Post by -|E|- on May 10, 2007 8:39:12 GMT -5
I liked this article a lot - it's pretty in-depth, and the guy has an odd sense of humour, which I always appreciate! There are pictures and videos at the link.
================================
The Shield: The Detective & the Lieutenant
Detective Vic Mackey kills cops, steals money, and beats suspects. How, then, can the man trying to bring him to justice be the "bad guy"?
by Quentin B. Huff
[9 May 2007]
PopMatters.com
“I used to think Mackey was the luckiest son of a bitch alive—how things just fell into place for him. And then I realized he was creating his own luck. So what you see as a simple microphone malfunction. I see as calculated.”
—David Aceveda, The Shield: Season Five, “Jailbait”
Detective Vic Mackey: “Ah, you must be ‘Doomsday’.”
Doomsday: “Who are you?”
Mackey: “I’m ‘Armageddon’. Say hello to the Hounds of Hell.”
Detective Shane Vendrell: “Ruff.”
—The Shield: Season Five, “Enemy of Good”
The Shield is elbowing its way into contention for the title of Best Cop Show Ever. There’s The Wire. Hill Street Blues. NYPD Blue. Barney Miller. Cagney & Lacy. Whichever permutation of the ubiquitous Law & Order you want to throw into the competition: the original, Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit. Stiff competition. Still, the fifth season of The Shield‘s proves that this show is unstoppable, rich in acting talent, character development, and plot progression.
In DVD form, it’s equally formidable, working its braided story arc across 11 intense episodes. You’ll love every minute. In addition, the package overflows with extras: extensive and insightful commentaries by cast members and creator Shawn Ryan for every episode; 25 deleted scenes, also with commentaries; a panel discussion with Michael Chiklis ("Detective Vic Mackey"), Forest Whitaker ("Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh"), and Shawn Ryan; a tribute to the late director/producer Scott Brazil; a documentary ("Delivering the Baby"); an Internal Affairs Department feature; a Fox Movie Channel presentation ("Making a Scene"); a prequel to Season Six; and a partridge in a pear tree. For fans of The Shield, Christmas came early this year.
I am convinced that The Shield‘s main man, Detective Vic Mackey (played to perfection by Emmy winner Michael Chiklis), is one of the roughest and meanest bad-asses in TV history. Where Dallas‘s J.R. Ewing (the inimitable Larry Hagman) was the oil tycoon you loved to hate, Vic Mackey is the perp-busting cop you hate to love. Oh, how different a movie like, say, Silence of the Lambs would have been if Vic Mackey had been leading the investigation.
Scene: the infamous flesh-eating Hannibal Lecter, has information about a serial killer. The police need Lecter to help pinpoint the suspect’s whereabouts.
Mackey: [kicking in Lecter’s cage door] Dinnertime’s over, a**hole. Now, where’s the serial killer?
Lecter: [smiling] First principles, Detective. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing--
Mackey: [punching Lecter in the gut, grabbing his face, and pressing his firearm into Lecter’s cheek] Cut the shit! I’m only gonna ask this one more goddamn time! Tell me what I wanna know or I will beat you half dead and then cut off your arm and make you nibble on it.
Lecter: [coughing] Okay, okay! The killer is staying at his cousin Wayne’s house. He’s about five feet ten inches tall, 180 pounds. He has a mole on his cheek, blues eyes, and he drives a sedan. His mama lives on the North end, in a cul-de-sac…
Or picture Vic Mackey in Star Wars:
Scene: the Rebel Alliance is searching for information about Han Solo, who was frozen in Darth Vader’s contraption and handed over to the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Mackey: [kicking in Darth Vader’s private chamber door] Looks like the Force is with me, a**hole. Where’s Solo?
Darth Vader: And who might you be? Another good Jedi from Master Yoda?
Mackey: No, metal head. “Good Jedi” and “bad Jedi” left for the day.
[Mackey shoots Vader in the leg, and then jabs at the wound through Vader’s body casing with a baton.]
Mackey: I’m a different kind of Jedi.
