“We’re not the typical lowlifes you represent.”
After the game-changing moment of truth-revealing that ends “The Enemy of Good,” we head into “Jailbait,” an episode that’s all about performances. The Shield always pursues the dramatic ideal of narrative momentum over the literary ideal of thematic unity, but damn if this isn’t an episode about performances that convince, performances that don’t, performances critiqued and evaluated and just occasionally, people not performing at all. It’s like one of Mad Men’s denser episodes–“Maidenform,” say–but with a lot more story.
The biggest performance comes from Lem and the rest of the Strike Team. First, a radio play for Kavanaugh: with Lem wired up, a meeting in the clubhouse conducted by typing (I’M SCREWED.) That scene can only be done on television, because 1) it uses the cinematic trick of having the words and images be out of sync–it’s all covered with Shane’s extended “death by chi-chi” joke (and there’s a neat little beat of hesitation when Lem types out WHEN LOOKING FOR ANGIES BODY, and later, Kavanaugh will critique the performance, saying it should be “ki-ki”) and 2) it shifts between wide and close shots of the team and the text (not possible on stage) but 3) it also depends on us knowing a history that stretches back four seasons. The facial acting in this scene and throughout the episode is intense and often incredibly funny, because everyone’s not just expressing but deliberately communicating with their faces. It’s like voice acting–when you lose either your appearance or your voice, you have to exaggerate the other.
After that, it looks like the Strike Team will have to perform being good cops for the day. This leads into some excellent comedy, both visual (continued looks at and inserts of Lem’s ribcage, never not funny) and in the dialogue (off one of the looks, we get Vic saying “why don’t we file for a warrant?” first time we’ve ever heard THAT from the Team. All through “Jailbait,” there are these little moments of everyone checking themselves from their instincts, and a particularly funny one late in the episode where they’re driving a suspect back in the van–he’s asked for a lawyer, so they do a little one-act play about the death penalty for his benefit, and Shane takes a moment before he picks up on it. The comic version of The Shield is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I kept thinking here of “Sweet Dee Gets Audited”–I was pretty sure Vic would start repeating “reason will prevail!” or Shane would start yelling “AAAAGH I don’t know how to express myself except through anger and personal attack!”
Vic also does another performance with Aceveda, coming up to him and asking about. . .what, garbage collection? (Benito Martinez’ what-is-this-shit? look is great.) It’s another little scene for Kavanaugh’s benefit, so Lem can observe it and he can question Aceveda about it. It’s one more way, as Aceveda says, that Vic can get you to doubt yourself. He’s telling Kavanaugh it that scene that Vic is a better performer than Kavanaugh has yet realized.
Meanwhile, Dutch meets Marshall, a parole officer with a client who’d been coerced into a murder, but more importantly, a fellow amateur profiler and student of “microfacial expressions,” someone who looks at a person to see if they’re performing. He helps Dutch study Every-Day (Marshall reads him as honest) and Claudette (Marshall reads her as not honest–she’s concealing something) and it comes off as a bromance until Claudette tells Dutch how Marshall “was checking out your package.” Dutch says “he’s–he’s gay?” and The Shield is smart enough to let it rest there. It’s a remarkably uninflected moment, as the camera just watches Karnes. I suspect it’s a Rorshach-test moment for us in the audience as to what happened at Dutch and Marshall’s dinner, if he went at all, if this is a homophobic moment or not. (Personally, I read it as Dutch simply having very weak gaydar.)
Kavanaugh continues his performance with Corrine, and he’s not doing a good job. He’s not doing a good job with the details (trying to lead her into naming the teacher–like Quentin Tarantino sez, it’s the details that sell your story, and he doesn’t have them) but more than that, he can’t conceal that he’s a cop, not from a cop’s ex: “I’ve been around cops long enough to know what they sound like.” She tells Vic, and he gives a little performance too, telling her nothing, trying to pass it off like no big deal–and keeping his face turned away.
