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Final Season (Take Two)
Saturday, 19 October 2024 01:30 amLast season was supposed to be the end of S.W.A.T., but with the shortened season and offscreen rallying, the show's back for a final final season [S8].
A bus full of kids is kidnapped. While the group makes a public demand for L.A. to pay $400 million towards fixing homelessness, they make a private demand for the cybersecurity software one of the mothers works on, which will help them access a particular bank. They're former French Legion turned mercenaries who are trying to rob their former boss of a bunch of gold bars. Nothing too complicated, really.
Otherwise: Miguel Alfaro is a permanent part of the team now, and after an Albanian grandmotherly type character stops by and points out 'Miko' would be his name in Albanian, he gains a new nickname. I can't blame him for not being thrilled; he's half Albanian and actually had that nickname from his grandmother, which was a narrative sign that no one was going to let it go. A new character was introduced - Devin Gamble. She's going to be dealing with an association of her father killing a cop about ten years previously in an entirely unrelated to her joining the academy event.
A masked group enters a gang stash house and clears out guns, drugs, and kills everyone in the house. It happens within Los Angeles limits or whatever gets a case put in the jurisdiction of SWAT, so they go off to help the sheriff's gang unit, since this masked group has done at least three other attacks before now with a different gang affected each time. The plot twist is that this gang unit is the masked group, on some sort of 'cleaning up the streets' vigilante crusade. They also were unaware that a witness at the last house was left alive, so there's no sweeping this under the rug. Very 'SWAT does things the right way unlike those corrupt law enforcement officials'.
I did like the Deputy Dobbs plot line with Deacon, though. Doberstein "Dobbs" was Deacon's first patrol partner, and he didn't make into the SWAT academy with Deacon. Instead of making Deacon infallible on his end of the not staying in contact bit, he apologized and offered to catch up with Dobbs. It's the sort of thing that feels a bit like a final season where we need to see old friends and apologize without the final season shenanigans of, like, getting kidnapped in a last high stakes rescue mission or something.
SWAT was called in to help with a riot at a prison, which turned out to be a cover for a break out attempt by a particular prisoner. It turned out that he killed the original doctor, disguised himself, was helped out as an injured citizen, and was apprehended with his nurse accomplice in the ambulance. This feels like the sort of episode that explains why I usually haven't done episode-by-episode commentary on this show. I mean, 20 Squad was in a prison where prisoners could attack them 'because cops' and the fight between Hondo and the one just seemed unnecessary. (This isn't to say that swinging the other way would make sense where every prisoner loved SWAT, but in a show where the main characters and favorable view are the police, it comes across a bit like the prisoners are flat, Insert Bad Guy types that can be justifiably attacked because the only thing keeping them semi-civil is the highly controlled prison environment and they'll descend into violent chaos whenever they get the chance.)
It's over 100 degrees [F], and there's a blackout. The named protocol of the episode is activated, so SWAT rolls out to help LA PD patrol the streets. Hondo and Devin Gamble helped out with protecting the mayor because someone had made a credible threat against him; they did stop him, but most of that plot line was Devin getting a chance to talk to Hondo about questioning if joining SWAT was worth it. (E2 featured one of the corrupt sheriff's officers revealing that Devin's father killed a cop in a shootout to Tan and him coming to terms with that. E3 featured someone spraying 'Cop Killer' in red paint on Devin's windshield and distributing her father's mugshot to every car in the parking lot.) While Hondo has stood up for her repeatedly, her character was getting this episode to really acknowledge that this was harder than she had thought it would be.
Otherwise, there's this whole thing with the blackout being orchestrated by a small group that was upset over water rights in a nearby place. (Los Angeles got the water rights almost a century ago, if I remember the dialogue correctly. I can't say I know a lot about the history of fighting over water in California, but I have heard that it's been contentious.) Owens Valley? I think. Their water was going to LA regardless of which place it was, and the one group member said that they were going to drown in their greed. Cue figuring out that the blackout was a cover for getting past security for a particular reservoir, and they were going to use a whole bunch of C4 to blow the dam up. Typical sudden life-or-death high stakes, but 20 Squad saved the day.
It was the sort of thing that was supposed to hammer home that they're the good guys, you know? Nothing too exciting, in a manner of speaking. It did serve as a bit of a distraction from the Sepulveda Protocol. There was some acknowledgement that a lot of people were too poor to have A/C or couldn't help that they were in the blackout affected areas, but it also didn't seem like increased patrols would actually help. Sure, the mayor wanted to go hand out water at a cooling station, but the combination of heat and an endangered child just led to Alfaro losing his cool and hitting someone. (Yeah, Tan and Alfaro talked about healthier coping mechanisms. But an overdosed meth addict was still attacked, and it just seemed like narratively addicts were less than human in this section of the plot.)
Deputy Chief Bennett is two months early for her review of 20 Squad, and Director Hicks is pretty sure it's tied to her being the wife of the prison warden he chewed out [back in E3]. The inquiry for him is within two weeks, or something, and while Bennett is adamant that she's not there to apply pressure regarding Hicks' testimony, she's also kinda clearly there to focus moreso on Hicks than the rest of 20 Squad. (Hicks is an old white man who should have retired ages ago, as she points out in a scene with Hondo.) So, for review day, there's a big case that falls into S.W.A.T.'s lap involving the leader of a cartel coming into the USA from Mexico to find his ex-girlfriend and kill her, and in order to do that, they have to find the DEA agent who hid the ex. So, the DEA agent's partner is high strung from the stress, and the DEA agent in question is tortured for the location of the woman.
