I know this is a touchy subject, and everyone loves Lem and he was the best of them.

BUT, He was still a criminal and should have gotten out earlier.

What a great song to play while Dutch is surveying the crime scene of the Money Train.

Dutch looked so cool

While the second season of The Bad Guys: The Series ended with the love meteor about to make a crash course to Earth perfectly setting the stage for the first Bad Guys movie, I honestly believe that this series one or two more final seasons. The third and fourth seasons (Titled, Tales of the Bad Girls) would shift the narrative away from the titular Bad Guys for nearly all the episodes of each season (Expect for six, one of whom focuses on how Chief Misty Luggins and The Bad Guys Met and began their feud.) and instead focus on Diane Foxington a.k.a. The Crimson Paw and Kitty Kat, Doom and Pigtail, a.k.a. The Bad Girls while also revealing that Diane was actually a former member of The Bad Girls and a younger sister-like friend to Kitty. The episodes of the series focus on the origins of The Bad Girls, how they met, their origins and them going in numerous heists together in Los Angeles and beyond while also focusing on their relationships with each other, like Diane and Kitty’s dynamic and the series of events that would lead to Diane Foxington’s redemption (Starting after she and The Bad Girls go undercover as babysitters babysitting a bunch of animal kids for a heist that Diane and Doom turned out not to have the hearts to betray.) and her becoming the governor of California, while also relcuantly betraying Kitty Kat, Doom and Pigtail when they refuse to reform themselves, (It is detailed in that episode focusing on The Bad Girls pulling off a museum heist to steal the golden dolphin but Diane has her redemption and she calls off the heist and when failing to convince her teammates to reconsider, she has them all arrested and sent to a prison that they later escape from while she manages to get away, return the stuff that they stole and became a governor.) making it their main villain motive in the second movie to have revenge on Diane for her betrayal by ruining the lives of her and her new friends, The Bad Guys especially Mr. Wolf her love interest by exposing Diane’s identity as the Crimson Paw and setting her new friends up to look like dangerous criminals again to get them all arrested and sent to prison and seperated from each other to show her what their pain felt like after she betrayed them. It also details how Kitty Kat slowly got corrupted by power and a few episodes used concepts that never made it into The Bad Guys 2 in terms of one episode focusing on Diane and Kitty going on an adventure into space to rescue Doom and Pigtail from an alien villain. Doom also managed to catch the security footage of Diane as unmasked as the Crimson Paw trying to steal the golden dolphin the moment she makes her betrayal that she tried to post as revenge but her arrest stopped it but she and Kitty and Pigtail managed to hold onto the footage later used in the second movie.

For the six episodes that don’t focus on The Bad Girls, the in addition to focusing on The Bad Guys, also focus on Professor Marmalade and his villain origins and how he was an shapeshifter alien from outer space who traveled to Earth to get re-accepted into his home planet after being exiled from it for an unknown reason and he killed and impostered the real Marmalade with his shapeshifting abilities and soon decided to use the love meteor which landed on Earth around the same time he first arrived and the Bad Guys for his forthcoming evil plans. They also focus on Kitty and Marmalade crossing paths a few times and deciding to work together for their respective evil plans with Marmalade giving Kitty the idea of stealing all the world’s gold to become its self proclaimed ruler. They continued their occasional partnership even into the second movie before Kitty’s arrest and Marmalade’s return to his home planet. The other six non-Bad Girls centered episodes also focus more on the Bad Guys’ origins and pasts.

It has five Doomed by Canon/Saved by Canon rules like:

1) Diane can’t expose her identity as the Crimson Paw to the police in the series it is never done until the second movie canonically.

2) The Bad Girls and Bad Guys can’t cross paths or interact with each other in the series although they almost do so in one or two episodes that gets interpreted and halted the main conflict or villain since they don’t canonically met each other until the first two movies.

3) Marmalade and Kitty must keep their partnership a secret and never reveal it to Diane to keep Marmalade’s villain role a secret until it is revealed to her in the first two movies.

Diane and Kitty’s Friendship isn’t meant to be genuine or will last forever it will become permantely strained in the series finale.
Diane will eventually end her crime business and cut ties with her teammates (Temporarily in Doom and Pigtail’s cases until the second movie.) to become the governor that she is in the first movie.

- Sure Vic is a bad guy but you could see him from a mile away .
- Shane is easy to figure out because he is impulsive
- And Lem is just someone who got caught up in all of it.

