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Post by -|E|- on Feb 3, 2006 11:42:35 GMT -5
I'm glad she's finally come down on Vic's side! ya think she did? I think she goes where the money is. Oh, I think seeing that Vic was going to help her in spite of what she told IAD made her decide to come clean with him. Yes, I think he's won her over and she'll help him out from now on. I sure hope so!! Six months of helping her and her son; what woman wouldn't want to keep a man like Vic in her life? Screw the money; I'd get on all fours and bark like a dog for that.. Wow. OK; I'm way off topic.
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Post by BenMackey on Feb 3, 2006 12:03:07 GMT -5
ya think she did? I think she goes where the money is. Oh, I think seeing that Vic was going to help her in spite of what she told IAD made her decide to come clean with him. Yes, I think he's won her over and she'll help him out from now on. I sure hope so!! Six months of helping her and her son; what woman wouldn't want to keep a man like Vic in her life? Screw the money; I'd get on all fours and bark like a dog for that.. Wow. OK; I'm way off topic. have you been hangin out with Taylor lately? well I think you were right up until vic took a knife to her throat.
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Post by arne on Feb 3, 2006 12:04:36 GMT -5
ya think she did? I think she goes where the money is. I second that. Emolia is weak. It's not like she doesn't have some kind of conscience (remember how she refused to take all the money Vic offered her in 5x02?), but still, she's weak. Kavanaugh would be a complete moron if he hasn't realized that yet. Emolia will always crack under pressure (she'd always feel compelled to take one of Kav's Juicy Fruits, I guess), and Kavanaugh will use that. He still needs her as a witness... at least for now.
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Post by BenMackey on Feb 3, 2006 14:16:39 GMT -5
while speakin of our old homie taylor - where can I place some money on whos Danny's baby daddy?
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Post by leadinvestigator on Feb 3, 2006 18:18:54 GMT -5
tapa boca means something like nobody is supposed to talk or can talk. like that thing you put on a dog so he cant open his mouth ... dont know the english word. I liked this ep like every other one so far this season. forest whitaker is great, vic found his season 1 and 2 game ... better than season 4 overall. The impression I get from the title is someone holding their own hand over their mouth... they feel scared, perhaps compelled to talk, but to keep themselves from blowing the case wide open--they all have to shut themselves up. Each is potentially his or her own worst enemy right now.
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Post by chemikalman on Feb 4, 2006 21:43:38 GMT -5
If Emolia wanted to screw Vic over she had her chance when Kav came in. Instead, she covered Vic's ass by saying what Vic told her to say (about her cousin).
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Post by Maggie1956 on Feb 4, 2006 23:01:28 GMT -5
I Meantime, I'm standing there totally fascinated by that sound and the gruesome reaction of her old bones to his youthful attempt to revive her. Needless to say, she was a gonner.
My intrigue knows no bounds. You're a sick puppy. I love it. I'd have had exactly the same reaction. Part of me would be sad for the woman, sympathetic for the well-intentioned officer, and part of me would be all "Ooh, that's an odd sound." I do that even when I'm the one who's having the disaster.
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Post by Maggie1956 on Feb 4, 2006 23:51:19 GMT -5
I gave it an A.
The trick of turning Kavanaugh against Aceveda worked smoothly because of each man’s weakness. Aceveda is so twee about his dignity that he thought the trash issue was just Vic being disrespectful. Kavanaugh is so deeply into secrets and deception that he will readily believe someone is betraying him, therefore he would not tell Aceveda he suspects him. Aceveda is so predictable that the Strike Team could predict his responses to the trash complaint so that the background noises perfectly covered every part of the conversation that sounded innocuous.
I wish Corrinne had been cagier with Kavanaugh. She was too quick to make him as a cop, and he will wonder what Mackey knows. But being a cop’s wife (and a nurse, they often have highly refined BS meters) is a reasonable enough explanation that he can’t be sure.
I shudder to think of Kavanaugh leaning on Mara. Seriously weak link. Someone kill her before she betrays them (worse than she already has the sticky-fingered loose-lipped iron-swinging virago). Hell, someone kill her just for being annoying.
Michael Chiklis and Onahoua Rodriguez were both astounding in the final scene. His volcanic rage with a dash of righteous indignation was smoking. And her emotions were so tangled; remorse, terror, self-preservation and self-loathing. Like the snake in the folk song, she reminded Vic that he knew what she was when he took her in.
