The Shield, "Bitches Brew": Second verse, same as the first
Spoilers for "The Shield" season seven, episode seven coming up just as soon as I hire a cleaning lady...
"Guess we do this the hard way." -Vic
Vic has always chosen to do things the hard way, and what has it gotten him? His marriage is long over. His oldest daughter is into drugs. He's broke, a cop-killer, entangled in some bizarre scheme of Aceveda's to take down a cartel, 10 days away from losing his badge, and -- oh yeah -- his protege is trying to kill him.
Like "The Sopranos," "The Shield" has been accused at times of making its homicidal protagonist too sympathetic. And like "The Sopranos," "The Shield" is going out the door making sure you know exactly who and what this guy is really all about. We've seen a more desperate, reckless, openly hypocritical Vic than ever before, and "Bitches Brew" was like a Greatest Hits of some of Vic's lowest behavior.
Most obvious was the return of Farrah, aka Bottom Bitch, from the season three episode of the same name. (If you've somehow forgotten one of the sickest episodes of the series, it's the one that features Vic ordering Farrah to simulate oral sex with his service weapon in an attempt to show her who's boss.) That this story played out almost identically to the first one -- with Farrah manipulating Vic into taking out her pimp so she could choose her own whoring destiny -- was the point. It's vicious cycle time for Vic at this point: he's making the same mistakes again and again and again, and he's too stubborn, too arrogant, too tough to do things any other way.
Not only does he get suckered in by Farrah again, but he drives yet another mother of his child into packing up her life to keep her kid the hell away from Vic Mackey. Corrine took the kids and ran away from Vic at the end of season one, aware that physical distance is her only real shot (and even that's not a good one) of keeping her son from being influenced by this SOB.
And as a little side order to our vicious cycle sandwich, we got the return of Lester from season six's "Haunts" to stand in (in place of the absent Carl Weathers) as The Ghost of Mackey Future. When Vic says of the cop-turned-"security expert," "If you think he did something (poopy), he probably did," he might as well be talking about himself. Virtually everything that someone (be it Aceveda, Dutch, Claudette, Kavanaugh and on down the line) has suspected Vic of doing, he did -- and often did worse than his pursuers assumed. If Vic somehow survives Shane's wrath, and avoids getting killed by the cartels, Lester's life is the best thing he has to look forward to, and he has no one to blame but himself.
Some other thoughts on "Bitches Brew":
• Dutch forcing a cleaning lady onto Claudette is the kind of moment that great series earn over time. It's hard to imagine the Dutch of season one being empathetic or forceful enough to make that happen, but the Dutch of today is no clown. He knows his partner, cares about her, and she respects him enough to acquiesce to this slight loss of control, because she knows Dutch will make her let him take care of her, one way or the other. Great scene, perfectly played by Jay Karnes and CCH Pounder. I particularly liked Claudette finally confessing her weakness to Dutch; her clock may not be winding down quite as fast as Vic's, but the end of her time on this job is coming, and she's just as helpless to do anything about it as Vic.
• With the Armenians mercifully out of the way, the blackmail box takes center stage again as Vic brings the thing to ICE and then Vic quickly plots to give it back to Cruz to regain his trust. I don't care about the box itself, but as MacGuffins go, it's pretty good.
• This episode seemed particularly high on the crude poetry, whether it was Vic's "deep throat with no gag reflex" joke, or him referring to the first meeting with ICE as "another Mexican donkey show, and Aceveda had me playing the role of the reluctant virgin."
• I do like that, while Julien will always be an outsider in Vic's crew and has been treated as an inconvenience since he joined the team, Vic was genuinely upset to realize Farrah had placed them in a situation where Julien had to kill somebody. Vic may be a cop-killer, but he thinks of himself as a champion of cops and he would definitely feel for Julien under these circumstances.
What did everybody else think?
