series. When he talks about “finding a job you're good at”, there are echoes of Walter's lost potential as a chemist, which has become the original tragedy in the way Walter narrates his life. Walter imagines adopting a new identity as the ultimate act of masculine industry that would prove his creative mastery more than any pure meth would.

But ultimately Walter fails to convince either Jesse or himself. To take the option of disappearance would mean destroying the suburban domestic life that Walter has tried so hard to maintain. Even if he took his children with him, there would be no way to maintain the lie of a normal family. Walter does assume a new identity later in the season, when there is no possibility of his domestic life surviving, but even then he finds it unsatisfying. He can never really begin a new life, whatever his documents say: his existing attachments and experiences stay with him.

Similarly, even if Jesse got in that nondescript car, his traumatic losses would still be with him, as would his lack of education or skill in anything but meth-cooking. But even when Jesse calls him out, Walter clings to his fantasy of self-reinvention. This is a reflection of his broader need to believe in his power to determine his own universe through hard work and masculine self-assertion. It's telling that Jesse describes Walter's speech as labour, specifically “working me”. If you want to go even broader, this reflects the American capitalist desire to refuse to believe in impossibility. There is always a frontier, always a new place to expand (Mexico! The Czech Republic!), and you can do anything if you put your mind to it [2]. In some ways Walter proves this last maxim right: he has achieved a great deal, apparently dragging himself away from death at the same time he becomes an improbable success in his chosen business. But he cannot reinvent the world, nor can he reinvent himself. Walter's speech to Jesse appears first as candid advice, then as a manipulative ploy, then as an inadvertent confession. But as a confession, it ultimately gives us only another lie – the one that Walter

It is perhaps this final inability to be genuine, more than Huell's sticky fingers, that ends Jesse's faith in Walter and allows him to finally realize how cruelly he has been manipulated over the course of the series. Jesse is perhaps most notable for his inability to lie or dissemble: he really is what he appears to be, and all of his vulnerabilities and doubts are immediately on the surface. This is what makes Walter and Jesse such a dynamic combination of characters, but also what makes their relationship so toxic: Jesse, in his strange naivete, cannot imagine the extent to which Walter is manipulating him, while Walter looks down on Jesse for precisely the vulnerabilities that make him so easy to use. And Jesse's openness colours his reaction to the sudden, bolt-from-the-blue revelation of Walter's betrayal. Jesse doesn't plot an elaborate revenge scheme, as Walter might. He doesn't get in the car and thank his lucky stars, as Saul Goodman undoubtedly would. Instead, he grabs a tank of gas and goes after the one thing that matters to Walt more than money: his idealized domestic life.

The scene in which Jesse comes to this decision is shot in a quite interesting manner. This scene needs to do something very difficult in conveying a character's internal thoughts visually. (A lesser show would resort to a voice-over or a contrived conversation to do the same work). The scene begins with a long shot, in which most of the frame is taken up by the setting. Jesse is an almost-insignificant blot on the larger, desolate plain. This surely mirrors his frame of mind: he is powerless in the grand scheme of things, controlled by forces larger than himself.

I'm not sure what part of Albequerque this is[3]. The large objects hanging above Jesse look like a mass of cement dividers, but they also resemble gravestones, which would seem much more natural to be sitting in a row on a hill. The deaths of those close to Jesse (Jane, Mike, almost Brock) literally hang above Jesse's head. Or maybe these are the deaths he has caused: Gale, but also the countless ones who have died because of the meth Jesse so expertly cooked, their only remains an unmarked grave.

The scene cuts between these long shots and media-length shots in which Jesse is more prominent, but still not completely free of his environment (as he would be in a close-up). Jesse is at first ruminative and uncertain, his expression matched by the slow and uneven drumbeats on the soundtrack. He begins searching for his cigarettes. This is both a symbolic motion and a literal one: he is searching for a solution to his problems, but his literal inability to find even his pot will cause a major revelation. Drugs have always been a coping mechanism for Jesse, albeit an unhealthy one, but here at his lowest point they have abandoned him.

What's striking here is that Jesse's first reaction to the missing cigarette is not anger or confusion but panic. Jesse desperately wants the cigarette to be there – not just to take the edge off, but to assure him that he understands the world around him, and that Walter wasn't actually behind Brock's poisoning. Despite his strong distrust of Walter, Jesse still wants at some level to believe in him. The camera plays in to Jesse's panic, swooping around him, examining every possible angle for hope that his suspicions aren't true.

But eventually Jesse's expression becomes resolute, and he walks away from the offer of asylum. Once again, the petty detritus of modern life stands in uncomfortable co-existence. “The guy”, for all he represents a new life and the impossible promise of reinvention, and carries a larger-than-life underworld aura, is ultimately a middle-aged man driving a boring red car that is nearly identical to the one that follows behind him. Jesse's momentous decision involves rolling a wheelie suitcase past a pile of concrete dividers. If there is drama to be had in the modern world, this is it, both tragic and ridiculous – a dynamic Breaking Bad embraces wholeheartedly. This scene is a credit to both Aaron Paul and episode director Michael Slovis, who convey wordlessly one of the series's most important moments, the final break between Walter and Jesse.

As I've said, many of the characters Walter meets in the drug underworld act as alternate versions of himself. Jesse is the complete opposite, a photo negative, but many characters function as ways of teasing out Walter's philosophy, the introduction of white-collar middle-class morality and work ethic to criminal enterprise. Characters like Gus, Mike, and Lydia, are alternate versions of Walter, and their failures suggest that making meth a respectable business requires more than a lab coat and pale skin. On the other hand, you have Todd and his Nazi clan.

The cold open concerning said group of neo-Nazis is perhaps the starkest contrast to Walt's constant deceit of himself and others. This is another scene that draws on the contrast between the rawness of the criminal world depicted in Breaking Bad and the fakeness of everyday life. Todd loudly recounts the story of the train heist (a moderately edited story, it should be noted) in a public area, not stopping when the waitress stops by to gawk at Uncle Jack's swastika tattoo. Walter, while prone to bragging in the right circumstances, would never do so in such a public environment. But Todd and Uncle Jack have no illusions about what they are, nor do they have any illusions that they present to the world. Their boisterous repartee is almost endearingly open – there's no sign of the layers of mind games that characterize Walt's relationship with Jesse, or the endless denial and estrangement between Walt and Walt Jr. Fitting with Breaking Bad's dark humour, the only example of a fully functional family we have on the show is a bunch of white supremacists.

In the bathroom of the diner, Jack makes a comment about how the inability to smoke on airplanes is a sign of how far downhill he country has gone. This foreshadows the moment later in the episode where Saul's own no-smoking rule indirectly causes Jesse to realize how Walter has betrayed him. There's a strange kind of logic in connecting Jesse to the neo-Nazis, as they're probably the two most honest forces left standing on Breaking Bad. They're also both forces that Walter White believes he can control with rhetoric, but whose raw and violent emotions prove to be ultimately beyond his harnessing.

