The Wire, Season 1, Episode 13: "Sentencing" (Veterans edition)

Since we're up to the final episode of "The Wire" season one, you really don't need me to tell you that this is the review where you can talk about anything and everything from all five seasons. If you want to be protected from anything from future seasons, scroll down for the newbie-friendly version.

Spoilers for episode 13, "Sentencing," coming up just as soon as I take this blog federal...

"You grow up in this s--t. My grandfather was Butch Stamford. You know who Butch Stamford was in this town? All my people, man -- my father, my uncles, my cousins -- it's just what we do. You just live with this s--t until you can't breathe no more. I swear to God, I was courtside for eight months, and I was freer in jail than I was at home." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Why do we watch this show? Seriously, why do we subject ourselves to a drama that spends 13-plus hours of television building towards an ending this bleak, that offers such little hope for the future of both its characters and the system we all live in? What masochistic impulse could lead me to obsess so much on this world, to go back and watch Bodie kill Wallace, or Brianna change D'Angelo's mind, or Bubbs fall off the wagon, six years after these things upset me the first time? Forget McNulty's line from season five asking what the (bleep) is wrong with this city. What the (bleep) is wrong with all of us who keep sticking around?

Nothing's wrong with us -- not related to our love of this show, anyway. We watch it because, even though it makes us despair, it's brilliant. We watch it because, even though it's awful to see D'Angelo throw away his future after Brianna packs his bags for a guilt trip, Larry Gilliard Jr. delivers such a scorching performance throughout. We watch it because, even though it's stomach-churning to see Maury Levy on the other end of Ronnie's phone call instead of the public defender, the moment is set up so expertly. We watch it because, even though many characters we like suffer many fates we don't, we realize in the end how much the show has been trying to warn us about this from the jump.

David Simon and Ed Burns have always modeled "The Wire" after Greek tragedy, and the concept of predestination is as strong here as it was in the time of Sophocles. Landmsan warned Jimmy in the very first episode that he'd wind up riding the boat, and Lester warned him again a few episodes later, and where does Jimmy wind up? (And it is, as usual, Jimmy's uncontrollable need to lecture others on their moral inferiority that screws him over; if he walks politely out of the meeting with the U.S. Attorney instead of insulting the guy, Rawls almost certainly never gets a call about it.)

"Sentencing" is packed with callbacks or payoffs to moments from throughout the season. Poot repeats D'Angelo's lesson about the danger of one man selling and then serving the same customer, as he takes D'Angelo's role as leader of the Pit. (Characters filling other characters' shoes will be a popular theme on the full-circle "Wire," particularly as the series moves forward.) When asked whether he talked business with Wee-Bey on the ride to Philly, D tells Bunk and Jimmy that they have a rule against it -- a rule Wee-Bey had to remind him of in the first episode. When the two detectives hear D refer to Diedre Kresson wanting to put the 8-ball on ice, they immediately understand why the refrigerator door was open. (D's recounting of that murder and how Wee-Bey really did it also reconciles D's aversion to violence, particularly against civilians, with him taking credit for the deed. For more on that, look to the bullet points.) Daniels gives Prez his gun back and makes a wry joke about its infamously light trigger pull. Herc tries to pass on the brains-over-muscle lessons of the detail, even though you can tell he doesn't really believe in them. On his way out of court, Stringer throws Jimmy's "Nicely done" line from the premiere right back at him. And after all of that, after the closing montage shows that the partial takedown of the Barksdale crew has in no way slowed the spread of drugs throughout Baltimore, we hear Omar whistle "Farmer in the Dell" one last time and remind us that it's "all in The Game, yo." The players may change, may (like Bodie or Lester) get promoted to bigger roles, but The Game will always be here.

One of the series' key themes is the folly of placing your faith in institutions, because they're designed to protect themselves and not you the individual. D'Angelo placed his faith in both The Game and his family, and they combined to drag him down and send his ass to prison for 20 years. McNulty put his faith in law-enforcement and found out that no one on either the local or federal level really cares about stopping the likes of Avon and Stringer. D goes to prison, Jimmy to the boat, and their institutions grind on with them on the margins.

Bubbs put his faith in Kima and had his thin recovery plan undone not because she was unreliable, but because the system placed her in a situation that made her unable to help him when he absolutely needed her. (Though, again, it was a shaky idea to begin with.) Daniels put his faith into the idea of climbing the ladder and staying tight with Burrell, and in the end gets burned and passed over for promotion because he tried to do his job the right way. Carver instead becomes Burrell's new pet and gets his own promotion, but Daniels' come-to-Jesus lecture makes him start wondering if it was such a good idea.

