This episode wasn’t as intense as I would have hoped, but I guess they can’t all be. Couldn’t believe it when Vic and Shane got taken down by Garza. Obviously Vic wanted to pound his face in, but was stopped short when Dutch and Claudette stepped in.
Dutch was incredible, again. He is quickly becoming my favorite character on the show.
Julian continues to fly straight, and I was suprised that he turned down Danny’s offer to partner up again.
Questions that remain:
What are they going to do with the money?
Tevon seems to be getting pissed, will he turn against the strike team?
Vic seems to be playing by the rules a lot more lately, but something is bound to push him over the edge. What’s it going to be? Shane’s Girl? Money? Family?
Yeah, except that this scene was shown 9,835 times in promos during the last week.
Hmm. He’s starting to creep me out; I smell a meltdown.
I hope you meant this ironically, right? Julian is sublimating his homosexual urges and expressing them as violence and hatred.
It’s gonna get stolen; Vic can’t go down or there’ll be no fourth season. Unless they decide to REALLY break some TV rules and have the fourth season in prison, or have Vic get caught but be too politically important to go down for it. The only thing we know is NOT gonna happen is NOBODY’s gonna live happily ever after. Except Aceveda; he’s quickly becoming the teflon snake that gets everything he wants, for all the wrong reasons, and you hate him for it.
Too easy. He’ll be killed, or corrupted. Probly not killed; they did that first season.
Shane’s girl is hard to predict. She could get popped–Shane would have to do it of course–or she could be this season’s thorn, in which case she’ll get more and more dangerous, until the end of the season, and then she’ll get popped.
I think his family’s gonna blow: his wife’s storyline is setting him up to pull some major macho shithead stunt. He’s gonna try to get her to quit: he’ll hire someone to scare her at work, and it will go horribly wrong, and he’ll have to raise the kids by himself, and Kim from 24 will come along and help him, except she’ll get in a horrible rolling crash on her way and be captured by terrorists, so Vic’ll have to get that crack whore from the first season to babysit. Unless she’s dead. Is she dead? Well, even if she is, I wouldn’t put it past him.
No, wait! Shane’s girlfriend will take one look at Vic’s artistic kids–sorry, autistic–and fall in love, and dump Shane and move in with Vic. Then she’ll get popped.
Well, with Buffy gone and Angel going, it’s pretty close.
I liked Touching Evil, but we’ll see. 24 is limping along. The Office is brilliant brilliant brilliant, but not the same kind of show of course.
Can I come out of the closet here and say I do NOT like Monk?
I think the family issue will just drive Vic over the top. He won’t know what to do with his autistic son, and will end up making some huge mistake with the kids.
24 is still good, but it is tough to say it’s the best when we have to wait 4 weeks to watch an episode. Haven’t seen the Office, but I hear it is great.
I don’t like Monk either, so maybe we can start a Pit Thread or something.
I predict that Vic finds out that there are marked bills and “loses” some of that money to one of the drug guys that is getting to big for his britches. Said drug guy spends it, gets flagged, and goes down for the murder of the Armenian guys.
And lissener, that Kim and the crack whore thing was freakin funny.
To expand some:
I’m really interested in seeing what Aceveda makes Claudette do, what hoops he places in front of her. He gave her the teams, but took her promotion (for now) and while she railed against it, she saw the political thing to do and she buckled. She’s never apporved of Vics actions for herself, but she has said, more than once, that she thinks he does what he thinks is needed and that it worls for him. You know that is going to come up- whether she will try to reighn in the Strike Team the way Capt A is doing.
Dutchboy is really great, true. It’ll be interesting to see if he can get a thing started with Danny, or if he’ll keep on holding that torch…or if he’ll run into Kim and have to save her from a cougar trap before she catches the clap from a Mexican drug czar…or he meet some other, random, chippie. And yes, I think he is going to let slip the information about the marked bills, but not, obviously, until a few hours after they have been used. D’oh! (or, see my post above)
Vic’s family…no idea, but yeah, I think the going bakc to work thing is going to cause problems for Vic.
Shanes girlfriend- ugh. T-R-O-U-B-L-E. She’s turning Shane around, making him try to change things. I mena, yeah, sure, he’s the whipping bot, but it’s because he’s a fuckup so much, and Vic loves him like a brother. A retarded brother, but still. So now she’s getting it into Shanes head that he shouldn’t have to take that and he should blah blah blah. Nevermind that this is how guys act, this is what we do. If you’re a guy, odds are that you have at least one friend that you rag on all the time, yet you trust explicitly and would do anything for. Now, if they started getting all uppity about it, you’d likely be like “WTF? I though we understood this thing, what’s up?”
Anyway, this broad is going to cause problems. Look for her to be joining the MP-5s in the bay.
Vic has major leverage over the Mexican gang dude, too. “What’s that, you want to be the tough guy, eh? Well, how about I tell your boys that you ratted out Garza and then got him to tell us where the weapons were? Huh?” Yeah, he’s boned. And I loved the aside “We don’t want to settle this locked in a steel container, do we?”
Yeah, I like this. Has potential for that great Sierra Madres tragic moment: Vic realizing that after all he’s been through, and all the dreams he’s hooked to that money, he can’t use it. I see an episode ending with him standing in an alley at night, sad, as he lets the money blow away. In slowmo of course. What song will be on the soundtrack? “If you want it, here it is, come and get it, but you better hurry cause it’s going fast.” Or Kate Bush’s “There Goes a Tenner.”
