We begin this epsiode with the world’s longest recap, much of which came from season three — Dutch killing a stray cat so that he could see what it was like to take the life of an innocent, Aceveda being forced to suck some guy’s dick at gunpoint, et cetera. Oh yeah, and some Antoine Mitchell stuff from this season! Bet you almost forgot about that stuff already, huh? Two weeks sure is a long time.
Shane, Ronnie, Army and Lem are looking for Angie’s body in the park where they were told it was buried. They’re searching out the landmarks and can’t seem to find anyplace remotely like where they were supposed to look.
Antoine is in the interrogation room, with the dialog spearheaded by Captain Rawling and backed up by Vic Mackey. Antoine signs a waiver that he’ll talk without being in the presence of an attorney. Monica starts: who killed the cops that were found in the seizure house? He reminds her that he was out of town and feigns innocence. After a bit of this, Monica brings up Antoine’s son, Donald the third. He’s in prison after getting busted earlier by her unit. And lookie here, in prison, he was caught having the BUTTSEX. Not raped… he likes it, baby, yeah! Antoine’s son is all about the male poontang, particularly Latino poontang. Monica brings up having him transferred to Folsom — lots of mexicans, lots of enemies — but will leave him alone if Antoine will talk.
Monica leaves the room. Antoine is PISSED and tells Vic as much. Vic, as you may recall, told Antoine that he’d try to keep the questioning from delving into difficult territory. Unfortunately, it certainly doesn’t seem as though Monica is going to let that happen.
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Vic talks to Monica and tries to cool her down… no dice.
Back in interrogation, Monica asks again about the cop killers. She brings up Antoine’s son again, in vivid detail. Antoine, on the other hand, shifts the attack and says that his son is on his own at this point. MOnica asks, what sort of regard does he have for family?
And Antoine takes the lead in conversation. He went to the library too, he says. He brings up Rich Nelson, Monica’s old partner, who was married with kids and Monica ended up having an affair with. He went back to his wife, he got cancer, and he died. And he asks her, what sort of regard does she have for family.
Back to the land of digging for bodies, Lem begins venting on Shane about his frustrations always having to clean up his messes, among other things.
Dutch and Claudette are still digging for the cop killer; in the meantime, Clevon (the suspect from a prior crime who was a suspected serial killer in Texas) is brought back into the station on suspicion of a murder. Monica removes them from the cop killer case to focus on this guy.
Aceveda is still hanging around, and he speaks with Monica briefly, inquiring as to Antoine Mitchell’s possible involvement.
Lem talks to Vic about the body they can’t find and brings up the idea of ditching Shane and leaving him to fend for himself. Vic doesn’t want to tear the part again.
Aceveda and Danny chat in the locker room. Danny says, “Nice getting shot at with you today.” They begin to talk about the crime scene, of course which Aceveda found himself. Danny then talks about how he’s lucky that he gets to go home to a family that loves him, and Aceveda remains cold and aloof.
Back in interrogation, Antoine brings up the charges that got him imprisoned in the first place — those made by Rich Nelson, which he claims were trumped up evidence. Monica goes on the attack, telling us all about Antoine’s history: his dad raped his younger sister while Antoine hid, and meanwhile his mother ended up shooting his father to death and rotting away in prison for it. Monica adds that Antoine is yet again too much of a coward to save his own son. Yeah, Antoine’s got the tears flowing, but he’s also a new definition of pissed. He brings up something about the body of a dead girl that “some dirty cops killed” and then demands his attorney.
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Danny and Julian are on assignment to watch the cage for the night. Danny was asking Julian about the families of the dead cops, and rumors that one of the wives is looking to sue the department over it. That shit don’t fly, yo.
Wagenbach and Wyms are talking to witnesses of the crime which supposedly Clevon committed. As the woman gives a description, the man begins berating her; this goes back and forth between them until the woman freaks out, throwing punches. As she’s hauled into the cage for assault, she carries on about stolen auto parts in their garage to charge him for.
Clevon is in interrogation, rather jumpy versus the laid-back persona he gave during the last investigation when he was surely innocent. They claim that witnesses place him at the scene. He says he was watching some sort of sports game of some type, and that his sister can corroborate; his sister mentions, however, that he did leave for about ten minutes for some sodas.
Aceveda is now at a hotel, and he’s called his little concubine Sarah for some fun and games. Sarah isn’t particularly happy after their last rendezvous and reviews their rules — no bruising or other marks, stop when she says stop. She brings up the investigation of the dead cops and they shortly converse before she says she’ll make him feel better. David says he doesn’t want to feel better.
Antoine is now with his attorney in the interrogation room while Vic is watching and listening via video. Antoine asks the attorney to relay that it’s time the girl is found. Shane shows up, and Vic tells him the body’s dropping, so Shane decides to go back after the mexican guy who told him where the body was supposed to be so that he can possibly get some better directions.
Aceveda is now going crazynuts with Sarah, where she’s frantically telling him to stop, and he’s not listening. He gets to the point where he opens his pants, pulls a gun on her, and tells her to suck. Sound familiar? As he drops the gun, Sarah smartly puts it all together and asks if that’s what was done to him. He goes to the sink and vomits as Sarah is telling him that it wasn’t his fault, that he didn’t know whether or not they’d pull the trigger, he did what he had to do to live, and that he’s a good person. “A good person wouldn’t be here with you,” he says, and kicks her out.
