Ronnie Gardocki

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Detective Ronnie Gardocki, played by David Rees Snell, is the fourth member of the anti-gang police task force known as the Strike Team on the FX Network drama "The Shield". A quiet, cynical introvert who is skilled in field of surveillance and other electronic police tools, Ronnie Gardocki is the show's resident man of mystery due to the fact that very little is known about his background, a classic Wedge-type character.

Contents 1 Background 2 Personality 3 Romantic Life 4 Relationship with Vic 5 Character History 6 Season one 7 Season two 8 Season Three 9 Season Four 10 Season Five 11 Trivia

[edit] Background

[edit] Personality

Few elements of Ronnie's personality and background have been revealed with regards to establishing Ronnie's backstory and personality. Many consider the character to be a classic example of the "man of mystery" character archetype, as the character's past and his personality are clouded in mystery, though trusted implicitly by the main hero (in Ronnie's case, Vic Mackey).

Outwardly, Ronnie can be best described as a "geek" due to his interest in electronic equipment, computers, and the character's awkward social manners when he interacts with other people in casual conversations. He has severe allergies (in one episode, Ronnie comments that he's allergic to cats and everything but sheet metal) and has shown to be shy around women. As such, the character's often mild mannered and geeklike personality makes for a sharp contrast to the other more testosterone driven members of the Strike Team, which has added towards the character's popularity with fans.

Internally, Ronnie has also shown to have a very meticulous, at times utterly cynical personality regarding human nature and the harsh realities faced by the Strike Team due to their dangerous jobs and illegal schemes. While for the bulk of the time Ronnie keeps these feelings and concerns bottled up inside of him, Ronnie is not afraid to speak what could be unpopular truths to Vic and the rest of the Strike Team during times of crisis.

In particular, Ronnie has often been forced to make Vic acknowledge the renegade behavior of Shane Vendrell and the threat that Shane represents towards the Strike Team because of his knowledge of what the team has done over the years. More darkly, he was an early advocate for killing Shane to prevent him from betraying the Strike Team to gang leader Antwon Mitchell and was the first to express fears that fellow detective Curtis "Lem" Lemansky might have turned states evidence against the Strike Team, though Ronnie was against taking violent action to silence Lem.

Ronnie's violent side would be seen in season 5. As the Strike Team tried to break up a riot at a funeral home between the blacks and hispanics, a black man with bleach blonde hair hit Ronnie in the back of the head with a crucifix. After Ronnie regained his composure and noticed the blood on his head he called out "Who hit me?" but to no avail as the culprit had fled the scene. After finding out the identity of the black man, Vic, Shane and Ronnie tracked him down. At the end of the first episode of season 5 we see Ronnie beating the suspect bloody while Shane holds him up for Ronnie. Afterwards, as Ronnie's attacker lay on the ground bloody, Vic throws down the infamous Strike Team card letting everyone know that the Strike Team is back in business.

[edit] Romantic Life

Ronnie is shown to be single and despite his claim that women like the moustache he had during seasons one and two, has been consistently portrayed as being socially inept when it comes to the opposite sex. In season one, Ronnie manages to turn off a lap dancer who offered to have sex with customers in exchange for money, after he tried to talk about golf during the middle of his lap dance. During season four, it was implied by Vic that Ronnie has not had sex in a long time when Ronnie pestered Vic for details about his latest one-night stand. In season five, Ronnie's romantic prospects apparently looked to be improving as Ronnie bragged about having an as yet to be introduced girlfriend to his fellow Strike Team members. Ronnie was also established as a leading possible candidate for the identity of the father of Patrol Officer Danielle Sofer's son, with Ronnie showing a great deal of interest in the details of Danny's pregnancy and being visibly excited when learning that Danny's child was going to be a boy.

[edit] Relationship with Vic

Though very little is known about Ronnie Gardocki's background, one major element that has been revealed and touched upon by writers is that he has an extremely close friendship with fellow detective and Strike Team leader Vic Mackey. The season two episodes "Partners" and "Co-Pilot" established that Ronnie and Vic met after Vic's original partner Joe Clarke was fired due to excessive force complaints, but before Vic met and became partners with Detective Shane Vendrell.

