Product Review

"Conscience is a killer" is the catchphrase that made season five of The Shield the most intense season of the series to date. These 11 tightly scripted episodes comprise the first half of a 21-episode arc, with series creator Shawn Ryan referring to the sixth season (broadcast in 2007) as "Season 5.1." This is The Shield at its finest, culminating in a climactic 11th episode ("Postpartum") that ricochets the series toward a complex range of dramatic complications. Jumping the shark? Not a chance, pal--not when you've got soon-to-be Oscar-winner Forest Whitaker in his outstanding guest-star role as Det. John Kavanaugh, the upright, tormented Internal Affairs cop determined to destroy Det. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his corrupt LAPD Strike Team. As Kavanaugh mounts an obsessive campaign to reveal Mackey's shameful secrets, conscience is a killer in the Strike Team's midst: Ronnie (David Rees Snell) maintains a stoical voice of reason, but as Mackey recruits (and seduces) a savvy lawyer (Laura Harring) to defend against Kavanaugh's harassment, Curtis "Lemonhead" Lemansky (Kenneth Johnson, never better) desperately protects the Strike Team with a sacrificial gambit that provokes Shane (Walton Goggins) to commit a crime that's both shockingly tragic and dramatically ingenious, since it forcefully propels The Shield toward a bold and unpredictable future.