In our everyday interactions, we have the choice to act out of fear or love. You get pulled over by a cop, you can curse the officer, the bullshit speed limit, and the other drivers with lead feet. Or you can accept the situation for what it is, realize that the officer is just doing a job to protect others and feed his family, and be thankful you weren't in a life-and-death situation where you needed to speed. Unfortunately, acting out of fear tends to be the default because it's easiest. We're always looking for someone to blame. On each of our shoulders, we have a dueling angel and demon. A cupid and a psycho.
“Cupid & Psycho” shakes things up for our characters in the Barn, and it results in one of the season's most compelling episodes yet. We have a literal shake-up from the leaked IAD Strike Team investigation, resulting in a Vic/Claudette and Shane/Dutch match-up. Aceveda reaps the rewards and gains backing for his run at City Council, even after Vic blackmails Julien into recanting, because “perception is reality.” And after watching Vic's back throughout Terry's murder and the whacky Armenian cocaine theft adventure, Gilroy's had enough and is done watching Vic's back.
But the main themes of this episode deal with love and drugs, namely a poisoned batch of meth called “Cupid” hitting the LA colleges because a bunch of incompetents skipped Walter White's science class. After a car chase mostly edited from the B-roll of America's Most Wanted ends with the driver dead and a conscious burn victim in the trunk, Vic and Claudette track down the manufacturers by alternating investigation methods (Vic's is always more fun). Meanwhile, Dutch and Shane help a grieving widow after her husband's murder case file was lost. We expect Shane to step in and pick the fruit, but Dutch ends up scoring (and canceling his date with Danny with the same excuse she used on him in “Blowback”). Julien and Tomas hit yet another rough patch, as Julien is blackmailed into backing up on his statement for fear of people finding out he's gay. I may have problems with the storyline (mostly because I just saw it as a device designed to raise the stakes against Vic) but Michael Jace delivers a fantastic monologue in the bathroom: “It's this thing inside of me. I push it down, it goes away, but then it comes back stronger. I shove it back again but it just keeps coming back until I don't have the strength to push anymore.” And finally, the Battle for the White Ghetto Woman returns, with all the flip-flopping-restraining-order goodness and juicy Von's supermarket hookups, until it ends with Lamar shooting both Fran and the grammatically-challenged Hooper. RIP (S)HOE.
Canvassing Notes
- The episode-ending music montage (this show does a lot of them, and it does them well.) is scored by The Magnetic Fields with their song “All My Little Words”, a beautiful tune about the limits of relationships and eventual heartbreak. It even matches up nicely to the images (“you tell me you're unboyfriendable” over Julien looking forlorn in the Barn).
- Written by Glen Mazzara (“The Spread”) and directed by Guy Ferland, who would later be one of the show's go-to directors.
- I hate pointing out production gaffes, and this might just be revealing my ignorance when it comes to cars, but are there any models where the lever to open the trunk is on the passenger side?
- “The chief dumped my balls like a coupla doughnuts in his morning coffee.”
- “I thought screwing sheep went out with New Wave.”
- “We hooked up at the Vons, yo!”
- “Shane wants to hit the monster truck rally on Friday.”
- “You can't go through life hating who you are.”
Pre-Cog Report
- We find out that Vic's father was a bricklayer, which is pretty much all we ever get regarding Vic's backstory. We don't even find out his middle name until the second-to-last episode of the series. According to Shawn Ryan, who's taking a page from David Mamet, “backstory is bullshit.” Which can be true, but when you're dealing with such a high-octane character like Vic Mackey, don't we want to know what fuels him?
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