Note: You may be wondering why I’m posting a random essay on The Shield on a random day with a Seinfeld frame. Well, I accidentally scheduled my weekly Seinfeld essay on the wrong day and then couldn’t delete the original post, so I thought, to hell with it, post an essay I had lying around.
Claudette, captain of the police precinct in Farmington, calls in officer Julian to inform him that she’ll be moving to arrest former cop Vic Mackey and his co-conspirator Ronnie Gardocki. She knows Julian was team members with them and may still retain a personal loyalty, so she offers him the choice to join the arrest or stay out of the process all together. In any other show – indeed, in any other season of The Shield – this scene would be a mechanical plot movement. We know pretty well at this point that Julian not only fucking hates Vic, but is a responsible cop who follows the law as best he can. That he would join in Claudette’s investigation is a given for any reasonable viewer who made it this far. With the context of the situation and Claudette’s character, it’s emotionally vivid.
Claudette Wyms is a moral absolutist. She believes fully in Right and Wrong and that one must act righteously – punish the wicked and reward the good. Her journey through the show is one of discovering that the universe doesn’t give a damn about what you think of it. The clear and obvious mistake that moral absolutists make, over and over and over, is thinking that saying something is evil will solve the problem. This is the exact mistake Claudette often makes early in the series; verbal condemnation only works on people like Dutch who care deeply about how you feel, and even people like that have their limits (as Dutch proves in season four, when he tries spinning a deal behind her back to get them back in the rotation after she burned her bridges with the DA).
Her understanding of power becomes more pragmatic. She has grown to understand that people will only ever do what they want to do; as Dale Carnegie once said, if you want people to do what you want, you have to give them what they want, and most of the time, that’s to be treated like an intelligent and decent person. Claudette knows she can’t make Julian do anything he doesn’t want to do, and even if she could, he’d probably be less inclined to support her in the future, so she offers him a choice. And not a choice between doing the right thing and persecution – a real choice, where she’ll accept the outcome and work around it.