The Shield: Final Season Is Going Out With A Bang!

Late to my own thread, as usual, but finally got to see the last episode.

I thought it was great!
I had been wondering what they could do to Vic…at one point during the show, I counted three people who had a really good reason to just walk up to him and put a bullet through his head, and there were probably another 20 or so who would have been easily motivated to do the same.
But that would almost have been the easy way out for him.

Then I thought Shane, in his final act, came up with one bit of damning evidence that Vic had not thought of and confessed, and it would have been enough to send Vic to jail forever.
But somehow, even that would have been too easy…he would have killed himself before it got that far.

But what I didn’t see coming is the living hell that Vic got…he lost his family, he lost his “posse”, he lost all respect at the Barn, he was stuffed into a suit that looked like he bought for his First Communion, he was forced to do paperwork and
he still had the memory of those photos of Shane and his family stuck in his mind, and he had been forced to watch Ronnie pay for both of their sins. In other words, they finally got Vic by the balls.

Putting the gun in the back of his ill fitting suit pants and heading out was Vic’s only resort. I fully expect to find Vic a year later, sitting in a bar, alone, drunk and afraid to be seen by any of the police he worked with. If anyone has ever hung out at a bar in the late afternoon, you see lots of “Vic’s” sitting in corners, muttering to themselves and considered crazy old loons.

Who know, maybe 10 years later his daughter, Cassie, will pop in out of the blue and invite Vic to her wedding, but after she hears what her father really did, I doubt even she will be rushing to find him ever again.

So, yeah…Shane was a sad ending, Ronnie got screwed, Claudette is dying, and life goes on in the Barn…but Vic learned the hard way that just getting away with everything he did didn’t pay off in the end after all.

Forgot to mention, I now put The Shield up there with The Wire as examples of really good television series that have raised the bar for every cop show to follow.

What do you know…there just might be a follow up film three years from now!

As per this Hollywood Reporter article.

FWIW – this is from a brief interview with Shawn Ryan in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly (#1024, page 59):

Here’s the way I look at it. There have been SO MANY TIMES where Vic looked like he was screwed. Totally out of options. No way out. Had the series ended after any of these points, there’d be people saying, “Man, he’s screwed, he has to be going down.” But then the series continued, and there he was, working his rogue cop magic to find a way out.

It’s the same thing this time, except the series did actually end. But I know Vic. I’ve seen him in tight binds for seven years. He’s already scheming for a way out. The obvious angle would be the blackmail against Olivia, but I’d not be surprised to see him play the “I’ll go over your head to Chafee” angle about something major, or the “Let’s just take this major discovery to the press and see if they’ll do something about it” to get himself back on the street.

Vic’s in Hell now, but he’s been there before. He’ll be fine. Which is why he’s the guy who has held us riveted for seven seasons.

Finale repeating Saturday late and Sunday late.

I just finished the final episode and I’ve raised this zombie so I could say I loved the ending.

The series was one of the best I’ve ever watched, and I’m really sad it’s over. Wah.

It was great, wasn’t it? I remember at the time my expectations of the ending were completely different: I thought it’d be a high octane shootout, but it was quite the opposite.
All things considered, while The Wire was a great show, The Shield was just so much more consistently entertaining. I have to list The Shield as my favorite series of all time.

I stopped watching after Lem died. That’s when I knew the games were over, and it wasn’t going to be how Vic stayed one step ahead of his opponents anymore.

I was sad that the show would be spiraling towards the fall of the strike team. Up until that point, I had hoped it would stay in the background, while they continued to solve interesting crimes week after week.

I read through the Wiki entries, and there’s hardly any mention of the crimes they solved. I hope the series is not only remembered for what happened to the strike team.

Hal, in case you weren’t aware, The Shield was inspired by and based loosely on the Rampart Scandal.

As such, and a few twists-and-turns aside, it really was always about the Strike Team.

Wow, I’m amazed that you could actually stop watching after that. That was the craziest series finale I’d ever seen - not just that he died (although that alone would’ve been huge), but the amazingly tragic way in which he did. Then the next episode Shane realizes that Aceveda was just feeding them misinformation to get them to make a move, and Lem wasn’t really turning on them.
I was just completely glued to the Shield after that. Did his death bother you so much that you couldn’t bare to watch it anymore, or did the whole storyline just turn you off? The massive unravelling of the team was riveting to watch, to me.