Season 2, Episode 9: “Co-Pilot”
After wrapping up the Armadillo
storyline last episode, it seemed odd that the following episode would be set
fourteen months earlier (and BTW, it’s been fourteen months since the first
episode happened? If I went through half
the stuff that has happened in the last season and half of the show, I would’ve
gone into a sanitarium). I can only
imagine how bizarre it was to watch “Co-Pilot”, since it seemed a prologue to
all of what’s happened during the show so far didn’t seem necessary. After watching it, I’m not sure it still
does, but it’s not a waste of time either.
For one, we get to see the Strike
team being formed, in both people and what they will ultimately become. Vic and Shane are just working cases (and for
one of the rare time in this show, wearing suits to work), when Vic gets
Assistant Chief Gilroy (before he became “incarcerated Gilroy”) to pull a favor
and get him in charge of a new Strike Team in Farmington, and with the
assurance that he will produce results immediately. So when the newly formed team gets there eyes
on a drug dealer taking over territory, and the normal methods of police work
aren’t producing fast enough results, as Vic says, “I think we need a
shortcut.” He swears this will be the
only time they’ll do this and he seems to believe that earnestly, but then
again, we the audience know different.
This of course leads to several
busts (including then alive Rondell from season one), and eventually using
Connie (still alive, and surprisingly cleaner looking than she’s ever been) to
trick herself out to plant drugs in drug dealer Lionel’s house. This leads to a rather icky scene where Vic
and Shane overhead via microphone Connie being raped (all in the background of
a carnival and vomiting clown) by Lionel, with Vic almost blowing the whole
thing by going (but ultimately prevented) to help her. They get Lionel, but get in David’s
crosshairs as a result, which lead to Crowley (you know, before he was shot in
the face by Vic) being put into the Strike Team to keep eyes on them all for
David. And we all know how bad that ends
for detective Crowley…
For the other partnerships,
things don’t start off that badly. Dutch
is pegged immediately as the rube of the new squad house (and what work it must
have taken to have it emptied like it was when the episode starts), arrives
late enough that he doesn’t get a choice of desks, let alone choice of
partners. He’s put with Claudette and
another veteran detective on a kidnapping case involving Mexican kidnappers and
a brutally raped Salvadorian girl who escaped her captors. They confront a negotiator the family hired
to get the girl back, and try to convince him to give them the kidnappers, but
thanks to Dutch’s keen observation and empathy with Claudette as an
investigator, get the negotiator to trap the kidnappers.
Danny and Julien go on the first
day of patrol together and things go well for them (excluding of course, the
naked, bloodied Salvadorian girl that they run into). Julien is a straight shooter who thinks he can
do better than most of his peers, but like most green cops, doesn’t realize he
has to sometimes not do the right thing.
Take a man Danny and Julien bring in for stealing groceries for his
family; groceries he wouldn’t have to steal if a punk in his apartment complex
wasn’t stealing the man and other people’s food stamps. Danny deals with the food stamp stealer by
basically giving him a chance to stop and walk away without getting arrested by
simply leaving what he stole on his porch for them to pick up later. What could have been a dicey arrest turns
into an deal that the thief agrees to and does immediately. Its not just a matter of arresting people,
but just making sure things are even in uneven times.
What that story does is show how
much police work in this show is about negotiation. Vic at the end of the episode can only lament
upon his slightly illegal escapade into busting Lionel, “That was pretty easy,
wasn’t it?”. Vic may have been a good
cop once, but here might be the point where he decided he can start getting
away with twisting the law a little bit more, but as a result, doing so became
less and less easy to do. In a way, this
mirrors the complex and risky steps the Strike Team needed to get rid of Armadillo. Could they have done the same a year
earlier? Probably not, or at least, not
as well.
By the end of the episode,
everything is set up pretty much where the pilot started. All the relationships are set up and all the
problems are laid out, but we kind of know where its going to go, which cuts
the dramatic impact of the episode down dramatically. “Co-Pilot” is a nice diversion, but in the
end, it’s a diversion we as viewers didn’t really need.
--Asst. Chief Gilroy before he became ex-Asst.
Chief Gilroy.
--Odd seeing the Barn minus people.
--Funny blooper with one of the
soundguys appearing briefly in the Strike Team room. In the widescreen releases, not sure about
the fullscreen releases.
--Pretty good editing avodiing
showing the naughty bits of a bloody naked woman.
--Connie before she became dead
Connie.
--Rondell before he became dead
Rondell.
--Funny meta moment with church
stuff being removed from the Strike Team room; the pilot was filmed in achurch
before being moved into a set.
--Fucked up backstory behind
Dutch's ex-wife.
--"I hate to say this, but I
think we need a shortcut."
Surprising to see that much doubt in Vic when he says that.
--Don't remember Connie being
this clean.
--Barfing clown during the sting
operation; random, but nice flavor to the scene.
--Another odd blooper with the
cameraguy popping up during the sting op.
The dangers of widescreen...
--Crowley before he became shot
in the face Crowley.
--Interesting to note how well
Crowley and David know each other.
--"Credit's
overrated." Might be Claudette's
motto.
--Oh, the beginning of the
unusable men's room.
--Dutch gets punked for the first
time by Vic.