I’ve been loudly calling for the brutal death of “Emoliant” (Exfoliant, whatever) since she said, “He likes helping me and my boy…we can use that against him.” But I think as the months rolled by and Vic kept being kind and decent, she began to feel guilt. When he came in the door knowing that she’d said something to IAD and *still* wanting to help her, she crumbled. She had nothing to gain by confessing that she’d been a spy the whole time and a lot to lose. For now I’d say Emolia is on Vic’s side…as much as Emolia can be on anyone’s side.
Then Kavanaugh’s entrance! Surprise is one of the harder emotions to fake, and FW totally looked like a deer staring at headlights. Mackey played it beautifully, flipping the situation as if he suspects Kavanaugh of being a menace to HIS confidential informant.
Now Emolia is truly between a rock and a hard place. She should flee town and change her name. Maybe her new name could be Scylla Charybdis. (All mythology geeks, raise your hands now)
P.S. Word to Corrinne. Discussing your ex-husband's possible criminal case with your ex-boyfriend who's also his disgruntled coworker? Serious tactical error.
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Post by eddiekaay on Feb 5, 2006 1:17:28 GMT -5
Hand raised.
The Shield has built-in the possibilities to mirror classical Greek tragedy -- when the main character does somethng bad, it's not enough for him to pay. Everyone he cares for has to pay -- that's Corrine, Shane, the kids, the rest of the ST... and he has to watch it happen, knowing he's got no control to stop it.
All the pieces are on the board -- I hope the Shield writers kick it in to gear....soon!
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Post by arne on Feb 5, 2006 2:31:30 GMT -5
Maybe her new name could be Scylla Charybdis. (All mythology geeks, raise your hands now) Another hand raised. Smart thinking, Maggie.
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Post by BenMackey on Feb 5, 2006 5:34:03 GMT -5
If Emolia wanted to screw Vic over she had her chance when Kav came in. Instead, she covered Vic's ass by saying what Vic told her to say (about her cousin). By snitching on vic her double income (vic and tom) would have been cut in half.
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Post by Inside Man on Feb 6, 2006 10:59:06 GMT -5
As explained in my other post on the "Jailbait" thread, I didn't get a chance to watch this episode with little interruption until Sunday. My aborted viewing on Tuesday was a joke: I kept getting called out of the room, so I just turned the television off after like, the third interruption. Curiously, every interruption prior to that took place right before the Strike Team's "Ass-Suck" investigation. Until yesterday, I didn't even know there was a second murder investigation going on in this episode.
So many thoughts on this episode. I think I graded the first 3 eps solid B's, but this is the one that gets a solid A from me, if only because I see it as the gateway to the rest of the season. This was a kick-ass top-notch closing scene.
The first thing I wanted to weigh in on was the title, "Tapa Boca." I finally got around to asking my fiancee what it means. She's Cuban and speaks Spanish & English fluently. She said that her mother used to say Tapa Boca! to the kids all the time. As a kid, did you ever play Indian and do the wah-wah-wah-wah thing by tapping your mouth repeatedly? Well, that's what my girl did when explaining, except she only tapped her hand to her mouth & pulled it away once. The intimation was, "Tapa Boca" was used by her family to mean something like Shut your mouth or I'll smack it.
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Post by Inside Man on Feb 6, 2006 17:17:05 GMT -5
Another thing that struck me while watching 'Tapa Boca' was the scene where the Strike Team went out hunting for Pitarrio and found an impostor working under his name at the construction site.
The fake Pitarrio told the story of a Heroin deal gone bad, because the real Pitarrio got his neck sliced in half. The real detail of that scene to me was something he said in Spanish: negro. The guy who killed Pitarrio was a black guy (and if I'm not mistaken, he said it was a big black guy). That much didn't really set my Spidey Sense tingling, but almost the very next scene was Vic going to Emolia's house and not finding her. The neighbor says that she left with--again--negro. This time, we know he's talking about Kavanaugh. The placement of those scenes almost back-to-back, not to mention the consistent use of Spanish in saying the same thing make me wonder if the writers are sending us signals.
