As we hurtle toward the final season of 'The Shield,' my favorite police drama of all time (props to my favorite SHOW of all time, 'The Wire,' but it's almost selling it short to call it a cop show... it's more about the Baltimore drug trade in general), I have high hopes... maybe too high.

Then again, the writers of 'The Shield' have been able to keep the series consistently exciting, still taking hairpin turns into its sixth season and leading The Faithful Viewer down roads he or she did not expect (although I have to say, my girl seems to have an uncanny ability to accurately guess what's going to happen next).

I still stand by my assessment that Vic will be the only member of the original Strike Team left standing at the end of the series. It's just such a fantastic image: Mackey all alone, gun in hand and no one to kill, his work with the LAPD done and his job gone, his family in ruins and no real friends to speak of. A lot of people seem to think Mackey's going to get his comeuppance at the end of the series, but I have my doubts.

To my eye, the whole point of the series is to show that, even in an extreme scenario of cops and criminals (at least to SOME degree) working together to maintain peace, it's just not possible. As Mackey has opined on One Niners, Byz Lats and bangers all over Farmington: "[They're] gonna be shitheads their whole lives." Someone's always waiting in the wings to play King of the Mountain. In the third season....

.... I'll have to write about that later... BACK TO WORK!