2. Director Clark Johnson's character was listed in the end credits as "Handsome Marshal." I really appreciated the opportunity to laugh at that point.

A father who needs immunity for multiple murders and felonies will never get the right to see his kid. And besides, Danny bailed on their meetings. Danni gets a restraining order in .5 secs and Vic cant even look at her again.

Vic is ALONE. Completely and utterly. Deservedly so, but still not enough for what he did to everyone else.

I praise Shaun Ryan for reversing 7 seasons of audience enabling for Vic in just 2 episodes.

Everyone, included me excused and coddled Vic and shifted our moral scales until we finally acknowledged what we was. A disease. He killed the ENTIRE strike team but still pretends Lem was his friend.

He shot Terry who was Lem's friend.

Ronnie will die in prison, unless he is given protection. Vic couldn't even muster up the courage to warn him.

Vic's corruption of Shane, is all the more tragic when you realize Vic was just as cowardly as Shane when it was Vic's family vs. Ronnie's life.
Vic cannot judge Shane for killing Lem.
And Shane's confession was heartbreaking. I mean wow. Little Jackson.

And Vic was partly responsible for Lem's death. Killing Terry is why Kavanaugh arrested Lem.

We realize now that Kavanaugh and Claudette, and Dutch were the heroes. And even they were compromised in various degrees by their involvement with Vic.

Vic's ethos about team and family were pure shit. He will look out for team as long as it's convenient to him. He's a "good cop" meaning he will risk his life for arrests, unlike Billings, who hides from conflict.

However Vic does that for the rush he gets as well as his sense of "duty."

Kudos to Clark Johnson and Shaun Ryan for kicking me in the gut. Great fiction is a powerful thing.

To answer your original question, The Shield is about the defenses we put up to avoid accountability for our actions.

Ronnie never agreed to kill Terry but he had plenty of opps to cut ties with Vic.

RIP Shield.

Looking forward to Dutch/Billings the buddy com or

Vic Mackey: THE ICE years.

To follow on my previous entry, the monster is out, and the scene of Vic watching the camera at the interrogation room would have been enough to end this series. But to add Ronnie's betrayal, Vic's cubicle hell, Claudette's support for Dutch, Aceveda's triumph and Julian's happiness slipping away took this one to a whole new level.

Shane's murders and suicide count as one of the top 5 gut-wrenching moments on this series that will stay with me for a long while (Aceveda's rape, Dutch's cat strangulation, Vic killing Terry and Shane' execution of Lem with Cavanaugh and Vic fighting after round up the rest of the top 5).

The only criticism is that the time spent on the other mayoral candidate storyline would have been better used to give Dani a resolution to her character.

To answer your question JP, what we always thought the series to be was a path to redemption for Vic Mackey for killing Terry and not a road to perdition that began with his murder. The Shield is what protected Vic from going all the way to the bottom. When he lost such protection, all he had was a highway straight to hell.

So Vic is going to jail (Remember that all those federal buildings have security cameras and Vic carrying a weapon became a violation of his immunity agreement). Will he go guns blazing? Will he go quietly in the night and go for the border? Will he try to find Corinne and make her pay for her betrayal?

The monster is loose, so sad we can't see where he is going.

About Vic insisting on taking down Beltran, I think drad098 summed it up. It's what Vic does. Even with everything imploding around him, he still thought he could save himself (and maybe Ronnie?) by making a big enough splash. It's part of his own self deception that he thought the feds would allow him to operate as he always had even after his confession. Even at the end, with his family gone, friends dead or betrayed, and confined to a desk; he still thinks he can go out and change the ending. And maybe he does.... (Memo to David Chase. THAT'S how you do an ending scene with your main character.)

I also agree with Tom Shaw that the serial killer storyline and Danny/Vic's baby seemed forgotten or rushed. Why were Dutch and Claudette so sure they'd prove the kid was the killer? With his other children gone, shouldn't Danny be terrified that Vic will devote all his attention to getting partial custody of their baby?

@JamesP- I read that Shawn Ryan refused to work on the show during the strike, even as they were filming the finale. Do you think some of these loose threads came from that or did they just decide to leave a few things unresolved?

And then there's the Vic grin - he can come up with a way out of even this hole.

Things I liked: Julien's look at the gay couple, Antwon Mitchellville, & the Kavanaugh's wife-eqsue Space Mountain conversation proved that the show still remembered all those bits, even if it would never have time to get back to them.

Things I didn't like: The Andre Benjamin bit did not seem to fit. (It also didn't help that Antwon Mitchell was introduced as the same kind of rabble rouser, and we all know how devoted to cleaning up the streets he was.) If the goal was to give Tina a big scene for the final season, I suppose it was okay, but that goes more towards her character never fitting with the show in the first place (Julien's student becoming the master has been done better elsewhere, as was Danny's crushing any notion of automatic workplace sisterhood.)

Dutch's serial killer bit fizzled as well. I suppose it establishes that both the cops and the robbers will still be here tomorrow, but the cops abandoning the birthday party to assist on the 211 did the same in far less time.

The Danny situation entirely fizzled, both logistically and thematically. Corrine and her kids are safely out of state, but Danny is still in the area with the only child Vic can track down? But Vic is apparently fine with Danny and their child walking out of his life but not Corrine and their children? Just a mess.

Still, I am quibbling about not getting perfection when fantastic is better than we deserve.

(In my opinion, Ronnie was already hosed due to the Shane/Corrine money drop. He may not have gone to prison (and not for life, in any case), but he would have been kicked off the force, had his pension revoked, etc. Although admittedly, neither Ronnie nor Vic knew how much Claudette knew.)