There are happy endings on the margins, like Lester escaping pawn shop purgatory (and winning the affections of Shardene, to boot), or Prez proving himself to be a useful detective, or even the return of a smiling Omar to the streets of West Baltimore (NOTE: several readers have pointed out evidence within and without the episode that Omar's operating out of the South Bronx at this moment in time), but they're overwhelmed by all the tragedies at the center. Yes, the detail gets Avon locked up on a minor charge, and several of his lieutenants are either dead or locked up for a long time, but at what cost? Wallace is dead. Nakeesha Lyles is dead. Orlando. Kima caught a bullet and is lucky to be stumbling around a hospital corridor on a walker. Jimmy's on the boat, Santangelo back in uniform, Daniels' promotion prospects are iffy at best, Kevin Johnson is half-blind, D'Angelo is taking the fall for his uncle, and Stringer and the organization as a whole don't seem to have missed a beat.

By the end, even Jimmy recognizes how much damage he's caused for so little noticeable gain. His "What the f--k did I do?" catchphrase again is used to connote tragedy, not comedy, as is Bunk repeating his "Happy now, b---h?" put-down from earlier in the season.

The wheel keeps turning, the players keep playing, and as hard as it was to re-experience most of what happened towards the end of this season, there's a part of me that wants to blow off all my professional responsibilities and proceed immediately to watching all the awful events of season two. And I don't believe there's a thing wrong with me to want that.

Some other thoughts on "Sentencing":

• Getting back to the pain of seeing D take the fall for Avon, it's a mark of how well D was written and played that we mourn a 20-year prison sentence for a character whom we first met as he was beating a murder charge through witness tampering.

• In the veteran-friendly review of "Old Cases," I talked at length about how D'Angelo lied to Bodie and the others about killing Diedre Kresson, and how it was virtually the only time in the run of the series that Simon and Burns would deliberately lie to the audience about something that big, for that long. I went on at length about my discomfort with the choice (specificially as it changed my perception about D'Angelo going from then until this episode) and then invited David Simon to offer up his own explanation for the choice. If you've been following the newbie versions of these reviews, I'd advise you to click on the above link to read it; so long as you bail out before the comments start, you won't get spoiled on anything that happens in later seasons.

• I could probably isolate and sing the praises of virtually every scene in this episode if I had the time, but one in particular I want to highlight is Jimmy finally finding the stones to visit Kima in the hospital. Every beat was just right, from Cheryl bolting in disgust as they discussed the case to Jimmy crying over his white guilt to Kima pragmatically stating that her only regret was not using more tape to secure the gun.

• As I said when I first started talking about the show's music rules, the one concrete exception made each season is with the montage at season's end that sums up where the characters, and The Game, are headed. This one's scored to "Step By Step" by Jesse Winchester

• I thought it was a very nice background detail to have D's public defender be so obviously horrified by the crime scene photos of Deirdre, Wallace, and company, and the realization that her new client was involved in some bad, bad stuff down in Baltimore. Like Jimmy and Bunk and D'Angelo, we've been so hardened to all these murders by now (save Wallace, of course) that it was good to have an outside reminder of just how brutal the Barksdale crew is.

• If you've ever seen or heard a David Simon interview or commentary track, you might have recognized his voice as the bailiff announcing the entrance of the judge for the sentencing hearing. It was a last-minute bit of audio looping, and Simon was the only guy in the room who hadn't already contributed a voice elsewhere in the episode.

• Jimmy's comportment in the relationship department has never been what you would call admirable. But Ronnie -- who claimed to be done with his drunken, manipulative ass several episodes back -- jumping his bones in the parking garage after he handed her what looked like a career case was a reminder that it takes two to have an ugly affair sometimes.

• Rawls punishing Jimmy is in some way on Jimmy, who could never leave well enough alone even as he knew his boss was gunning for him, but Rawls absolutely does not play fair with Santangelo. Santy kept up his end of the deal by closing an open case, and Rawls still puts him on a foot post in the Western district.

• Another nice touch involving a throwaway character new to the storyline: Lester's retired buddy at the phone company who invokes the cliche of cops giving speeches about how "all-fired important" their case is, followed by the guy's genuine pleasure at realizing he can help Lester catch a guy who shot a cop.