In the midst of all the performances, The Shield tosses a new character in the mix, lawyer Becca Doyle (played by Laura Harring, whose breakthrough role was a double performance in Mulholland Drive). She comes in with the information that other students have been pinning the blame on Every-Day in the shooting back in “Extraction.” As a lawyer, Becca’s a professional, not a crusader–she knows the value of working with police and making deals. She gets Claudette to do a little performance, claiming there was “gun residue” in another student’s locker, as leverage to get him to make a deal. She also sees right through Vic’s performance–he’s using her to briefly represent a grandmother who’s part of a sex-trafficking operation. (The Strike Team is all about the right to counsel today.) Vic puffs himself up with righteousness, talking about all the children in danger, and Becca turns around and gets a deal to keep the grandmother out of prison. (There’s a lesson for Vic here that no, women won’t always do what he wants. That’s going somewhere.) I’ve blown right by the interrogation of the grandmother, which is another one of The Shield’s trips into classic comedy, with her running an escalating series of curses in Spanish and Tina translating–Paula Garcés’ slightly amused expression is what sells the gag.
Tina will have the other major performance this episode, and it’s really a double performance. Her undercover work–she’s the bait to lead the Strike Team to the trafficking site–is the obvious one, and she gets to show her skills at improv (coming up with the line “I got gonorrhea in my throat” to keep from blowing three guys) and asskicking (fighting off another guy in the house). That house, by the way, is another great Shield set, with “rooms” made by hanging sheets everywhere. It has the visual effect of breaking the space into smaller spaces and rectangles, and increases the chaos of the raid as the sheets get torn down. Tina also has a smaller but even more important performance just before all this, as Vic and Julien argue over whether or not she’s ready. Vic’s evaluating her appearance–does she look young and naive enough? (He’s like a CW exec deciding if an actress in her late 20s is suitable for playing a high school student in Generic Teen Drama.) Garcés communicates that Tina is performing here–she’s just one notch below fully confident. When the act closes out on her face (this is another old-school Shield move, letting us get one strong, brief shot of a face and then cutting to black–”Inferno” is a good example too), she looks more relieved than anything else.
Late in the episode, Vic steps up for one more performance, a monologue this time, just him, Lem, and Kavanaugh’s microphone in the Strike Team clubhouse. It’s a replay of what he said in the second episode of the series (“Our Gang”), about his guilt over failing to clear the room and getting Terry killed. (Vic’s lying when he says he’s never told anyone this before, although whether the lie is for Lem’s or Kavanaugh’s benefit I’m not sure.) I think this is the story that Vic has told himself over the preceding two to three years; he’s been performing this so long in his head he comes off as sincere. It’s effective that Vic isn’t overdramatic here; he plays it like something that happened a long time ago. It works, on Lem at least, with Vic concluding the speech with a cue card, writing “we together?” and Lem nodding.
A brief note on Stephen Kay’s direction: there are a couple of moments here that point up Shield style, because Kay breaks with them and does something cinematic rather than television-oriented. One is the pan from Dutch/Marshall in the listening post to Claudette/Every-Day in an interrogation room. It’s just a little too slow for The Shield and feels like something that would work in a 2.35:1 frame, but not here. Another is the going in and out of focus with Mara and Shane–again, it’s slower than normal here. They’re good stylistic moves, but they aren’t in The Shield’s grammar. Then again, maybe it’s one more part of the performative aspect of this episode–even the camera’s in on it.
All praise, though, to the little move Kay does in the last scene–the quick pull-back of the camera to reveal Kavanaugh in Billings’ office, the stage for–finally!–the meeting of Kavanaugh and Vic. Both of them are performing. Kavanaugh, of course, is just here on a “tour of the division” after the failed ballot measure mentioned in “Extraction,” and Vic, of course, has nothing to hide. (For some inexplicable reason, I absolutely love Kavanaugh’s desaturated-fuchsia tie.) It’s a nervous and funny moment, the last performances in an episode full of them, with Chiklis and Whitaker facing off in the World Series of Shit-Eating Grins Tournament. It’s the kind of performance where neither one expects the other to buy it.
(Cool detail that Kavanaugh remembers Lem’s birthday; when Shane hears about it, he offers to go get drunk with Lem, but Kavanaugh got him some fly-fishing lures. It makes sense, because Lem feels like a Norman MacLean character who took a wrong turn and wound up in a James Ellroy/Joseph Wambaugh story. He’s way more suited for fishing or firefighting than the Strike Team.)
