Everybody makes mistakes. The most notoriously disliked section of The Shield outside of a certain episode is Kevin Hiatt, a character whose badness isn’t just annoying but baffling. This is a show with a masterful understanding of its characters, able to comprehend exactly what they want and what they’ll do and a willingness to follow them as far as they want to go. So why do they have such a wet noodle of a dude floating around the Barn? There’s an extent to which Hiatt can be seen as changing his motivation depending on the scene or episode; his swan song has him suddenly take up the cause of preventing crime beforehand by targeting children before they become gang members (which, hilariously the other characters find weird and naive, especially Ronnie). But he never really struck me as having a motivation at all, and it is utterly bizarre to me that The Shield would botch that kind of thing six goddamned seasons in. The same section of the show has one of the other major mistakes in creating a needlessly byzantine plot that can make it hard to track what’s going on, but that almost feels like a logical mistake for the show to make at this point – a complex understanding of the structures of police and crime syndicates (what’s the difference dohohoho) has always been a kind of secondary skillset for the show, supporting the melodrama of a dozen-odd individuals, so I can see ambition going to the writer’s heads as they lean too hard on the wrong ideas. The uselessness of Kevin Hiatt has no explanation beyond the writers just suddenly deciding they want to write something bad instead of something awesome.

What are some of your favourite artist’s creative decisions that aren’t just bad, but inexplicably so?