“The Confession” is a tricky title, as there are several long speeches which present themselves as confessions but are all in some way deceitful – Walter admitting he has cancer to Junior (truthful but not honest), Walter blackmailing Hank with a just-true-enough account of his misdeeds, and Walter's manipulative speech to Jesse which presents itself as a genuine longing for freedom. At this point, it would be hard to dub any of these confessions true or false, as that would suggest there is an “authentic” Walter White deep down somewhere. On the other hand, Todd's bragging tale, while withholding some crucial facts, is perhaps the most genuine confession of the lot. It is also, of course, totally sociopathic. And this is perhaps the most troubling, and the most brilliant, part of “The Confession”: it suggests that the truth may be even uglier than the lies.

[1] Albequerque is also located in New Mexico, near the border, and Breaking Bad problematically uses Mexico and Mexicans to represent this untameable chaos.

[2] It's become increasingly difficult over the show's run to view Breaking Bad as primarily a commentary on capitalism. Walter White seems like such a singular character that it is difficult to generalize his personality or see his actions as representative of a larger group. Maybe this makes him a comedic figure in the medieval sense: a larger-than-life figure that embodies the smaller vices and delusions within us all.

[3] Surely you don't expect me to do research for this thing. This is close reading, man.

Inside Men 3

Inside Men is a show about security.  That's true on a literal level, of course, as the titular saboteurs are all in some degree in the security industry, protecting the cash that flows through their counting-house, with Chris being a literal security gaurd.  But it also revolves around less physical ideas of security.

Chris and Marcus are both threatened by financial precarity, and this is what motivates them to turn to crime.  As much as Marcus may dream of lavish ends to put his stolen millions to, his primary motivation is to avoid the kind of finaical failure that his life has, it's been implied, been a steady stream of.  His goal is class mobility, the unfulfilled promise of capitalism.  Marcus has a goal that's even more enshrined in our culture, providing for his impending family.  The recession is never directly mentioned, but grey streets and empty businesses are a constant backdrop.

And it's not a coincidence that their target is a central institution of the global currency system, but one of those silent parts of the system that was responsible for the last crash.  As violent and partial as it is, the robbery they plan is a kind of resistance against capitalism and the money system that supports it.

Of course, this still evinces a basic belief in the power of money.  This is a version of Marx's commodity fetishism, at least as I understand it.  Obviously paper money only has value because a state structure exists to give it value, otherwise it's just paper with a kind of ugly drawing on it.  The same is true of gold or any other kind of commodity: it is only valuable insofar as it exists in an economic system that gives it value.  The protagonists of Inside Men don't really understand this.  Through their heist they remove the money in the counting house from the capitalist circulatory system, assuming that all of its value will transfer to them.  But the problem immediately arises: they can't even retrieve it, as they're being monitored by the police in the wake of the robbery.  Even if they could, they couldn't spend it (or at least not much of it) without alerting the authorities.  If they follow John's plan, they'll have to go about their normal lives for a long while without making significant changes so as not to draw attention.  In other words, the money loses its value, as they can't actually do anything with it.

This is itself a commentary on the economic system, whose arbitrariness -- massive cages of cash sitting in a warehouse while the streets are filled with empty storefronts -- Inside Men makes clear even to those without a grounding in economics.  This exact mental slippage, the conflation of money with what it represents, can be seen in the recent financial crash.  Not only were the people involved obsessed with massive sums of money that, after a point, couldn't have made any actual difference to their lives, but through financial devices like derivatives and bundling they repeated this process of abstraction several times order until eventually they were exchanging massive amounts of nothing.  The supposed security of money -- even the cold, hard cash that our trio of saboteurs steal -- is in itself an illusion.

What about the other forms of security they seek?  Racial priveledge, for those who have it, is an obvious kind of security, but it's also one that seems consistently under threat in Inside Men.  The incident which perhaps sets everything in motion is John discovering that Dita, a young East European immigrant, has palmed a 20-pound note and firing her.  The trio's criminal operation forces them to hire the oily Kalpesh and his crew of Indian immigrant thugs.  While someone like John seems to symbolize that criminality can come in any guise, it still exists primarily as a threat from afar, carried in on foreign bodies.  Our protagonists are descending not just into the world of crime, but a distinctly racialized world.

While there is a bit of subversion here, Inside Men still relies on typical ideas of the immigrant criminal.  In this episode John hires Riaz, one of Kalpesh's men, in order to let him scope the place out.  It's a scenario that goes out of its way to play into fears about immigrant workers.  The Indians are never much more than thugs, and while it's okay to have some flat characters in a four-episode miniseries, the choices about who to develop and who not to are important.  While John proves himself more than capable of violent depravity, it is explicitly a descent into a racialized depravity -- see Garland Grey's recent post about Breaking Bad for why this is problematic.

How, then, to deal with Chris?  He's made every bit as sympathetic as the other two protagonists -- arguably more so, as he's the only one who really has a conscience.  Maybe as a British native, even a black one, Chris is not the outside threat that Kalpesh and Riaz are.  Or maybe his eventual decision in this episode to betray his co-conspirators to the police signifies that he is, in the end, still an outsider -- or, more precisely, one who is neither able to be entirely inside or outside.  I can't offer one interpretation here that explains everything -- Chris is the fly in the ointment, producing an endless array of complications.

What about the security of masculinity, of settling into a definite gender role that matches up with your biological sex and which gives you a power that's been established over millennia?  That's what John seeks in this episode.  What he relishes is the sheer masculinity of crime -- and not just any masculinity, but a physical and primordial "real man" type.  His attempts to start an affair with one of his co-workers pretty clearly stems from this rush, as does his playground-esque physical confrontation with Chris.


The contemporary world, Inside Men suggests, has little room for this ruggedness and its accompanying danger -- there isn't much of the fronteirsman less in the meek get-along middle manager that John starts out as.  Through crime, however, he returns to a more simple world, one without the tolerant ambiguity of human resources, and one that allows for this uncomplicated masculine persona.

(I'm not sure how accurate a social prognosis this is.  Masculinity is still glorified in our culture, especially its most violent and predatory manifestations.  Arguably antihero-driven shows like Inside Men feed into this obsession and the constant cultural demand for a more masculine society, usually expressed in laments about feminization by sidewalk-droppings such as Adam Carolla.  While these shows go to great extent to show the negative sides of their protagonists, their rejection of order in favour of action always seems to be supported by a troubling section of fans who will loudly support the masculine violence of John/Walter White/Don Draper/Vic Mackey/Tony Soprano/and so on and so forth.)

There have been a lot of comparisons between Inside Men and Breaking Bad (well, not a lot, as not a lot of people have seen the former.  But among those who have, there are comparisons).  And there's a definite connection, with the scene in this episode where Chris watches his mother choke to death instead of helping her seeming like a deliberate recreation of a similar scene from Breaking Bad's second-season finale.  A larger part of this is just a continuation of the antihero figure that's become so prevalent in "quality" dramas.