Would it be too much of a stretch to think that Kavanaugh is the one who killed Pitarrio? Perhaps as a way of getting Emolia under his thumb? That thought almost helps define his character. He preys on women. His coming at Corrine bolsters this theory. And like Vic said, Everybody's All American can't be that clean. And oh man, did he ever pull the gloves off after she made him as a cop.
arne and jwc, I agree with you guys about Corrine going to Dutch with questions. It fits her character, in my opinion. She cares about her family's well being (Vic included), and she really doesn't know how much Dutch has the claws out for Vic. Vic has also always told her portions or shades of the truth for the duration of their marriage, so she wants a second opinion. It wasn't the wisest move from a viewer's standpoint, but I can sure see her doing it.
ETA: Added Vic quote.
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Post by dizzylizard on Feb 6, 2006 18:23:42 GMT -5
My first thought on that wouldn't be Kavanaugh, but rather Antwon.
~Diz
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Post by axeman61 on Feb 7, 2006 5:51:27 GMT -5
Inside Straight, that is going a little bit out of reach with Kavanaugh. I know you're speculating, and there's nothing wrong with that, but negro means black, and that's all.
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Post by BenMackey on Feb 7, 2006 14:21:54 GMT -5
I actually think corrines decision to ask dutch wasnt that bad. dutch is a honest and decent guy. even after the thing he pulled with corrine in the beginning but that was different.
as for the "big black guy" - it definitely had to be kavanaugh or antwon, otherwise they wouldnt have mentioned the "big" part. btw, did you see forest whitaker on jimmy kimmel? he lost like 20 or 30 pounds i'd guess.
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Post by Inside Man on Feb 7, 2006 16:13:56 GMT -5
axeman & dizzy, it is a stretch, I realize. I rarely engage in speculation and theorizing, mainly because others have proven to be much better at it than me. I'm impressed at how many theories I remember being floated around last year are beginning to come to pass. Me, I'm still waiting for that Vic-Corrine reunion prediction of mine to come true. But something about the placement of those 2 scenes I mentioned and the dialogue contained within really made me think. Once that though enters my head, I've gotta let it out here or I'll go crazy. So if my idea is wrong, it wouldn't be the first time. But I gotta stand by it for now.
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Post by axeman61 on Feb 7, 2006 18:16:41 GMT -5
I didn't mean to insult you. I just don't think Pitarrio got killed by Kavanaugh. The negro scenes are nice catches, but I don't think they "mean" anything. Kavanaugh's not big. He's fat. I think that even latinos would describe a big black guy as someone muscle-bound. That's a common connotation. Kavanaugh would be a fat black guy. The fake Pitarrio was probably thinking of someone muscular.
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Post by jimmycracker on Feb 7, 2006 22:09:03 GMT -5
Kavanaugh killing somebody... that's like Claudette fabricating evidence. Way out of character.
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Post by acc on Mar 26, 2007 11:34:01 GMT -5
5x04 Tapa Boca is a very strong episode. I hate to disagree with jwc and eddiekaay because I value their opinions highly and if I were writing this back at the time of this episode's air date I probably would be getting kind of tired of the arcs in question since they seem to be taking their sweet time getting anywhere.
However, I think Tapa Boca, which I give an A, is a more visceral episode than the ones that came before it in the season, and has a more emotional impact as a single episode than the previous three. If the aforementioned episodes were more about setting the tone and establishing the characters and arcs of Season 5, Tapa Boca lets the audience settle into an involving one-episode narrative.
I give the episode an A. The Dutch-Claudette case is given a great deal of focus and I found it engaging. I agree with jwc that Claudette most likely should tell Dutch about her lupus but one of her character traits has always been her secretive nature. After Dutch's involvement with the ADA in Season 4, behind Claudette's back, she simply feels like she can't trust her partner anymore, at least certainly not to the extent that she once did. (This concern becomes evident in 5x10 when she confronts Dutch, wrongly, for telling Billings about her illness, who told the Assistant Chief Phillips, but she happens to be wrong. When Dutch tries to defend himself, she brings up his behind-her-back dealings with the ADA. It gives out her justification for her silence long after the fact, which I think is a good way of getting it out rather then spelling it out during the actual meaty part of the arc.) That said, at this juncture I was getting sick of the lupus arc and when she actually *does* tell Dutch about it in the very next episode--only after he writes "I'm sorry/I'll stop" to her--it felt like one of the biggest anti-climaxes in the series' history. Of course, the *real* juicy episode, where all of this finally reaches its culmination, is in 5x07, which I consider in many ways to be the mother of all Claudette episodes. But we'll get there soon.