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Dutch talks to Clevon, telling him that going out to get drinks doesn’t jive with his timeline. He puts him in a lineup saying there are witnesses there to ID him. But it is a trick! There are no witnesses!
Lem heads off to find the informant who told them where to find the body. He finds him, he hits him, and tells him he wants better directions. Well, when the guy told them that the girl was buried “by the horses,” he meant by the carousel horses, not by the on-ground stables of horses. As insurance, Lem takes the guy’s stash and relays the info to Vic and Shane.
Aceveda is at home. He hugs his daughter and he starts talking to his wife, Aurora. He pours out his heart about how rough things have been and says that time period is over. They make amends. AWWW.
Shane shows up at the burial scene to find that cops had already beaten him to the punch, digging away.
Claudette talks to Clevon, trying to pressure him with threats of “witnesses” and whatnot. They’re then informed that the victim has come to and ID’ed Clevon.
Shane is now in the old Strike Team room with everyone. He talks about how Army has no ballistics run on his gun and he could swap his out to avoid involvement with the bullets found in the body, but he was done for. Shane talks about killing Antoine since he’s already going to be going down for this murder. Everyone of course red-lights the idea, although Lem pipes in that this might be the first “good” thing that Shane has done in a long time to help himself and everyone else. Shane agrees.
Shane goes to visit Antoine in the interrogation room and brings up his son again, this time in full glowing detail. Wanna hear it? Oh yeah. Shane goes on about how Antoine has all of this money and power, but he’s “still a nigger with a faggot nigger son, where’s the respect in that?” Antoine sits down calmly, realizing he’s being goaded; Vic comes in and steals Shane. He says that if Shane comes clean, they can spin the videotape to be in their favor, blissfully ignoring anything that really happened before the video came to exist, essentially using all of Shane’s leaking as reason for blackmail.
Vic shows Monica the tape — you know, Antoine putting the hit on Vic. She’s pissed, as seems to be quite the theme in this episode. Vic tries to spin everything as promised, but Monica is angry that she specifically asked Vic to find the leak and he hid it from her. He brings up her old partner and what she would do for him, and she gets even more pissed. She wants to talk to Shane.
Monica brings in Shane to converse. He talks about the cul de sac bust, the leaks, et cetera, and runs down the new and improved version of the story where he comes off as a victim. Monica asks him if he’ll take a polygraph, and he agrees. Then she calls for Army.
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Vic again talks to Monica; she talks about making Army and Shane take a lie detector test. Vic insists that he doesn’t want good cops punished when it’s people like Antoine who should be behind bars.
Danny and Julian are still dealing with the feuding couple, and now the guy has pointed the cops at some stolen family heirlooms she had hidden in their house.
Dutch and Wyms are with Clevon again. Dutch begins a conversation; why would someone kill a cop? He talks about people tired of being treated like criminals. One of the blue-clothed cops pops in to say their victim is awake, and they leave the room. Claudette takes Dutch aside and tells him to close Clevon down; he had him going, time to end it.
Danny and Julian are talking again, this time about a money jar which was placed for the dead cop’s wife; Danny heard rumblings that this money would be used to help her sue the department, and she railed on Julian for advocating that sort of thing.
Dutch is back in the room with Clevon. He tells Clevon that the victim IDed him. Dutch starts talking in extreme detail about the sensations of strangulation from beginning to end in a most creepy and firsthand fashion. However, he talks about the girl waking up from a coma, and previously he had talked about her going into surgery, and Clevon picked up on these changes in detail. He calls their bluff and says he’ll go visit the girl himself to ensure he’s properly IDed.
Monica and Vic show Antoine and his attorney the videotape from the department vehicle. Not surprisingly, Antoine freaks, and Vic subdues him. Monica: “Wanna tell us who killed our two men now?”
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Antoine says he wants to be in prison with his son and with his old prison life. He signs an agreement of some type for his cooperation. Yet, he insists he knows nothing at all about the dead cops, meanwhile taking another shot at Shane and Army.
Back to Claudette and Dutch, their victim is dead, and Clevon is free to leave with no evidence to the contrary. However, his sister is now clued in to the fact that he may not be an innocent, and it seems apparent that she’ll be watching out for any disturbing behavior on his part.
Someone stole Julian’s money jar. Darn. And the feuding couple wants to drop all charges, as they kissed and made up. Awwww, love.
In the old Strike Team room, Vic enters and recaps that Antoine is going down. Everyone is okay, free and clear, aside from the polygraphs. They make an agreement that from here on out, there’s nothing over their heads, so it’s just time to start kicking ass and taking names.
Monica talks to the IAD mole in her gang unit; he’s found Vic to be nothing but squeaky clean. She wants him to keep watching Vic and the other guys.
Antoine is being hauled out to the paddy wagon when Vic stops to speak with him. Of course he forthrightly whispers about how no cop killing would go down without his okay. Vic sends him on his way and vows to solve this case.
…and that’s all, folks!
Coming up next week: polygraph intrigue!
Whew. This was ninety minutes of nonstop intensity to say the least, thankfully broken up with the silly feuding couple every now and again. Can’t these cops have one moment that isn’t a madhouse of drama?
Would we watch if they did?
–gloomchen