But there's an important difference between Walter and John.  Walter White certainly isn't doing everything for his family, as much as he will say that to anyone who will listen.  But he's doing it for a purpose, an ideology -- the code of masculine ideology that he's always subscribed to, albeit usually less ferverently.  Crime is a means to an end, just not the end he claims.  But for John, crime quickly becomes the end itself -- it's the act of subverting the rules that he lives for.  (This possibly helps justify the series' ending.)  He doesn't need the money, nor does he have any grand plans to spend it.  He just wants to become a criminal.

And this is, perhaps, what Inside Men finally suggests about security.  The very objects which seem to make us secure, seemingly stable and eternal things ranging from the financial system to gender, in fact create their own kind of danger.  Viewed from this angle, the eventual failure of the heist becomes clear.  The elements of stability that John relies on, from the carefully designed plan to the racial and class priveledge that he assumes will eliminate him as a suspect, can in themselves throw things into chaos.  It's a counter-intuitive message, but one that seems increasingly applicable to the times we live in.

Next week: "If you love someone, don't you set them free?"  "No."

The Shield 7-05: Game Face

Despite all the (deserved) focus and praise that gets heaped on the Strike Team and their antics, my favourite character on The Shield is probably Dutch.  He's a character who's obviously flawed -- arrogant but with a fragile ego that needs boosting through intellectual accomplishment and puerile chest-beating -- but also one who's basically a good guy.  It's the same balance the series tries to strike with Vic Mackey, but one that seems to fit together into a more real character, although that may just be because Dutch never falls near as far as Vic does.  Dutch is a "good cop", but in the sense of The Wire, in that he's motivated more by the intellectual rush of outsmarting criminals than material reward.  He's the kind of overcompensating beta male that's difficult to like, but at least manages to avoid the corruption of Vic and the complacency of Billings.

But in another way Dutch is just an alternate universe version of Vic.  It's worth noting that in their police work the two deal with very different criminals: Vic and the strike team deal with gangs, whereas Dutch's plotlines tend to involve serial killers and crimes of passion.  And while the strike team becomes more and more of a criminal gang, Dutch comes to resemble the killers he profiles.  This is an old trope, but it's well-executed here.  There's the scene a few seasons ago where he kills a cat, but more generally he begins to resemble a serial killer in his obsession, his preening and his ability to dehumanize the people around him (his relationship with Corrine a season or two ago being the best example of this).  And yet this is what makes him a good cop.  It's like Dexter, but less ridiculous.

"Game Face" deals with this dynamic a lot, along with the usual strike team maneuvering and flailing.  I want to focus on the serial killers for now.  First there's Kleavon, the killer Dutch and Claudette dealt with two seasons ago, who returns in this episode to confront Claudette with a legal challenge[1].  The second is Lloyd, a teenager Dutch suspects but can't prove is a future serial killer who's just committed his first murder.  Together these two plotlines present not just a before-and-after picture, with Kleavon as the potential future of Lloyd, but also presents a direct challenge to the characters of Dutch and Claudette.

Unlike most of the cast, Claudette doesn't have much in the ways of obvious moral or character flaws -- sure, she can be self-righteous and stubborn sometimes, but that mainly stems from her intense moral compass, one that just about everyone else on the show lacks.  She's the only one who views morality as more than a justifying pretext.  So instead of a moral flaw she's been given a physical one: she's been struggling with a hidden case of lupus.  Her disease has mainly been in the background, exactly how she or Dutch would see it: a looming problem, but one under the surface.  Kleavon, acting as his own attorney, returns to try and dredge this problem up to the light.

There's an interesting parallel with Claudette's actions at the end of season three, in which she revealed a public defender was on drugs, forcing all of her cases to be retried and earning the enmity of the top brass.  Obviously it's not the exact same situation, but Kleavon is making the same case: if the mechanisms of justice are flawed in any way, then they are illegitimate.  Whether or not he has a legal leg to stand on, it momentarily places Claudette in the same position as Vic -- the representative of flawed justice, who raises the question of whether it's better than no justice at all.

(There's an argument that could be made that the stresses of the chief's position have corrupted or at least worn down Claudette -- after all, her reign hasn't exactly been the radical change we'd been led to believe it would be.  I'm not sure whether this is a flaw in the character or a flaw in the show though.)

On the other side of things we have Dutch dealing with the potential future serial killer in Lloyd.  He's butting up against the natural limit of police work -- the police are there ostensibly to maintain order, but they do that by catching and punishing people after they commit crimes.  This may be justice, but the deed is already done.  The serial killer actually presents the clearest case of how arrest can be preventative, as they'll clearly kill again otherwise.  It's more questionable whether locking up a crime-of-passion case actually does much good, aside from deterrence.  Of course, there's no alternative, unless one wants to talk of Minority Report-style future crime.

So Dutch decides to go beyond the bounds of his job to deal with Lloyd.  The role he envisions is not criminal like Vic's extracurricular activities, but more of a social worker, trying to save Lloyd (and his future victims).  And yet it involves using the powers of his job for other means, as the strike team does repeatedly, and involves the same "I can't prove it but I know he did it" logic we see routinely on this show.  Problematically, this intuition almost always turns out to be correct, as if evidence is just a burden to confirm a cop's gut feeling.  Everyone Dutch talks to about the case expresses doubt about it.  On the other hand, Kyle Gallner plays Lloyd as a smarmy sociopath so well that it seems believable -- although to an extent he's just drawing out the sociopathy present in all teenagers.

Michael Chiklis wrote this episode, stepping into a star-auteur role a la Louis C.K., Bryan Cranston, and (to a lesser extent) Michael Imperioli.  Despite this, it's not really a showcase episode for Vic, at least not any more than the rest of the show is.  The strike team is mostly involved in an episodic plot involving rescuing the daughter of a Mexican drug kingpin who's about to flip.  There's nothing really wrong with this plot, but it feels like filler.  This is a bit of a reversal -- usually it's Dutch and the other "straight" detectives who get the one-off B-plot, while Vic and the strike team are involved in a serialized storyline.  Of course, all of the running plotlines advance in small increments, both in Vic's "professional" life (his conflicts with Shane and Pezuela) and in his personal one (the rebellion of his daughter Cassidy and Danni's attempt to get him to sign away paternity rights for their child).

In a way, it's remarkable how the show juggles all of these balls without it ever being confusing.  This is probably best seen in the scenes on the floor of the Barn, which switch rapidly between plotlines, managing to hit up nearly everything in five minutes or less, both recapping and advancing plots.  Even the visual aspects of these scenes reflect this through the chaotic jumble of figures in the background.  If you watch closely (which I usually don't) you can even make out tiny stories and actions going on silently behind our main characters.

