Television Review: Enemy of Good (The Shield, S5X02, 2006)

Enemy of Good (S05E02)

Airdate: 17 January 2006

Written by: Charles H. Eglee & Adam E. Fierro
Directed by: Guy Ferland

Running Time: 45 minutes

The writers of The Shield, led by Shawn Ryan, possessed a singular and often frustrating talent: the penchant for steering characters and plots to the very precipice of a simple, logical, and predictable conclusion, only to yank the narrative rug from beneath the viewers’ feet and continue as if the ground had never shifted. This was both the series’ greatest strength—a source of relentless, gut-wrenching tension—and its occasional weakness, leading at times to convoluted prolongations of conflict. A quintessential example of this dynamic is found in Enemy of Good, an early Season 5 episode which brings to the fore a shocking sin from the pilot, an event all but buried yet which begins, here, to cast its immense, inescapable shadow over Vic Mackey and his Strike Team. The episode wrestles with the immediate consequences of loyalty tested by institutional pressure, whilst simultaneously struggling under the weight of a cumbersome, formulaic subplot that undermines its own potent core drama.

The episode’s primary engine is the fallout from Detective Lemansky’s predicament. Having been caught mishandling heroin, he is subjected to an interrogation by IAD Lieutenant Kavanaugh, who proves a masterful manipulator. Kavanaugh presents Lem with a brutally simple, binary choice: become an informant and wear a wire against Vic Mackey, or end the day behind bars. This manipulation is expertly aided by Councilman David Aceveda, Vic’s former superior, who joins the fray bearing his own bitter history of failed attempts to ensnare Mackey, most notably through the ill-fated federal probe and the unfortunate informant, Detective Terry Crowley. When Aceveda—whether genuinely or performatively—realises Lem was ignorant of the machinations that led to Crowley’s murder, Kavanaugh seizes the opening. He exploits Lem’s inherent decency and corroding conscience to lever him into ‘doing the right thing’. Lem, cornered and morally fatigued, agrees to wear the wire. It is a classic Shield set-piece: a character backed into an inescapable corner, forced to make a choice that promises a clean, if devastating, narrative resolution.

Yet, true to form, the narrative refuses this simplicity. Having Lem make his binary choice so early in the season would be anathema to the series’ protracted, agonising storytelling. Instead, when he meets Vic whilst wired, Lem makes another, more instinctive choice. He provokes a brief physical altercation, disabling the microphone momentarily, and confesses everything to his friend and partner. In this moment, Lem opts for the primal bond of friendship over abstract institutional duty. However, the brilliance of the writing ensures things are not nearly that simple. Before the conversation ends, Lem poses the question that has festered for years – did Vic have anything to do with Terry's killing. Vic’s denial is immediate and forceful, yet the seed of doubt is irrevocably sown. This ‘little worm of doubt’, becomes not just a personal rift but a continuous source of simmering tension, the direct cause of catastrophic dramatic consequences that will define the remainder of the series. The episode’s main plot, penned by Charles H. Eglee and Adam E. Fierro and directed with typical gritty assurance by series veteran Guy Ferland, is thus a great example of deferred payoff and psychological corrosion.

Sadly, Enemy of Good opts to dilute this intense focus with a weak procedural ‘villain of the week’ subplot, a formulaic endeavour that clashes tonally and thematically. This involves ‘Doomsday’, a local Latino thug (played by Lobo Sebastian) who begins violently extorting businesses in Farmington. Vic interprets this as a personal affront to his hegemony over the district’s streets and is eager to reassert dominance. His initial solution is to have Doomsday physically restrained, but when the thug escapes through negligence, he escalates his violence out of sheer spite, resulting in the murder of three Black teenagers. A witness, a middle-aged Black woman from the neighbourhood, initially identifies Doomsday, only to later recant her testimony after someone decapitates her dogs. Faced with this escalation, Vic decides Doomsday must be permanently removed. His solution, however, is uncharacteristically and problematically soft. Rather than the swift, brutal vigilante justice one expects from a man whose defining weakness is a ferocious desire to protect the young, Vic captures Doomsday and hands him over to a corrupt Mexican policeman to be imprisoned on false charges. This resolution—a contrived, ‘clever’ extra-legal deportation—feels anti-climactic and out of character. It transforms a killer of innocent youths from a visceral threat into a bureaucratic problem to be outsourced, undermining Vic’s established moral code, however warped that code may be.

A more promising, though underdeveloped, minor subplot involves Officer Tina Hanlon, now being mentored by her partner, Officer Julien Lowe. This echoes Julien’s own mentorship under Danny Sofer and holds potential for exploring the cyclical nature of guidance and failure within the precinct. Tina makes a critical error during a routine domestic violence call, resulting in her own injury and the use of excessive force during an arrest. Julien’s subsequent chastisement of her is a brief but effective moment, highlighting the burdens of responsibility and the harsh lessons of the street, offering a glimpse of a more interesting character dynamic than the sensationalist Doomsday saga.

At the end of the day, Enemy of Good is a mixed bag. It propels the series’ overarching plot in a clear and compelling direction, masterfully leveraging the buried sin of Terry Crowley’s murder to fracture the Strike Team’s foundation from within. The central drama involving Lem, Kavanaugh, and Vic is superbly executed, a tense psychological duel that trades in moral ambiguity and the terrible cost of loyalty. Yet, the episode is muddied by its insistence on a formulaic and oversensationalist antagonist whose storyline resolves in a manner that feels both implausible and antithetical to Vic Mackey’s established persona. It is an episode of stark contrasts: between the complex, lingering poison of past actions and the simplistic, disposable violence of a weekly threat; between the show’s strength in prolonged psychological warfare and its weakness in resorting to conventional police drama tropes.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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