The Shield 1/14
 

Woah. A bunch of us are at a friends apartment watching tonights episode and we are sitting with our mouths on the floor.

That black detective is getting on to the crooked cop. He better be careful she seems like a real blood bound
(I just starting watching the show I haven't learned names yet)

It totally sucked that the Arab guy died he did an Incredibly stupid thing but his neighbor was a COMPLETE b***ch.

Great writers for this show...it amazes me how they keep up such a good pace with a great story line when some shows are lucky to have a couple of decent episodes throughout a whole season. Mackey is really getting in deep with the criminal side of things......

That stove scene at the end of the episode is the most intense thing I think I've seen on TV, more than any of the Sopranos episodes...

appearing next week is cool though.

Pretty intense episode.

I was doing something else while watching it, and last episode was the only episode I've seen.

So was that hispanic guy at the end (Armond "Armadillo") actually guilty of using the necklace on the two informants?

Yeah he is actually the one responsible. And I gotta agree, this is a very intense show. I've never seen a TV show that keeps me on the edge of my seat for 60 minutes a week.

I have been watching this show since the beginning and I have to say that this was the most intense show yet. The end with Mackey holding Armand's face to the stove was intense.

Hot Damn! Brilliant, F'ing brilliant :)

As Creek Rat said in the last thread

The Shield. What the Sopranos should have been.

Holy S$#%!!!

I scene the beating with the book coming, but burning him on the stove was unbelievable.

I was waiting for Vic to pull out his gun and pop that PI that his wife was with.



This season is off to a great start.

Wow! This show just keeps surprising me. Definitely the most intense episode to date. Things are really starting to cook.

Great idea to pit the black lady detective (what the hell is her name?) against Vic. Glad to see her taking a more centralized role. She is one tough broad.

FX is really bold with this show. Makes all the watered-down crap on the networks look even worse.

What an intense episode.

:up:

Last night's episodes of '24' and this must have been the best 2 hours of television I've watched in quite some time.

Huh? What?

"The Shield" is what "The Sopranos" should have been?

Are you serious?

"The Shield" - this season at least - is like the Itchy & Scratchy of cop dramas. It's becoming increasingly implausible to see Mackie skate through these reams and reams of "on the DL" dealings and shady criminal setups with nary a scratch. Where are the consequences to Mackie's actions? Where is the push/pull?

Take the season opener for instance. He takes down this new drug overlord by traveling to Tijuana and simply kidnapping the guy in broad daylight - with one gun between the four "droogies?" Oh come on. Compounded with the "move along - these aren't the droids you're looking for" jedi mind trick to cross the border back into the U.S. with a "roofied" drug lord and sackfuls of money in the shot up trunk? Clearly we're watching a cop fantasy show and not the hardcore nitty-gritty cop drama that "The Shield" pretends to be.

And last night's episode with the pretty boy brother drug lord prancing about in his skivvies at a moment's notice. The passive-aggressive Doris Day of a civilian auditor is bulimic? "Quelle drama." How about the rumpled PI just happening to break up Mackie's day with conveniently timed updates on his errant wive's whereabouts? Then that completely over the top revenge beating of the pretty boy drug lord - ripped from the outtakes of some cheesy slasher flick? Come - TF - on.

The length of scenes on the new season of "The Shield" can now be measured in mere seconds. We zip through plot explication with a flurry of Spanish perp names and onto the next blood-soaked showstopper. The flashcutting and loopy camerawork is identical to the filmmaking "tics" that fanboys bitched about when slapping down "Moulin Rouge" last summer. The show feels like it was edited by ADD-afflicted chimpanzees this year.

Mackie's become a cartoon - in just the first two episodes. There's no sense of stakes or of danger. Mackie just smiles and lies his way through every situation - now with the full support of his politically lusty captain (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). The only compelling character of the new season is CCH Pounder's - who I'm hoping puts the serious hurt on Mackie and his bad-boy muskateers sometime soon.

Thus far, the show is a pale, pale shadow of its greatness last season. Here's hoping it improves in the coming months. Otherwise Chiklis' best actor award will truly be a fluke.

This episode was great. Every episode of this show has left me with my jaw on the floor. Every week when the show is over, I have so much anticipation for next weeks episode. This show ranks one of the highest on TV.

What the hell kind of name is "CCH", and how do you pronounce it?

They're initials.
 

"See See Aitch"

When does this show repeat again? I COMPLETELY spaced on this show (stupid school re-starting). Forgot to even set the Tivo. Urg.

At least grunter didn't try to convince us that having your teeth kicked out and a bullseye burned onto your face wouldn't hurt much.

Unlike having a spoon rammed up your ass by a sadistic Nazi.

I would like to know this as well. I just got FX yesterday (along with DirecTiVo) and the Season 1 boxset is on it's way from FYE.com.

Will there be a 'catch-up on season 2' type marathon where they show all of the episodes in order?

CCH Pounder is probaly in the top 10 of cool names.

D

If they do like they did last season, which I suspect they will, they will immediately follow the end of the second season with a reairing of the complete season. That's how I happened to catch the first season. You may want to just watch the first season dvd now and then catch the second season the second time around.

One thing I would recommend to anybody who is thinking about watching the show but hasn't seen Season 1: watch Season 1 first. There have been a lot of spoilers in Season 2 for events in Season 1 so far that might dampen your enjoyment.

"The Shield" seems to rerun on Sunday nights on FX, do not know specific time (or zone for that matter), but Sunday night would be the best guess.

Who else was bothered with the idea that a PI was assaulting a police officer? Im not saying that it bothered me, but we all know Vic's character and he would have dropped his ass without a hesitation for coming after him. And the thing with the wife investigating her husband's background is just going to be a real b**ch this season.

Great episode! Chiklis definitely deserved the Emmy.

As for Grunter's comments, I disagree. True, the border crossing was a little over the top, but acceptable if only it was to heighten the dramatic tension. As for all the scenarios Vic is involved in juggling (work/drugs/family), it's just a matter of time before one of the balls drop and the crap really hits the fan!

Vic seems to fit the profile of the cops(sort of crooked, sort of clean) that would have taken on Al Pacino's Serpico.

Commentary on 24/Without a Trace/Shield/Arabs in America:

Its pretty sad that Arabs (or South Asians for that matter) are almost *never* on TV to begin with, and when they are, nowadays its only to make some cheesy 9/11 point. Here is an idea: lets have an Arab character on the show once in a while whose purpose isn't *purely* defined by his race.

To rant a little, its kind of funny how in real life you see South Asians and Arabs all over the place. Doctors, landlords, hotel owners, hell fast food managers. Yet on TV, you see the occassional cab driver or quickie mart owner. Granted, there are a lot of Arabs employed this way. But we should be seeing a lot more, and in more varied roles.

Not every Arab-American's life is in total turmoil over 9/11. How about seeing some of them out of this context?

-C00Ki3

One word: Monk