To me, this is the episode where the Danny/Julien/Tina arc actually became interesting. Hindsight helps here, too, because Tina's crying is mirrored in the next episode when Danny, in an uncharacteristic moment of weakness (due to her pregnancy), starts crying in front of everybody in the Barn. This arc never quite manifests itself into something big and powerful (though I suspect that's coming in the very first or second episode of Season 6) but at this point it was shaping up nicely. I buy Danny's concerns, and I buy Julien's partly hypocritical, partly wholly justified crackdown on Tina's poor behavior. That this whole arc would somehow find itself linked to Billings' installation of a vending machine (which ties in Dutch, who's infatuated with Tina) is really shocking to me and one of the tightest, most organically realized surprise plot twists the writers ever dreamed up.
Now, onto Vic. Vic has always had an almost pathetic attachment, emotionally, to "wounded women"--those who are clearly victims in his eyes and deserving of his sympathy (however he projects that: sexually, economically, etceteras). Like Connie, like Emma, like the Armenian gal whose sister was murdered by Margos, Emolia fits into this prototype in some rough approximation. Vic just can't help himself. On this issue, he's just a sucker. After repeatedly telling Connie he doesn't have the loose cash he once had anymore in 2x05 Greenlit he ends up giving her some cash anyway. The thing about Emolia is key--he doesn't see it coming. He thinks he can trust this woman because of all the sympathy and care he's given to her and her mentally challenged child (yet another link he shares with her). When he finds out that she is the source for all of their problems as far as Jon Kavanaugh goes, he flips out. I agree with those in this thread who say that Chiklis conveys a deep menace here that seems completely capable of slashing Emolia's throat. Could Vic do it? It's one of those tough "we'll never quite know" things but I imagine not. The point is he scares the hell out of her so badly that she immediately regrets ever betraying him. (Who wouldn't?)
There was a comment on another forum about Vic's behavior with women back when Season 5 was airing. A guy wrote that he treats many of his female informers, like Emolia, similarly to a pimp. It's pretty much true. He feeds into their desire for a strong masculine presence, demands favors (tips) in exchange for money and care. But he can be positively brutal, too, when he must be and this is example A.
Now, for full disclosure: as a fan of the series, since March 12, 2002, when I watched Pilot, I honestly thought the series was possibly starting to lose its edge around the time Season 4 wrapped up. I even said, fully dismayed at how the Season 4 finale went down, that Season 5 should probably be the last season. (The finale felt overly predictable; almost stale, in a way... The Shield showed some signs of exhaustion--rather than being the supernova that would burn out quickly it seemed as though the writers were starting to milk the main arc for as long as possible... In my own defense, however, I wrote after a few days on The Shield Fans website that perhaps Season 4's quieter, almost happy conclusion, where so many things became status quo, or at least seemed to, was somehow necessary. It turned out it was.)
The main arc of the show is really about Vic and his guys. The writers know this so well that every so often there is an establishing scene that explicitly demonstrates where these guys' heads are. It's there in 1x05 Blowback when they rally together to snuff out Aceveda's crusade against them with the cocaine. It's there in 2x08 Scar Tissue when Vic hands back the keys to their money to take out Armadillo for good. It's there in 2x13 Dominoes Falling when they look in awe and disbelief at their Money Train cash. It's there in 3x01 Playing Tight when they're preparing to make a minor bust, smiling in the car. It's there in 3x15 On Tilt when the team experiences a terrible meltdown. It's there in 4x13 Ain't That A Shame when they party it up. And it's there again in 5x10 Of Mice and Lem when they split up as a unit for the very last time. If you take those individual scenes together, it shows the progression of these people, as a team and individually as well. The happy go lucky (as I believe Dead Armenian called it in the 5x10 thread) conclusion to Season 4 is turned on its ear by the end of Season 5.
When I started watching Season 5, I thought, well, this is where the show starts to descend. When I first saw the first three episodes, I probably would have given them all Cs or maybe a B for Extraction. I was, in a way, kind of down on the show.
Tapa Boca, for me, brought the show back to its basics and to the natural elements that made the show viscerally exciting and powerful again. Hence my attachment to the episode. 5x05 Trophy took that to another level. But that's the next episode.
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