Where did we leave off with episode six? Oh yes, Shane’s naturally born bad.
And so we open episode seven with Antoine in Shane’s automobile. Awww, Antoine’s had a major drug bust in the church, six of his guys arrested, and his flow with El Salvador cut off. He wants $20k from Shane in repayment, plus one more thing…
Vic, Ronnie, and Lem are watching their man Kosodov, one of many folks in their garage sting. Ronnie needs to replace the hard drive, but the Russians have places to go. Vic and Lem stall them long enough to make the switch.
With the information on the aforementioned hard drive, information comes to light that Kosodov has hired an arsonist to torch a building of his in an insurance fraud scheme. There are no names and no locations, but enough info to make a bust. Rawling congratulates Vic for his hard work.
Out in the parking lot, Vic busts a priceless line about his car overheating as he fans smoke signals from under the hood. He sure could use a nice seizure car, and has two Lakers tickets to whomever gets him a sweet ride.
Aceveda appears with a nice little doctored videotape taken from the church bust. Oh, the screaming, oh the crying, and oh the zooming in on Vic smiling away after taking down one of the drug runners. Clearly it’s edited, but it was also sent to several local news stations. Aceveda uses this as reasoning to pull the Kosodov bust from their tainted unit to an outside team.
YAY, IT’S… THE SHIELD! What the hell do they say in that opening theme song anyway?
Shane’s got a case from vice — a Bizlat in the penn who is willing to act as an informant. Monica says, hey, bring Lem along! See what the old Strike Team can do. Turns out his racket is buying cigarettes tax free from an indian reservation and selling them off at face value. Creative.
Dutch gets a call from Mission Cross. They have brought in a girl, age seven, with burns to her face and throat. At the hospital, they discover the girl, Joya, was forced drain cleaner down her throat… also sexually assaulted.
Visiting the foster house, Claudette discovers the parents have seven children in their custody. Not only that, they have a cute little closet with a lock on it for “time out”s when the kids are unruly or violent. Wyms mentions this is child endangerment. Dutch’s assessment? The father is a control freak, but not a rapist. So who does that leave? Well, apparently there was yet another child who was supposed to be in their care, Darnell, who ran away three months ago.
Questioning the father, he says that Darnell was uncontrollable; Wyms and Wagenbach bring up the child endangerment issue and question why they were still collecting checks for a foster child who was no longer in custody. He makes his excuses before mentioning that Darnell was caught in the house two weeks earlier, stealing food and prescriptions.
Captain Rawling discusses the case with Darnell’s case worker. CPS had no record of Darnell gone missing; Monica pulls out copies of emails sent from the family. She says that their neglect is just as bad as the abuse at hand and actually goes so far as to arrest the CPS employee for child endangerment.
Out and about, Danny and Julian pull over a car of black guys with expired plates. Danny smells pot! She and Julian yank the guys out and find a nice chunk o’ weed. Busted! As the sweet black ride with leather seats is rolled into the police lot as seized property, Vic is a’drooling, and takes the opportunity to lay the ol’ Mackey mackin’ on Danny.
Well, as what typically happens when folks from the outside are brought in, the Kosodov bust went sour. So, they’d like some assistance from transcribing services in London – UK for transcribing videotapes from the sting. Vic tries to storm out and hunt down Kosodov himself, but Monica backs up the assistant chief’s orders.
Vic heads out to talk to the assistant chief about the issue. He pointedly brings up that Aceveda is using the tapes as leverage against him; if he knows what’s best for himself and his career, he’ll back Rawling.
COMMERCIALS!
A visit is made to Darnell’s mom’s house. She has nothing but pleasant things to say about the boy… you know, he’s into drugs, he’s violent, and he’s into sex. She points them in the proper direction to find him.
And there he is, in the questioning room. His permission is asked for blood and semen samples, which he promptly refuses. Except, of course, he’s in his foster dad’s custody officially, and he has no problem giving his consent. At that point, Darnell admits he raped the seven year old girl, but he had nothing to do with the Drain-o. He pointed figuratively to Bebe, the oldest of the remaining foster kids.
Back to Shane’s job, his CI is spurting off about sexing up a Bizlat buddy’s fourteen year old sister, which most certainly doesn’t go over well with Mr. Juvenile Division Lem. As he cools it, the bad guys all congregate and things roll along smoothly, setting up a cigarette exchange. And now nice, the guy is rewarded with a chicky for blow jobs in the back! Wouldn’t it rule if this is how all jobs worked? I guarantee you would never see another slacker employee in the entire universe.
Monica was informed that the videotape of the church bust was shot by a relative of Antoine Mitchell’s. Shock? Of course not. The assumption, of course, is that he had something to do with the edit job.
Speaking again with Aceveda, Rawling calls him out on adjusting crime numbers to make the Farmington division look worse than it really is. He’s not shy in saying he wants to kill the seizure program. Or is it just that he wants Mackey out on his ass? Monica refuses to take orders from Aceveda, but he says that if Vic is off the table, then he’s going stone-cold after the seizure program itself.
Danny and Julian are out and about again, this time stopping a white guy who flipped a U-ey where he shouldn’t have. Oh look, an open container in the car. And bootleg DVDs! And he has ink. Julian is more than abrupt with arresting the guy on suspicion of distributing these (three) DVDs and such.
