The Shield Ending Revisited: What Worked & What Didn’t

The beauty of streaming services is that old, great shows have a new shelf life. If you’re one of the people who just discovered the Los Angeles-based police show The Shield, you’re in for a treat: One of the best endings in television history. Warning: there will be spoilers for The Shield in this article.

Unlike the ambiguity of the Sopranos’ finale (although, c’mon, it’s obvious Tony was whacked), The Shield’s ending gave its protagonist, Vic Mackey, the future he deserved. Vic was too crafty to end up in prison, but he ended up in a prison of sorts all the same, stripped of everything that mattered to him, through every fault of his own. His chickens came home to roost, but not in the obvious ways.

The series ran for seven seasons on FX, running from 2002 to 2008, but it can now be found on streaming sites like Amazon and Hulu. Vic was one of a string of modern, complex anti-heroes to break through, from Tony Soprano to Dexter to Jax Teller in Sons of Anarchy to Walter White in Breaking Bad.

Few people are all bad or good, and these are not the one-note Hollywood villains of old. They’re complex personalities capable of both good and extraordinary antisocial behavior. They reject society’s rules, while living by their own internal codes. Ultimately, they are people colored by shades of gray. That makes them incredibly interesting. Like Jack Bauer in 24, Vic Mackey gets the job done, keeping peace on the streets and reducing crime, but he does it by any means necessary. The series makes you ponder whether it’s worth the price, whether we should be grateful the Vic Mackeys of the world are out there doing what they do, as long as we don’t have to know about it.

At the center of The Shield is Mackey, a corrupt Los Angeles cop who, like the Mafia godfathers before him, still has a value system: family and brotherhood. Or does he? Just when you start to detest Mackey, you realize you still sort of like him. But you know you shouldn’t. He’s played by Michael Chiklis.

In the end, though, Vic had to pay. After all, he killed a cop in the first episode of the show, and now it’s time to pay that price.

Here are five ways The Shield’s ending got it just right. And two ways it didn’t.

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What the Ending Got Right

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1. Vic Loses His Blood Family

Vic needs to pay a price, and the biggest price he can pay is losing his family. He shows up at the family home to find it empty with law enforcement outside. He’s informed that his ex-wife and kids have been moved to witness protection, and she’s requested protection from him too.

She’s made the right decision. Vic corrodes and corrupts everything he’s near. Corrine’s only hope for survival is to never see him again.

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2. Vic Loses His Strike Team Family

Throughout The Shield, Vic treats the police Strike Team he leads like an actual family, often letting it take priority over his own. Thus, it’s noteworthy that, in the end, the Strike Team has disintegrated. Shane is dead, in a grisly suicide at his own hand. Lem was already dead, from a grenade Shane tossed in his lap. Ronnie is under arrest and looking at life in prison, the only guy left to take the fall.

In the end, Vic is all alone.

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3. Vic Gets a Job as a Desk Jockey

Other than his families (blood and Strike Team), the biggest thing you can take from Vic is the streets. That’s his arena, his zone of comfort, the place he thinks he owns. The streets are his real mistress. Or wife. The feds, horrified by Vic’s confessions but stuck with the sweeping immunity agreement they’ve given him, consign him to a boring, mind-numbing desk job.

We see him there in an ill-fitting suit, where he’s supposed to churn out daily gang memos. To Vic, this may be a fate worse than prison or death, and, surely, a prison it is (although it’s got a shelf life of three years.)

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3. Claudette & Vic Have a Final Showdown

Claudette Wyms (C.C.H. Pounder) was the moral center of The Shield. Along with Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), she was the character who most clings to her conscience. The job doesn’t change all. They were the light to Vic’s darkness.

So it was extremely gratifying to see her final showdown with Vic, in which she lays out, one-by-one, the photos of Shane and his deceased family. Something that looks like guilt or remorse flickers across Vic’s face. When Claudette leaves the room, she’s finally gotten the upper hand, at long last, and she leaves with it.

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4. Shane’s Familicide

Shane Vendrell (Walter Goggins) made a series of amoral decisions, at times egged on by his equally amoral wife. They were bound to catch up to him, and the final episodes of The Shield show him on the run with the walls gradually closing in. In the end, Shane has no escape.