The 'previously on' segment included the introduction of Tan's journalist girlfriend, Olivia Navarro. Unless it's just been very easy to miss, I don't think we've really gotten any passing references to her since she was introduced. It turns out that she had made an arrangement to interview the cartel leader (aka The Bloodhound) in an effort to get closure for a story on missing-but-presumed-dead student activists five years earlier, and her being ushered into the totally subtle black van just happened to look like a kidnapping to Tan. There was a smidge of nodding to protecting contact sources as a journalist, but it mostly came across like a plot line to suddenly press on Olivia thinking Tan wasn't really committed to their relationship unless he thought he suddenly needed to save her life. Considering how little we've heard of said relationship, it seemed to come out of nowhere, but Tan did communicate with her in the end. I guess that's his bit of HEA as some plot lines get wrapped up this season.
The episode opens with a doctor at a women's clinic being shot. While this is attention grabbing and instantly sets up a situation to look into whether an anti-abortion person took their protesting too far (especially when a nurse at a different women's clinic is also killed), that's actually not the reason these two characters were shot. They were in a self-defense class with a woman who was gearing up to leave her husband, and the husband went on a spree killing of the people who he found out encouraged his wife. (He shot his wife first, used the group chat history on her phone to find the others, and then was stopped before he killed his two kids.)
It kind of felt like this scenario was more about showing Deacon and Gamble trying to work together despite their differences. It's not a bad message, or something, but it did seem a little on the nose. Devin Gamble did not seem like she had ten years of police experience with how she was asking for coping tips from Deacon for not letting a personal connection to a hot button issue trigger her, and it felt a little to easy for Deacon to be the one to talk about finding empathy for the other person and, like, finding some little point of non-Issue connection with the other person. Gamble is a young Black woman, and I almost wished someone could have had a moment of understanding for why she felt so emotionally invested in this issue amongst a team of mostly cis men. Perhaps the writers didn't want to re-tread old ground, since they mentioned Deacon and Chris going over these differences in the past.
Also: Powell's son was brought up again. (I think it was last season that we found out she gave up a baby for adoption when she was about 16, and she's been reconnecting with him as he's in college.) She wanted to support his indie band dreams by chipping in money to go to Portland for his band to open for a larger, recognized band, but his adoptive parents had to storm into S.W.A.T. headquarters to accuse her of meddling in their family and return the money. It's the kind of thing that feels a little too dramatic for a subplot, but it's topped off by her son making an emotional dig as he left her apartment when she tried to convince him to go back to his parents. (A part of me is a little worried that we're going to jump into another topical issue of the week sort of episode about homelessness or something by having him turn up as an unhoused musician in the next episode.)
This episode was about parenting and family connections. Hondo and Nichelle had a back and forth disagreement over which daycare to put Vivian in; Hondo wanted a place with a panic room and tighter security while Nichelle wanted the least amount of security in favor of free play or something creative. (They ultimately decide to look for another daycare instead of fighting over those two.) Powell got advice from Commander Hicks on trying to reach out to her son and whether it was better to give him time to cool off; Hicks had gone that route with at least one of his children and he definitely advocated for keeping a line of connection even if it felt a bit pushy because he'd let a year or more slip by where the issue eventually turned into the child feeling cut off [he has adult children]. (Thomas ultimately decided to finish out his last semester and go on a summer tour, and he appreciated that Powell kept in contact.) Tan suddenly stopped being the go-to driver just long enough to damage a car and need Gamble to contact her brother to fix it, and it was really more of a way of getting her back into touch with her family.
The main case opened with two university students being shot at, and there was a concern that the woman's kinda hovering Hindu parents had escalated a bit of private investigation into an attempt to remove the unsuitable man from their daughter's life. He helped with creating a website for a Sikh separatist group, but that was the extent of his involvement with the group (with an implication that the parents weren't as opposed to him after finding this out). The shooter was part of a counter-group that went after Sikh separatists with an additional personal connection for the shooter, who lost his mother in a terrorist plane jacking on the part of 1980s era separatists. It's the sort of gloss of an international thing happening within the show's universe that's only briefly intersecting with Los Angeles, so it's not like a lot of details were really necessary. It mostly led to the shooter finding the two main posters on the website and showing up at a Sikh temple, which was kinda tense (1). Faced with the possibility of getting shot, the one poster used his kirpan to cut the shooter's arm and escape. It was foreshadowed in such a way that it felt important, but I'm not really sure if that was intentional or needing to visually explain to the audience where this particular knife was coming from.
(1) Kinda tense is an intentional downplay. This is a show where the team saves the day more often than not, and this is a clearly fictional story. There was never going to be a risk that the people in the temple were going to be injured by the gunman. Times being what they are, watching people hide in their religious building from a gunman also isn't the sort of thing that feels totally calm.
A group has stolen radioactive material and tries to put in a bomb to be set off near a highly populated building in downtown Los Angeles. Obviously, 20 Squad stops this. In less high stakes character development, Alfaro has to reveal his history of developing fighting skills with his mother's not-so-great boyfriends, which is why he has a personally negative association with boxing one-on-one. (Someone else tries to goad him into joining the SWAT boxing tournament, and he has to explain to Powell why he's not interested despite seeming like a pretty good boxer to others.) It didn't really feel like the fall finale until Gamble finally visits her father in prison, who's been trying to call throughout the episode. He dramatically reveals that someone has put a $1 million bounty on a S.W.A.T. member's head, and we see several team members relaxing unaware as the final shot.
❄️ Winter Break ❄️
In a continuation from E8, Hondo opens his door at home, and a rather scared kid is holding a gun. Obviously, it's Hondo who has the bounty out on his head. This particular teen boy is not in any gang like the rest of the people who start to try to find him, and he provides information that ultimately helps S.W.A.T. figure out who ordered this bounty (and accepts Hondo's offer of going to Leroy's mechanic shop instead of getting the harshest sentence possible and a prison sentence). Someone Hondo had arrested in the past had blamed Hondo for everything that went wrong post-arrest, and when he died in prison, his brother took up the mantle of blaming Hondo enough to call for this bounty.