The two detectives are very close, with an unspoken bond of loyalty between the two that is a sharp contrast towards Detective Mackey's disfunctional relationship with Detective Shane Vendrell. This loyalty was established during season two when Ronnie was disfigured, in retaliation by a pedophillic crime boss who Vic had disfigured in a similar fashion early in the season. When the crime boss was arrested, he threatened to file a police brutality complaint against Vic for disfiguring him if Vic didn't force Ronnie to recant his statement, identifying the crime boss as his attacker. Vic's response was to call the crime boss's bluff, stating that he wouldn't be able to live with himself if he were to force Ronnie to let the man who mutilated his face go.

In turn, Ronnie's loyalty towards Vic was shown when he stood by Vic after the Strike Team disbanded at the end of season three. The level of respect between the two has also been shown over the course of the series, with Ronnie being one of the very few characters in the series who that can openly question Vic's methods and reasoning, a rarity given how Vic has been shown to be quick to verbally attack anyone who questions his authority.

Despite his close friendship with Vic (or perhaps because of Ronnie's close friendship with Vic), Vic has carefully kept Ronnie in the dark regarding some of the darker schemes. Most notably, Ronnie was not involved in Vic's murder plot against turncoat Strike Team member Detective Terry Crowley. Both Vic and fellow conspirator Shane Vendrell have gone out of their way to avoid talking about their crime in front of Ronnie, with the implication that Ronnie would turn against the group if he knew what the two men had done. In spite of their fears though, in the wake of Internal Affairs publicizing the belief that Vic may have murdered Detective Crowley, Ronnie has continued to fully support Vic during the investigation.

[edit] Character History

[edit] Season one

Ronnie Gardocki appeared on and off during season one of "The Shield", with Snell appearing in about two-thirds of the season's episodes, including an uncredited appearance in the show's pilot. To explain away why a member of the Strike Team would be missing in action most of the time, the writers established the notion that Vic would often have Ronnie run errands for the group.

The writers ultimately gave viewers their first look at Ronnie's personality in the episode "Dragonchasers". The episode firmly established Ronnie as being a geek by having Ronnie sent into a stripclub to investigate a stripper who was using the club's private lapdance room to lure customers outside the club with promises of sex, only to have an accomplice rob the unwitting victim. When in the lapdance room with the stripper, Ronnie nervously chatters away about assorted nonsense (including discussing golf, of all things) while receiving his lapdance and annoyed the stripper so much that she did not solicit Ronnie with an offer of sex outside the strip club. When he returns to the rest of the Strike Team, the group (having heard Ronnie's entire encounter with the stripper via a hidden wire Ronnie had on him) mercilessly mock Ronnie over the way that he turned the stripper off with his geek behavior.

[edit] Season two

Fan response to the character at the end of the first season was mixed; while the character did have fans, some disliked the character. Complaints usually centered around David Snell's porn star-type moustache and the fact that some fans considered Ronnie to be a blatant "redshirt" character, who was on the show for the purpose of being killed off later down the line to create an atmosphere of danger for the rest of the characters.

Realizing that many fans saw Ronnie as a "redshirt" character, the show's writers crafted the character's first major storyline which played up upon the belief that Ronnie's whole purpose on the show would be to die in order to establish a level of danger for the other more prominent cast members. And while David Snell's would not find his character's screentime expanded upon greatly, the actor and his character would go on to appear in just about every episode of the show from season two onward (the exceptions to this being the season two episodes "Coyotes" and "Carte Blanche") .

