The Shield, "Petty Cash": It's hard out here for a Vic

Spoilers for "The Shield," season seven, episode 11, coming up just as soon as I start going through gas station men's room trash cans...

"The edge is where we live, all of us, all the time. People try to convince themselves otherwise is just an exercise in self-deception." -Vic
"Philosopher?" -Beltran
"Former cop. Same deal, less horses--t." -Vic

Oh, it's getting bad around Farmington. As Ronnie -- still so clear-headed most of the time it's amazing he ever let himself fall under Vic's sway -- puts it, "The wheels are coming off the whole damn thing."

Shane and Mara are still on the run, and they've gone from having 100 grand to start their pie-in-the-sky new life south of the border to being lucky to get $2500 after taking Jackson along to rob Mara's former employer. (In one of the saddest and yet funniest moments in the history of the show, one of the cleaning ladies being held at gunpoint offers to hold the little boy while Mara focuses on opening the safe.) Ronnie himself is apparently doomed when he has to step in for Vic and get the hundred grand to Corrine under the watchful eye of Claudette's surveillance team. And Vic's playing a very dangerous game by stealing from the local drug kingpins whom he's trying to bring into Beltran's organization.

I feel like I need to ask this question every week: how did it come to this? I suppose if I was a philosopher or a former cop, I might suggest that Vic was so concerned with maintaining his edge that he wound up slitting his own throat.

What's been amazing about this downfall of the strike team arc is how little it's been driven by external forces. Yes, Kavanaugh and the Armenians put pressure on the guys that led to certain bad decisions, but they were only in a position to do so because of actions that Vic and the boys committed of their own volition. They chose to get into bed with drug dealers, to treat Farmington as their personal ATM, to bend and even break the law whenever it suited their purposes. As James Poniewozik argued a few weeks back, "If it hadn't been Terry, it would have been something else."

This is on them, every bad thing that's happening now, and it's a testament to the acting and writing that I find myself feeling bad for them as often as I do as they suffer their deserved comeuppance. Shane's despicable and Mara's not a whole lot better, but when he puts his head into Mara's arms and notes that neither of them has another friend in the world anymore, I briefly forget about Lem and the grenade, just as I forget about the bullet between Terry's eyes when I watch Vic share a nice moment with Cassidy, not realizing that Corrine is taking steps to keep father out of daughter's life forever.

"Petty Cash" is another break-neck episode, as Vic and Ronnie race to make the the Beltran/ICE case work at the same time they're trying to deal with Shane's various demands, while Shane himself is too busy trying to scrape together even a small amount of cash to enjoy how much he's making his old partners suffer. And yet in the middle of all the usual maneuvering and double-crossing -- including Aceveda trying to call a truce with Vic in their war for ICE supremacy -- there's still time for a completely self-contained, satisfying Julien storyline involving the murdered basketball prospect.

I've commented on this before, but it bears repeating: Julien's tenure with the strike team, in which he became a better cop without losing his soul, proves that it's possible to move in Vic's orbit without getting crushed. Admittedly, the others deliberately froze Julien out of the illicit stuff, in the same way they did with Tavon and Terry and Kevin Hiatt, so it's not like they ever placed him in situations where had to choose between loyalty and the law. But when Claudette presents him with that exact choice, Julien doesn't even hesitate. He's a good cop who only has to worry about his own conscience, while Vic, Shane and Ronnie are all busy circling the drain.

Some other thoughts on "Petty Cash":

• We get our first reference to Danny since we saw her packing boxes a few weeks ago. And Dutch's comment suggests not only that everyone knows that Danny left and why, but that she's expected back down the road, once things with Vic hopefully calm down.

• Billings' man-crush on Ronnie continues to be amusing, here with him helping Ronnie look out for Shane's envelope because he has Ronnie's back "in a world of crazy coozes."

• This episode was co-written by Shawn Ryan's longtime deputy Charles H. "Chick" Eglee and Jameal Turner, and directed by Craig Brewer, whom you might know from "Hustle and Flow" and "Black Snake Moan." He joins an impressive roster of Very Special Guest Directors for the series that also includes Frank Darabont, John Badham and David Mamet, in addition to more usual (but still talented) suspects like Clark Johnson, DJ Caruso, Paris Barclay, Peter Horton and the late Scott Brazil. (And Michael Chiklis himself has directed several episodes, including this season's "Game Face.")

• Yet another minor character brought out of mothballs for the final stretch: Van Bro, the scooter-bound, eyepatch-wearing street artist, who appeared a handful of times early in the series, including the second episode ever.

• As with Shane's piano lesson story last week, Vic telling Beltran about his grandparents struck me as unusual because we know so little about these characters' lives before the series began. I have better notes now about the chat a bunch of us critics had with Shawn Ryan right after we watched the series finale, and so I wanted to expand on the Mamet-by-way-of-Ryan quote I used in last week's review:

"David Mamet always talks about backstory being bulls--t in his mind. But I definitely adopted that attitude before I heard it out of David's mouth. As a storyteller, I think I'm a little bit like a shark: I'm about going forward. There are certain ways that I ran the show -- I would like to think a lot more benevolently than how Vic operated in that world -- but the way I ran the show was very similar to the way Vic approached things, and that's where a lot of those stories came from... Those sort of scenes of reflection, you always talk about Vic not liking to be self-reflective, and I guess I didn't, as a storyteller, like to look back too much to the past."

What did everybody else think?