I’ve been a huge fan of the FX series “The Shield” since episode 1. The writer, Shawn Ryan, had an amazing idea to create a character who is corrupt beyond belief, but generally works toward the common good. This would be Vic Mackey, a detective who is corrupt enough to kill another cop in the first episode in order to hide his corruption, yet a majority of the corrupt deeds resulted in an overall good for the public. Yes he skimmed money off of drug deals, helped broker drug deals, perpetuated gang wars, but the deals he worked out with these nefarious characters were on conditions such as the drugs are never to be sold to kids and gang violence would not target innocent civilians.
The show made people think and fight over who they really want to root for. On the one hand Vic was the epitome of corruption, yet when he was being investigated by Internal Affairs, one couldn’t help but to hope he was able to get away clean because he meant well overall.
By completion there were 7 seasons of this remarkable program, some better than others. The first couple of seasons were nothing short of awesome. Around the 3rd or 4th season I thought the season “jumped the shark” with the Armenian money train story arc, and it just didn’t seem to get back to the level it had been prior. It was almost to the point I debated if I was even going to bother watching this season, but thankfully decided to since it was the last season anyway.
The final season kicked the series back up to the level it was when it first started out. Intense. Dramatic. I was watching it in dread of the final episode, constantly saying “It’s getting good again just in time to end.” Every episode I watched just kept getting better and better, and I remember thinking how awesome of a finale it must be in order to tie up the story being built.
After watching the finale, I was completely let down. The whole finale felt to me like they planned another season or two, then right before they filmed the episode decided it would be the last and had to fake their way through it. I understand where it was going in that the only thing Vic had to show for all his effort through the last couple of years was his gun and a photo of Lem, but there was so much left unfinished. The shield was full of little mini-plots that were never resolved, but nothing like the possible-serial-murder-kid that Dutch was chasing. That case was one of the more prominent story lines this season, yet they didn’t bring it to closure. Watching Ronnie being arrested yet Vic didn’t do anything but say “Sorry” was another story line that didn’t fit. Vic was all about corruption if it benefited him, but at the same time he was all about justice. He wouldn’t have let Ronnie take the entire fall without some kind of plan to get him out and run off to Mexico together.
In a way I feel cheated, but in a way I’m hopeful they left a couple of major story lines open in order to make some movies, much like Joss Wheadon’s “Firefly” series sparked the movie “Serenity” or the SciFi Channel’s “Stargate SG-1” series (ironically spawned originally from a motion picture) spawned a couple of direct-to-DVD movies.