Vic Mackey’s tragic flaw is self-righteousness. A tragic flaw is not an error in personality; it’s not some kind of additional attribute to make your hero more relatable or human (Aaron Sorkin, I’m looking in your direction). The tragic flaw is embedded in the character and is essential to the character. Vic’s self-righteousness defines his identity as a cop; whatever he does, steal, frame, violate, plant, fight, threaten, kill, he does because he’s a cop and he does it for good. The other guys, the criminals, do it for evil. That self-righteousness is what Vic needs to know he’s not a criminal.
It’s essential to Vic’s character–and, of course, it resonates with American life in the last decade-plus. I think, though (you know me), that it’s an even larger theme. Vic’s flaw of self-righteousness also calls back to a recurring theme in political science, from Plato to John Rawls–how much evil can a government do in the name of good? (Michael Rogin called this attitude the “countersubversive tradition,” noting how governments repeatedly justify acting like the enemy because it’s necessary to counter the threat of that enemy; think of David Mamet’s great line in The Untouchables, “I have become what I beheld, and I am content that I have done right.”)
The Shield has presented this flaw from the third episode of the series, “The Spread,” with Shane’s sudden, desperate cry of “[w]e killed, a cop!” and Vic’s response (played ad fucking infinitum in previews) “get over it, don’t bring it up again.” (I’ve compared Vic to early-Mad Men Don Draper, and that line is Vic’s version of “this never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.” Both characters are sure they can just walk away from the past.) It comes up again in the late-first-season episode “Carnivores,” with Vic saying to the Fruit of Islam “there’s nothing I can do to gain your trust, is there?” and a member responding:
“Admit you’re evil.”
That moment is Tiresias showing up to warn Vic; it’s The Shield’s version of “thou thyself art thine own bane.” “Admit you’re evil,” of course, is the thing the self-righteous can never do. It continues in season two, at the end (“Dominoes Falling”), when the team has stolen two million dollars from the Armenian mob, and Vic still won’t take the hit over Armadillo to spare Danny. It continues in season four, with Vic coming as clean as he wants to, but no further, and that holding back is what finally confirms Rawling’s suspicions about him (in “Back in the Hole”) and leads to the increased attention from IAD, which leads to the heroin brick. It continues through “Extraction,” where Vic gets shoved into early retirement–and the ever righteous, ever badass Vic doesn’t see it has a safe-conduct pass out of danger. He tears it up. And now, deep in the second act of the series entire, in the last act of “Tapa Boca,” that self-righteousness comes clearer, and more destructive than ever before.
It begins in Becca’s office, with Vic making his pitch for the Strike Team as her new clients. He has attorney-client privilege here, she needs to know about him to make a defense, but he gives absolutely no hint of his criminality. I can see not leading off with Terry or the Money Train, but Vic goes into victim mode here–he’s the “poster boy for corruption” and the new police administration wants a “scapegoat”; “you’re a push-the-envelope kind of lawyer, I’m a push-the-envelope kind of cop.” “Which Aceveda sanctioned,” she says. It’s really breathtaking, how the tough guy of the last four seasons becomes poor poor pitiful Vic, oh boo hoo that nasty Aceveda and company wanted us to do all those bad things. (It’s self-serving, but it isn’t a wrong assessment of the situation. I think it’s why Aceveda’s pushing Kavanaugh–someone is gonna be the scapegoat and Aceveda’s making sure it won’t be him.) Thing is, I feel like Vic believes this now; he may be consciously aware he’s covering things up, but to himself, he feels like an innocent victim. And he believes the Strike Team is just as righteous, as Becca warns him “everyone eventually needs to look out for themselves,” but oh no, not Vic’s Team. “We’re a family.” (Literary viewers can have fun with the way Vic can be both victor and victim.)
And then his self-righteousness explodes him in his confrontation with Emolia. He has finally figured out, at the end of “Tapa Boca,” that Emolia has been informing to Kavanaugh, after deluding himself for most of the episode–there’s an earlier, subtle moment of acting from Chiklis, when he said of her “[s]he’s not gonna turn on me” with just the slightest emphasis on that last word–oh of course she might turn on someone else–you know, lowlifes–but not good old Vic Mackey. (Shane has no such illusions.) She reveals that she has actually been informing for six months (“I didn’t know you then”) and there’s a scary use of classic Shield quick-focus–suddenly a Vic we’ve never seen before becomes literally clear before our eyes. He’s so terrifying in this scene, ready to cut a woman’s throat while her son’s in the house. (At least part of the reason he doesn’t is realizing that what he said isn’t true–if Kavanaugh has physical evidence, it won’t all end with her.) He’s enraged, betrayed, hurt that a woman, a mother, someone that good ol’ Vic Mackey was helping sold him out.