A cartel and a local gang have teamed up to try to smuggle cocaine into the country via the road cases of a Brazilian pop star. However, the gang kinda lost track of which road case they needed; a truck driver gets tortured, a gang member briefly takes a sex worker hostage who was with the truck driver, the backup dancers (and all the techs in the rehearsal space) are briefly hostages, and the backup dancer who actually found the road case barely escapes getting shot in exchange for handing the bag back. Deacon winds up determined to show the sex worker that police - and men in general - aren't all horrible liars.
Otherwise, Hondo's cousin from Houston is trying to hide from a loan shark, and he skips out on Hondo after Hondo pays half ($4,500) and comes up with a repayment plan for the cousin. I have no idea if we're actually going to come back to this, but it seemed like Deacon magically forgot that one season where he got into trouble with a loan shark.
The title is a reference to an Amber Alert. A young girl is kidnapped, and the team does find her. While there is an explicit acknowledgement that the majority of child abductions are custody disputes between parents, this was done by a stranger and introduces a time limit. Seventy-four percent of children abducted and killed are killed within the first three hours, according to the dialogue (*), so several characters get to briefly lose all previous characterization because it's almost three hours.
The other plot things happening were around Gamble. She's been making more of an effort to visit her family, and she apparently visited the day before a raid on a suspected stolen cargo location happened. (Her brother and cousin have supposedly gotten into cargo theft.) Internal Affairs is going to open an investigation, and she's not going to be on active duty during it. I don't know if this is going to be a way to write Gamble off or what's going to pan out on this. After all the narrative time around getting the rank-and-file to stop painting Gamble with a brush based on her father's crime, it kind of feels like the higher-ups are just carrying on with the slow effort to get Gamble out of LA PD.
(*) "FBI research revealed that 74 percent of children abducted and murdered were killed within the first 3 hours of their disappearance." Crimes Against Children Spotlight from November 2011. I don't really feel like extensively researching this topic for any more current statistics, but I did want to double check since a specific number was given.
Alfaro is lightly undercover in order to be inside an establishment to identify someone that 20 Squad is trying to arrest, which goes fine, but he's recognized by someone from a past undercover assignment and addressed with that name. This Albanian crime family is trying to restart up their operation (and owes 3 and a half million dollars to the Russian mob), and Alfaro wants to help locate Uncle Omar. (Five years ago when he went undercover with the Long Beach PD, he was helping to identify and locate the brother, who was the father of the main guy Alfaro knew, Stefan. Alfaro was deemed too close to Stefan, his request for witness protection for Stefan was denied, and he was pulled from the case.)
Omar is desperate to get his hands on money for the Russians, and he needs Alfaro to be the getaway driver for two robberies in one day. Things don't go well: the really tall guy gets shot in the bank robbery, Omar shoots the talkative cousin for his role in fucking up the bank robbery, Alfaro breaks his cover while convincing Stefan that he truly could get WitSec this time, Stefan is arrested (and helps enough to locate Alfaro), there's a rocket launcher, Alfaro tries to stop the rocket launcher guy, and it's just not the finest example of a robbery in both instances. Omar is caught, Stefan is going to be put into WitSec, and things sort of end okay for Alfaro, but I can't say that I blame Hondo and Deacon for their wariness earlier in the day. This was more flying by the seat of his pants than planning, and I'm relieved that undercover assignments truly don't come up often.
Otherwise, we got a bit of an exercise with the SWAT Academy recruits. We've gotten glimpses throughout this season that Deacon kinda regrets handing it over to Tan, though he did think Tan was the best person to take over when he tried to retire. It's not so much not having faith in Tan as it is a lack of control over changes made to the training program. No one seemed bothered by Tan wanting to add in more tech stuff in training, for example, but Deacon did speak up on if cutting half the guys in the first two weeks and pushing them hard was a bit much. He tends more towards broad encouragement and cut one person about every one or two weeks if I remember their conversations correctly; Tan wanted to cut a lot early on and then encourage a smaller number (with more specificity). However, Dobbs was injured in the training exercise we saw in this episode - one of the little explosive things to put on a door to force it open sent chunks of the door flying into him - and we ended with Dobbs out of surgery and upset with Tan for pushing them too hard.
Tan spent time earlier in the episode regretting that he pushed the recruits so hard and remarked that something like that would never happen if Deacon were still in charge. So Deacon shared an old exercise where he was in charge over an accident. They were out in Wherever Canyon doing a climbing exercise, and someone didn't get something about their carabiner right and fell, like, twenty feet. The person broke their leg, but it wasn't really obvious that he had gotten the same severity of injuries or would be facing the same post-recovery life. Dobbs was facing a possible leg amputation, but he ultimately kept that leg. The doctors weren't sure if he'll be able to reach a long-term goal of walking without pain, which means that he may not be able to return to his usual deputy position (his fallback if he was cut from SWAT Academy).
Powell apparently likes hiking, and she takes Gamble off on a Saturday hike to some trail that's supposedly new to Powell. For those who like hiking, there was very little hiking because they accidentally come across someone guarding an illegal marijuana farm, want to rescue one of the trafficked workers, want to rescue all the trafficked workers, and want to avoid being shot. It was mostly something to do while Powell stressed that Gamble needed to fill out her official statement for the Internal Affairs investigation to speed up. In the stress of all this, Gamble got out something about how Powell was codependent with the team and unable to think for herself, which seemed like something to get them together in the end (back at HQ) to apologise.
The title is the name of a ship that different countries have been fighting over who 'owns' the treasure found on it. One team attempts to steal it, since they were the people on the ship that literally found the Santa Clara and feel cheated out of at least a couple million USD. The surprise for 20 Squad was that a second team from the Indigenous peoples of the country that made the treasure were impersonating the embassy team in order to take the treasure for themselves. While several team members empathized with the Indigenous team, they still couldn't let them steal everything from the official embassy team.
