the A.D.A.'s Ninth Step: 'It's so damnably ironic'

The register claim lives in the scene's last turn: what has the A.D.A. by the throat is the trite Ninth-Step language itself. His entire revenge engine (Gately's picture "up on my Priority-board," the biding of time, "waiting to get him") is dismantled not by any counter-argument but by the recovery-clichés he has submitted to — the amends-imperative, working Nine, "the growth that promises real relief" — banal program vocabulary proving strong enough to compel one of the most remorseless constables in three counties to drop the case against the man he most wants destroyed. He calls the predicament "so damnably ironic," and the situational trap is real (noted, not milked: the scene lets him feel "I, who wanted nothing so much as to see this man locked down in a cell" as genuine anguish rather than as a bit) — but the trap itself is not this theme's register war. The theme's datum is narrower and stranger: the same trite machinery that levels the biker and the "sick fuck" here overrides a prosecutor's deepest wish. The cliché doesn't console him; it coerces him, and he obeys.