Quick digression: this scene gets anticipated earlier in the episode with the Corrine/Kavanaugh confrontation. She calls him out and he’s almost as scary as Vic is here, flipping immediately into full-on threatening mode. There’s something effectively feral about Whitaker here, the way animals or people trained in martial arts can attack without the slightest pause. This sends Corrine into a quick and genuine conversation with Dutch about what to do (it’s a movingly honest moment between the two of them, as characters and actors), and Dutch asks Corrine about the meds Claudette’s been taking.
Back to Vic: in season 2’s “Barnstormers,” Emma (she ran the battered women’s shelter) recognized Vic’s need to dominate women, even (or especially) when he was helping them, saying “you can’t stand anything you can’t control” and Vic learns here that he has no control at all over Emolia and that turns into pure rage. When she says “I report on people for money Vic, that’s what I do!” it cuts to the core of who Vic is–she’s saying “you are not special, Vic, you are a criminal like all the rest, and I treated you like one.” There’s a great, suspenseful ending to the scene, with Vic’s phone going off (Shane and Ronnie’s signal that someone’s on the way) creating a ticking clock until Kavanaugh shows up. Vic goes so much calmer in those moments, telling Emolia just how to lie, and that’s just as scary. And I don’t think he successfully convinced Kavanaugh of anything.
Meanwhile, Tina, who did so well last episode, commits a major fuckup, charging into the jail cage without checking her gun (set up by an earlier shot where she did). The Shield never hesitates to show us consequences, and to cross up our sympathies–we get the wide shot of Julien yanking her out (the distance and the space around them emphasize how much bigger he is, and how he’s almost throwing her across the space) and then just verbally tearing her apart in front over everyone. Again, this is done visually too, cutting back to Tina isolated in the frame. She runs off, and the camera again goes wide and shows her in tears in a corner, isolated next to the evidence cage. Someone told me this twenty years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it: a wide shot can be as revealing as a close-up. The Shield’s crew was expert on both.
When Danny comes in, it changes the tone of the scene. What we saw was a big man getting violent and verbally attacking a small woman, but Danny understands why he did it, that Tina did something incredibly, lethally stupid. “You know why you’re dangerous? Because none of this is real to you.” Danny’s right, too; when Tina responds “all I’ve done is try to be nice to you,” she reveals how much she still thinks it’s all about making friends and how much she doesn’t get what the rules are, and how you have to follow them. (Rules aren’t people. You can’t charm them.) Tina slams back with how everyone has made mistakes, and that had to land with Danny and the biggest mistake in her file, the knife that killed Armadillo (back in season two’s “Scar Tissue”) that was smuggled in by Lem and Shane and blamed on her. Danny, again, explains the rules to Tina–go out there crying and you forever lose everyone’s respect, and it’s the women who try and get by on charm who make it so difficult for women like Danny who go by rules. It’s exactly what drama is, the conflict between two people with different moral codes, and it’s exactly what The Shield so often does, show us that there are some things that can’t be compromised.
Claudette, in these episodes, gets somewhat back on her game, diligently working the Every-Day case and doing a good job on the absolutely horrific case of a pregnant woman killed in a carjacking, her baby cut out, and the baby’s death through being premature and then absolute stupidity. (Sahara Garey’s monologue about what happened is terrifying, both for what happened and her almost-but-not-quite lack of affect when telling it. It’s the sort of thing that I wish I could call unrealistic, and the sort of thing that if you’re a cop, you’re going to deal with on a regular basis. Even Billings steps up his game on this one, talking to the press and doing what looks like a damn good job of it.) She’s still concealing what’s going on from Dutch, who confronts her (“[y]ou’re sick. How sick?”) and gets an acknowledgement of his sympathy, but not much else, from her. (Like Vic in “Extraction,” she admits it by not admitting it.) Hit “pause” when you watch this to see the incredible ending shot of Dutch and the pillars of the Barn marking out a huge negative space in the shot–it’s like a living Barnett Newman painting–making a striking image but more importantly, leaving Dutch absolutely isolated.