(Catherine Dent isn't looking so great in this screenshot, but mainly I'm just trying to figure out what the old guy in the background is doing.)

And the sheer multiplicity of these storylines is not just a case of overstuffing -- it's a very conscious effect.  Vic has to juggle all of these dilemmas in the same way that the show (and the audience) does, and as the plots pile up his life spins out of control, with a thousand forces tugging him in different directions.  Even his family, the golden ideal that he says all of his actions are for, is beginning to come apart at the seams.  When Danni wants Vic to sign away his paternity, he reacts badly because she's threatening to take away the only thing he can use to justify his actions.

In large part this is because he chooses to do things for them (or at least things he says are for them) instead of actually being with them.  The Cassidy plotline in this episode is a great example.  Vic discovers that his daughter was at a rowdy, drug-and-sex-fueled teenage party, and instead of talking to her about it decides to deal with it the Vic Mackey way -- i. e. abusing his authority to punish some guy.  The problem arises when the teenage boy he interrogates reveals that Cassidy herself was the organizer of the party.  Vic has by this point lost the ability to deal with problems outside of the cop/criminal paradigm, and as a result he's beginning to lose his family.

This could only happen in the final season of the show -- there's really nowhere to go from here, no way that things could spiral out of control any worse.  That's more obvious by the time we get to the midway point of the season, but even here in the earlier episodes, we have a sense that everyone is on the edge, that the usual tactics aren't working, and that doom is on the horizon.  And, like Dutch with Lloyd, we can't prove it but we know bodies are about to drop.

Next Week: I do my best Phil Keoghan impression.

[1]I've probably mentioned this before, but I really like how The Shield brings back characters from the past just when you'd started to forget about them.  This really ties into the series's main idea of recurrence, how the effects of your actions never really stop, and how there's no such thing as safely in the past.  (For instance, despite being dead for several seasons Ben Gilroy still manages to make trouble for Vic every once in a while).  Deena, a carjacker from an earlier season, shows up in a more damaged and scarred form in this episode as well.

The Shield 6-10: Spanish Practices

As it's gone on, The Shield has found its heart, which is the relationship between Vic and Shane.  Shane is the failed mimic of Vic, attempting to walk the police/criminal line and play the dangerous schemes like he does, but always ending up a little worse, a little more onto the side of definite darkness.  Through the foil of Shane Vic becomes more defined: we can see that it is only precisely a man like him who can (and would) do the things he does, and the people who follow his footsteps inevitably end up in over their heads.  This is reflected in the complex bond between the two partners, one that is equal parts love and envy.  Of course, this could be an easy out for the show: it's okay for Vic to do this because he's really good at it, but other characters are evil for doing the same thing.  But it also shows just how tenuous these moral compromises are, and how vile they can seem from just a slightly different perspective.  Moreover, opposing Vic and Shane makes Vic into a character I can grudgingly accept as the protagonist in a way that none of the first season's dog-petting did.

This is in large part due to Walton Goggins's performance.  He inhabits Shane with puerile aggression and instability, making him eminently human but also someone who could realistically snap at any moment.  In this episode, when Shane is running around switching sides in an Armenian mob dispute that he's managed to jump right in the middle of, he seems like less of a manipulator and more of a flailer.  And again, a large part of this is due to performance -- if it was Vic, with Michael Chiklis's cool demeanor and detatched humour, we would probably come away from the scheming with quite a different impression.

"Spanish Practices" is the sixth season finale, which means it should theoretically bring the season's plotlines to a close, but it's also the season finale going into the last season, which means it needs to set up the storylines that are going to bring the show to a close.  Truth be told, the heavy serialization of The Shield has moved beyond even the season model at this point.  Whereas normally in even serialized shows the end of the season brings things to an at least temporary conclusion, the seasons of The Shield (with the exception of the fourth, probably the most conventional (and my least favourite) of the series) don't feel the need to wrap things up that neatly.  For instance, the Kavanaugh storyline that dominated the fifth season was allowed to continue to the second or third episode of the sixth.  This is the series-as-novel method David Simon always shouts about taken to its extremes.

There are a couple of stories taken care of, although they're generally minor ones.  Kevin Hyatt, the frat boy-esque cop brought in to replace Vic as leader of the strike team, ends up being shown the door.  Hyatt, like Shane, is defined as a character as not Vic, and this episode shows that as much as Vic's warped brand of intelligence is necessary for his underworld scheming, it's also needed for his effective police work as well.  In this episode Hyatt enforces a kind of broken windows strategy by going after a gang initiation, which spirals out into disastrous consequences [1].  His error shows how vital a more nuanced and perhaps shady approach is than simply enforcing the law as written.  It's perhaps unfair that he gets demoted over this when Vic managed to keep his leadership over five seasons of shady deeds, but Kevin's decision to simply leave afterwards doesn't help his case.

What Hyatt shows in this episode is a distinct lack of appreciation for fallout, the future consequences of his actions.  This is one of the predominant themes of The Shield, and a key to its structure -- in many ways its characters are still dealing with the aftereffects of things that happened in the first season, not the first episode.  Whereas Kevin views actions as quickly over and done with (his break-up of the gang initiation or his one night stand with Tina, both of which have longer-ranging consequences he doesn't want to deal with), Vic acknowledges that nothing really ends, and that every action has a seemingly endless string of reactions.

I don't want to go into too much detail on the Tina subplot, but it shows that the show has gotten better at its comic relief as well.  Instead of Danni and Julian's wacky case-of-the-week, we have the awkward courtship between Dutch and Tina, and Billings's police hackwork and petty jealousy.  (I have to give a lot of credit to David Marciano here, who turns what could have been a one-note character into something hilarious.)  Watching this episode and the last, with the constant gossip mill about who Tina is sleeping with, one can't help but be reminded of high school.  From Dutch's awkward seriousness to the frattish atmosphere of the strike team (maybe extending even as far as Vic's bad one-liners), none of the characters (except maybe Claudette) seem to have matured out of that selfish and emotional stage.  The Shield isn't as explicitly critical of police as an institution as, say, The Wire (which it was tremendously unfortunate to be a contemporary of), generally presenting them as a necessary force to contain the evil in this world, and with any abuse being motivated only by good intentions.  But on the other hand it doesn't really seem like a good idea to place the kind of power Vic Mackey wields into the hands of a bunch of oversized teenagers.

We can see that immaturity in the way they relate to their families.  Vic (and Shane imitating him) is constantly talking about protecting his family and doing all of the terrible things for him, but at the same time his actions and personality increasingly estrange him from that same family.  This is another idea that Breaking Bad would take from The Shield -- the man who claims to do everything for his family, until it becomes a false mantra that only he believes in.  When Shane tries to protect Vic's family from the fallout of his failed scheming, he ends up kidnapping them and locking them in a shipyard container -- for their own protection, of course.  It becomes distinctly hard to tell who is the protector and who is the threat.