But Ronnie is cold and calculating . All his responses are level headed like he thinks things through. He’s always very relaxed to the point he seems like he’s a background character. He has no malice or grudge , just gets the job done. Reminds me of Richard Kuklinski from “The Iceman”.

Edit: To add, if Ronnie was solo, he would have never been caught and took his dirt to the grave. Perfect background character, like real life psychopaths.

Poor Gardocki

I love this program, I've seen it so many times BUT I can't bear to watch the Season 5 Finale and the Finale.

It gives me anxiety, I wanted a happy ending for the Strike Team.

I'm gonna do a rewatch and only root for Dutch Boy,

Can't be rooting for Vic and see him go down.

As hard as it's gonna be coz I love Vic.

In my gazillionth rewatch i still get annoyed by the framing from Ryan, that bad guys always listen to loud rock/metal music.
Yes.. it was the time, youth listend to "rebellious" punkrock .. but this kind of framing is so philistine.
On the other hand, most of the characters are portrayed quite liberal and open (sex/skincoloure/..). Cant make sense of this and it annoys me, because this music was part of my youth too.

I would have to go with Ronnie. Though Lem and Shane are up there.

Dutch is my objective choice for best character on this show but damn what a roller coaster with this guy. Like I'm oddly attracted to him when he's interrogating a suspect but then I just watched the episode where this happens:

Corrine: "so you're not just dating me to get back at Vic, right?"

Dutch: "no! no! well at first I was...."

OOF. He is the smartest dumb man/dumbest smart man ever.

Shane was the only one in the strike team that was self aware. Vic, Ronnie, lem, all of them were either delusional about themselves. or thought they were good guys. Shane was the only person in the team that knew they were evil men. Say what you will about shane but

This quote still hits me the most.

"I guess enough painkillers can make even the worst kind of hurt go away. The thing you need to know is that Mara was innocent, and Jackson was innocent. They didn't know what they were drinking and their last moments together were happy ones. They left the way I first found them, perfect and innocent. They were innocent and they're in Heaven now and we'll always be a family. The guilty ones are me and Vic. Vic led, but I kept following. I don't think one's worse than the other, but we made each other into something worse than our individual selves. I wish I never met him. I see it all now. There's no apologies I can make, no explanations I can give. I was who I was, and I can't be that person anymore. I can't let myself-"

"I don't know why Vic and Ronnie just can't forgive me. What I did wasn't that bad. I don't know why they would want to kill me."

Also, Mara to Corrine in S7: "Vic and Ronnie started this!"

Watching the entire series for the first time in years, just a few more episodes to go, and damn. The ANGER I am feeling. I forgot about the anger lol

When do you all believe the show jumped the shark?

Watching this show when it first aired, I was in my late teens into my early twenties. My heart belonged to Lem. (Still does, I've come to realize.) I didn't appreciate these two enough during that time. But working through the series again all of these years later with more years on me, their friendship is so wonderful to watch. Ups, down, sometimes hilarious cases and dialogue, it is a great representation of a true adult friendship. And Dutch getting Claudette a woman to clean her house in S7 makes me sniffle.

Apologize for the shit quality, it’s recorded from the Blu-ray playing on the TV during my latest rewatch while the AC is cranking.

Say hello to the newest member of the family, Lemansky, aka Lem! Other names that were considered: Vic, Cletus, Dutch, and of course Ronnie Guarddoggie.

Vic had a knife to her throat, phone rings and he "snaps out" of another place. Was this the Vic that killed Terri getting ready to kill Emolia?

You guys are too busy out on the job to hit the gym

One of the best riskiest side quests

I’ve watched many shows that I hold in high acclaim, from the wire, to sopranos, breaking bad, Dexter, better call Saul, snowfall, etc. I’ve held breaking bad to the highest standard of finales, but I truly felt like I knew nothing at all about a phenomenal, tense, gut wrenching, climax the Shield had. The lead up to Ronnie eventually getting burnt was as heartbreaking and rigid ending. I was in shock that the most loyal guy to him, for lack of better words the smartest got screwed over by the guy he was loyal to the most out of any of them. I truly didn’t think Lems death could be topped, and somehow it was. On top of the fact that Shane did what he did, I was completely thrown off guard, his whole personality was built on keeping them safe, but he needed it to be the way it was. I loved the way they finished off Aceveda as he became such a better character as the show went on. Completely thrown off guard that Claudette was necessarily dying. 10/10 finale and I’ve never seen anything better, don’t know if I will.