SPOILERS FOR BREAKING BAD AND SERIOUSLY? YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT? WHAT THE HELL KIND OF SHIELD FAN DOESN’T WANT TO SEE THE SECOND GREATEST TV SHOW EVER?
There are little points of comparison to Breaking Bad all over these episodes, especially late Breaking Bad. (The end of the complication–the setup–takes place at the end of The Shield’s second season, and at the end of Breaking Bad’s fifth season, or fifth-and-a-half if you want to get technical. It’s when Walt says “I’m out.”) Vic pulling a knife on Emolia superficially resembles “Ozymandias,” but I think the stronger comparison is the end of “Say My Name”–Mike just goes over the line on Walt’s tragic flaw (pride in his case) and Walt just snaps. Vic doesn’t kill Emolia because Vic has one hell of a lot more self-control than Walt, which is probably why Vic could stay at the top of his game for longer than Walt. (Also, that little pull-back that reveals Kavanaugh in “Jailbait” is also like the camera move that reveals Walt in “Felina”; it’s natural and jumpy here and smooth and geometric there, exactly right for the style of each show.)
Another character that keeps coming to mind here is Gale. Gale isn’t self-righteous like Vic, but he has a similar problem of not recognizing the situation he’s in. Both Gale and Vic think they’re not criminals. Gale has that kind of cluelessness peculiar to people who are really smart at one thing, and fail to recognize their massive ignorance on, oh, everything else. “Well there’s crime, and there’s crime,” Gale says, and no there isn’t. Gale is a criminal, Walt is a criminal, Gus is a criminal, and criminals have a huge tendency to fuck each other up when trouble comes. Becca gets this. (Another point of contact between the shows: does anyone ever just fucking listen to their lawyers?) Vic’s whole identity is built on not being a criminal, no matter what he does, so he doesn’t get that either.
THE SPOILER DISTRICT
It’s a good example of The Shield’s approach to character that Billings is on good terms with his ex-wife and daughter, and that’s something you always see in the job when children are threatened. Billings giving a shit is a sight to behold.
On the rewatch, it’s agonizing to see all the pieces leading to the end of the season get snapped into place, one by one. The Shield always keeps the story moving, not through artificial surprises, but through necessary events–Kavanaugh knows bugging Lem isn’t working, he knows Vic is on to him, so he’s going to escalate in the next episode to bugging the Strike Team clubhouse, and that will lead to, well, we know. A lesser show could spin this out for six more episodes, but that would make Kavanaugh stupid.
The most painful pieces, though, are about Shane. At the beginning of “Jailbait,” he says of Lem “like burn the Money Train cash?”–a reminder that Shane has never forgotten the way Lem’s conscience can betray the Strike Team. Shane also immediately says that Lem has to be ready to go to jail–of course, the Team will do everything to keep him out of it, but the worst-case scenario is Lem gives himself up. And Lem’s ready to do it.
Even more powerful, and tied to Vic’s self-righteousness, is the postfuck conversation between Shane and Mara. Vic never understands the genuine love, loyalty, and honesty Shane and Mara have. One scene before, Corrine tells Vic about Kavanaugh, and he essentially tells her “don’t worry about it.” Shane, by contrast, opens up to Mara about Lem and gives her some idea about what is going on. Alan Sepinwall nailed the distinction between the Vendrell and Mackey marriages:
Though Shane has turned his wife and child into fugitives, has slept with hookers and been beaten up by pimps, has murdered and stole and broken the majority of the 10 Commandments, Mara stands by her man, because he has never lied to her about who he truly is.
Vic has it exactly wrong when he goes to Becca in “Tapa Boca”–Shane says “team’s one thing, family’s another.” Vic has been losing (and will continue to lose) his family over the course of the series, so he doesn’t get the difference. Shane does, and says it here, and that will be what drives his decision to kill Lem–family over team. Also, I wonder if we saw here the moment when the never-to-be-born Frances Vendrell was conceived.
Previous: “Extraction”/”Enemy of Good”
Next: “Trophy”/”Rap Payback”