(This scene, while great, was remarkably difficult to take a screencap of.  The trademark directorial style of The Shield is alive and well here, with everything in constant motion, and in this scene it becomes even more swimmy than usual, conveying the panic motivating everyone in the scene.)

Vic, meanwhile, has gotten himself involved with a bad guy distinctly higher up the food chain, namely the corrupt developer Pezuela.  Pezuela is being set up here as the ultimate Shield villain, embodying both the vicious gangs and the beauraucratic officials that have been attacking Vic from both sides.  He's also a quintessential Shield villain in that he's essentially a fantasy, the racialized super-predator white suburban folks stay up at night worrying about.  In truth there's no one that's as easy a villain as Pezuela, a convenient fiction to patch together disparate villainized groups that seeks to break down a complicated situation into a dualistic struggle.  Of course, things are still pretty complicated in The Shield, with both sides of the struggle fractious and self-defeating.  But it still reminds me of Machete, where the plot contrives to put American racists and Mexican cartel killers on the same side.  The difference is that Machete was self-conciously a dumb action movie whereas The Shield presents itself as a realistic cop show.

Still, there are some nice notes in this plotline.  It brings the series full circle by forcing Vic and Acaveda into a reluctant partnership once again.  The trunk full of evidence implicating all of the important local politicos in sordid affairs is a nice example of the series's well-humoured cynicism.  But what's most interesting is how Pezuela only comes to the attention of Vic and Acaveda because he wants to ally himself with both, believing they will be useful to his cause.  There's more than a hint that the kind of man both are, the guy willing to break the rules for what he thinks is right[2], can ultimately be a very useful pawn.  The Shield is at its best when it's emphasizing the thin line between Vic and the criminals he despises, and that line is appearing thinner by the episode.

And that's ultimately why Vic has been able to survive so long, both in his department and out on the streets: he's a useful evil.  Claudette wants him gone, but still relies on him to solve the San Marcos murders and save her own job.  Acaveda wants to wash his hands of Vic, but somehow keeps having to rely on him.  The same goes for his wife Corrine.  If one of the main ideas in The Shield is that sins keep reoccuring and dragging the sinner back into the dark, then Vic is the living embodiment of those sins.

But ultimately Vic can't be summed up that easy.  He does have a moral code, albeit a strange and hole-ridden one, and this is exactly what makes him dangerous and not just another thug.  In this episode, despite pulling all kinds of shady and illegal business in an attempt to keep his job (including attempting to blackmail Acaveda over being raped and a city official over his dead daughter's drug use), he refuses to use his autistic children to garner sympathy in front of a review board, a tactic that is at worst a bit exploitative.  The man who claims to be doing everything for his family walks out on the hearing, preferring to do more off-the-grid justice than lose his dignity in an attempt to save their livelihood.  Vic would probably present this as caring for his family, but Corrine's expression certainly doesn't show appreciation.

And this brings us back to Vic and Shane and the family locked in the back of a truck for their own protection.  I've argued above that Shane is a dark mirror of Vic, all of his brutality without the smoothness and the vener of benevolence, and this scene -- abusing Vic's family to protect them -- certainly plays into it.  But a dark mirror still shows a reflection, and it's clear that the choices Vic makes are trapping those he cares about as much as they are protecting him.  It's not a dirty truck, but it's about as dark.

Next week: The technicolour dream of The Bob Newhart Show.

[1]Rewatching the episode I found it remarkable that this whole plotline didn't even start until about 40 minutes into the special 60-minute (of running time sans commercials) episode.  Another example of how The Shield is willing to play with TV narrative convention without entirely abandoning it.

[2]Stating it this way is probably being too flattering to both.  As the series goes on Vic claims more and more to be doing everything for his family, but is willing to hurt many others to do so -- isn't this really just a kind of displaced selfishness?  Although we haven't seen enough of Acaveda in recent seasons to have a clear motivation other than a thirst for power, this would seem to apply to him as well.

The Shield 4-01: "The Cure"

The third season of The Shield ended in a suitably apocalyptic fashion. The strike team dissolved in a fight over the now-mostly-destroyed money train cash, while Claudette's sense of justice destryed her chances to become the new captain. The end of the show's second season was similar in promising major changes (Dani's firing, Claudette replacing Acaveda) but pulled back on them in Season 3 and maintained a kind of status quo.

“The Cure” wants to reassure us that this won't happen again, that significant things have changed and will continue to change. So we are introduced right away to Monica Rawlings, Acaveda's replacement as captain of the Farmington division. The disruption starts even in the credits, as we see Glenn Close suddenly appear second on a title sequence that hasn't had anyone added to it since the first season, with even major characters like Corrine and Ronnie stuck at guest star status. She directly appears in the first scene, joking around with a rookie cop and letting him off the hook for killing an attack dog in the line of duty. Close plays Rawling with a soft, almost motherly demeanor that directly contrasts with the show's other two female cops, but with just enough inner toughness that she seems believable. For Vic Mackey being all-business means being a tough guy who doesn't take anyone's shit or follow niggling things like the law, whereas for Rawlings it involves putting aside that tough guy posture and just levelling about things. Her way of turning a potentially stressful situation into a joke also differentiates herself from the serious Acaveda, obsessed with the rules when he isn't breaking them himself.

(Another sign that times have changed: when Vic breaks into the guy's house, makes a lame joke, and arrests him, he actually has a warrant for once! Woah.)

The first several scenes of this episode are dedicated to introducing Rawlings, a decidedly noticeable focus for the usually ensemble-driven series. We see her joking around with pretty much everyone, establishing her gentle outside discussed above. It's also established that she worked as a beat cop in the past, placing her in direct contrast with the “paper-pusher” Acaveda. Already this positive portrayal complicates things due to the fact that Rawling's very presence is a result of Claudette's failure to get the post promised her due to, well, “giving a shit when it's not your turn to give a shit.”[1] We may like Rawlings, but that clashes with the fact that strictly speaking, she's here because of corruption and politics.

There's a further, more pragmatic layer to her character, which is revealed during her sit-down with Vic late in the episode. She wants to put Vic at the head of her new anti-gang initiative, but she says she needs to trust him first. Her emotional honesty is placed in direct contrast with Vic's frequent lies and tough-guy facade, and is its own kind of bravery. From this early scene it seems like the clash of personalities will be less violent than the one between Vic and Acaveda, but still significant. She also goes behind Acaveda's back to start negotiating with a criminal, looking to continue the AGC sting despite not being captain yet. For all her outward friendliness, there is also a cunning, take-no-prisoners side to Rawling's personality, and “The Cure” poses the question of which of these sides, if any, is the true Rawlings that will emerge in the season to come.