Early in the season, the Strike Team was ordered by Captain Aceveda, in the interests of promoting ethnic diversity, to select a non-white detective to fill the vacant fifth member slot of the Strike Team. Meanwhile, the Strike Team began a vicious war with a Mexican drug lord called Armadillo, who sought the wholesale slaughter of all possible rival gangs in Farmington so as to gain complete control over the city's streets. His use of rape and burning his enemies at the stake horrified Vic, especially after Armadillo used these techniques to kill a drug dealer who the Strike Team was protecting in exchange for a vow to keep his drug activities at a tolerable level.

Fearing that Armadillo would rat out Vic and the Strike Team to Detective Claudette Wyms (who was investigating Armadillo with a vengeance after he brutally raped and disfigured a young girl who offered to testify against him), Vic viciously beat Armadillo, burned his face on a kitchen stove and ordered him to leave town or be killed. Armadillo responded by declaring he was going to murder the members of the Strike Team and even murdered his own brother (who the Strike Team had arrested earlier) so as to keep the Strike Team from using his brother as a pawn against him.

These events horrified Ronnie, who began to fear that the psychopathic crime boss would succeed and kill the Strike Team before they could bring him to justice. Adding to Ronnie's paranoia was his suspicion that he was being followed; when he told Vic, Shane, and Lem that he was being tailed by one of Armadillo's flunkies, they laughed at him and dismissed his fears as cowardly paranoia.

To get his mind off of being killed, Vic sent Ronnie on an errand to retrieve his checkbook (Vic was planning on writing a check to pay for the burial of a longtime informant, who died while alerting Vic of the whereabouts of a missing child whose father murdered the child's mother along with several other innocent women at the battered womens shelter the two were staying in).

When Vic returned to the hotel room with his girlfriend, for the purpose of having sex for the first time, the two were horrified to see Ronnie laying on the floor near death and his face having been horribly burnt on a nearby stove burner. As they rushed Ronnie to a hospital, Ronnie revealed that Armadillo was personally responsible for the attack on him and had disfigured Ronnie's face as payback for Vic disfiguring him in the exact same manner.

The Strike Team vowed to inflict a swift death upon Armadillo for his attack on Ronnie. Realizing this, Armadillo arranged to willingly turn himself over to the police, knowing that it was the only way to ensure Vic could not touch him. Armadillo then threatened to reveal why he disfigured Ronnie, which would result in ruining of Vic's life and career, if Vic didn't convince Ronnie to take back his statement regarding Armadillo disfiguring him, and allow Armadillo (who by now had all of his people in place to control the drug trade in Farmington) to leave for Mexico, having successfully escaped any punishment for all of the horrific crimes he had committed in the city.

Facing a horrific ultimatum, Vic shocked Shane and Lem by telling them that he would never force Ronnie to recant his statement about Armadillo disfiguring him and would confess to burning Armadillo's face to negate Armadillo's blackmail scheme. Shane and Lem, despite being told that Vic would do everything possible to convince IAD that the rest of the team had nothing to do with his actions, quickly sprung their own scheme without Vic's knowledge: they convinced a disgruntled gang leader who had been demoted to running errands by Armadillo to get himself arrested so he could be put in the same holding cage as Armadillo. They then slipped him a shiv, and sat back and watched him kill Armadillo. Vic was freed from having to admit to engaging in police brutality, though his on-again, off-again lover Officer Danny Sofer was scapegoated for failing to properly search the gang leader for weapons when she arrested him and ultimately is fired from the force over the incident.

Ronnie survived his encounter with Armadillo, but was left permanently disfigured. After the resolution of the Armadillo arc, a flashback episode aired that featured Ronnie participating in the formation of the Strike Team. The flashback episode was done for several reasons, one of which was to give the make-up staff on the show the time needed to create a suitable make-up job regarding the scars on Ronnie's face. While the flashback episode itself fleshed out the background of several of the show's characters, the episode only furthered an aura of mystery around Ronnie. The episode established that Vic had hand-selected Ronnie as a founding member of the Strike Team and refused to tell Shane and Lem the reason for selecting Detective Gardocki. The episode did reveal one aspect of Ronnie's character, that he grew his trademark moustache to make himself more attractive to women. It also established that Ronnie was the only member of the Strike Team to openly question Vic's decision to have the team break the law in their pursuit of arrests within the Farmington District.

