Ellen Gray: No happy endings for 'Shield'

THE SHIELD. 10 p.m. tomorrow, FX.

'HOW MUCH memory has that thing got?"

With those words, spoken into a digital recorder in exchange for immunity, former LAPD Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) last week began to rewind seven bloody seasons of FX's "The Shield."

Beginning at the beginning - though, really, how could it possibly have been the beginning? - when Mackey planned and executed the killing of a fellow cop in the show's very first episode.

There's never been anything coy about "The Shield," which is first and last, a show about a dirty cop, albeit one with more lives than a cat.

And as it wraps up a remarkable run on basic cable tomorrow night with the grimly ironic "Family Meeting," it's not ducking any of the messes Mackey created.

Written by "Shield" creator Shawn Ryan and directed by Philadelphia's Clark Johnson ("Homicide: Life on the Street"), who directed the show's 2002 pilot and who appears onscreen briefly tomorrow night, the finale might well be for "Shield" fans that perfect ending: everything they never thought they wanted.

I'm not, of course, going to tell you who lives and who dies, who's freed and who's punished.

It doesn't matter. Not on "The Shield." Sooner or later, we all die. No one is free. Everyone is punished.

Chiklis, who gets to live inside his most memorable role for an excruciating last hour, is well-served by a script that also pays off for fellow cast members Walton Goggins, CCH Pounder and Cathy Cahlin Ryan, each of whose characters gets a powerful sendoff.

I'll confess to having watched "The Shield" the way I long ago read "War and Peace," skimming the war parts, lingering over the peace.

Ask me too many questions about the Armenians and the Mexicans, or any of the other combatants in the drug-driven wars Vic Mackey and his Strike Force fought and fed off of, and I'm stumped.

Car chases, takedowns - these things have largely left me cold. And while I've respected "The Shield" for its willingness to show the horror wrought by even simple homicides, I wouldn't have watched it for the blood spatter, however realistically arranged.

I loved the seasons with Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, each of whom played characters who pushed Vic's buttons in different ways and helped, perhaps, to justify keeping "The Shield" on past the point where his antics had begun to demand an end, already.

Ryan gave Mackey a private life that included a rocky marriage and eventual divorce (Ryan's own wife plays Corinne Mackey) and four children, two of them autistic and one with a woman (Catherine Dent) who wanted nothing to do with him.

If those children didn't mean everything in the world to Mackey, he at least believed that they did, experiencing fatherhood on that primitive level where hunting and gathering is Job No. 1.

Mackey without children would have been a monster. With children, he was a monster paying child support and willing to do anything to get it.

In "Family Meeting," Ryan gives his monster one last opportunity to show what he's made of, where his loyalties truly lie, where his lies have taken him.

It's not a pretty picture. But then it was never meant to be. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.