--Uh, yeah. Lem gets checked out unknowingly by Julien.
Rating: 3 ½ out of 5 stars
Season 2, Episode 10: “Coyotes”
After the brief detour in “Co-Pilot”,
“Coyotes” sets the end of this season into motion with a few big problems. One comes immediately when Lanie’s report on the
Barn is leaked to the press, and it outright holds blame on David and Vic for
its not-so-sterling reputation. This
fragile alliance was strained as it was throughout the season, but both men
find themselves put into damage control.
On David’s end, he’s brought into to talk to the chief of police, and
has to negotiate to keep his job, albeit for a while longer. Either way, the message the chief lays out is
pretty clear: win or lose, once the primaries begin, he’s out. So David is left with little option but to
win, because his career as a cop is going to get flushed anyway.
Vic has his own problem in this
episode, and that’s in the sudden and bizarre appearance of his former boss,
Gilroy (John Diehl). I say “sudden and bizarre”
because he’s under house arrest for his land grab scheme last season, and that
he appears at Vic’s house, begging for help to get out of the country. This is suspicious enough, but with this
coming on the heels of the Barn report, is even more so. Add to that, the newest addition to the
Strike Team, Tavon (Brian White), who clearly is an outsider to the inner
circle that the Strike Team is now. So
while Vic and Shane head off to handle Gilroy, this leaves Lem to work with
Tavon to bring down an illegal chop shop ring.
While Tavon does not know anything about the team’s plans with the
Armenian mob money train, he proves he’s not some completely by-the-book
addition, playing a good game of “good cop, bad cop” (Tavon being the bad cop)
to get the head of the ring. Tavon does
bend the rules enough to earn Lem’s respect, but the rest of the Team would
rather keep him out of the money train plan.
He can bend the law, but break the law is a whole other thing.
In Claudette’s case this episode,
she comes in with a shaken perspective on Vic, the Strike team, and David,
causing her interactions with them in this episode to be nothing less than
venomous. She knows they were involved
with the Armadillo mess earlier in the season and murder in the Barn in “Scar
Tissue”, and is in a position that she can’t really prove it, but won’t let
them forget that she knows. She can bend
the rules like Tavon, but knows she’s working with people who have outright broken
and burned the law behind them. Still,
she soldiers on, working with Dutch somewhat reluctantly on a breaking and
entering that left an old woman dead.
For a good portion of this episode, Claudette’s mind is not on the case,
but still trying to dig up evidence on the Armadillo murder. Eventually, she gets back into her groove and
finds the robber, a drugged out transvestite (whose found in such a zonked out
state, you almost think they discovered a zombie in this drug den), and puts
the Armadillo case on the back burner.
She has let go of the matter for now, but hasn’t forgotten it, as the
rather quiet terse exchange between her and Vic at the episode’s end suggests. If they were friends before, they definitely
aren’t now.
Danny and Julien’s case this week
is quaint by comparison, trying to help a very pregnant gangbanger who barely
survived a beating. She’s not concerned
for the well-being of the kid (her boyfriend/baby daddy is not in the picture
anymore), and when Danny suggests her adopting the kid out of the blue, even
less so. Danny is in a bad place, with
the whole mad widow storyline and being held responsible for letting Armadillo
getting killed in the cage, so it seems like a desperate move to hold onto something
that could be a good thing. She’s been
getting the shit end of things this season, and her life doesn’t get better by
the last few episodes.
Meanwhile, Vic and Shane are
setting up Gilroy’s escape to Mexico, and it becomes clear that Gilroy didn’t
so much escape house arrest, as he was let go by Lanie to entrap Vic in a
criminal act. They pull off a difficult
escape out of that situation, but one that leaves Lanie without a case to stand
on (after all, if Gilroy was let go, without really a connection or Gilroy’s
wire evidence of Vic for his escape, any case would be circumstantial at best),
and has her being shown the door by the department, who are revealed to be the
one’s responsible for leaking her report.
It’s another big theme of The Shield at play this episode with
Claudette, Lanie, and even Danny: shit spills down, especially when it comes to
covering your ass. The higher-ups can
tolerate some corruption when it comes to getting the job done, and are
ruthless when it comes to protecting themselves from the blowback.
The kick of this episode comes in
Gilroy’s supposed plan to escape to Mexico becoming a reality, with him getting
a small amount of cash out of the funds the Strike Team stole from Gilroy’s
safe deposit box. The rest went to a
hitman, who will kill Gilroy if he’s discovered crossing back into the U.S.,
pretty much damning Gilroy into exile. It’s
a rough fate for Vic’s former boss and friend, but despite that, Gilroy leaves
Vic with one message, “I got greedy. I
lost everything. There's a lesson
there." That final dialogue from
Gilroy is more than true, especially as the show ends this season and begins
another season with those words coming back to haunt the Strike team.
--"I just don't like not
liking my job."
--"He's my cousin. It'll screw up Christmas."
--"What about the hut, the
rice and the beans?" "That's
when I wasn't really going."
--"You made me pay my own
hitman?"
--Aw, can't Vic and Claudette
make up? Yeah, probably not.
--Directed by Davis Guggenheim, a
regular TV director now known more for his documentaries An Inconvenient Truth
and Waiting for Superman.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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