The following episode ("Coyotes") saw the end of the search for a new Strike Team member, as Vic, Shane, and Lem select a detective named Tavon Garris to join the team. The writers fiendishly had the characters hinting that Ronnie would not be coming back to active duty and ran a somewhat cliched subplot where Lem is extremely resentful to Tavon for "taking Ronnie's spot" on the team before ultimately accepting Tavon as a teammate by the end of the episode.

However, to fans of the character, Ronnie would make his return to the show in the following episode ("Inferno"). His face still had scars from Armadillo's attack and his near-death experience caused him to want to take a more active role with the affairs of the Strike Team. In particular, Ronnie spent his downtime, after receiving an emergency skin graft for his face, planning out a means for the Strike Team to rob the Armenian mob, by hijacking their "Money Train" convoy. Vic had proposed the plan early in season two upon stumbling upon the existence of the "Money Train", but assorted personal problems and increased tension between the Strike Team and Detective Claudette Wyms caused him to shelve the plan. Ronnie, having previously scoffed at Vic's original intent on using the "Money Train" loot only as a nest egg for the Strike Team members in the event they get fired or maimed, had come to realize through his own brush with death the logic of Vic's scheme. Playing on Vic's guilt, Ronnie convinced Vic to let the team go ahead with his plan for robbing the convoy. Vic agreed and Ronnie's plan was carried out. However, Ronnie's plan took an unexpected detour when the Armenians in charge of the Money Train heist turned against each other, resulting in several deaths before the Strike Team moved in to successfully carry out Ronnie's scheme.

[edit] Season Three

During season three, Ronnie continued to gain more screentime and would appear in all 15 episodes of the season. He would also start to find a voice in regards the Strike Team's internal power structure as the person who was willing to ask the questions no one else was willing to ask. Ronnie also sported a new look, as David Rees Snell grew a full beard; whilst the change in appearance was never officially acknowledged during the third season, it is generally accepted that Ronnie's beard was a means for the show's writers to sidestep the issue of Ronnie's disfigurement.

At the start of season three, Ronnie charged into action and saved the lives of his fellow Strike Team members when Vic, Shane, and Lem found themselves almost executed as a result of a botched sting operation. Ronnie was also the one who discovered that a large sum of money from the "Money Train" loot was stolen. It was this storyline that redefined Ronnie's position inside the Strike Team, as he took on the role of "Devil's Advocate" and openly pondered the notion that either Vic and Shane were the thief. Vic's reaction to Ronnie accusing Shane was one of great horror, as Vic defensively accused Ronnie of messing up and miscounting with regards to the discovery of a missing portion of the "Money Train" loot. However, Vic slowly realized that Ronnie might be telling the truth although ultimately the real thief would be revealed to be Shane's girlfriend, who had secretly discovered the existence of the loot and taken a portion of it. Ronnie retaliated by being the deciding vote along with Lem in forbidding Vic from using the "Money Train" loot to pay for treatment for his son's autism, citing the fact that it was not safe for any of the Strike Team to begin spending the "Money Train" loot given that forces were still looking for the identity of the people behind the heist. Vic, who knew ahead of time that the team would veto the use of the money, begrudgingly accepted Ronnie's decision to vote against him.

By the end of the season though, Ronnie was once again marginalized as the show focused more on the growing tension between the rest of the members of the Strike Team with Ronnie given the role of having to get between Shane and Lem to keep the two from attacking the other. However Ronnie was able to contribute to the team crippling the Armenian mob's west coast criminal syndicate in the finale, discovering a fake business being used by the Armenian mob that led to the mob being brought down by the Strike Team. However, Ronnie's contribution did little to save the Strike Team from imploding. As the season ended, Ronnie was sent to try and calm down Lem, who quit the team after Shane accused Vic of hating Lem and only wanting to keep him on the team so that the powers that be wouldn't disband the Strike Team.