But to pin it on a drug guy would be too risky: they’d sell him out in a second, and he can’t afford the scrutiny. He’d have to be the one who catches them with the loot, and they’d get killed resisting arrest. And the episode would end with Aceveda giving Vic a knowing look, but unable to touch him. Cut to alley scene above.
I think Shane’s new girl is in for a rude awakening. Shane’s going to choose Vic every single time. Sure, he rebelled slightly when he bought the car, but I think that’s because he honestly didn’t see it as a big deal. When the big stuff happens, he’ll forget all about the little chippy…The thing is, Shane’s too stupid to survive without Vic, and he’s just smart enough to understand that.
Last year I was convinced Dutch was heading for a breakdown. It’ll be interesting if he stays relatively sane or if he’s pushed to the breaking point again. And isn’t he hooked up with that widow that we never saw again? I don’t think he’s carrying a torch for Danny anymore.
I’m glad Danny’s back. At first I thought it meant bad things for Vic, but now I think it’s going to mean bad things for Julian. If her job is dependent on being Aceveda’s snitch, how long with old loyalty hold out if she finds out what Julian is getting himself sucked in to?
I don’t think Claudette likes Vic at all…or trusts him…but I think Aceveda is cornering her and that’s a bad move. Vic’s not going to be “playing it straight” forever, and if Claudette decides Aceveda can fuck himself and somehow gets sucked in to helpign Vic…
Heh, look at me trying to figure out what’s going to happen. Shawn Ryan is more unpredictable than Whedon.
I am leaning that way myself. Claudette hates Vic, but Aceveda just might make her hate him more. I foresee an uneasy and unholy alliance between Claudette and Vic.
That’s an unerstatement. I’m not sure if you’ve seen the other seasons, but take if from someone who has-- Claudette loathes Vic. I think it’s pretty safe to say that her primary motivation for wanting Aceveda’s job is take Vic down.
Yeah, I’ve seen the other seasons. I don’t think she loathed him in S1. I think she didn’t want anything to do with him, but she tolerated him because he did his job. I think her feelings changed over the course of the two seasons until she was in the place she would want to take him down.
What was the motivation for the whole MP5 thing? Vic and gang went out of their way at great risk to get these guns out off the streets, without getting any credit for it. I doubt its a purely altruistic act, so what was that all about?
Actually, Vic is trying (in his own way) to make the world a better place. Sometimes that involves doing the right thing, and sometimes it doesn’t. It was a bit transparent for the writers to put that story line in-- you need to see Vic as neither all good or all evil.
You know, I thought he was just trying to save his own ass. The last thing he needs is all those guns on the street pointing at him. Sure, he’s not going to credit for it, but he’s not going to die and neither will his men, on the wrong end of one of those guns.
Pepperlandgirl, as always, is exactly right. This move was about keeping Vic and the crew safe, AND, in power. If his team is going up against those guns on the street, then they are obviously in great danger and wouldn’t stand a chance. It seems almost everything Vic does is to keep himself at the top of the game.
Actually, I presumed Vic’s motives for dumping the MP5’s in the sea as opposed to turning them in was to keep his promise to the Byz Lats’ lieutenant. If he had turned in those guns, the Byz Lats would have known it was the lieutenant that gave their location away and would have had him killed. This way, the lieutenant keeps his life and in turn keeps the gangs at peace, even though Vic gets no credit for getting them off the streets. He had no choice but to dump them if he wanted to keep the greater peace.
Not pure altruism on Vic’s part, but there was no choice for him; if he had broken his promise and took credit for the seizure the gang war would have continued.
I think he tossed the MP5s because Aceveda pissed him off. Vic didn’t want Aceveda getting any credit for taking the guns off the street when Aceveda wouldn’t lift a finger to help.
Vic dumped the guns because there’d be no way to turn 'em in without suspicion falling on him.
And Tevon’s a dead man. I predict it. He gets killed in the line of duty… Vic will have nothing to do with it, unlike the first one. Tevon’s death will REALLY put the heat on the Strike Team.
The money: They’re gonna keep pecking at it. They’re gonna wind up spending a lot of it in order to keep anyone from finding out about it. More irony, that.
Dutch is going to be the thorn in Vic’s side. I predict, by the end of the season, that it’s gonna be Dutch vs. Vic. (And fie on he who calls Dutch a creep.)
Corinne is going to wind up with some of the Money Train loot, and that’s gonna be another gigantic pain in the ass.
I see it as a race. Remember, there’s $20k that didn’t get re-captured. That money will get put into the regular business chain (“white market”, as opposed to “black market”?). But at the same time I agree with you that the Strike Team’s loot will start to get spent. Sooner or later the Treasure Dept./Dutch will get notice that the money’s on the street, and will start to track down the places it was spent. Question is, who will get fingered as “hey, that’s the guy who bought the stereo with the tainted money last week” by a cashier? A Byz Lat, or one of Vic’s men? Or Corinne?
Initially, when the $100k was gone, I thought for sure the above would happen (with a Byz Lat spending it), and Dutch would let it slip to Vic accidentally, so Vic would know the money was tainted. And perhaps that was how they’d get Garza - Garza and his crew would be implicated in the Money Train murders. But I think it’s gonna get more complicated than that, so I’m going with my guess in the previous paragraph.