By Brandon Nolta

Watching THE SHIELD is almost always like taking a bath in mud; you feel dirty right away, and you keep finding grit and dirt long after it’s over. Unlike mud baths, however, this show’s addictive; the stellar writing and acting keep turning over old tropes and clichés as fast as they churn them out. This week’s episode, “Recoil,” was a master class in betrayal, with so many backstabbings, I tossed my notepad away twenty minutes in.

Series creator Shawn Ryan and his crew have embraced the serial drama format with glee, reeling in plot threads and characters from several seasons past for more hijinks. Did you enjoy the heist of the Armenian money train? It’s back, along with the shadow of Antwon Mitchell (Anthony Anderson) and that pernicious cell phone picture of Aceveda (Benito Martinez) doubling some guy’s pleasure at gunpoint. The only way the show could get any more wrapped up in its past would be if all the guys Det. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his Strike Team have capped over the years rose from their graves and came back to Farmington looking for munchies. It’d make a hell of a movie, but I digress.

In this week’s episode, Vic is surfing the s-storm without a board. The city controller he made a deal with to save his job can’t help with the legion of enemies Vic has; Capt. Wyms (CCH Pounder), the only cop in Farmington as tough as Mackey, is determined to give him the boot; and with word out that his time is short, nobody’s feeling cooperative. Even catching the guys that chopped up a house full of Mexican nationals with machetes isn’t helping. Meanwhile, his old friend Shane (Walton Goggins) is cozying up to the daughter of an Armenian mob leader (Franka Potente, in a guest role) who’s getting ready to fill Daddy’s shoes, and the new guy leading the Strike Team actually thinks he’s gonna uphold the law or something. Dutch (Jay Karnes) and Billings (David Marciano) are one-upping each other in the Snide A-hole sweepstakes, and Lem … is still dead.

This is just a partial list of the goings-on in this episode; listing all the plot threads would take longer than actually watching the show. What is obvious, and has been all season (which some rumors say is the last one for this intense show), is that things are coming to a head. There is a sense of reckoning a-coming. And, with Mackey receiving some dirt on his old friend Aceveda from a surprising source, if he just quits poking around the San Marcos mess, the overall impression one gets from “Recoil” (aside from the always-sterling work; I’ve been watching THE SHIELD from the beginning, and I have yet to see an episode where I thought, “Didn’t bring their A-game today”) is that soon enough, everybody’s gonna get theirs. After five seasons of white-knuckle, who’s-getting-it-next drama, it’s been a long time coming. If this is THE SHIELD’s last hurrah, it looks like it’s heading down the right path. If you don’t watch it, you should, and if you do watch it, keep going, ‘cause it’s one of the best damn shows out there.