[edit] Season Four

At the beginning of season four, David Rees Snell's screen time grew even more. During the first couple of episodes of season four, Ronnie was Vic's partner and that the two were working on a hidden camera sting operation that had been started up towards the end of the third season. In the first episode of season four, the writers even gave Ronnie his own subplot as Ronnie sought to help an abused child whose father had been caught on hidden camera physically abusing his son. With Vic's help, Ronnie arranged for the father to get into a fight with Vic, which caused the father to break his parole and be sent back to jail and his son was sent to live with relatives.

As season four progressed, Ronnie once again found himself forced to play mediator between the warring members of the Strike Team, reunited by Vic with the ulterior motive of keeping an eye on Shane, who was now in league with local drug kingpin Antwon Mitchell. In an effort to ease tension between Vic and Shane, Ronnie stole one of the department's hidden cameras and planted it in the car of Detective "Dutch" Wagenbach, so as to get footage of his disastrous blind date as well as footage of Dutch singing along to his car's radio, which he then showed to his fellow detectives, both of which had longstanding personal problems with Detective Wagenbach. However, soon Ronnie would be planting a hidden camera in Shane's car and finding out if he was leaking police intel to Mitchell regarding the various investigations into his criminal empire. The camera would ultimately capture Shane being ordered by Antwon Mitchell to kill Vic, which put Vic in a position of having to kill Shane before Shane killed him. In a private moment, Ronnie confided to Lem that he honestly hoped Vic would kill Shane, if only to provide closure to the growing problem that Shane represented to the Strike Team.

In the end, Vic opted to spare Shane's life and was forced to play out a complex scenario in order to recover the dead body of a girl Antwon Mitchell had murdered using Shane's gun, as well as that of his new partner, Army, as a means to permanently bind Shane to Mitchell's criminal organization. Complicating the issue was the sudden murder of two patrol officers, which many believed were ordered by Antwon as a warning to the Farmington Police Department and its new Captain, Monica Rawlings. As Rawlings demanded Antwon (who was out of town when the murders took place) be bought into custody, Vic was forced to broker a deal with Antwon to obtain the body, which Ronnie and Shane were sent to recover. During their time together searching for the body, Ronnie was quite open with his scorn for Shane and the mess he had made with his antics, with him ordering Shane to wade through urine and faeces from an overturned port-o-potty and do most of the digging in a location that the two believed the body to be buried.

In the end, Antwon revealed Shane's involvement with his criminal activities, which caused Vic to switch gears as he ended up being forced to use the hidden camera tape containing Antwon making a threat of blackmail against Shane, to spin a scenario where Antwon was attempting to frame Shane and Army for murder in order to force them to give police intel on Antwon's organization to Antwon. In the process though, Vic admitted that Ronnie knew about the tape too, which placed Ronnie in hot water as well. Since the two had not told Rawlings about the hidden camera in Shane's car, the legality issue regarding the tape was in question. Captain Rawlings briefly contemplated firing both Ronnie and Vic for failure to alert her of the tape but was talked by Vic into agreeing to pretend that she authorized the hidden camera being placed in the car so that they could use it as leverage against Antwon.

[edit] Season Five

In Season Five, Ronnie is also under investigation by Internal Affairs Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh. However, unlike the rest of the Strike Team, Ronnie has been careful with hiding his share of the remaining Money Train cash and looks like the one member of the Strike Team that could possibly walk.

[edit] Trivia

• Ronnie appears to favor the Beretta 8045 Cougar F as his sidearm.
• Ronnie likes to golf and is a fan of the 1980s music group "Journey"
• Ronnie shops at discount clothing stores.
• Besides going from having a moustache to having a beard, Ronnie's clothing has also changed along with his facial hair. When he had the moustache, Ronnie dressed in a very early 1990s grunge rock style complete with loose fitting, unbuttoned flannel shirts. But since growing the beard, Ronnie has abandoned his grunge look and taken to wearing golf shirts and a varsity jacket.