This scene also begins in an interesting way: instead of cutting directly into the action, we see shots of a crowd passing through the street. The main focus here seems to be on the diversity: an Asian woman in a SARS mask, a rasta dude on a bicycle, and some guys in cowboy hats are all thrown at us rapidly. It's only a few shots that take up about twenty seconds interspersed with the opening credits, but it does a lot to re-orient the viewers in Los Angeles. The Shield has never transformed its location into a defining characteristic the way a show like The Wire or Treme or even Breaking Bad does, but here it's taking a step in that direction – Los Angeles is portrayed as a meeting point for all sorts of cultures and societies, and in The Shield this is not a gentle meeting of cultures but a violent collision, less of a melting pot and more of an exploding pot. We see our police officers walking among this crowd, headed to their job, just another culture warring with all the others.

There's a significant time gap between seasons 3 and 4, and to a certain extent “The Cure” is about filling in that gap and dealing with the fallout from it. Other than the strike team's disbandment the most obvious gap is the AGC sting Vic has been running that started in the last season, which has taken up a lot of resources and been a total bust. The sting is the dull time-consuming type of police work which rarely makes it into TV shows. Vic Mackey, so we are told, has spent the past six months sitting in an office watching video tapes trying and failing to find any criminal activity on them. This is an effective use of the ellision of time that usually falls between TV seasons. Plotwise this is something that has to take place, but at the same time it would not really make riveting viewing material. It would be possible to make a TV show out of this kind of boredom and fruitlessness – in a time long ago, this was the premise of The Office – but it is difficult, and if The Shield steers away in order to do something more to its strengths then it can't really be begrudged for that.

In any case, with the absence of the strike team Vic appears to have finally been tamed. At the same time, his work during this period turns out to be useless: the police department has itself been scammed through the AGC sting, with the perpetrator quietly hiding genuine criminals from the investigation. Vic, usually always half-expecting betrayal, was completely taken for a ride here. He also finds out in this episode that he's missed a job opportunity due to a scathing letter from Acaveda that has pretty much ruined his chances of any position outside the Barn. As the season starts we see Vic as powerless as we ever have. The dead dog at the start of the episode seems especially symbolic here, seeing as how Mackey has been implicitly compared to a dog throughout the series (see my previous post on The Shield for a good example.)

The changes we see in “The Cure” reveal just how strongly the characters, no matter how much they want to picture themselves as individual heroes, rely on each other. Without his loyal followers Vic is reduced to doing desk work, and doing it poorly. The male bond between the strike team has become an increasing focus throughout The Shield's run, and it is clear that without it Vic can't get up to any of his old tricks: it's hard to bend the rules if your partners will eagerly report you for it. For as much as Vic was the clear leader of the strike team, he needed them as much as they did him. Claudette and Dutch also find out how much they were reliant on others when those others explicitly shun them, leading them to do the grunt work in their homicide case and not receive any credit for what they do accomplish. Even the criminals in the case-of-the-week play into this – one relies on another to finish the job by drowning a little boy, but the other relents, leading at least in part to their capture. This feels like a necessary corrective for the show that has valorized the lone wolf working against the system. Vic, Dutch and Claudette all essentially picture themselves as this lone-wolf hero in different ways, and while often The Shield has given credence to this, now it seems to be panning back to reveal that mavericks, for all the good they can do, require their own intense support system behind them, or else they'll just be out lost in the wilderness.

On the other side of the equation gang members, the criminals Vic specializes in, are powerful precisely because of their social bonds. Without his own gang Vic can't truly tackle them. This kind of dangerous community is seen with the introduction of Antoine Mitchell, immediately positioned as this season's long-term villain. The Shield has been experimenting with this character role since the second season. In the first season The Shield followed a kind of cop show standard – the crime plotlines were episodic but the character-based plots centred around the police officers were at least to an extent serialized. Introducing longer-lasting villains was a part of the transition towards full serialization. The first attempt at this was the psychopathic Mexican drug lord Armadillo. This didn't go too well, as Armadillo quickly became something of a cartoon supervillain. The role was then passed to Margos Desarean, who was more ominous and less heavy-handed mainly by staying off screen for most of the time.

Antoine Mitchell, however, is different from Armadillo or Margos. Instead of being a lunatic driven by base desires, he's more of a silver-tongued manipulator. Although The Shield pretty much instantly confirms that he's not the reformed humanitarian he makes himself out to be[2], there's still some degree of ambiguity over Mitchell's actions – he makes several actions in this and the next couple episodes to try and bring peace to the neighbourhoods even as he rules over them, which is not that different from Vic's mandate for his drug-dealer partners in seasons past. With that said, there's also a bit of dog-whistle racism that his character unfortunately brings up. When we first see him Mitchell is in the centre of a black anti-gang rally. Although their message is anti-crime, his speech is distinctly racialized, focused on the hip-hop-inspired chant of “Respect!”. Of course, this ultimately turns out to be a front for criminality, dismissing the idea that the black community can save itself instead of being saved by Vic Mackey.

The fact that Mitchell turns out to be a criminal and not the leader he presents himself as could just be viewed as The Shield's usual cynicism, and that was probably the way the writers justified it in their discussions and their minds. But it also cultivates the idea that the racist mistrust of black leaders and black communities is at its root justified. The Shield rarely engages in out-and-out racism (the only major exception I've come across so far is “Rice Burner”, in which we learn that Korean gangsters play Starcraft, have restaurants with filthy kitchens, and have every Korean in town on their side, even the cops). However, it portrays almost all of its criminal characters as foul and instinctively evil, and – true to American crime demographics – the majority of those characters are Black or Latino. Of course, there are also positively portrayed characters of colour, mostly in the police force. But it's still a combination that makes for a lot of problematic scenes and plotlines.

“The Cure” is directed by Scott Brazil, one of The Shield's regular directors and a veteran of the crime genre, having started off on Hill Street Blues, the show that made gritty serialized cop shows like The Shield and The Wire possible. Brazil directed more episodes of The Shield than anyone else, so if anyone can be credited with the series's distinctive directorial style it's him. I've described the style in my previous Shield post (linked above), so I'll mostly note here that it continues without any major differences in “The Cure”. The episode is written by Glenn Mazarra, another Shield regular. The consistency of tone and style that using such a regular crew establishes is quite evident here. Despite the many changes in plot, this is still evidently an episode of The Shield, with all its gritty cynicism and sudden camera movements. By the fourth season both creators and viewers are completely accustomed to this house style, and it creates a distinct and familiar world that the series can call its own despite being set in LA, the most filmed city in the world.

I'm not entirely sure how to end this review, so I'll end it where the episode itself does: with Shane Vendrell. Shane has been a sidekick for the past three seasons, Vic's loyal partner whose instability frequently caused problems. Walton Goggins has done a great job hinting at a more angry side of him, and with him finally removed from Vic's command that side seems to have taken control. Vic comes across Shane unexpectedly when going to talk to a new CI, who turns out to be dead. Whether or not Shane killed the guy is left open, but in any case Goggins has turned the creepy instability in the character up to 11, and it comes across in the awkward conversation with Vic. The two make small talk over the dead body, and then Shane steals the victim's Blackberry while implying a connection to both him and Mitchell's gang. The whole scene is shot in deep shadow, increasing the dark and uncertain atmosphere.