The Legacy
Interestingly, I think the show’s legacy, and its ultimate ranking in the pantheon of cop TV, rests on the shoulders of one character, Vic Mackey. It’s a tricky proposition because, while many shows depend on the outcome of a storyline, the achievement of a specific goal, or the consummation of an inevitable romance, viewer satisfaction with The Shield will likely depend on where Vic Mackey lands—psychologically, professionally, family-wise—at the end of the series. Will he go to jail? Will he run off to Mexico? Will he get shot by a suspect he leaned on too hard? Will he retire and collect his pension? The ending for Mackey can influence the meaning of the show’s entire run.
Even trickier is the fact that this character demands that you throw out everything you think you know about portrayals of police officers on television. Nothing about this dude is predictable. The bald-headed, tight-lipped detective has been compared to everybody from the Commish (also played by Chiklis), connoting Mackey’s gentler side, to Dirty Harry and Tony Soprano, indicating how tough and callous Mackey can be. To borrow the slogan from the reality show Big Brother, you have to “expect the unexpected” whenever and wherever Vic Mackey’s involved.
But The Shield has never been solely concerned with simply “getting the bad guy”. Rather, The Shield poses questions of character, asking, “What does it mean to be ‘bad’?” and the show continually varies the contexts and perspectives from which the question is raised. This was true when the series began and Season Five is no different.
In fact, Season Five is vital to the show’s ultimate resolution—whenever that resolution finally arrives and whatever it may be. But don’t discount it as merely a transition season. Where previous seasons developed the show’s main characters through new adventures, aided in kind by consequences of past actions, this season brilliantly dredges up the nasty nooks and crannies from Seasons One through Four, and churns out a tale as tragic as Shakespeare’s Othello and as gripping as The Godfather movies. Fittingly, “Conscience is a Killer”, the season’s subtitle, seems to include the idea that past actions won’t stay buried forever.
The World of Vic Mackey
Mackey heads an elite unit (called the Strike Team) that specifically targets gang and drug activity. “The Strike Team” is a compelling name for the unit, given the fact that “strike”, as a verb, can mean “to attack”, “to pierce”, and “to work diligently”, all good things for a police unit. Yet, there’s an ambivalence to the word as well—in bowling, you want a strike; in baseball, if you’re up at bat, you don’t. Likewise, the Strike Team’s aggressive style may boost arrest rates but in past seasons it has wreaked havoc on public relations.
As for the Strike Team’s roster, Mackey is joined in his work by: Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), the flamboyant, hot-tempered sideman who, as the actor himself adeptly notes in the commentary for the finale ("Postpartum"), “walks with a swagger that’s not really there”; Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), whose silent and shadowy presence might make him TV’s most underrated police character; and Curtis Lemansky (nicknamed “Lemonhead"), the most personable of the crew, almost universally beloved by viewers, and the closest thing the Strike Team has to a conscience.
If you prefer, we can get Freudian with it: the freaky world of The Shield is Vic Mackey’s psychological playground, and his three partners in crime-stopping represent his id (irrational and bigoted Shane Vendrell), his ego (realistic and prudent Ronnie Gardocki), and his superego (morally conflicted Curtis Lemansky, nearly universally beloved by viewers). In Season Five, Mackey’s conscience (Lemansky) takes quite a beating.
Unleashing the Strike Team was an extreme measure calculated to address an extreme world. In Season Five alone, we find: criminals who prey on hardworking residents, madmen who intimidate witnesses by cutting off their pets’ heads, scumbags who run sex slave operations, peddlers of bootleg prescription drugs, smugglers of explosives, not to mention rapists and murderers and so on. In Machiavellian terms, the officers of The Shield are surrounded by “bad” people, making it impossible to be “good” 100 percent of the time.
But these “guys” push being “bad” over the limit. In the pilot episode, Mackey’s captain, David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), and the Justice Department, recruit Detective Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) to infiltrate the Strike Team and uncover their corrupt dealings. Later, a drug dealer is shot and killed during one of the Strike Team’s drug raids, with Crowley onboard. Mackey, having learned of Crowley’s assignment to bring him down, shoots Crowley in the face. Mackey and Detective Vendrell, the only witnesses, cover their tracks by framing the dead drug dealer for Crowley’s murder. Mackey tells Vendrell, “Get over it, and don’t bring it up again.”