• Carver's a knucklehead and a rat, and yet there are these moments of incredible clarity like his "Wars end" line from the pilot or, here, him watching Bodie and his crew beat on Onion and observing that this is why the cops can't win: "They f--k up, they get beat. We f--k up, they give us pensions." Somewhere, Det. Mahone (retired) is hoisting a glass in Bodie's honor.

• Blink and you may have missed Toni Lewis, who played Det. Teri Stivers in the last few years of "Homicide," as one of the feds in the second meeting with McNulty, Daniels and Lester. She'll pop up a few more times in season two.

And for the last time, let's talk about how events in this episode pay off down the road:

• Kima refusing to ID Wee-Bey will be reflected in her refusal to go along with Jimmy and Lester's plan to get Marlo. Sometimes, things just gotta play hard, right?

• When "Sentencing" originally aired, I was amazed that someone as bright as McNulty somehow was dumb enough to ignore Lester's warnings about how to answer the "Where don't you want to go?" question. Eventually, I tried to write it off as Jimmy punishing himself for what he did to D'Angelo and everyone else, but in season two we find out that Jimmy did, in fact, keep his mouth shut, and that Landsman ratted him out just so he could win their bet from the first episode.

• Stringer will work out of this funeral home for the rest of his run, though the place looks different in later seasons. Simon couldn't remember whether or not they changed locations between seasons, but we also don't see the inside of the viewing rooms here, which is where most of Stringer's memorable economics lectures will take place. So it could be the same location throughout in real life, and in the show's world it's supposed to be.

• D'Angelo never does get to breathe free, now does he? Sigh... I can take some (very) small solace from watching Jimmy emotionally destroys Brianna for what she does here when she confronts him in season three (skip ahead to about the five minute mark, and then watch how good Dominic West and Michael Hyatt can be).

• In the end, Lester's arrogance will be the undoing of his career the same way it will be for McNulty, but his other happy ending from this season sticks, as Shardene will still be his special lady friend by the time we get to the series finale.

• While Prez proves himself to be a good police over the course of this season, he's right to not really want that gun back, given what happens with the undercover cop at the end of season three. In retrospect, Prez would have been a lot happier if Daniels hadn't saved his job after the Kevin Johnson incident.

• It's been a while since I watched season two. I know Jimmy tries to get back into Ronnie's pants a few times over the next two seasons, but is this the last time it actually happens?

Coming up next: Nothing. Summer's just about over, new TV shows start debuting as of Monday, and I unfortunately won't have time to move on to season two until at least next summer. (And I still have to do those "Sports Night" reviews I've been promising for forever; maybe that'll be a circa-Christmas/Chanukah/New Year's thing, but don't hold me to it.) It's been really gratifying to read comments in both versions of these reviews from people who said they finally started watching the series because of me and quickly raced through the later seasons.

As a reminder, you can find my reviews of season four here, and of season five here. Eventually, I'll get around to chronicling the adventures of Frank Sobotka, Ziggy, Fruit and company.

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The Wire, Season 1, Episode 12, "Cleaning Up" (Veterans edition)

Almost to the finish line, and you should know the deal by now: we're going to talk about season one of "The Wire" in two versions: one for viewers new to the show who don't want later events spoiled for them, and one for people who have seen and can talk about everything from first episode to last. This is the latter; scroll down for the newbie-safe version.

Spoilers for the penultimate, Pelecanos-ian episode of season one, "Cleaning Up," coming up just as soon as I find out who makes the best chili dogs in Newark...

"Where's Wallace? Where's the boy at, String?" -D'Angelo Barksdale

This is "The Wire," right here.

"Cleaning Up" is considered by many "Wire" fans to be the series' best -- and most painful -- episode ever, but its genius illustrates why even asking the Best Ever question is besides the point with this series. So much of what makes it great comes from everything we've seen before: our knowledge of the Bodie/Poot/Wallace friendship; of how much work the detail has put into getting Avon and Stringer, of how far Daniels has come from being a company man to being someone who cares about doing good policework, politics be damned; of how much D'Angelo sees of himself in Wallace, and of how he tried desperately to nudge Wallace out of a life he knows himself to be trapped in by circumstance and blood. There are many isolated moments of brilliance, but it's the cumulative effect of having seen every chapter of this novel for television that makes them really powerful.

"Where's Wallace? That's all I want to know."