Shane's turn to the dark side shows the other side of the time-skip between seasons. For Vic, it's used to skip over a dull part in his life, watching tapes all day, that is important to the plot but not really thrilling television. For Shane, we want to know what's happened in these six months, what's led him even further down the path of corruption, but that information is elided. By this late in the series the creators of The Shield know thoroughly how to use the conventions of the crime genre, and this mastery is evident throughout “The Cure”.

[1] There was quite a bit of moral ambiguity regarding Claudette's decision to report the DA for drug use at the end of last season, but whatever the situation was she was playing by the rules and her punishment for it is a pretty clear case of corruption.

[2] It would have been funny – and a lot more realistic – to see Vic harassing an innocent community leader for several episodes, but The Shield can really only maintain its ambiguous morality by making all of the people Vic really goes after guilty anyway. This is why I've said and continue to say that the thematic question central to the show's premise – whether or not Vic is justified in his brutality – is actually The Shield's biggest weakness, requiring unrealistic plot contortions to maintain some degree of nuance, and the show is a lot better the more it gets away from this question.

Next Week: The roaches... the roaches...

The Shield 3-13: Fire in the Hole

The third season of The Shield has had this frenetic element of impending doom to it, like everything is about to fall apart and the characters are rapidly scrambling to hold it all together with increasingly tenuous threads. In this way it can be seen as an antecedent to Breaking Bad (returning tonight! Holy shit!), which takes the standing-on-a-rickety-bridge-over-an-abyss plotting and extends it to the entire series. At the beginning of the series Vic used his shady and sometimes brutal tactics to gain more power, whereas now he is forced to use them merely to hang on. Becoming an honest cop, as he tried to do earlier in the season, is no longer an option. In “Fire in the Hole”, as in several previous episodes, the strike team has to get to a criminal before the legitimate police do for fear that if the criminal enters the system alive he will reveal too much. By stepping outside the system for their own ends, they have found that they are now trapped outside the law, and whatever initial goals they had are consumed by the endless cover-ups and cover-ups of cover-ups of what they did. Criminality becomes not a means to an end but means, end, and universe.

This is also a description of a good percentage of all crime stories, including the aforementioned Breaking Bad. Walter White and Vic Mackey have similarities both superficial (baldness and disabled sons) and deeper (their prevailing narrative arcs, as discussed above, and the fact that both come from trusted public-servant professions). While Walt is driven by stubborn pride and ideology, Vic's urges are baser and more animal. So even as he lives in constant danger, Vic puts another pot on another burner by starting an affair with an engaged police dog handler (the animalistic imagery is obvious). The entire money train robbery which is causing Vic's current problems was motivated by a mixture of naked greed and a macho need to be his family's sole breadwinner.

Vic may be a whirling ball of id bound together only by a mass of schemes and self-rationalization, but lately he's become strangely sympathetic. This is simply the human inclination to sympathy: when we see a person in a bad situation, even if they're a bad person and may have contributed substantially to their own troubles, we feel bad for them. Just as Breaking Bad positions White's personal precariousness as a symbol of the nation's economic struggle, The Shield emblematizes the psyche of the Bush era: we have wealth and power and something like success, but it comes from something terrible, and we all know it won't hold together for long. This makes Vic much more sympathetic than the early seasons' heavy-handed attempts to portray his heart of gold (helping out his pet hooker or his autistic son) ever could.

“Fire in the Hole” opens, as every episode of The Shield does, with rapid cuts between a scene and the opening title cards. This is an immediately disorienting and claustrophobic experience, and helps to establish the panicking, uncertain mindset that underlines the show, especially in its third season. This time the opening scene is a fire in Corrine's kitchen, accidently set by Matthew. This is a typical in media res opening, common in The Shield, but the sudden appearance of another problem on top of everything else creates the sense of mounting tension and the slow but inevitable slipping away of control out of nowhere. After a long week between episodes a TV show needs to quickly re-establish its atmosphere, and The Shield's opening sequences almost always do the job. In the previous episode, “Rice Burner”, Vic asked his team to use some of their stolen money to help pay for Matthew's counselling, but was turned down. This is, then, the immediate result: another issue Vic was juggling, his children, spiralling out of control as his fumbling for a solution fails. The fire also foreshadows another, more important fire that occurs in the climax of the next episode. On top of all this it creates a very striking visual: the burnt kitchen, a symbol for Vic and Corrine's ruined domesticity.

Immediately after this scene we have another problem that's been left on the back burner for a couple of episodes rise to the surface: the ill-fated fifth Striketeam member, Tevon, who we discover has just woken up from his coma and remembers the fight with Shane that lead to his accident. The following scene introduces another problem, this week's major episodic plot: a planned biker gang robbery revealed by the police force's ongoing hidden-camera scheme. After that we have another plot thread introduced, where Danni and Julian discover a car crashed into a storefront full of bootleg liquor. The next scene continues the biker gang plotline, but ties it into the season-long power struggle between Vic, Claudette and Acaveda. These kinds of interwoven plots are textbook television, although tieing them to season-long arcs is a more recent invention. However, there's something distinctive in the way The Shield structures its multiple plotlines, throwing all its balls up in the air with a lot of doubt as to whether it will catch them on the way down.

But no sooner has “Fire in the Hole” established its structure, getting the audience used to the idea, then it begins breaking it. After spending ten minutes setting up these four plotlines, another is thrown into the mix: the escape of O'Brian, the strike team's designated fall guy, who they then have to track down before he can be killed by the Armenians. This added complication, seemingly going against the narrative flow, creates a sense of chaos, a disordered world in which even television convention can't be held onto. The return of the Decoy Squad, whose plot seemed to have concluded several episodes ago, both further disrupts narrative expectations as well as reinforces one of this season's major themes: nothing ever truly ends, and every problem you thought was solved will resurface and create further complications.

This atmosphere is heightened by the series' distinctive directorial style. In addition to the washed-out colours and almost grainy video quality, the camera in The Shield frequently shakes, hovers, and zooms in and out abruptly. It never stays still, cementing the aura of instability that affects all of the series' characters. Series regular Guy Ferland, who directed thirteen episodes of The Shield in total, continues this style and does it well here. For an example of this style in action, look at the video below – a fairly regular scene from the show, but filled with small but constant camera movement and shifting.

“Fire in the Hole” is written by Charles H. Eglee and Kurt Sutter, both veterans of the show as well as TV in general. Sutter in particular would go on to create Sons of Anarchy, which inherited the “gritty FX crime drama” spot from The Shield. There's a possible link between this episode's biker gang plotline and that show, although The Shield's horde are more similar to the Nords than the righteous rebels that Sons of Anarchy centres around. Looking at the crew lists for each season there are an awful lot of co-written episodes. The Shield has been praised for its consistency of both tone and quality, and that may stem from this process, sublimating individual writers' voices into a communal one. While some television shows are the product of a single creative vision – Babylon 5 stands out as the most obvious example, although that didn't lead it to quality – most are produced along these lines. This is what makes an auterist television criticism so difficult, although that hasn't stopped some from trying.

