FX may be heavily promoting this year of “The Shield” as its last, but tonight’s season premiere felt like it could have taken place anywhere in the show’s timeline. Sure, Vic may be hanging on to his career by a thread, and Shane continues to dig himself into an even bigger hole every time he tries to do “the right thing,” but something about the forthcoming season reads like a page out of the show’s golden years. What’s even better is that it actually makes sense. After all, Vic is trying to save his job and protect his family, so what better way to do both then to pit those standing in your way against one another?
Picking up almost immediately where season six left off, Shane arrives home to discover Mara bound and gagged on the couch. Before he can do anything to help her, Vic and Ronnie grab him from the shadows and begin to beat him up as payment for kidnapping Corrine and Cassidy. When Shane explains that he was only trying to protect them (because the Armenians know about the money train), Vic has no other choice but to join forces with Shane in order to stop the Armenians from exacting revenge. This includes tracking down Zadofian (the hitman sent to kill Vic’s family) who, coincidentally, Shane has also been ordered to find. Unfortunately for him, Vic arrives first (though Ronnie is the one who actually kills him, assuring Vic is clear of any suspicion). And so Shane, desperate to cover his ass, makes the murder look like Kazekian’s handiwork by chopping off the feet. When Rezian questions how she could possibly be getting anything done while on the run, Shane suggests she’s in cahoots with the Mexicans.
Meanwhile, as Pezuela continues to fuel the Mexican and Salvadorian turf war in order to make room for future business ventures, Vic and Aceveda are busy deciding how to best use the recently acquired blackmail files to take him down. Vic is hoping to perform a little blackmail of his own so that he may save his job, but when Aceveda informs him that doing so would ruin the chance of building a real case against Pezuela, Vic is forced to change his game plan. Instead, he goes straight to source, giving Pezuela fake intel about an ongoing bidding war for the missing documents, and in return, earning a 30-day reprieve from his forced retirement. Vic makes Pezuela believe that the Armenians desperately want that box of files, and by forcing him (and by default, the Mexicans) into a gang war with the Armenians, Vic hopes to kill two birds with one stone. Then again, it’ll probably only make things worse.
The rest of the episode was a bit of a mixed bag. Dutch and Claudette trick Billings into voiding his own lawsuit when he solves an old case, Ronnie puts in a transfer request to SIS (and also gets promoted to Strike Team leader in the same day), and the Mexican/Salvadorian bloodbath lures a federal agent named Olivia Murray to town hoping to regain favor with her bosses. I’m not exactly sure how the third subplot is going to pan out, but I really wish that they would have saved her introduction for an episode with more time to explain things. Murray is briefly introduced in the opening sequence, only to disappear for the rest of the episode, and I’d like to think I would’ve understood why she was there a little better if there wasn’t so much going on.
Of course, when Vic is crashing cars into buildings (Best. Diversion. Ever.) and Shane is chopping off people’s feet, it’s easy to miss some of the episode’s subtler moments. Nevertheless, this is a great start to the new season. Now all Shawn Ryan and Co. have to do is keep it up.
