Television Review: Grave (The Shield, S4X02, 2005)

Grave (S04E02)

Airdate: March 22nd 2005

Written by: Kurt Sutter
Directed by: Paris Barclay

Running Time: 44 minutes

It is a commonly observed phenomenon in long-running television series—particularly those lauded for their sustained quality—that the fourth season often marks the beginning of an inevitable creative decline. The narrative engines begin to sputter, character development can feel repetitive or forced, and the sheer weight of ongoing plotlines starts to compromise individual episodes. This thesis finds compelling evidence in Grave, the second episode of The Shield’s fourth season. While by no means a failure, and possessing several moments of the series’ characteristic brutal grace, the episode represents a perceptible downgrade from the taut, focused intensity of the preceding seasons. It is an instalment where the machinery of the show’s complex world becomes distractingly visible, cramming an overabundance of plot into a restrictive timeframe and leaning on narrative devices that feel undercooked or, in one notorious case, gratuitously exploitative.

The episode’s structure is ambitiously confined to the final day of Captain David Aceveda’s command of the Farmington Precinct. As he prepares to assume his City Council seat and hand over to the newly arrived Captain Monica Rawlings, Aceveda’s pathological need for control manifests in petty, counter-productive defiance. His rebuffing of Rawlings’ sensible, practical initiatives—such as hiring a plumber to finally repair the perpetually dysfunctional men’s bathroom—is a sharp study in corroded authority.

This theme of compromised efficacy extends to Vic Mackey. Now shackled to a desk, Vic is revealed to be a profoundly ineffective bureaucrat. His supervision of the money-laundering sting operation targeting the financier, Roger Sperling, has been catastrophically lax. He fails to notice that the operation has stagnated, a blindness Sperling exploited to continue his business via intermediaries while warning his clients. Vic’s humiliation is palpable when this failure is exposed. The subsequent renegotiation of Sperling’s immunity deal, masterfully handled by Rawlings, forces Vic to confront his limitations outside his element of street-level coercion. Sperling’s desperate offering of a “big fish”—Alex Kozodav, the “taxi king” of the Russian mob—feels like a narrative salvage operation for a plotline that has stalled.

Denied his usual arena, Vic’s police work is relegated to doing favours for old contacts. One such case involves Cal (Joe Renteria), a restaurant owner concerned for his crack-addicted employee, the teenage boy Cyril (Peter Pasco). This subplot is arguably the episode’s weakest element. The search for Cyril, which escalates when his addiction leads him to a deadly armed robbery, is rushed and feels peripheral. Cyril himself is barely a character, more a narrative device. The subsequent revelation—that Cal torched house of the dealer Fat Benish (Kevin Brown) and confesses to Vic that he was in love with Cyril and planned to finance his sex-change surgery—arrives with a jarring, unconvincing abruptness. It serves less as organic character development and more as a shocking post facto justification for Cal’s actions, lacking the careful groundwork typical of the series’ better writing.

More successful is the continuation of Shane Vendrell’s tragic arc. Attempting to fill the void left by Vic’s desk-bound status, Shane seeks to establish his own extortion racket. His mentorship of the Iraq War veteran, Army Renta (Michael Peña), through the strong-arming of a One-Niner-affiliated pimp named Cromo (Marcus Brown), is a chilling mirror of Vic’s own methods. The episode’s closing shot, where Vic observes Shane meeting with high-ranking One-Niners, powerfully suggests Shane is forging a direct, and undoubtedly doomed, pact with Antwon Mitchell. This thread simmers with menace and promise for future chaos.

The episode provides one significant closure with the return of the body of Ben Gilroy, the disgraced former Assistant Chief and Vic’s friend, who drank himself to death in Mexico. Vic’s insistence on attending the funeral, joined only by Lem, is a poignant moment of loyalty amidst moral ruin. What Gilroy’s widow, Nancy—played by Katey Sagal, wife of the episode’s writer Kurt Sutter—tells Vic after funeral lands with devastating force. Her hope that her husband suffered at the end, for throwing away decades of good career and marriage, serves as a stark, sobering mirror held up to Vic’s own future.

Sutter’s script contains these strong, character-driven scenes—Vic’s farewell to a fallen comrade, Aceveda’s tense departure—yet the overarching plot construction feels frail. Despite solid direction from Paris Barclay, the compression of multiple subplots into a single day strains credulity. Some threads exist purely as thematic echoes. The story of Olivia Kenshaw (Donna Cooper), the HIV-positive prostitute whose rape was caught on tape, serves only to refract Aceveda’s unresolved trauma from his own sexual assault. His initial empathy curdles into a baffling, deeply unsettling conclusion where he is visibly aroused by the evidence tape and steals it from the office. While intended to illustrate the profound and twisted impact of his assault, the scene risks being characterised as exploitative, a shock for shock’s sake that offers little new psychological insight.

Perhaps most interesting in retrospect is a minor subplot often dismissed at the time: the Mackey family’s consideration of joining a class-action lawsuit against vaccine providers, which they suspect may be linked to their children’s autism. Upon the episode’s premiere, this was heavily criticised as endorsing a groundless conspiracy theory. Viewed from today’s perspective, following the COVID-19 pandemic and heightened public scepticism towards pharmaceutical industry practices, the detail reads less as credulous and more as a bleak reflection of desperate people seeking tangible culprits for intangible tragedy—a theme entirely consistent with the show’s world.

Grave is a solid but overstuffed hour of television that bears the marks of a series going through the difficult transition from a completed major storyline (the Money Train saga) into a new phase. It possesses moments of the show’s trademark power, particularly in its study of failure and legacy, but these are undermined by a cluttered narrative, underdeveloped subplots, and a reliance on sensationalistic character beats that feel unearned.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Leodex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9