There's an rotten lot of self-deception accepted on in "Game Face." Vic has always been a boss at perjury to himself, but his blinders are strikingly emphatic tonight. He claims that nailing Pezuela "is a down-payment on me being able to spirited with myself," when even Shane (Shane!) can reflect that it won't variation much of anything, and certainly won't bring in Terry Crowley back to life. He refuses to even note the odds that Cassidy (who's been in tormenter all season) might have played an nimble role in scoring the drugs for the squad until he has the truth shoved in his face.
And when Olivia confesses her own predicament, he suggests he's the best valet to reserve her, when in event he should know by now -- as Ronnie tried to clarify to him a few episodes back -- that all he ever accomplishes is falling deeper into the quicksand. Even the other characters are starting to be plagued with Vic's affliction. Danny in actuality lets herself into that Vic might autograph himself out of their son's life, Claudette refuses to endure how her lupus might be an continued liability, and Dutch convinces himself he can outwit Lloyd, when the closest he tends to come to analogous wits with a serial exterminator is when he picks up a drift cat. (Claudette was the one who got Kleavon to confess, after all.) But getting back to Vic's own barely society of self-deception, what's very stuck out to me in these decisive two episodes is how functioning Julien has been.
While the time off of the Strike Team is event around trying to put out Armenian and Mexican-related brushfires, Julien is doing the manifest job, and doing it well. (So well, in fact, that in the premature incident the others had to wield around his effectiveness to solve one of their extra-curricular problems.) For all that Vic likes to sermon and rap about how all the crimes he commits are in some feeling in service to the people of Farmington, possibly he should take a step back and pass on attention to what a cop can get done when he's not constantly upsetting to escape the latest hangman's noose.
In some ways, Claudette (and, to a lesser extent, Dutch) served that motivation in earlier seasons. Their cases weren't expressly the same class -- where Julien's doing gang up intervention with the siesta of the Strike Team, Dutch and Claudette had to contend with rapists and serial killers and the peer -- but we still got to distinguish Claudette's dogged, by-the-books closer with Vic's reckless, extra-legal tactics. Neither near has in put a dent into Farmington worth of life, but at least Claudette hasn't pink so many other problems in her wake. I had nearly forgotten about Kleavon.
Though his scenario was featured so heavily in period five, it was overshadowed (as most "Shield" b-stories are) by Vic's gorge (in that year, Vic being hounded by Kavanaugh), and then it didn't come up at all during mature six. This was a over-nice mnemonic of just what an unlucky slink he was, as well as bringing bailiwick how Claudette's proudness may be getting in her course here. Yes, we be informed that in an ideal world she should still be able to do her job without having her faculties questioned, but "The Shield" takes home in a solely non-ideal corner of an already unsound world, and this could defer to coming up. At least she had the spirit of mind to accept Dutch's advice from last week to cover Danny her administrative aide and irrational backstop.
Kleavon's presence, along with the put in an appearance again of Dutch's profiler friend, also helped drop-kick the Lloyd storyline up a notch. While there's still a business of me that wishes Dutch would be common into fresher territory, the subplot felt much stronger this week than it did in time, in department because of the various crackerjack opinions Dutch was getting, in separate because Lloyd was allowed to be more overtly monstrous, and Kyle Gallner (as any "Veronica Mars" fans knows) plays that isolated color very well.
With all due respect to site: read
