TV Review: The Shield, season 7

TV #36 of 2023:

The Shield, season 7

The penultimate sixth season of this police drama was its weakest in my opinion, and this final year takes a little while to shake itself back into gear. Early on, there’s a continued focus on the macguffin of a blackmail box (or as I kept mishearing it, “black mailbox”) that improbably contains dirt on a wide range of L.A.’s elected officials, which is a bit abstract of a threat concept to be worth investing our energies in. Luckily things take a turn about midway through, and from there on out The Shield is as thrilling and compulsively watchable as it’s ever been. The ultimate fracturing of what’s left of the Strike Team has been a long time coming, and while none of those gentlemen exactly deserve a happy ending, there’s still a tragedy in the dissolution of their former bonds, as well as the question of how many innocents they will manage to drag down with them.

So many great moments come in the last few episodes of this series, from Vic’s underhanded deal with ICE and overdue admission of his crimes, to the ironic twist of his eventual fate, to Shane and Mara’s increasingly desperate attempts to get away from it all and their own heartbreaking last scene that gives the finale its title. As ever, the anti-copaganda stance of the program is clear: these particular abusers were enabled by the power of the system, as we see in the immediate difficulties they face when some of them have to start operating without a badge, but their less corrupt peers are no heroes either. The whole department is ineffective, self-serving, and complicit in racist violence, and we have no reason to believe that Vic was the bad apple that made them that way, or that they aren’t representative of similar forces across America. In the end certain perpetrators are brought down, but there’s no sense of justice in any of it — just a lingering bad taste and a feeling that no meaningful problems have been solved or progress made. A powerful, sad, and bitterly funny thesis statement, bolstered by some of star Michael Chiklis’s best acting work yet. I don’t know that I would ever be drawn to watch this show again, but this was a phenomenal endgame for it.

[Content warning for racism, gun violence, gore, torture, rape, suicide, drug abuse, domestic abuse, and death of a young child.]

This season: ★★★★☆

Overall series: ★★★★☆

Seasons ranked: 5 > 1 > 7 > 4 > 2 > 3 > 6

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