In between all that, Tan is upset that Dobbs is trying to sue him for the injury he sustained in the SWAT Academy training. Deacon isn't happy that he might be called as a witness for saying that he thought Tan was pushing the recruits too much. Tan and him get into a fight over this, which mostly seemed stressful instead of really helping anything along here. Someone shared with Deacon that a different precinct had their training charges denote too early, which prompts Deacon to tell Tan and Dobbs about this. (Due to using so many charges in training exercises, the LA PD supposedly used a cheaper brand that recently started having this issue pop up.) It's implied that Dobbs will drop his lawsuit, but it still seemed like Tan and Deacon were going to have to work past all that they said in that fight. (It feels kinda unsatisfying for a final season, but that's partially because we're not keen on tension coming from arguments like this. These characters have supposedly spent seven prior seasons getting along without all this yelling, you know?)
Also: Hicks does some poking around and politicking to figure out what's holding up the last Internal Affairs guy on finishing out the investigation into Gamble. She's cleared of wrong-doing and reinstated at the end of the episode, so that plot line should hopefully be done. (Hicks also gets to show his support to Gamble instead of reserving all his support to conversations with others.)
20 Squad didn't get much warning before they were asked to help with identifying Goliath, an anti-government person who is picking up a hard drive from a locker at a bus terminal. They moved from online poster to being deemed an actual threat after planting an explosive at an FBI field office the month before, so the hard drive is very important to preventing another attack. Deputy Chief Bennett wants 20 Squad to maintain their cover in order to identify Goliath, even after a crew that just robbed a bank shows up and takes everyone in the terminal hostage. (They were hoping to catch a certain bus out of there, but the one guy shot a guard and delayed the leaving process just enough to miss the bus.) Alfaro, Tan, and Deacon each try to determine if their possible suspect is Goliath, and it turns out to be the talkative guy who wanted to know if Tan wanted to rush the guy with a gun.
There's been some time in-universe between last episode and this one because Deputy Chief Bennett has been shadowing a bunch of missions to see how Commander Hicks acts day-to-day. He disobeyed an order to have 50 Squad stand down and ordered them to wait in a maintenance tunnel, so Bennett ordered him out of the mobile command center. She has wanted to have him replaced with someone younger, so it seems like this is a step towards replacing Hicks. Nothing's really been confirmed in this particular episode, so this plot line isn't over with yet. (He's been convinced since he got her husband fired back around S8E3/E4 that she's personally going after him, but she's insisted that she merely wants someone less archaic. Everyone else has been aware that a deputy chief sitting in on so many missions isn't typical, so something's up.)
🏀 March Madness Break 🏀
Deacon is doing a shift with his security company at a football game when two college students - football players themselves - are kidnapped. Initially, there's speculation on whether the millions they're slated to get for Name/Image/Likeness contracts are a factor, but it's more like mistaken identity. The RA of their dorm did a drug deal in their room as some sort of payback against their social class, except he ripped off a drug dealer willing to kidnap and torture the two students in an effort to get his drugs back. Both students live through the torture and will probably recover enough to play again in the future. (There's also a cameo from Whatshisface, a retired football player. Kenny "The Jet" Smith is what's turning up in DuckDuckGo searches.)
Outside of this main case: Powell's son wants to try to reach out to his biological dad, so Powell talks to him so it's not a complete surprise. This takes some talking to other teammates for courage and two attempts, but she does end up talking to him. Andre - who got Hondo involved in a loan earlier this season (and dabbled in selling a protein powder as a get rich quick scheme in another episode) - has gone to see a recruiter for the Marines. Hondo is concerned and not sure if Andre's just interested in the 20,000 USD sign-up bonus thing, but Andre eventually makes a successful case of needing guidance and structure and whatnot. (He's also apparently under 28, as that's the upper limit joining the Marines.)
In-universe, it's about a year after a school shooting that seemed to be alluding to the Uvalde, TX elementary school shooting. A police officer hesitated and didn't enter a school to stop a shooter, and he's kind of reached a breaking point after not making it through the mandatory counseling for a return to active duty. He kills three other officers who were involved and, as perceived by him, threw him under the bus. (I think he claimed there was a miscommunication about something, and he was supposed to be in charge of the those three, so they said that it was all his miscommunication.) He briefly takes the counselor hostage, but he also gets talked down from suicide-by-cop.
Otherwise, this is the episode I referenced in my Fire Country S3 post about a stalking plotline showing up around the same time in both shows. The lady who Deacon met with regarding the college students in E16 asked him out to dinner at the end of that episode. In this one, she fakes a burglary attempt in order to call Deacon; he initially treats it as a possible real case, but he finds evidence that she staged it. He gets mad when she sends a bouquet of roses to his home, which leads to him showing up at her house and loudly stating that she should never contact him or his family again. (She tries to insist that a part of him must want this since he showed up at the house, but hopefully, this is the end of the stalking plotline.)
The case of the week revolved around finding someone who's in the midst of a sex trafficking ring. She reached out to her brother, who got some friends in a biker gang to track her down. This mostly seems to be a way to show how rescue operations should be left to the police, but it's written in such a way that this case may never have been on the LA PD's radar without the biker gang element, since the missing woman was originally from a different state. (She moved to LA to become an actor, and she briefly worked at the night club that the bikers show up at in the very beginning. She's been missing for about a month when 20 Squad comes onto this case.)
The point that stood out was that Deputy Chief Bennett has put together a list of recommended people for a new art theft unit. She talked to enough other higher-ups in the LA PD that they agreed to let Commander Hicks head that unit. He initially downplays the rumor, but in the end of the episode, Bennett shows up to reveal that she has put forward his name. It's phrased as this great promotion, but Hicks isn't unaware that it's a demotion. (The art theft unit is a position more suited to an up-and-coming officer who needed to get experience somewhere.) Hicks wants to go out on his own terms, so he resigns instead of taking this position. It comes across as a heat of the moment thing moreso than the retirement that he's alluded to in the past. Like, it just doesn't feel the same as him knowingly planning to retire.
