A Fitting End for The Shield

In one of the last episodes of the Shield, whose series finale airs Nov. 25, corrupt former L.A. cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) takes a meeting with a drug boss. Mackey has brought him a big dope deal with another gang–secretly setting him up in order to secure for himself an immunity deal with the feds for a list of crimes that starts with murder and continues the length of your arm. The kingpin offers him a drink to take off the “edge.” Mackey refuses. “The edge is where we live,” he says. “People try to convince themselves otherwise. It’s just an exercise in self-deception.”

For seven intense seasons, The Shield (FX, Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) has not just lived on that edge. It’s sprinted along it, panting and veins bulging. In the pilot, Mackey–who with his antigang unit, the Strike Team, has been skimming seized drug money–learns that one of his crew is an undercover fed. Mackey puts a bullet in his head.

Mackey, clearly, is a bad cop. (Or was, until he recently turned in his badge as the series began its endgame.) That would not be interesting for long if it weren’t for the fact that Mackey was also a very good cop. He nails criminals other police couldn’t get–albeit using shady deals and the occasional beatdown with a steel chain. He’s a shameless racist, yet he lives to take down crooks who prey on one of L.A.’s poorest and brownest neighborhoods. He’s a brutal thug and a loving dad.

The show’s themes and Chiklis’ brooding, minotaur-like physicality invite comparison with that Urtext of male antiheroes, The Sopranos. But our relationship with Mackey is more complicated–and self-implicating–than ours was with Tony Soprano. Tony was roguish and funny; we even rooted for him against other Mob bosses. But we had more distance from him because he was a criminal and a sociopath, beyond redemption and beyond our experience.

Vic Mackey may not be one of us either. But he is one of ours. He’s a monster who takes down other monsters, in our name. And while the Soprano clan was cozy in a suburban McMansion, Mackey is a civil servant with a crappy paycheck, an ex-wife and two autistic kids who need special schooling. It’s not an excuse; he’s surrounded by cops who could go the easy route and don’t, like Captain Claudette Wyms (the outstanding C.C.H. Pounder), who’s investigating Vic but won’t cut corners to do it. But it is a reason.

When The Shield debuted in spring 2002, it was hard not to see it as a 9/11 parable. Mackey was Dick Cheney with stronger pecs, going to the dark side to do what couldn’t get done the pretty way. The Shield asked–as did 24, in a more gung-ho fashion–how much brutality we are willing to accept for our safety.

But as The Shield winds down, the social trade-offs have yielded the spotlight to the personal ones. From the start, Mackey rationalized his thieving in the name of his kids. The idea–the same big lie that justifies a million little compromises in ordinary lives–was that he could insulate his kin from the consequences of his actions, taking the moral bullet for them.

The Shield’s endgame dispels that myth. Mackey’s corruption has poisoned every relationship he’s had. As police investigators close in on the Strike Team’s scams, his former disciple Shane (Walton Goggins) has turned on him, trying to kill him, then going on the lam with his pregnant wife and sick son (concern for whose welfare does not keep Mackey from trying to have Shane and his wife whacked). Another Strike Team member is dead, murdered by Shane for fear he might squeal. And Mackey is almost completely estranged from his kids, who along with his ex-wife–whom he’s made complicit in his cover-ups–stand to be ruined if he goes down.

The Shield’s unflinchingness, and creator Shawn Ryan’s brutal writing, has made it as disturbing as any HBO drama. The final episodes are even more so. Seeing Shane’s toddler on the run with him and his wife is almost unbearable, and Goggins plays the pathetic, mentally overmatched Shane like a cornered rat. Chiklis, meanwhile, is masterly. He defined Mackey with his Mr. Clean physique, but his most valuable body parts are his eyes. To the end, as his options narrow and it becomes clear Mackey has destroyed everything he’s tried to build, they dart about, looking for the exit, one last scam that will fix everything.

Shield fans have long debated what kind of end Mackey deserves. I won’t characterize the finale, except to say it proves Mackey is not so different from the people he disparages to the drug boss. Yes, he lives on the edge and embraces it. But for him, self-deception is not just an exercise; it’s an Olympic sport. Fittingly and terribly, The Shield carries him across the finish line.