The Strike Team spends the remainder of Season One selling drugs, manipulating gangs, beating suspects, and even kidnapping a professional basketball player to ensure a gambling win.
In Season One, the show also established its major figures: Mackey and the Strike Team; Councilman David Aceveda, who was the precinct’s well-intentioned Captain, but whose thirst for political success lead him to accept compromises rather than full adherence to the rules; ethical but cynical Detective Claudette Wyms, who rises to the Captain’s position in Season Five (CCH Pounder); Holland “Dutch” Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), Wyms’ partner, a self-congratulatory suit-wearing detective who behaves like he’s the second coming of Sherlock Holmes; Officer Danielle Sofer (Catherine Dent), whose sexual relationship with Mackey rears its head in Season Five and who seems to have honed her ability to navigate the male-dominated terrain of the force, hence her either-gender nickname “Danny”; and Officer Julien Lowe (Michael Jace), whose religious beliefs bring him into conflict with his homosexuality, both of which complicate his life as a cop.
In Season Two, The Strike Team hijacks a truckload of money (the “money train") from Armenian mobsters. And the next thing you know, ol’ Mackey’s a millionaire.
Seasons Three and Four introduce discord within the formerly harmonious Strike Team, as loyalties are tested and trusts are violated. Season Four also gave us incredible performances from Glen Close as the supremely focused and committed Captain Monica Rawling, and Anthony Anderson as Antwon Mitchell, a street gangsta who makes New Jack City‘s Nino Brown look like a cartoon villain from Disney Channel’s Kim Possible. I’m telling you, whenever I see Anthony Anderson on TV or in a film now, I recoil and go, “Oh my God! It’s Antwon Mitchell!”
Season Five’s Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh (also played to perfection by Forest Whitaker) launches an Internal Affairs investigation into Mackey’s unclean hands. The results are thrilling from beginning to end.
Life & Irony in the Barn
So much mayhem, committed by those sworn to uphold the law? The Shield, like life, is not without irony. And so, Season Five ends where the series began, steeped in the tragedy of a cop’s murder at the hands of a fellow officer. This time around, the pill is even harder to swallow, exacerbated by pangs of friendship and loyalty.
Season Five is filled with irony and humor, often drawing from the show’s vast reservoir of character material: the rookie cop Tina Hanlon (Paula Garcés), who tries to juggle her femininity with the demands of being a cop. Meanwhile, Danny Sofer, who appears to be pregnant with Mackey’s baby, is schooling Hanlon on in the force’s testosterone-filled environment. Officer Julien Lowe, who began the show making rookie mistakes as Danny Sofer’s trainee, opens Season Five as Tina Hanlon’s inflexible training officer. At the same time, Lowe’s struggle with his homosexuality resurfaces, first in his relationship with trainee Hanlon, and later when he’s almost accused of being anti-gay in his handling of an investigation. Even Jon Kavanaugh’s moments with Lemansky are ironic, with Lemansky being interrogated, negotiated with, and bluffed like any other “perp”.
The Strike Team officially operates in a fictional district of Los Angeles, California, although they’ve done unofficial dirt in places like Mexico. Their district is “Farmington”, significantly named because the cops on the show operate from a refurbished church affectionately referred to as “The Barn”. Get it? “Pigs” in a “barn” in an area called “Farmington”? Nice.
More importantly, the “Barn” is like a character on the show, as distinctively quirky and recognizable as Miss Patty’s barn on Gilmore Girls, where the town of Stars Hollow holds its town meetings; The Practice‘s office of Donell, Young, Dole, & Frutt, which grew from a messy rat hole to “the law firm across the street”, with an ornate conference table; or the courtroom Shark‘s defense-attorney-turned-prosecutor Sebastian Stark (James Woods) built in his home to simulate live testimony.