S8E1: Vanished
A bus full of kids is kidnapped. While the group makes a public demand for L.A. to pay $400 million towards fixing homelessness, they make a private demand for the cybersecurity software one of the mothers works on, which will help them access a particular bank. They're former French Legion turned mercenaries who are trying to rob their former boss of a bunch of gold bars. Nothing too complicated, really.
Otherwise: Miguel Alfaro is a permanent part of the team now, and after an Albanian grandmotherly type character stops by and points out 'Miko' would be his name in Albanian, he gains a new nickname. I can't blame him for not being thrilled; he's half Albanian and actually had that nickname from his grandmother, which was a narrative sign that no one was going to let it go. A new character was introduced - Devin Gamble. She's going to be dealing with an association of her father killing a cop about ten years previously in an entirely unrelated to her joining the academy event.
S8E2: Gang Unit
A masked group enters a gang stash house and clears out guns, drugs, and kills everyone in the house. It happens within Los Angeles limits or whatever gets a case put in the jurisdiction of SWAT, so they go off to help the sheriff's gang unit, since this masked group has done at least three other attacks before now with a different gang affected each time. The plot twist is that this gang unit is the masked group, on some sort of 'cleaning up the streets' vigilante crusade. They also were unaware that a witness at the last house was left alive, so there's no sweeping this under the rug. Very 'SWAT does things the right way unlike those corrupt law enforcement officials'.
I did like the Deputy Dobbs plot line with Deacon, though. Doberstein "Dobbs" was Deacon's first patrol partner, and he didn't make into the SWAT academy with Deacon. Instead of making Deacon infallible on his end of the not staying in contact bit, he apologized and offered to catch up with Dobbs. It's the sort of thing that feels a bit like a final season where we need to see old friends and apologize without the final season shenanigans of, like, getting kidnapped in a last high stakes rescue mission or something.
S8E3: Life
SWAT was called in to help with a riot at a prison, which turned out to be a cover for a break out attempt by a particular prisoner. It turned out that he killed the original doctor, disguised himself, was helped out as an injured citizen, and was apprehended with his nurse accomplice in the ambulance. This feels like the sort of episode that explains why I usually haven't done episode-by-episode commentary on this show. I mean, 20 Squad was in a prison where prisoners could attack them 'because cops' and the fight between Hondo and the one just seemed unnecessary. (This isn't to say that swinging the other way would make sense where every prisoner loved SWAT, but in a show where the main characters and favorable view are the police, it comes across a bit like the prisoners are flat, Insert Bad Guy types that can be justifiably attacked because the only thing keeping them semi-civil is the highly controlled prison environment and they'll descend into violent chaos whenever they get the chance.)
S8E4: The Sepulveda Protocol
It's over 100 degrees [F], and there's a blackout. The named protocol of the episode is activated, so SWAT rolls out to help LA PD patrol the streets. Hondo and Devin Gamble helped out with protecting the mayor because someone had made a credible threat against him; they did stop him, but most of that plot line was Devin getting a chance to talk to Hondo about questioning if joining SWAT was worth it. (E2 featured one of the corrupt sheriff's officers revealing that Devin's father killed a cop in a shootout to Tan and him coming to terms with that. E3 featured someone spraying 'Cop Killer' in red paint on Devin's windshield and distributing her father's mugshot to every car in the parking lot.) While Hondo has stood up for her repeatedly, her character was getting this episode to really acknowledge that this was harder than she had thought it would be.
Otherwise, there's this whole thing with the blackout being orchestrated by a small group that was upset over water rights in a nearby place. (Los Angeles got the water rights almost a century ago, if I remember the dialogue correctly. I can't say I know a lot about the history of fighting over water in California, but I have heard that it's been contentious.) Owens Valley? I think. Their water was going to LA regardless of which place it was, and the one group member said that they were going to drown in their greed. Cue figuring out that the blackout was a cover for getting past security for a particular reservoir, and they were going to use a whole bunch of C4 to blow the dam up. Typical sudden life-or-death high stakes, but 20 Squad saved the day.
It was the sort of thing that was supposed to hammer home that they're the good guys, you know? Nothing too exciting, in a manner of speaking. It did serve as a bit of a distraction from the Sepulveda Protocol. There was some acknowledgement that a lot of people were too poor to have A/C or couldn't help that they were in the blackout affected areas, but it also didn't seem like increased patrols would actually help. Sure, the mayor wanted to go hand out water at a cooling station, but the combination of heat and an endangered child just led to Alfaro losing his cool and hitting someone. (Yeah, Tan and Alfaro talked about healthier coping mechanisms. But an overdosed meth addict was still attacked, and it just seemed like narratively addicts were less than human in this section of the plot.)
S8E5: Human Interest
Deputy Chief Bennett is two months early for her review of 20 Squad, and Director Hicks is pretty sure it's tied to her being the wife of the prison warden he chewed out [back in E3]. The inquiry for him is within two weeks, or something, and while Bennett is adamant that she's not there to apply pressure regarding Hicks' testimony, she's also kinda clearly there to focus moreso on Hicks than the rest of 20 Squad. (Hicks is an old white man who should have retired ages ago, as she points out in a scene with Hondo.) So, for review day, there's a big case that falls into S.W.A.T.'s lap involving the leader of a cartel coming into the USA from Mexico to find his ex-girlfriend and kill her, and in order to do that, they have to find the DEA agent who hid the ex. So, the DEA agent's partner is high strung from the stress, and the DEA agent in question is tortured for the location of the woman.
The 'previously on' segment included the introduction of Tan's journalist girlfriend, Olivia Navarro. Unless it's just been very easy to miss, I don't think we've really gotten any passing references to her since she was introduced. It turns out that she had made an arrangement to interview the cartel leader (aka The Bloodhound) in an effort to get closure for a story on missing-but-presumed-dead student activists five years earlier, and her being ushered into the totally subtle black van just happened to look like a kidnapping to Tan. There was a smidge of nodding to protecting contact sources as a journalist, but it mostly came across like a plot line to suddenly press on Olivia thinking Tan wasn't really committed to their relationship unless he thought he suddenly needed to save her life. Considering how little we've heard of said relationship, it seemed to come out of nowhere, but Tan did communicate with her in the end. I guess that's his bit of HEA as some plot lines get wrapped up this season.