Still, this kind of communal consistency is key in a serial drama. When I was much younger I used to be interested in “impros”, stories where one person would write the first chapter then hand the reins over to another writer, who would write another chapter and let another write the third and so on and so forth. They were fun, but the tug of different writers was clear – characters would act different from chapter to chapter, plotlines would be dropped without notice, and there was no hope of a consistent tone or style. On an episodic show this isn't really an issue – one episode can be more serious than the norm while another can be raunchier and it won't make the show seem any worse. (Such variety can even help.) But major shifts in style in the midst of an ongoing storyline demands. And so an episode of The Shield becomes less of a product of Shawn Ryan or any other single writer's vision but a collectively authored entity. The trend towards co-writing only reinforces that.

The re-emerging storylines first two scenes, despite forming a dramatic opening, are not really the central focus of “Fire in the Hole”. These two plotlines – Vic's family troubles and the Tevon dilemna – are both thoroughly serialized storylines, in large part because they're about slowly shifting family relationships. (The strike team functions as more of a family for Vic than his actual family.) Tevon's plotline could be theoretically condensed into one episode – a new guy joins the strike team, does well but gets into a fight with Shane, and Vic has to deal with the fallout. But this is a kind of pat and obvious plotline when put in episode form, precisely because the viewers expect any “new team member” to be gone by the end of the episode. The Shield is very clever about undercutting viewer assumptions – see putting Reed Diamond in the opening credits only to kill him off in the first episode. By serializing the Tevon plotline The Shield allows him to settle into the series space and make it seem as though he might just stick around. Vic's family is serialized simply because it's something that will never go away, short of the show simply choosing not to focus on them any more. Another plotline introduced early that doesn't make up much of the episode is the bootleg liquor storyline, although that's just because it's an insignificant C-plot thrown towards the resident insignificant C-plot characters. (That seems to be especially true this season. Danni and Julian have always been heavily involved with trivial and comic subplots, but in previous seasons they also had more substantial character arcs, which despite some attempts have mostly vanished in the third season.)

After all these we are left with the episode's two major stories, both of which are classic The Shield: a mostly episodic story based on an ethical dilemna, and the latest chapter of a serialized narrative in which Vic Mackey desperately scrambles to fix his mistakes and conceal his crimes, trying to stay one step ahead of both other police and more typical criminals.

The episodic plotline centres around the question of whether the Farmington cops should compromise the decoy squad's investigation into child porn in their hunt for a lead on the Horde's planned robbery. The decoy squad has enough evidence to convict the producer of the videos but not the procurer, a corrupt social worker. They decide to give up on the procurer in order to quickly arrest the producer in hopes that he'll flip on them and lead them to the Horde gig. On the surface this is presented as a turf war: the Farmington cops getting even with the decoy squad by pushing their case ahead, no matter who it hurts. Even Claudette, normally the show's moral clarion, goes along with it. And yet to me it seems like a bad bargain, letting go of a sure conviction of someone responsible for victimizing many children in order to possibly get information to stop a robbery that will only possibly result in violence, even given the Horde's apparent propensity for bloodshed. I think beyond inter-department strife, there's also the issue of which victims matter. In this case, business takes priority over black children who are already in perilous situations even before the pedophilia comes in.

(I should note that I love the moment where Waylon shows up seemingly out of nowhere. It's played perfectly here, with the camera positioned so that we don't notice his true identity until Vic does, with him appearing to simply be a regular hobo at first. The sudden reappearance of a character whose involvement in the story appeared to be over, as mentione above, cements the idea of past troubles being constantly dredged up again. It's also remarkable to see his transformation, which is later contrasted with Claudette's undercover guise that is convincing despite basically consisting of Claudette putting an old jacket on. Then again, as she monologues about hating her job and ex-husband, it seems like Claudette doesn't have to act too hard for this role.)

The other major storyline concerns Vic Mackey as the centre of a crime story, which is a lot more interesting than Vic Mackey as the centre of an ethical dilemna, which is what the first season or so attempted. Vic and company now have to save their fall guy for the money train robbery, a lowlife named O'Brian, from the vengeance of the Armenian mob. For a tantalizing moment it seems like it will work, then O'Brian's greed gets the best of him and he remains in town long enough for the mob to catch up with him. The strike team then has to dispose of the body in a scene that seems like a predecessor of Breaking Bad's second episode, body horror and all. The Shield is in itself following from The Sopranos' long tradition of “how are we gonna get rid of this body?” storylines, the most notable (read: most horrific) of those occurring in the fourth season episode “Whoever Did This”. This is basically a scenario designed to produce heebie-jeebies.

Both O'Brian and Margos Desarean, the murderous leader of the Armenian mob, fall under The Shield's usual characterization of the criminal. Unlike a show like The Wire, where crime is driven by circumstance and social conditions, in The Shield crime is for the most part caused by base desires grown out of control – it is essentially a personal and not a social phenomena. O'Brian's suicidal greed is one example, but a better one is Margos (played by the aforementioned Kurt Sutter) who is mainly known through his kind of psychopathic foot fetish, cutting off the feet of his victims. It is then natural that O'Brian goes back for the money and Margos kills him and takes his feet: neither man can control the impulses that make them a criminal.

O'Brian's death is also yet another crime that can be laid at the feet of Vic Mackey. For all Vic talks about how O'Brian was a criminal and a bad guy, we've basically seen him do nothing wrong in the show: he takes the bag of marked money he found outside a bar, as just about anyone would, and is reluctant to leave town at the proddings of a group of abusive policemen. Vic is basically responsible for his death. There's a paralell between him and the procurer in the episode's other major plotline: just because you don't commit the crime yourself doesn't absolve you of setting up the conditions for it to happen. Once again we have the feeling of everything spinning out of control, and this time someone's wound up dead.

At the end of “Fire in the Hole” the strike team have disposed of O'Brian's body, ensuring that the police will keep looking for him and not pursue other leads. However, Terry points out the grim reality: the Armenians know that O'Brian is dead, and the strike team has really not solved any of their problems. Despite all the events of the episodes, at the end all of the core problems still remain: Tevon's testimony, Vic's children, and most of all the careening consequences of the money trainf c robbery. Even this week's episodic plotline ended with loose ends: the procurer is still out there and probably still exploiting children. Like so many episodes this season, “Fire in the Hole” briefly creates the sense that problems have been resolved, before ultimately reminding the viewer that things are more out of control than ever.

Next Week: It's a new anime season, and that means more giant monsters and mythological weirdness. I take on the premiere of Kamisama Dolls.