Vic, Ronnie, and Lem shut themselves into the old Strike Team room and flip on a video from Shane’s car. Why, it’s what we saw in the opening shot tonight. But that one special favor? A hit on Vic, of course. You know, a body trade — Angie for Mackey. Shane is adamantly against it, but Antoine pushes with talk of jailtime and his to-be-lonely wife and son… Shane does eventually agree. As there’s a knock on the door (Rawling), Vic says he wants this all kept on the down-low for now.
Rawling asks to speak to Vic alone, and asks Vic to take a step back from his lead role. She wants to regroup because Aceveda has the chief’s ear and wants to save the seizure program. Vic accuses Monica of not having a backbone; Monica fires back that Vic was the red headed stepchild of the department, and that she went out on a limb for him. For the sake of future graces, he best take it like it is.
Vic heads to the bathroom, pacing and clearly upset. He turns to the sink, dousing his face in water, clearly to hide the hurt. Shane comes by to say they’re ready to roll on his bust, and Vic quickly pulls it together.
COMMERCIALS! They need to get some new commercials into rotation, by the way.
Back to the Joya case, now Wyms and Wagenbach are speaking with Bebe. They tell her that Darnell admitted the rape. She’s clearly upset and says she tried to stop him, but she knew that if Joya talked that everyone would be removed from the house, so she gave her the Drain-o. Sure, this house had the tiny locked room, but at least nobody touched her in this house… yikes.
Danny discusses the day’s busts with Julian. Julian argues about the focus on race, on browns and blacks, and how seizing some guy’s car just makes him unable to get to work and gives him a reason to turn to crime.
Monica’s two cents? Race is a hard thing to deal with, but in the force, you’re BLUE. She’s putting in for Julian’s transfer.
Back on Shane’s bust, Shane wants Vic to come along with him and Lem to stay behind. Clearly, Vic is weary and uncomfortable, but he goes along. They witness the cigarette/cash exchange, the whole while Vic clearly nervewracked.
Rawling is confronted by the child protection services case worker’s supervisor regarding the arrest of her employee. Rawling brings up an old case of an abuse victim in the foster care system who was later beat into a coma. After more denial of responsibility on the part of the CPS system, Rawling agrees to let the case worker go; however, further negelct will result in a major crackdown on CPS.
As Shane’s bust grows larger, Ronnie calls Vic with information found on the garage sting tapes — Kosodov’s got a coyote to get him out of the country. Vic begs off claiming he’s being sent back to the barn to take care of paperwork, and walks off.
Vic stops to talk to a friend in the Bizlats; he’s clear that he’s willing to sell out Shane’s CI for the name of the coyote moving Kosodov. While the banger doesn’t seem like he can be too helpful, Vic wastes no time in saying he’ll insure their cigarette trade will go off without a hitch if he gets him this information.
COMMERCIALS AGAIN! More Sneaker Pimps… whatever happened to the chick from that group anyway, after the stupid European guys kicked her out and went on to make really shitty ambient garbage? Damned tangents…
Imagine this: when it comes to protecting one’s racket, the Bizlats suddenly have quick information about the coyote moving Kosodov. Vic gives up the name of Shane’s CI, and the banger is incredulous that this guy could be a snake; Mackey further carries on about his bragging about popping his younger sister’s cherry, and suddenly there’s no issue. Oh yes, and Vic will be more than helpful if something happens to this CI dude and things need to be swept under the carpet.
Sneaky sneaky with a hood, Vic nabs Kosodov from his hiding spot. He wants the arsonist, and gets a name — Gregor.
Claudette visits Joya in the hospital, and surprisingly found Monica already there. Rawling tells a story about her childhood best friend’s father was abusive, but she felt too helpless to speak up. She feels even more helpless now.
And now, Vic, has both Kosodov and Gregor hooded, and cuffed to some type of dresser/armoire thing. He takes gunshots to the wall behind them.
Meanwhile… DUTCH AND CORRINE ARE HAVING DINNER, AT HER HOUSE! OH NOOOOO! This, my friends, is hard for me to watch. Ugh. And they’re so damned sweet, with Dutch talking about his stress dealing with suffering children like Joya. Megan runs in with a book, and Dutch magically whisks her aside to read to her.
I’m ill. I’m so ill. Mackey’s going to eat his face off.
Shane’s on the phone, trying to get ahold of his CI, who hasn’t been answering…
Kosodov and Gregor are brought into the station by the third party group after responding to a shots-fired call. Hooded and cuffed? Hey, they’re not asking questions, but Rawling certainly seems to know what happened.
And Vic walks the streets. He brushes against some guy, a cop shines a light at him and he tells them to f*ck off in cable-television-approved language. He just keeps on walkin’.
Credits.
Did you miss it? Are you planning not to catch one of 50,000 reruns in the next week? Well, count this episode among one of the more gripping of the season. Typical of this series, there’s some masterful suspense being built. Honestly, how much more assraping is Vic going to take before crazy shit goes down? Gotta keep watching to find out…
Crossing fingers for the “S” to come back next week,
–gloomchen