S8E6: Hot Button
The episode opens with a doctor at a women's clinic being shot. While this is attention grabbing and instantly sets up a situation to look into whether an anti-abortion person took their protesting too far (especially when a nurse at a different women's clinic is also killed), that's actually not the reason these two characters were shot. They were in a self-defense class with a woman who was gearing up to leave her husband, and the husband went on a spree killing of the people who he found out encouraged his wife. (He shot his wife first, used the group chat history on her phone to find the others, and then was stopped before he killed his two kids.)
It kind of felt like this scenario was more about showing Deacon and Gamble trying to work together despite their differences. It's not a bad message, or something, but it did seem a little on the nose. Devin Gamble did not seem like she had ten years of police experience with how she was asking for coping tips from Deacon for not letting a personal connection to a hot button issue trigger her, and it felt a little to easy for Deacon to be the one to talk about finding empathy for the other person and, like, finding some little point of non-Issue connection with the other person. Gamble is a young Black woman, and I almost wished someone could have had a moment of understanding for why she felt so emotionally invested in this issue amongst a team of mostly cis men. Perhaps the writers didn't want to re-tread old ground, since they mentioned Deacon and Chris going over these differences in the past.
Also: Powell's son was brought up again. (I think it was last season that we found out she gave up a baby for adoption when she was about 16, and she's been reconnecting with him as he's in college.) She wanted to support his indie band dreams by chipping in money to go to Portland for his band to open for a larger, recognized band, but his adoptive parents had to storm into S.W.A.T. headquarters to accuse her of meddling in their family and return the money. It's the kind of thing that feels a little too dramatic for a subplot, but it's topped off by her son making an emotional dig as he left her apartment when she tried to convince him to go back to his parents. (A part of me is a little worried that we're going to jump into another topical issue of the week sort of episode about homelessness or something by having him turn up as an unhoused musician in the next episode.)
S8E7: Home
This episode was about parenting and family connections. Hondo and Nichelle had a back and forth disagreement over which daycare to put Vivian in; Hondo wanted a place with a panic room and tighter security while Nichelle wanted the least amount of security in favor of free play or something creative. (They ultimately decide to look for another daycare instead of fighting over those two.) Powell got advice from Commander Hicks on trying to reach out to her son and whether it was better to give him time to cool off; Hicks had gone that route with at least one of his children and he definitely advocated for keeping a line of connection even if it felt a bit pushy because he'd let a year or more slip by where the issue eventually turned into the child feeling cut off [he has adult children]. (Thomas ultimately decided to finish out his last semester and go on a summer tour, and he appreciated that Powell kept in contact.) Tan suddenly stopped being the go-to driver just long enough to damage a car and need Gamble to contact her brother to fix it, and it was really more of a way of getting her back into touch with her family.
The main case opened with two university students being shot at, and there was a concern that the woman's kinda hovering Hindu parents had escalated a bit of private investigation into an attempt to remove the unsuitable man from their daughter's life. He helped with creating a website for a Sikh separatist group, but that was the extent of his involvement with the group (with an implication that the parents weren't as opposed to him after finding this out). The shooter was part of a counter-group that went after Sikh separatists with an additional personal connection for the shooter, who lost his mother in a terrorist plane jacking on the part of 1980s era separatists. It's the sort of gloss of an international thing happening within the show's universe that's only briefly intersecting with Los Angeles, so it's not like a lot of details were really necessary. It mostly led to the shooter finding the two main posters on the website and showing up at a Sikh temple, which was kinda tense (1). Faced with the possibility of getting shot, the one poster used his kirpan to cut the shooter's arm and escape. It was foreshadowed in such a way that it felt important, but I'm not really sure if that was intentional or needing to visually explain to the audience where this particular knife was coming from.
(1) Kinda tense is an intentional downplay. This is a show where the team saves the day more often than not, and this is a clearly fictional story. There was never going to be a risk that the people in the temple were going to be injured by the gunman. Times being what they are, watching people hide in their religious building from a gunman also isn't the sort of thing that feels totally calm.
S8E8: Left of Boom
A group has stolen radioactive material and tries to put in a bomb to be set off near a highly populated building in downtown Los Angeles. Obviously, 20 Squad stops this. In less high stakes character development, Alfaro has to reveal his history of developing fighting skills with his mother's not-so-great boyfriends, which is why he has a personally negative association with boxing one-on-one. (Someone else tries to goad him into joining the SWAT boxing tournament, and he has to explain to Powell why he's not interested despite seeming like a pretty good boxer to others.) It didn't really feel like the fall finale until Gamble finally visits her father in prison, who's been trying to call throughout the episode. He dramatically reveals that someone has put a $1 million bounty on a S.W.A.T. member's head, and we see several team members relaxing unaware as the final shot.
❄️ Winter Break ❄️
S8E9: Open Season
In a continuation from E8, Hondo opens his door at home, and a rather scared kid is holding a gun. Obviously, it's Hondo who has the bounty out on his head. This particular teen boy is not in any gang like the rest of the people who start to try to find him, and he provides information that ultimately helps S.W.A.T. figure out who ordered this bounty (and accepts Hondo's offer of going to Leroy's mechanic shop instead of getting the harshest sentence possible and a prison sentence). Someone Hondo had arrested in the past had blamed Hondo for everything that went wrong post-arrest, and when he died in prison, his brother took up the mantle of blaming Hondo enough to call for this bounty.
S8E10: The Heights
A cartel and a local gang have teamed up to try to smuggle cocaine into the country via the road cases of a Brazilian pop star. However, the gang kinda lost track of which road case they needed; a truck driver gets tortured, a gang member briefly takes a sex worker hostage who was with the truck driver, the backup dancers (and all the techs in the rehearsal space) are briefly hostages, and the backup dancer who actually found the road case barely escapes getting shot in exchange for handing the bag back. Deacon winds up determined to show the sex worker that police - and men in general - aren't all horrible liars.
