Television Review: Tar Baby (The Shield, S4X05, 2005)

Tar Baby (S04E05)

Airdate: April 12th 2005

Written by: Charles H. Eglee
Directed by: Guy Ferland

Running Time: 44 minutes

In the dysfunctional universe of The Shield, triumphs are fleeting illusions, mere moments of precarious order before the inevitable, brutal reassertion of chaos. Tar Baby, the fourth season's fifth episode, serves as great example of this grim philosophy, presenting a narrative where every hard-won gain is instantly shadowed by a devastating, often innocent, cost. What begins as a procedural hunt concludes as a seismic event that brutally rearranges the balance of power in Farmington, leaving its characters—and the audience—reeling from the consequences of a pyrrhic win.

The episode’s cold open is a deliberate, unsettling feint. A scene depicting Councilman David Aceveda apparently raping a woman, Sara Frazier, is immediately revealed to be well-rehearsed, controlled roleplay. The well-paid prostitute later justifies it as a healthy channel for "energy," but Aceveda brushes it aside with a politician's practised detachment. The truth, however, lies beneath the surface: for Aceveda, this is fundamentally an issue of control, a commodity he lost during his own traumatic sexual assault. His need to reclaim it now metastasises into the political sphere. He inserts himself into an escalating conflict in his former jurisdiction, now an electoral district, publicly confronting Captain Monica Rawling at a town hall meeting over her controversial asset forfeiture program. He is joined, in a moment of stark irony, by gang lord Antwon Mitchell, who leverages the same platform to accuse the program of racism. This political theatre, however, is merely a prelude to the episode's first major, and far more visceral, battle for control.

The catalyst is the murder of Romeo Barnes, a former drug dealer who had turned his life around to become a drug counsellor. Such a target is unusual even by Farmington’s desensitised standards, which piques Vic Mackey’s professional interest. Detective Lemansky provides a crucial lead: Angie Stubbs (Bree'anna Banks), a vulnerable thirteen-year-old girl whose heroin-addicted mother, Hoda (Fylicia King), Romeo had been trying to help. Angie suggests her mother’s dealer may be responsible. To identify this dealer, Vic is forced into a reluctant alliance with Shane Vendrell and Army Renta, who in turn contact Antwon Mitchell. The drug lord swiftly deduces the killer is Freebo (Jeffrey Lorient), one of his own men, and orders his protection whilst simultaneously demanding Shane feed him intelligence on Vic’s investigation. This creates the episode’s central tension: a parallel pursuit where the Strike Team’s official investigation is shadowed by Mitchell’s clandestine counter-operations.

Through relentless pressure and Lem’s dogged work, Vic and his team locate Hoda Stubbs and use her to find the a house used by Freebo as both a dealing spot and a primary distribution hub for Mitchell’s One-Niner gang. Vic delivers this intelligence to Rawling, who organises a massive, militaristic raid. The operation is a spectacular success, proceeding with crushing efficiency. Shane, despite his frantic efforts, fails to warn Antwon in time. A large contingent of One-Niners is arrested, and Captain Rawling basks in the glow of Farmington’s largest drug bust in ten years. Freebo himself escapes the net, but not for long, being tracked down and captured by Vic despite Shane and Renta’s continued attempts at sabotage. It appears to be an unqualified triumph for the new captain and her methods.

Yet, this triumph extracts an immediate and unexpected price. The raid uncovers a meth lab, necessitating a hazardous materials evacuation of nearby buildings. A Black man, tending to his sick young son, refuses to leave and is forcibly, aggressively manhandled by officers. The scene makes Officer Julien Lowe profoundly uncomfortable, prompting him to mutter that something should be done. It is a small, sharp moment that pierces the celebratory mood, a precursor to the far greater moral cost to come.

That greater price is paid with innocent blood. Antwon Mitchell is infuriated not merely by the colossal financial loss, but by the catastrophic blow to his authority—a loss that must be answered with unequivocal brutality. Shane and Renta, having failed him, are not themselves to be punished; they are to be transformed into the instruments of his demonstration. In a chillingly calculated move, Mitchell overpowers them during a meeting, produces the terrified Angie Stubbs, and executes her with Shane's own service weapon. He then presents fabricated evidence and a ready-made narrative framing the two detectives for the girl’s murder. His subsequent message to Shane is stripped of all ambiguity. From now on, he will do whatever Antwon wants. In one stroke, Mitchell reasserts total control, transforms Shane from an aspiring viceroy into a serf, and sacrifices a child’s life as mere punctuation.

Whilst this underworld coup unfolds, Rawling moves to assert control within her own domain. She discovers that detectives Dutch Wagenbach and Claudette Wyms have become inexplicably entangled in a minor case involving Maurice Webster and the forfeiture of his house. By chance, she overhears Dutch admitting to Claudette that he cut a deal with Assistant District Attorney Beth Encardi to secure their careers. Rawling’s response is a masterstroke of bureaucratic dominance. She calls Encardi directly, warning her never to manipulate her people again, threatening to have the Barn stonewall every one of her cases if she does. The prosecutor’s reluctant acquiescence confirms Rawling’s political fortitude, establishing a stark contrast with the bloody control Mitchell exerts elsewhere.

Tar Baby is not without flaws. A rather unnecessary filler subplot involving Donna (Lily Knight), a woman who murdered her elderly stepmother, feels like a generic procedural obligation included purely to meet a case-of-the-week quota. Furthermore, the attempt to leaven the episode’s oppressive grimness with humour—Vic and his crew watching a surveillance tape of Dutch awkwardly dating a Black woman and singing Duran Duran’s "Hungry Like the Wolf"—falls notably flat, feeling tonally disjointed from the surrounding darkness.

These minor stumbles aside, writers Charles H. Eglee and director Guy Ferland deliver an episode that expertly subverts conventional structure. It begins with routine, deceptively familiar elements—a misleading cold open, slowly unfurling political machinations—only to detonate a "wham" ending of staggering brutality that irrevocably alters the Farmington landscape. Whilst the revelation that Antwon Mitchell is no choirboy was never in doubt, the sheer viciousness, duplicity, and strategic genius of his scheme delivers a profound shock. Most crucially, it redefines Shane Vendrell’s trajectory. Having already ventured into the moral darkness in a bid to emulate Vic and carve out his own fiefdom, he instead finds himself reduced to a drug lord’s thrall—a position made all the more galling by the racist sentiments he must now swallow whilst serving a Black kingpin.

The episode’s conclusion stands as one of the most powerful moments in the season thus far. In the silence that follows Angie Stubbs’ murder, a new, more terrifying order is born. Rawling may have won the battle of the raid, but Mitchell’s ruthless counterstroke wins the war for psychological dominance. Shane is enslaved, an innocent is sacrificed, and the audience is left to question every assumption about where power truly resides. With this episode, the series forcefully reclaims the devastating narrative potential of its finest earlier seasons, proving that its capacity for shocking, meaningful consequence remains undimmed.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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