The “Barn” has two floors. On the top floor, there’s the Captain’s office, with its glass windows sometimes compromising the ability to be discreet. Despite its vantage point over the bottom floor, and the significance implied by its location at the top of the stairs, the office tends to isolate captains from the Barn’s flow of information. This is how Mackey often becomes a critical middleman, trading tips and disinformation between the isolated parties. In Season Five, the Captain’s office because a lair of disappointment. Interim Captain Steve Billings (David Marciano), focused on decorating the office with a leather couch, finds himself ousted when Jon Kavanaugh takes over the office for his Internal Affairs investigation. In the finale, Kavanaugh gets kicked out of the office as Detective Claudette Wyms ascends to the position of Captain.
There are also second floor interrogation rooms, containing a desk and a couple of chairs. In the first season, Mackey beat up a suspected pedophile in the interrogation room. In Season Five, Mackey elicits information from a gang member by electrocuting his handcuffs, attached to metal bars fastened to the desk. The significant feature is the surveillance camera in corner of the ceiling, allowing others to watch from a monitor in a separate room, also located on the second floor.
The interrogation rooms figure prominently in the show’s matrix, as when Detective Mackey learns that Kavanaugh’s ex-wife is the Lieutenant’s “weak spot” by secretly soaking up their interaction in on the other room’s monitor. Kavanaugh, realizing the camera’s presence, reacts with horror, as if the room and the camera have minds of their own and they’ve chosen to betray him.
On the bottom floor, you’ll find a holding cage for arrestees and a mess of desks for almost all of the cops, no cubicles. It’s crowded, noisy, and almost constantly moving, except when something dramatic happens, like when a suspect almost pushes detective Claudette Wyms over the second floor balcony or when Kavanaugh finally arrests Curtis Lemansky with the whole Barn as spectators. The Strike Team’s space, by contrast, is private, cozy, and privileged. It’s a modestly furnished clubhouse with two doors, both of which were removed by Kavanaugh to take away the Team’s home court advantage and disturb their seclusion. Disrupting the clubhouse was such a good idea, I’m surprised previous captains, like Aceveda, didn’t think of it as a method of keeping Mackey in line. The point is that the Team’s clubhouse, like the rest of the Barn, participates in the drama, changing and adapting to plot developments like the human characters.
================================
The Shield: The Detective & the Lieutenant
Detective Vic Mackey kills cops, steals money, and beats suspects. How, then, can the man trying to bring him to justice be the "bad guy"?
by Quentin B. Huff
[9 May 2007]
PopMatters.com
“I used to think Mackey was the luckiest son of a bitch alive—how things just fell into place for him. And then I realized he was creating his own luck. So what you see as a simple microphone malfunction. I see as calculated.”
—David Aceveda, The Shield: Season Five, “Jailbait”
Detective Vic Mackey: “Ah, you must be ‘Doomsday’.”
Doomsday: “Who are you?”
Mackey: “I’m ‘Armageddon’. Say hello to the Hounds of Hell.”
Detective Shane Vendrell: “Ruff.”
—The Shield: Season Five, “Enemy of Good”
The Shield is elbowing its way into contention for the title of Best Cop Show Ever. There’s The Wire. Hill Street Blues. NYPD Blue. Barney Miller. Cagney & Lacy. Whichever permutation of the ubiquitous Law & Order you want to throw into the competition: the original, Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit. Stiff competition. Still, the fifth season of The Shield‘s proves that this show is unstoppable, rich in acting talent, character development, and plot progression.
In DVD form, it’s equally formidable, working its braided story arc across 11 intense episodes. You’ll love every minute. In addition, the package overflows with extras: extensive and insightful commentaries by cast members and creator Shawn Ryan for every episode; 25 deleted scenes, also with commentaries; a panel discussion with Michael Chiklis ("Detective Vic Mackey"), Forest Whitaker ("Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh"), and Shawn Ryan; a tribute to the late director/producer Scott Brazil; a documentary ("Delivering the Baby"); an Internal Affairs Department feature; a Fox Movie Channel presentation ("Making a Scene"); a prequel to Season Six; and a partridge in a pear tree. For fans of The Shield, Christmas came early this year.
