>The Rawlings character was unbelievable to me. Claudette and
>Danny are tough at times, but believable. Rawlings was too
>over the top and having her breakdown at the end doesn't fit
>in with the tough-bitch-win-at-all-costs persona that they set
>up all season.

>The writing this season seemed hell bent to cash in on Glenn
>Close's star status. In prior seasons, The Shield was all
>about the ensemble and while Vic Mackey is the central figure,
>they didn't compromise the story by focusing on him. He was
>tied to every character in the show. With Rawlings, she was
>perched on a ivory tower and all of her policies and ideals
>affected the entire show, but she wasn't really CONNECTED to
>anybody in the show in a real way. Maybe that was the point,
>but it ain't feel right to me.

Almost the entire season focussed on Rawlings and the reprucussions of her seizure policy; the Antonie Mitchell stuff was directly related to it. The only side-plots where Dutch messing with the es Ms. Mackey (which was minor) and some stuff about Aceveda and the call-girl which was dropped waaaay too early.

And despite all the attention given to Rawlings this season, I don't feel like I got to know the character at all. What made her tick? Why was she doing any of this stuff? What was her motivation? All the "character development" was all really basic level stuff: she grew up in Farmington and wants to help it; she hates Mitchell because of her old partner. There was no depth to her charcter. They were banking on Glenn Close's star power to make her interesting, and it never clicked.

The season had one great plot twist: Antoine shoots the girl was Shane and Army's guns. But after that happens, they didn't do anything with it, and then resolved the problem without much conflict. Even with the solution, they didn't explore the reprucssions of Army refusing to take the lie detector test.

I'll give this season a B- on the whole. Still better than most of the other shows on TV, but really dissapointing as whole.