Television Review: Riceburner (The Shield, S3X12, 2004)

Riceburner (S03E12)

Airdate: May 25th 2004

Written by: Adam E. Fierro & Scott Rosenbaum
Directed by: Scott Brazil

Running Time: 45 minutes

The 1990s witnessed a fascinating, if ultimately flawed, revolution in US broadcast television crime drama. Series like NYPD Blue broke ground by presenting a grittier, more “edgy” aesthetic—swearing was bleeped, nudity was suggested, and moral ambiguity was briefly flirted with—only for most to succumb, over time, to the comforting rhythms of the conventional, by-the-numbers procedural. By its third season, FX’s The Shield was itself in danger of lapsing into a similar routine, a peril nowhere evident in the technically solid but profoundly unremarkable and forgettable episode, Riceburner. While the series had built its reputation on vicious energy and corrosive moral complexity, this installment feels like a perfunctory exercise, going through the motions of its signature darkness without delivering the requisite punch or insight.

The primary narrative engine involves the Strike Team’s pursuit of Charlie Kim (played by an uncredited Johnny Nguyen), the ruthless chief enforcer for the Korean-American “K-Town Killers” gang. A poorly executed raid goes catastrophically wrong; Kim escapes in a hail of gunfire that kills a young boy and critically injures a girl. This tragedy fuels Vic Mackey’s signature righteous fury, making him determined to bring Kim down by any means necessary. Meanwhile, Captain Aceveda attempts a more diplomatic strategy, leveraging his old college friend Thomas Choi (Daniel Dae Kim), an influential figure within the Korean community. Choi explains the community’s deep-seated wariness of police cooperation, viewing gangs like the K-Town Killers as a necessary, if ugly, bulwark against predation from Black and Latino gangs. This set-up offers a glimmer of the series’ potential for examining urban ethnic politics, framing the Korean community as an isolated enclave forced into pragmatic, tragic alliances.

Vic’s method predictably bypasses such nuance. He strong-arms a old informant, Taylor Orrs, who directs him to Tracy Pok (Lydia Look), a forger specialising in counterfeit documents. Mackey visits her shop and, with minimal persuasion—a blend of implied threat and the promise of police indifference—secures her cooperation. She later provides a tip on Kim’s location, but the Strike Team arrives to find an empty nest. Vic’s immediate, paranoid assumption is that Pok double-crossed him, but she logically argues that betraying the police would be against her own interests. This leads Vic to the correct, more intriguing conclusion: the leak was Choi, protecting his community’s perceived interests from within. When Vic informs Aceveda, the captain’s response is a brutally pragmatic, non-diplomatic campaign of harassment—launching a series of punitive raids on Korean businesses for minor administrative violations. The pressure works, and Kim is captured. This resolution, while efficient, feels mechanical, reducing a complex socio-cultural stand-off to a simple equation of applied force.

A parallel procedural storyline follows Dutch and Claudette investigating a string of bizarre armed robberies committed by a visibly terrified woman. The description of her revolver leads them to her husband, Hank Deets (Douglas Roberts), a man with a documented history of domestic abuse. The detectives initially assume Hank is coercing his wife Angie into crime, but her friend reveals the grim truth: Angie was robbing stores to fund her escape from his violent tyranny. Before she can succeed, her story ends in a bleak, meaningless death—shot by a callous store owner (Yvans Jourdain) who then demands her body be removed so he can reopen for business. While intended as a gut-punch of tragic irony, the subplot plays out with a hollow, exploitative rhythm, feeling less like an organic tragedy and more like a contrived exercise in despair.

A more minor, almost farcical plot thread involves two valuable chairs stolen from the police commissioner’s wife. The retrieval duty falls to Julien and Danny, who are later “assisted” by the lecherous informant Orrs, who uses the opportunity to clumsily hit on a vastly amused Danny. The chairs are discovered in the possession of an elderly man who bought them for a pittance after the thieves failed to find a buyer. Julien retrieves them for a mere ten dollars—a thousandth of their value—in a resolution so neat and inconsequential it borders on satire, highlighting the episode’s lack of substantive narrative weight.

Simmering in the background are the personal crises of the Barn. Shane announces his Vegas wedding to Mara, while the Mackey family is rocked by their daughter Megan’s diagnosis with autism. This places severe financial strain on Vic and Corrine, who delivers an ultimatum: he should quit the force to become a full-time carer for their two autistic children, not her. In a desperate move, Vic proposes to the Strike Team that they use money from the illicit Armenian “money train” stash to pay for therapists. His plan to launder it involves framing low-level criminal Neil O’Brien with marked bills—a scheme that succeeds perfectly when the US Treasury dismisses O’Brien’s true story of finding the cash as an obvious lie. Despite this tactical victory, which leaves the team triumphant and their immediate problem ostensibly solved, the Strike Team votes against Vic using the funds. This moment of collective, pragmatic betrayal amidst personal turmoil is one of the episode’s few genuine sparks, a reminder of the team’s fragile, self-interested loyalty.

Written by Adam E. Fiero and Scott Rosenbaum and directed by the reliably competent Scott Brazil, Riceburner ultimately functions as pure filler—an episode the series’ overarching narrative could easily dispense with. While some commentators have retrospectively viewed the hunt for Charlie Kim and the Korean community’s reluctance to cooperate as a rough allegory for the hunt for Saddam Hussein in post-invasion Iraq, such a reading feels intellectualised. Within the episode itself, these themes are rendered shallow and under-explored. Daniel Dae Kim, an actor poised to demonstrate his considerable charisma on Lost, is wasted here in a one-note, functional role. Similarly, the female robber storyline, rather than offering a poignant critique of domestic entrapment, plays like a cheap and uninspired attempt to garner pseudofeminist points from a “politically correct” viewership, its tragedy feeling unearned and manipulative.

However, the element that truly sinks Riceburner is its abysmally flat and uninspired dialogue. The crackling, visceral exchanges that typically define The Shield—whether they are Mackey’s brutal pronouncements, Claudette’s weary wisdom, or the team’s darkly comedic banter—are entirely absent. It is this lack of linguistic verve, more than any narrative shortcoming, that renders the episode one of the series’ most regrettably forgettable entries.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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