TV Review: "Jailbait"--The Shield Season 5, Episode 3, 1-24-2006

They've got some particularly good images of comedic grotesqueness in the opening scenes of the Mexican sex-slave ring storyline. Coming in cold, a businessman called them to report a truck driver dead in his backroom. Big chunky naked Mexican truck driver took too many enhancement drugs, and died in the saddle, right on top of the girl. The image of his big naked dead butt sticking up in the air was irreducibly wrong and funny.

It only got funnier when Officers Julien and Tina got to looking at him and suddenly realized the girl was still alive, trapped under this big corpse. A couple of hours later in the hospital, worried sick about her young brother Pablo who had been kidnapped along with her, the girl STILL had to laugh about the guy dying on top of her.

This storyline also provides the first time that new trainee officer Tina has actually done well on the job. She's incompetent, and about halfway a danger to herself and others- as her training officer Julien politely but insistently points out.

Looking for a young Mexican girl who doesn't look like a cop, Officer Tina went undercover in place of the girl under the truck driver. On the one hand, she's not shown much talent or skill generally at cop work. However, she apparently knows how to deal with men who want to screw her. In the middle of a van full of nasty Mexican gangbangers wanting to hump her, she kept her head. The story about having gonorrhea in her throat was nasty, but effective. She played it just right with her offer to fellate them as requested- just don't be mad if it starts burning later.

Councilman Aceveda, meantime, is back to wanting to get Vic. Ol' Vic is unfinished business for this powerful politician, and having been lured by Kavanaugh into becoming involved, he's obviously planning to stay with it. "This could be our last shot at him, and I'm going to be right here to make sure you don't blow it."

Shane's wife Mara makes her first appearance in a season and a half. She's not so far bringing in any drama of her own here- having done PLENTY of that with her nasty mother and the money train business. She's serving a more utilitarian role at the moment, an alternate voice giving Shane doubts about his devotion to the Strike Team, pushing him to clarify his priorities. As he puts it when she pushes a bit, "Team's one thing, but family's another."

Article Author: Al Barger

Unreformed hawkish Hoosier hillbilly Al Barger runs the still squeezin' down the psychodelic Kentucky moonshine at More Things. What with the paranoid religious visions, the Pentecostal music, visions of God and anarchy running amok and such, somebody …

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