Otherwise, Hondo's cousin from Houston is trying to hide from a loan shark, and he skips out on Hondo after Hondo pays half ($4,500) and comes up with a repayment plan for the cousin. I have no idea if we're actually going to come back to this, but it seemed like Deacon magically forgot that one season where he got into trouble with a loan shark.
S8E11: AMBER
The title is a reference to an Amber Alert. A young girl is kidnapped, and the team does find her. While there is an explicit acknowledgement that the majority of child abductions are custody disputes between parents, this was done by a stranger and introduces a time limit. Seventy-four percent of children abducted and killed are killed within the first three hours, according to the dialogue (*), so several characters get to briefly lose all previous characterization because it's almost three hours.
The other plot things happening were around Gamble. She's been making more of an effort to visit her family, and she apparently visited the day before a raid on a suspected stolen cargo location happened. (Her brother and cousin have supposedly gotten into cargo theft.) Internal Affairs is going to open an investigation, and she's not going to be on active duty during it. I don't know if this is going to be a way to write Gamble off or what's going to pan out on this. After all the narrative time around getting the rank-and-file to stop painting Gamble with a brush based on her father's crime, it kind of feels like the higher-ups are just carrying on with the slow effort to get Gamble out of LA PD.
(*) "FBI research revealed that 74 percent of children abducted and murdered were killed within the first 3 hours of their disappearance." Crimes Against Children Spotlight from November 2011. I don't really feel like extensively researching this topic for any more current statistics, but I did want to double check since a specific number was given.
S8E12: Deep Cover
Alfaro is lightly undercover in order to be inside an establishment to identify someone that 20 Squad is trying to arrest, which goes fine, but he's recognized by someone from a past undercover assignment and addressed with that name. This Albanian crime family is trying to restart up their operation (and owes 3 and a half million dollars to the Russian mob), and Alfaro wants to help locate Uncle Omar. (Five years ago when he went undercover with the Long Beach PD, he was helping to identify and locate the brother, who was the father of the main guy Alfaro knew, Stefan. Alfaro was deemed too close to Stefan, his request for witness protection for Stefan was denied, and he was pulled from the case.)
Omar is desperate to get his hands on money for the Russians, and he needs Alfaro to be the getaway driver for two robberies in one day. Things don't go well: the really tall guy gets shot in the bank robbery, Omar shoots the talkative cousin for his role in fucking up the bank robbery, Alfaro breaks his cover while convincing Stefan that he truly could get WitSec this time, Stefan is arrested (and helps enough to locate Alfaro), there's a rocket launcher, Alfaro tries to stop the rocket launcher guy, and it's just not the finest example of a robbery in both instances. Omar is caught, Stefan is going to be put into WitSec, and things sort of end okay for Alfaro, but I can't say that I blame Hondo and Deacon for their wariness earlier in the day. This was more flying by the seat of his pants than planning, and I'm relieved that undercover assignments truly don't come up often.
Otherwise, we got a bit of an exercise with the SWAT Academy recruits. We've gotten glimpses throughout this season that Deacon kinda regrets handing it over to Tan, though he did think Tan was the best person to take over when he tried to retire. It's not so much not having faith in Tan as it is a lack of control over changes made to the training program. No one seemed bothered by Tan wanting to add in more tech stuff in training, for example, but Deacon did speak up on if cutting half the guys in the first two weeks and pushing them hard was a bit much. He tends more towards broad encouragement and cut one person about every one or two weeks if I remember their conversations correctly; Tan wanted to cut a lot early on and then encourage a smaller number (with more specificity). However, Dobbs was injured in the training exercise we saw in this episode - one of the little explosive things to put on a door to force it open sent chunks of the door flying into him - and we ended with Dobbs out of surgery and upset with Tan for pushing them too hard.
Tan spent time earlier in the episode regretting that he pushed the recruits so hard and remarked that something like that would never happen if Deacon were still in charge. So Deacon shared an old exercise where he was in charge over an accident. They were out in Wherever Canyon doing a climbing exercise, and someone didn't get something about their carabiner right and fell, like, twenty feet. The person broke their leg, but it wasn't really obvious that he had gotten the same severity of injuries or would be facing the same post-recovery life. Dobbs was facing a possible leg amputation, but he ultimately kept that leg. The doctors weren't sure if he'll be able to reach a long-term goal of walking without pain, which means that he may not be able to return to his usual deputy position (his fallback if he was cut from SWAT Academy).
S8E13: High Ground
Powell apparently likes hiking, and she takes Gamble off on a Saturday hike to some trail that's supposedly new to Powell. For those who like hiking, there was very little hiking because they accidentally come across someone guarding an illegal marijuana farm, want to rescue one of the trafficked workers, want to rescue all the trafficked workers, and want to avoid being shot. It was mostly something to do while Powell stressed that Gamble needed to fill out her official statement for the Internal Affairs investigation to speed up. In the stress of all this, Gamble got out something about how Powell was codependent with the team and unable to think for herself, which seemed like something to get them together in the end (back at HQ) to apologise.
S8E14: The Santa Clara
The title is the name of a ship that different countries have been fighting over who 'owns' the treasure found on it. One team attempts to steal it, since they were the people on the ship that literally found the Santa Clara and feel cheated out of at least a couple million USD. The surprise for 20 Squad was that a second team from the Indigenous peoples of the country that made the treasure were impersonating the embassy team in order to take the treasure for themselves. While several team members empathized with the Indigenous team, they still couldn't let them steal everything from the official embassy team.