I am convinced that The Shield‘s main man, Detective Vic Mackey (played to perfection by Emmy winner Michael Chiklis), is one of the roughest and meanest bad-asses in TV history. Where Dallas‘s J.R. Ewing (the inimitable Larry Hagman) was the oil tycoon you loved to hate, Vic Mackey is the perp-busting cop you hate to love. Oh, how different a movie like, say, Silence of the Lambs would have been if Vic Mackey had been leading the investigation.
Scene: the infamous flesh-eating Hannibal Lecter, has information about a serial killer. The police need Lecter to help pinpoint the suspect’s whereabouts.
Mackey: [kicking in Lecter’s cage door] Dinnertime’s over, a**hole. Now, where’s the serial killer?
Lecter: [smiling] First principles, Detective. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing--
Mackey: [punching Lecter in the gut, grabbing his face, and pressing his firearm into Lecter’s cheek] Cut the shit! I’m only gonna ask this one more goddamn time! Tell me what I wanna know or I will beat you half dead and then cut off your arm and make you nibble on it.
Lecter: [coughing] Okay, okay! The killer is staying at his cousin Wayne’s house. He’s about five feet ten inches tall, 180 pounds. He has a mole on his cheek, blues eyes, and he drives a sedan. His mama lives on the North end, in a cul-de-sac…
Or picture Vic Mackey in Star Wars:
Scene: the Rebel Alliance is searching for information about Han Solo, who was frozen in Darth Vader’s contraption and handed over to the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Mackey: [kicking in Darth Vader’s private chamber door] Looks like the Force is with me, a**hole. Where’s Solo?
Darth Vader: And who might you be? Another good Jedi from Master Yoda?
Mackey: No, metal head. “Good Jedi” and “bad Jedi” left for the day.
[Mackey shoots Vader in the leg, and then jabs at the wound through Vader’s body casing with a baton.]
Mackey: I’m a different kind of Jedi.
The Legacy
Interestingly, I think the show’s legacy, and its ultimate ranking in the pantheon of cop TV, rests on the shoulders of one character, Vic Mackey. It’s a tricky proposition because, while many shows depend on the outcome of a storyline, the achievement of a specific goal, or the consummation of an inevitable romance, viewer satisfaction with The Shield will likely depend on where Vic Mackey lands—psychologically, professionally, family-wise—at the end of the series. Will he go to jail? Will he run off to Mexico? Will he get shot by a suspect he leaned on too hard? Will he retire and collect his pension? The ending for Mackey can influence the meaning of the show’s entire run.
Even trickier is the fact that this character demands that you throw out everything you think you know about portrayals of police officers on television. Nothing about this dude is predictable. The bald-headed, tight-lipped detective has been compared to everybody from the Commish (also played by Chiklis), connoting Mackey’s gentler side, to Dirty Harry and Tony Soprano, indicating how tough and callous Mackey can be. To borrow the slogan from the reality show Big Brother, you have to “expect the unexpected” whenever and wherever Vic Mackey’s involved.
But The Shield has never been solely concerned with simply “getting the bad guy”. Rather, The Shield poses questions of character, asking, “What does it mean to be ‘bad’?” and the show continually varies the contexts and perspectives from which the question is raised. This was true when the series began and Season Five is no different.
In fact, Season Five is vital to the show’s ultimate resolution—whenever that resolution finally arrives and whatever it may be. But don’t discount it as merely a transition season. Where previous seasons developed the show’s main characters through new adventures, aided in kind by consequences of past actions, this season brilliantly dredges up the nasty nooks and crannies from Seasons One through Four, and churns out a tale as tragic as Shakespeare’s Othello and as gripping as The Godfather movies. Fittingly, “Conscience is a Killer”, the season’s subtitle, seems to include the idea that past actions won’t stay buried forever.
The World of Vic Mackey
Mackey heads an elite unit (called the Strike Team) that specifically targets gang and drug activity. “The Strike Team” is a compelling name for the unit, given the fact that “strike”, as a verb, can mean “to attack”, “to pierce”, and “to work diligently”, all good things for a police unit. Yet, there’s an ambivalence to the word as well—in bowling, you want a strike; in baseball, if you’re up at bat, you don’t. Likewise, the Strike Team’s aggressive style may boost arrest rates but in past seasons it has wreaked havoc on public relations.
