While I enjoyed the first season of The Shield, I felt its episodic structure came at odds with its attempt at dramatic story-telling and led to the season feeling a bit scattershot. Thankfully, Season 2 is a huge improvement with a more focused and serialized structure and much more gripping drama.
Season 2 of The Shield is primarily about the Strike Team facing off against a child molester and drug dealer named Armadillo, who threatens to out the Strike Team's crimes after Vic literally grilled his face off. I can't overstate how much better it feels to have an overarching antagonist who wasn't just revealed in the last two episodes, Armadillo feels like more and more of a threat as the season continues and the tension slowly heightens as the Strike Team eventually gets in danger of dying let alone being outed. The rest of the storylines this season are pretty great, particularly the Barn being watched by an auditor (whose story ends up being pretty damn crippling), Mackey trying to win back his family, and the Strike Team devising a plan to discretely steal from the Armenian Mafia's Money Train. While each episode still has their own storylines, there's still a much stronger focus on the serialization which leads to a much more focused season... at least for its first half.
A little over halfway through Season 2, the crew faced a big issue: Danny Pino, the actor for Armadillo, had to leave the show. I don't want to criticize anyone involved for it, stuff like this happens when working in TV, but with the main antagonist dead and five episodes remaining, Season 2 did start to suffer a bit. The biggest issue here was a filler flashback episode (Co-Pilot) that was solely made so that the crew could think of how to proceed with the season, but ends up feeling pace-killing and at times a bit contradictory. The last four episodes never get that bad, but without Armadillo, there definitely isn't quite as much urgency. Thankfully, the finale decides to end the season with the Money Train heist, a fantastic decision that still managed to feel climactic and tense.
This season was also fairly consistent (outside of Co-Pilot), but the highlights were much more noticeable this time around:
Homewrecker: This episode absolutely punched me in the gut. I was able to tell the writing was on the wall for Connie the moment she got kidnapped, but that didn't make it any less painful. The whole final sequence was thrilling, tense, and terrifying because I knew The Shield would never let Connie get out alive, and I was right. This was easily the most heartbreaking episode yet.
Scar Tissue: While Armadillo was written out a bit early, I'm glad the crew of The Shield took the time to give him one hell of an exit. Ronnie nearly dying in the previous episode already cranked up the tension to 11, but then Claudette comes in and bumps it up to 12, leaving the Strike Team closer to being outed than ever before. Armadillo may have gotten killed in a pretty neat way, but Claudette knows pretty much everything about the Strike Team now and the season hasn't ended yet.
Dominoes Falling: While I enjoyed Circles, all of the buildup made for a way better finale this time around. There was the Money Train heist, the several layoffs, Julien being beat up, and Aceveda winning the primary, with all of these storylines interweaving and interacting making for a very satisfying and twisty finale. Vic's wife leaving was a big twist but here, I can't help but feel nothing is going to be the same again.
Overall, Season 2 of The Shield is a big improvement over the first with a much more compelling overarching storyline and a stronger emphasis on serialization and character drama over a procedural structure. While Armadillo getting written out early did hurt the final stretch of the season, we still ended up getting a pretty great finale.
4/5 Stars
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