Last night was the series finale of The Shield. I’ve been a big fan of the show since the beginning, so I was both sad to see it end and excited to finally see all the drama and conflict that’s been building up for 7 years come to a head. Now that it’s over, I have a few thoughts that I’d like to immortalize forever on the interwebs.
Don’t read any further if you don’t want to read a LOT of spoilers.
I don’t want to say that I’m disappointed with the ending. It was a good episode, and I definitely enjoyed watching it, but it’s not at all what I was expecting.
I’ve been rooting for Shane to get what he deserved since the very first season. I’ve never liked him, even in the sympathetic light that he was being shown during the past couple of seasons. I can understand what they were trying to do with his character: he was just doing what he could to protect his family, he finally grew a conscience (thought that’s debatable), so on and so forth. It all culminates with him being overcome with regret and seeing absolutely no way out once Vic gets immunity. Killing his family and then himself is almost cliche, and I thought it was a big let down. I was looking forward to Vic and Shane finally clashing, letting all of the animosity and regret fuel a savage and bloody confrontation, hopefully ending with Shane dead and Vic on the run, or in jail. I wanted to see Ronnie, who finally had a character and a backbone, come into play. I wanted to see what was left of the strike team come to blows and tear themselves apart. Their final self-destruction was long overdue.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Shane became the only likable one, and we’re made to feel sorry for him and his family. Ronnie goes down in an extremely lame way. They just waltz up to him and arrest him while he’s on the couch crying. His anger toward Vic, once he realizes he betrayed him, was believable but ultimately forgettable. I was actually kind of rooting for Ronnie to kill Vic. I didn’t necessarily want Vic to die, but it would have been satisfying to see Ronnie come into his own finally and take down the king.
I’m also not satisfied with Vic’s punishment. A desk job? For three years? I understand that for someone like Vic, being locked in an office doing paperwork for any amount of time is a tortuous eternity, but still… This man killed a lot of people and committed a LOT of crimes, and there’s no real consequence to his actions. Shane and his family are dead, Lem is dead, Ronnie is in jail forever. It’s already been established that Vic is a narcissist, so those things will make him sad now and then, but he’s free from the mental torture that normal people would suffer knowing that they’d caused such disasters. He did lose his family, but whether he would actually get to see them or not was left an open question. He was already limited to sporadic visitation. So it gets a little more sporadic. So what?
I wanted a resolution to the baby serial killer situation, and I thought that the inclusion of the “New Paradigm Party” mayoral candidate was basically filler, since he was introduced and then killed in the span of about 45 minutes. It was pointless. It ended as a small blip on Aceveda’s radar, and had no impact on his campaign.
All in all, though, I thought it was a good episode. It just didn’t give much closure for the series. We’ve spent 7 years watching Vic do horrible things and always get away with them. We’ve watched him destroy his family, and the lives of everyone he got close to, and in the end, he gets a slap on the wrist. I wanted more. I wanted an epic clash. I wanted to see a tidal wave of karma rush over him and envelope him, and I would have been happy whether he survived it or not.
I guess I actually am disappointed. It’s still been one of the best shows on television, and I’m sad that it’s gone. My only hope is that, since Vic is still alive and still sort of in law enforcement, they might be able to wrangle a movie out of this.