As for the Strike Team’s roster, Mackey is joined in his work by: Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), the flamboyant, hot-tempered sideman who, as the actor himself adeptly notes in the commentary for the finale ("Postpartum"), “walks with a swagger that’s not really there”; Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), whose silent and shadowy presence might make him TV’s most underrated police character; and Curtis Lemansky (nicknamed “Lemonhead"), the most personable of the crew, almost universally beloved by viewers, and the closest thing the Strike Team has to a conscience.
If you prefer, we can get Freudian with it: the freaky world of The Shield is Vic Mackey’s psychological playground, and his three partners in crime-stopping represent his id (irrational and bigoted Shane Vendrell), his ego (realistic and prudent Ronnie Gardocki), and his superego (morally conflicted Curtis Lemansky, nearly universally beloved by viewers). In Season Five, Mackey’s conscience (Lemansky) takes quite a beating.
Unleashing the Strike Team was an extreme measure calculated to address an extreme world. In Season Five alone, we find: criminals who prey on hardworking residents, madmen who intimidate witnesses by cutting off their pets’ heads, scumbags who run sex slave operations, peddlers of bootleg prescription drugs, smugglers of explosives, not to mention rapists and murderers and so on. In Machiavellian terms, the officers of The Shield are surrounded by “bad” people, making it impossible to be “good” 100 percent of the time.
But these “guys” push being “bad” over the limit. In the pilot episode, Mackey’s captain, David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), and the Justice Department, recruit Detective Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) to infiltrate the Strike Team and uncover their corrupt dealings. Later, a drug dealer is shot and killed during one of the Strike Team’s drug raids, with Crowley onboard. Mackey, having learned of Crowley’s assignment to bring him down, shoots Crowley in the face. Mackey and Detective Vendrell, the only witnesses, cover their tracks by framing the dead drug dealer for Crowley’s murder. Mackey tells Vendrell, “Get over it, and don’t bring it up again.”
The Strike Team spends the remainder of Season One selling drugs, manipulating gangs, beating suspects, and even kidnapping a professional basketball player to ensure a gambling win.
In Season One, the show also established its major figures: Mackey and the Strike Team; Councilman David Aceveda, who was the precinct’s well-intentioned Captain, but whose thirst for political success lead him to accept compromises rather than full adherence to the rules; ethical but cynical Detective Claudette Wyms, who rises to the Captain’s position in Season Five (CCH Pounder); Holland “Dutch” Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), Wyms’ partner, a self-congratulatory suit-wearing detective who behaves like he’s the second coming of Sherlock Holmes; Officer Danielle Sofer (Catherine Dent), whose sexual relationship with Mackey rears its head in Season Five and who seems to have honed her ability to navigate the male-dominated terrain of the force, hence her either-gender nickname “Danny”; and Officer Julien Lowe (Michael Jace), whose religious beliefs bring him into conflict with his homosexuality, both of which complicate his life as a cop.
In Season Two, The Strike Team hijacks a truckload of money (the “money train") from Armenian mobsters. And the next thing you know, ol’ Mackey’s a millionaire.
Seasons Three and Four introduce discord within the formerly harmonious Strike Team, as loyalties are tested and trusts are violated. Season Four also gave us incredible performances from Glen Close as the supremely focused and committed Captain Monica Rawling, and Anthony Anderson as Antwon Mitchell, a street gangsta who makes New Jack City‘s Nino Brown look like a cartoon villain from Disney Channel’s Kim Possible. I’m telling you, whenever I see Anthony Anderson on TV or in a film now, I recoil and go, “Oh my God! It’s Antwon Mitchell!”
Season Five’s Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh (also played to perfection by Forest Whitaker) launches an Internal Affairs investigation into Mackey’s unclean hands. The results are thrilling from beginning to end.
