...that the episode where Vic shot one of his own in the face for being a spy sticks out like a booger. But that can also be explained away as the development of his character, too. Hence his response to Shane's internecine behavior when Shane offed Lem.

I can get on board with people who see Jack Bauer as all about fascist propaganda, but not Vic Mackey. No way. Vic Mackey would eat Hack Bauer for breakfast and fart little Keiffer's all week long.

Vic Mackey is pretty real, if surreal in his stamina. But I've seen real people put forth surreal efforts in their work, so I can believe that Vic Mackey's level of focus, drive, intelligence and raw cunning exist somewhere in law enforcement.

But Jack Bauer's character is so obviously scripted out of the Whitehouse it's not even funny. Anymore.

I wonder what Jack Bauer would do if he suddenly realized that the black box from the doomed Pentagon airliner was 230 feet higher than the Pentagon itself at the time of impact? Or if it's not physically possible for two 110 story buildings to pancake in on themselves so that all of their steel pillars ended up in neat, 30 foot or less chunks of scrap metal headed for China? Hmmm? Would Jack be willing to take out a President from the other team the way the other team so enthusiastically took out the President from the Progressive camp?

Jack Bauer is "Puffy the Brownskin-People Slayer." How Donald tolerates this kid's work anymore is beyond me. It is whoring on a scale that boggles the mind of any feeling human being.

I, too, was raised Catholic. I grew out of it. The breaking point was when my sister, who married a man that way too late she discovered was a violent schitzophrenic, tried to get an annullment of her marriage from the Church. She was told she had to be rich, pay for a Catholic lawyer to argue it in Vatican City, yadda yadda yadda, and she walked out of the Church forever. And I followed.

It's not being a "lapsed Catholic," as the Church likes to call them, assuming that the little lost lamb will be back. After all the scandals and discoveries of hypocricies, it's more like "collapsed Catholic."

However, it seems that some of that ol' time religion has stuck. You, and a few other people like RealName, have problems with antiheroes. You seem to be saying that Vic Mackey isn't suffering enough for his sins against humanity. And I remember that long before the evangelical Protestants started criticizing popular culture, the Catholic Legion of Decency could declare seeing certain movies as "morally objectionable" and a sin if a Catholic went to them.

I'd be very cautious about declaring The Shield as a morally objectionable work. Comparing this show to genuine vigilante propaganda - most of the collected works of Sylvester Stallone, for instance - it comes off as practically child-friendly.

By the way, one of the classic antiheroes of the 1960's was aired recently on cable; Hud. Did you think that film was immoral, too?

Mackey did get disappointingly nice after the first couple of episodes. And his wife was a near-accomplice in the pilot. Next thing we know she's run off with the kids because . . . because . . . Wait, give me a minute. Because it made a good season finale?

See, the TV powers don't think we can handle a series lead who isn't likeable in some way. So they had Vic save a few babies and crack-whore moms, so that we would think it's OK for him to beat, torture and murder suspects.

By the way, if you're one of the people who say, "Sure, Vic does bad stuff but boy I sure would want him with me in a fight" -- well, you better hope you stay on his good side.

Well, what commissar or camp commandant didn't think what he was doing was in a good cause? How we act is what counts. As a Klingon character once said on Star Trek: "Motives? Who cares about motives? Humans, perhaps. What mattered was that on that day you acted like a Klingon." Or, if you want to invoke the philospher Karl Marx, "a lion is what a lion does." Being good is not about intentions or motivations or "thinking you are acting in a good cause." It's about acting morally. The Buddha and Confusius nailed that one way back. I'm tired of this dopey Protestant idea that if you are washed in the Blood of the Lamb your actions are secondary, the whole justification by faith nonsense. I was raised a Catholic--and being Catholic and "loving Jesus" wasn't close to enough to get to through the Pearly Gates. No, you had to DO stuff. Like live like Christ. Americans are not the good guys, cops are not the good guys, unless they act rightly and do good. The rest is excuses.

The Shield "jumped the shark" at the end of the series pilot and I've never heard any of its fans ever talk about this. The tension in the program often involves wondering what Vic will do when the powers that be close in on him. Well... judging from the pilot, I have to think that "shoot them in the face" is an obvious answer. In the pilot episode Vic kills a fellow officer in cold blood, why? Because the cop was about to turn him in? Because he had evidence of corruption? NO! Because he'd been planted in the unit as a spy. The central character is established at the end of the first episode as a psychotic cop killer. Then we're expected to feel sympathy because he and his wife aren't getting along? Hey! Why not... shoot her in the face! Another detective getting a bit nosy? Um... shoot her in the face, that might work.

The series creators wanted to have a series revolve around a character like the one Denzel Washington played in Training Day, but they quickly realized that this is not going to work in series TV. So, they immediately turned to the model Dennis Franz created in NYPD Blue, except that character would never murder another cop (or even a criminal for that matter) in cold blood out of a need for nothing more than convenience.

The Shield is built on a flawed foundation. It is as if its fans bracket off that pilot and set it aside as an abberation.