In between all that, Tan is upset that Dobbs is trying to sue him for the injury he sustained in the SWAT Academy training. Deacon isn't happy that he might be called as a witness for saying that he thought Tan was pushing the recruits too much. Tan and him get into a fight over this, which mostly seemed stressful instead of really helping anything along here. Someone shared with Deacon that a different precinct had their training charges denote too early, which prompts Deacon to tell Tan and Dobbs about this. (Due to using so many charges in training exercises, the LA PD supposedly used a cheaper brand that recently started having this issue pop up.) It's implied that Dobbs will drop his lawsuit, but it still seemed like Tan and Deacon were going to have to work past all that they said in that fight. (It feels kinda unsatisfying for a final season, but that's partially because we're not keen on tension coming from arguments like this. These characters have supposedly spent seven prior seasons getting along without all this yelling, you know?)
Also: Hicks does some poking around and politicking to figure out what's holding up the last Internal Affairs guy on finishing out the investigation into Gamble. She's cleared of wrong-doing and reinstated at the end of the episode, so that plot line should hopefully be done. (Hicks also gets to show his support to Gamble instead of reserving all his support to conversations with others.)
S8E15: Hostages
20 Squad didn't get much warning before they were asked to help with identifying Goliath, an anti-government person who is picking up a hard drive from a locker at a bus terminal. They moved from online poster to being deemed an actual threat after planting an explosive at an FBI field office the month before, so the hard drive is very important to preventing another attack. Deputy Chief Bennett wants 20 Squad to maintain their cover in order to identify Goliath, even after a crew that just robbed a bank shows up and takes everyone in the terminal hostage. (They were hoping to catch a certain bus out of there, but the one guy shot a guard and delayed the leaving process just enough to miss the bus.) Alfaro, Tan, and Deacon each try to determine if their possible suspect is Goliath, and it turns out to be the talkative guy who wanted to know if Tan wanted to rush the guy with a gun.
There's been some time in-universe between last episode and this one because Deputy Chief Bennett has been shadowing a bunch of missions to see how Commander Hicks acts day-to-day. He disobeyed an order to have 50 Squad stand down and ordered them to wait in a maintenance tunnel, so Bennett ordered him out of the mobile command center. She has wanted to have him replaced with someone younger, so it seems like this is a step towards replacing Hicks. Nothing's really been confirmed in this particular episode, so this plot line isn't over with yet. (He's been convinced since he got her husband fired back around S8E3/E4 that she's personally going after him, but she's insisted that she merely wants someone less archaic. Everyone else has been aware that a deputy chief sitting in on so many missions isn't typical, so something's up.)
🏀 March Madness Break 🏀
S8E16: Hail Mary
Deacon is doing a shift with his security company at a football game when two college students - football players themselves - are kidnapped. Initially, there's speculation on whether the millions they're slated to get for Name/Image/Likeness contracts are a factor, but it's more like mistaken identity. The RA of their dorm did a drug deal in their room as some sort of payback against their social class, except he ripped off a drug dealer willing to kidnap and torture the two students in an effort to get his drugs back. Both students live through the torture and will probably recover enough to play again in the future. (There's also a cameo from Whatshisface, a retired football player. Kenny "The Jet" Smith is what's turning up in DuckDuckGo searches.)
Outside of this main case: Powell's son wants to try to reach out to his biological dad, so Powell talks to him so it's not a complete surprise. This takes some talking to other teammates for courage and two attempts, but she does end up talking to him. Andre - who got Hondo involved in a loan earlier this season (and dabbled in selling a protein powder as a get rich quick scheme in another episode) - has gone to see a recruiter for the Marines. Hondo is concerned and not sure if Andre's just interested in the 20,000 USD sign-up bonus thing, but Andre eventually makes a successful case of needing guidance and structure and whatnot. (He's also apparently under 28, as that's the upper limit joining the Marines.)
S8E17: The Enemy Within
In-universe, it's about a year after a school shooting that seemed to be alluding to the Uvalde, TX elementary school shooting. A police officer hesitated and didn't enter a school to stop a shooter, and he's kind of reached a breaking point after not making it through the mandatory counseling for a return to active duty. He kills three other officers who were involved and, as perceived by him, threw him under the bus. (I think he claimed there was a miscommunication about something, and he was supposed to be in charge of the those three, so they said that it was all his miscommunication.) He briefly takes the counselor hostage, but he also gets talked down from suicide-by-cop.
Otherwise, this is the episode I referenced in my Fire Country S3 post about a stalking plotline showing up around the same time in both shows. The lady who Deacon met with regarding the college students in E16 asked him out to dinner at the end of that episode. In this one, she fakes a burglary attempt in order to call Deacon; he initially treats it as a possible real case, but he finds evidence that she staged it. He gets mad when she sends a bouquet of roses to his home, which leads to him showing up at her house and loudly stating that she should never contact him or his family again. (She tries to insist that a part of him must want this since he showed up at the house, but hopefully, this is the end of the stalking plotline.)
S8E18: Exploited
The case of the week revolved around finding someone who's in the midst of a sex trafficking ring. She reached out to her brother, who got some friends in a biker gang to track her down. This mostly seems to be a way to show how rescue operations should be left to the police, but it's written in such a way that this case may never have been on the LA PD's radar without the biker gang element, since the missing woman was originally from a different state. (She moved to LA to become an actor, and she briefly worked at the night club that the bikers show up at in the very beginning. She's been missing for about a month when 20 Squad comes onto this case.)
The point that stood out was that Deputy Chief Bennett has put together a list of recommended people for a new art theft unit. She talked to enough other higher-ups in the LA PD that they agreed to let Commander Hicks head that unit. He initially downplays the rumor, but in the end of the episode, Bennett shows up to reveal that she has put forward his name. It's phrased as this great promotion, but Hicks isn't unaware that it's a demotion. (The art theft unit is a position more suited to an up-and-coming officer who needed to get experience somewhere.) Hicks wants to go out on his own terms, so he resigns instead of taking this position. It comes across as a heat of the moment thing moreso than the retirement that he's alluded to in the past. Like, it just doesn't feel the same as him knowingly planning to retire.