Life & Irony in the Barn
So much mayhem, committed by those sworn to uphold the law? The Shield, like life, is not without irony. And so, Season Five ends where the series began, steeped in the tragedy of a cop’s murder at the hands of a fellow officer. This time around, the pill is even harder to swallow, exacerbated by pangs of friendship and loyalty.
Season Five is filled with irony and humor, often drawing from the show’s vast reservoir of character material: the rookie cop Tina Hanlon (Paula Garcés), who tries to juggle her femininity with the demands of being a cop. Meanwhile, Danny Sofer, who appears to be pregnant with Mackey’s baby, is schooling Hanlon on in the force’s testosterone-filled environment. Officer Julien Lowe, who began the show making rookie mistakes as Danny Sofer’s trainee, opens Season Five as Tina Hanlon’s inflexible training officer. At the same time, Lowe’s struggle with his homosexuality resurfaces, first in his relationship with trainee Hanlon, and later when he’s almost accused of being anti-gay in his handling of an investigation. Even Jon Kavanaugh’s moments with Lemansky are ironic, with Lemansky being interrogated, negotiated with, and bluffed like any other “perp”.
The Strike Team officially operates in a fictional district of Los Angeles, California, although they’ve done unofficial dirt in places like Mexico. Their district is “Farmington”, significantly named because the cops on the show operate from a refurbished church affectionately referred to as “The Barn”. Get it? “Pigs” in a “barn” in an area called “Farmington”? Nice.
More importantly, the “Barn” is like a character on the show, as distinctively quirky and recognizable as Miss Patty’s barn on Gilmore Girls, where the town of Stars Hollow holds its town meetings; The Practice‘s office of Donell, Young, Dole, & Frutt, which grew from a messy rat hole to “the law firm across the street”, with an ornate conference table; or the courtroom Shark‘s defense-attorney-turned-prosecutor Sebastian Stark (James Woods) built in his home to simulate live testimony.
The “Barn” has two floors. On the top floor, there’s the Captain’s office, with its glass windows sometimes compromising the ability to be discreet. Despite its vantage point over the bottom floor, and the significance implied by its location at the top of the stairs, the office tends to isolate captains from the Barn’s flow of information. This is how Mackey often becomes a critical middleman, trading tips and disinformation between the isolated parties. In Season Five, the Captain’s office because a lair of disappointment. Interim Captain Steve Billings (David Marciano), focused on decorating the office with a leather couch, finds himself ousted when Jon Kavanaugh takes over the office for his Internal Affairs investigation. In the finale, Kavanaugh gets kicked out of the office as Detective Claudette Wyms ascends to the position of Captain.
There are also second floor interrogation rooms, containing a desk and a couple of chairs. In the first season, Mackey beat up a suspected pedophile in the interrogation room. In Season Five, Mackey elicits information from a gang member by electrocuting his handcuffs, attached to metal bars fastened to the desk. The significant feature is the surveillance camera in corner of the ceiling, allowing others to watch from a monitor in a separate room, also located on the second floor.
The interrogation rooms figure prominently in the show’s matrix, as when Detective Mackey learns that Kavanaugh’s ex-wife is the Lieutenant’s “weak spot” by secretly soaking up their interaction in on the other room’s monitor. Kavanaugh, realizing the camera’s presence, reacts with horror, as if the room and the camera have minds of their own and they’ve chosen to betray him.
On the bottom floor, you’ll find a holding cage for arrestees and a mess of desks for almost all of the cops, no cubicles. It’s crowded, noisy, and almost constantly moving, except when something dramatic happens, like when a suspect almost pushes detective Claudette Wyms over the second floor balcony or when Kavanaugh finally arrests Curtis Lemansky with the whole Barn as spectators. The Strike Team’s space, by contrast, is private, cozy, and privileged. It’s a modestly furnished clubhouse with two doors, both of which were removed by Kavanaugh to take away the Team’s home court advantage and disturb their seclusion. Disrupting the clubhouse was such a good idea, I’m surprised previous captains, like Aceveda, didn’t think of it as a method of keeping Mackey in line. The point is that the Team’s clubhouse, like the rest of the Barn, participates in the drama, changing and adapting to plot developments like the human characters.
continued below....