He’s willing to give himself up to save his wife, who has committed murder, but he’s lost his leverage with Vic’s federal immunity deal. No matter what Shane gives them, police can’t touch Vic. With the roof closing in on him, Shane’s final act makes sense in conjunction with his character. He chooses death over Mara ending up in prison, and their children in the system, someday to learn the truth about their parents. But he unconscionably chooses it for all of them, a final act of narcissism and depravity, another bad choice in a long line of them.

Shane and Vic were a toxic pair who brought out the worst in each other; Shane and Mara were as well. They didn’t temper each other’s bad impulses. They escalated them.

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5. Vic Retrieves His Gun

Just when you think Vic has finally received his comeuppance, you realize that, to stay true to his character, he must find a way out. Vic is a sociopath, a shark, but he’s also a survivor. He’s not going to be content without his family and trapped behind a desk for long. We see him retrieve his gun, and leave his cubicle. That’s where the show ends. This is fitting; the viewer can imagine what comes next. There are a myriad of possibilities, all likely.

Surely, Vic will track down his family. Surely, he will find another point of leverage to give the feds something they want more than chaining him to a desk as punishment. Maybe he will find a way to extricate Ronnie. We already know the man’s character and his skills. The final ending allowed the viewer to write the final ending, perhaps giving Vic a glimmer of potential redemption.

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What Didn’t Work So Well

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1. Vic Betrays Ronnie

It never seemed fully true to Vic’s character that he killed a cop, Terry Crowley, in the first episode of the first season. Although it was a secret that hung over Vic’s head and bonded him with Shane throughout all of the seasons, the one line that Vic seemed like he would never cross was betraying his brotherhood in blue. You. just. don’t. kill. another. cop.

Vic’s last-minute betrayal of Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell), the last member of the Strike Team, also did not ring true to his character. This was explained away by his loyalty to family; he had to take the immunity deal to get immunity for Corinne. But to take the immunity deal he had to confess to his sins and, in doing so, he implicated Gardocki. Worse, telling Gardocki to run would have been a violation of the immunity deal.

So Vic strings Gardocki along, using him to bring the feds their big cartel arrest, and lying to him that they both have immunity. The scene where police move in and arrest Gardocki in the barn, and he realizes the extent of Vic’s betrayal, was one of the most heartwrenching endings in television history. We see it dawn on Gardocki in seconds that, not only has Vic utterly betrayed him, but his life is, effectively, over. Vic might as well have murdered him.

However, there are holes in all of this. First of all, Vic could have warned Ronnie to run a few minutes BEFORE he signed the immunity agreement, which wouldn’t yet have been a violation. In short, he could have told him the score. Secondly, it was never clear why Vic needed Ronnie that badly to get Beltran, the cartel leader. And Corinne surely wouldn’t have done much time anyway (and probably none because she was working with the police, which Vic eventually learned from Shane); in contrast, Ronnie was looking at multiple life prison terms. Finally, why would the feds have come up with immunity for Vic’s wife so fast but stalled on getting it for Ronnie? The one thing Vic didn’t seem like he would ever do is turn on one of his Strike Team brothers. It’s more plausible that he would have taken the hit himself.

Betraying the final member of his Strike Team? It’s also easier to imagine Vic betraying his ex-wife. After all, he’d already done that enough. It doesn’t fit.

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2. Where Is Rita?

Too many loose ends were left behind in the case of Lloyd’s missing mom, Rita.

Dutch was convinced, of course, that Lloyd, a teenager, was a future serial killer in the making. Now it appeared that Lloyd was trying to frame Dutch for his mother’s likely death.

Rita went missing, Dutch received a series of hang-up calls that she didn’t know about, and her charred clothing was found in his trash can.

But where is Rita? Did Lloyd kill her? Is it possible that Dutch might have done so? We’d say no, but what was with him strangling the cat earlier in the show? Tantalizingly, the show dangled that scene to make you wonder if the benevolent Dutch wasn’t hiding a darker core. But it didn’t transpire, not really.

It’s all just enough to make people, sort of, wonder, into perpetuity.

Those are minor quibbles. The Shield is one of the best, if not THE best, police shows in television history. And the ending did it justice. Please, someday, bring it back!

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