10 Bad Episodes Of Otherwise Perfect TV Shows

Although it never had the epic, sprawling ambitions of something like The Sopranos or The Wire, there are few shows as consistently hard-hitting and entertaining as The Shield was over the course of its seven seasons. One of the show’s greatest strengths was the writers allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions on the characters and themes, rather than ramming any moral lessons down our throats. Basically it treated us like intelligent people rather than the blithering, unwashed masses we actually are.

Co-Pilot goes against this somewhat. Coming in the middle of the second season, the writers bizarrely decided to do a flashback episode that explores the events preceding the first episode, focusing on how anti-hero Vic Mackie and the rest of the Strike Team formed. This might have had potential, but for a show that was so typically so tightly written, there are a number of plot holes that anyone who's actually watched the first episode will pick up on. For example, the first episode implies the Strike Team had been together for a long while, certainly before Aceveda had arrived at Farmington - but Co-Pilot tells us they were only formed as he took over. This isn’t just a harmless blunder - it actually messes up the entire Mackie/Aceveda relationship that drives the first three seasons of the show.

The odd placement of this episode in the series order doesn't help either. The second season featured the excellent Money Train arc in which Vic and his boys' efforts to steal from the Armenian Mafia gets them in deeper and deeper crap. The storyline was ingeniously plotted and it draws you in like the best television does, with suspense with every episode - until this stinker comes along, and the dramatic momentum is stopped dead in its tracks. Co-Pilot just feels like an unwelcome, wholly unnecessary distraction and is one I tend to skip on re-watching the series.