Mackey's desperate attempt to stay in the game: The Shield

Vic Mackey is now very close to the "hearing" that will knock him into retirement - he knows the deal has been fixed - and in one last desperate effort to keep his job as head of the strike team he vows to find the Salvadorans who chopped up 12 Mexican gangsters. Pretty gruesome stuff. Mackey does manage to capture two, whom he grimly delivers the Mexicans for vengeance, but this seems not nearly enough to placate Captain Wims and let Mackey/Chiklis stay in the game. Not sure where he's going to head next in the final episode of Season 6 of "The Shield." This one, as usual with this series, includes a lot of strands. Shane, paired with Ronnie, is trying to bust the Armenian mobsters (but we know, and Mackey suspects, that Shane has something else going - in fact he's being paid by the Armenians to protect them from rival gangs). Also, Detective Billings seeking emotional vengeance against his partner, Dutch, by leading him to believe the hot young officer is interested in him. And finally there's the pursuit of the councilman, Acevedo, who Mackey believes interferes too much and may have exposed an undercover agent. How can these strands all tie together in one more episode? They probably can't. The Shield moves so fast though that you don't particularly worry about the finer plot points. Good to see in this episode that the focus coming back to Mackey. As noted in many other posts here, Mackey/Chiklis is the dubious heart of this series. An emblematic scene for The Shield is Mackey storming into an alley, about to make a bust, with his team members following in his wake, blurred and indistinct.