There are many great tragedies throughout the run of "The Wire," but the death of Wallace is the first and still the one that probably cuts deepest. Yes, this is the life he chose -- and the life he chose to come back to after Lt. Daniels had provided him his escape -- but he was a sweet kid pushed into this life practically from birth (check out how little his mother cares about him), given such a limited understanding of the world that he couldn't fathom any other way to be. Forget being freaked out by living in the country; he's never been out of the West side of town! Yet even within this life, he found ways to rise above, to not grow up too fast and too hard like Bodie (who also got a raw deal from childhood) so eagerly chooses to. Wallace looked after those kids, looked after his friends in The Pit, felt genuine remorse for the role he (somewhat) unwittingly played in Brandon's murder, held onto his childhood as long as he could.

He's not without sin, but this? To be coldly executed by your two best friends while you sob, wet your pants and beg for your life? Just imagine I'm quoting the McNulty/Bunk apartment scene from "Old Cases" right now, because even after all these years, that's how I respond to it. What makes it especially haunting is the interplay between Bodie and Poot. Bodie is acting hard, more than eager to go kill his friend on Stringer's order. He's the one who stands at the top of the stairs and has to urge the reluctant Poot to follow, but when the actual moment comes, he freezes, and it's Poot who has to order him to do it, and who then takes the gun from Bodie's trembling hand and finishes the job. (This is the first of all the many times I've watched the scene, by the way, that I see that Poot's doing it out of compassion for Wallace.)

And then... and then... and then we come to D'Angelo screaming and cussing and demanding that Stringer tell him where Wallace is. As with the famous Bunk/McNulty scene, it's an example of "The Wire" using simple, repeated language to say so many things so well. We've seen D'Angelo struggle all season with his growing guilt about the pointless cycle of violence in the drug game, and the death of this kid, whom D'Angelo believed (wrongly, as it turned out) would never pose a threat to Avon and Stringer, is the straw breaking the camel's back. When he asks, over and over, where Wallace is, what he's really asking is, "Why have I sold out of my future for a couple of remorseless psychopaths like you and my uncle?," "How do you not get that it's the bodies that keep attracting the cops' attention?," "Why does The Game have to play out this way?," "Why should I be loyal to bosses who have no loyalty to their employees?," "Why didn't I just come right out and tell Wallace he was probably going to die if he didn't leave town?," etc., etc. While some "Wire" actors have parlayed their great showcases here into more mainstream work (Tristan Wilds is not only in the new "90210," but canoodling with Dakota Fanning in "The Secret Life of Bees"), it's beyond ridiculous that no one in Hollywood watched the "Where's Wallace?" scene and thought to give Larry Gilliard Jr. an interesting role off of it.

Just as we've watched the journeys of Wallace and D'Angelo, which led one of them to death and the other to jail, we've also watched Cedric Daniels grow from Burrell loyalist to dedicated cop. The motives for the change may on some level be self-serving -- he feels guilt over Brandon's murder, and now for Kima getting shot -- but there's no questioning that his loyalty is now 100 percent to doing this case right, no matter how much it costs him in his quest to climb the ladder. It was pure pleasure to watch him give it to both Burrell and Clay Davis in a way that wasn't insubordinate, or profane, or literally disrespectful, but was so frank and unswerving that it alarmed these two born liars.

And yet, in that "Wire" way, Daniels' triumphant moment (of character, if not of career) has to come in the same episode where we find out that, yes, he was dirty once upon a time and stole money off of drug dealers to help finance the swank lifestyle he has now, with the well-appointed brownstone, the expensive political fundraisers, etc. No one on "The Wire" is ever all good or all bad. (Though some would argue the latter point.) They're just people.

Note how McNulty, our ostensible hero, shows his true colors in the opening scene, when he admits to Daniels that he only cared about Barksdale as an excuse to prove how smart he was. Of course, anyone who's been paying attention all these weeks -- and that includes Daniels himself -- probably figured that out by now, but it's still admirable that the show would be willing to have its main character make such a confession. We've been watching long enough to know that the case does, in fact, matter, but to Jimmy it's just as much of a power trip as it is to Burrell, and Rawls and Avon and Stringer.

Though "Cleaning Up" is the culmination of several months (in real and show time) of investigation by the detail, with the arrests of D'Angelo and Avon, it's also something of an intentional anti-climax. Thanks to the deaths of Wallace and Stinkum, Wee-Bey's escape to Philadelphia and Avon and Stringer constantly changing up, what does the detail have to show for all this work? A murder charge on Bird (that relies on Omar coming back to town and being a credible witness), murder charges for a fugitive (Wee-Bey) and a man they don't know is dead (Little Man), a mid-level drug charge on Avon, and a potentially larger one on D'Angelo. For all the lives this crew has taken, that's it? Really?

Obviously, there's still some string to be played out in the finale, particularly with Lester following the money so closely that he scares the snot out of Clay, Burrell and Ronnie's boss (not to mention Ronnie herself), but I love how even an episode that's this powerful, and that brings together so many storylines from the previous eleven episodes, can be designed in a way that's still vaguely unsatisfying. As McNulty puts it to Daniels before they raid Orlando's, "This isn't as much fun as I thought it would be."

Some other thoughts on "Cleaning Up":

• As he will do in every subsequent season, sometimes as a freelancer, sometimes as a staff writer/producer, novelist George Pelecanos gets the honors of writing the next-to-last episode and playing hatchet man for David Simon. These penultimate chapters tend to be the best part of each season, primarily because the worst things happen in them. Like fellow authors Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, who would join the writing staff in later seasons, Pelecanos is a natural fit with the world of "The Wire." His Washington, D.C.-based crime novels cover much of the same thematic ground about the pointless culture of drug-related violence, the cyclical nature of family relationships, the decay and neglect of American cities, etc. One of his books, "Drama City," might as well be a "Wire" spin-off, and his latest novel, "The Turnaround," is terrific. What are you doing spending all this time watching TV when you can just read a book?

• Whenever a "Wire" character I like gets killed (or suffers a fate that's almost as bad), I like to look back at the elaborate chain of circumstances that has to take place for that to occur. In this case, Omar and Brandon have to rob the Pit stash at a time when Poot's in the room; Poot and Wallace have to be at the Greek's arcade at the same time as Brandon; Poot has to be too afraid to make the call himself (and to talk to Stringer later); Wee-Bey and Bird have to dump the body right in Wallace's backyard; Herc and Carver have to be listening to Poot have phone sex long enough for them to hear him give up the info about Wallace's guilt over Brandon; the Baltimore PD has to have no money for witness protection; Kima has to get shot and distract Daniels from going to pick up Wallace before Wallace goes stir crazy at his grandma's; Burrell has to demand that Daniels raid the main stash, making Stringer and Avon paranoid enough to have Wallace killed, etc. It's never just one action, but a series of little tragedies along the way that lead up to the big ones.

• Though he appeared briefly at the political fundraiser party in "One Arrest," this is the first real showcase for Isiah Whitlock Jr. as Clay Davis. He makes the most of it, demonstrating how quickly Clay can shift from smooth politican to profane street hustler.

• Last week, Maury Levy showed himself to be a great legal attack dog for the Barskdale crew. This week, he reveals himself to be an active co-conspirator in Avon and Stringer's crimes. He may stick to the letter of the law by excusing himself before those two actively begin discussing whom they need to kill, but Maury's the one strongly suggesting they have that conversation in the first place.

• A couple of episodes back, we saw that Shardene wasn't immune to Lester's charms, and here we see that he's more than happy to reciprocate her interest. He bigfoots Sydnor on Shardene's request for coffee (and knows how she takes it!), is the one to comfort her when she freaks out about wearing a wire, and eagerly volunteers to, um, room with her for the duration of the case. Again, Lt. Daniels is an observant man, so he knows what time it is with this.

• More Daniels cleverness: even as he's openly defying Burrell, he still knows how to play the political game when it suits his purposes. When Burrell asks whom Daniels doesn't want to lose from the detail, Daniels knows the best answer is none at all -- that Burrell would no doubt cast away anyone Daniels expressed an interest in protecting -- and is rewarded when Burrell cuts loose the useless Santangelo and the mostly useful Sydnor while "punishing" Daniels by making him keep Lester and Prez, who are by now the heart of the detail.

• Lots of Herc-related hilarity: Herc and Sydnor driving Lester nuts with their chili dog argument, Herc and Sydnor trying really hard not to leer as Ronnie watches them watch Shardene walk with the string around her ankles, and especially Herc's victory dance at finding out his score on the sergeant's exam.

• This episode features the first appearance of Michael Hyatt as D'Angelo's mom, Brianna, and their interaction (and relatively close ages) does create the brief impression, expressed by Wallace, that this is some girlfriend of D's we haven't met yet. Note that their closeness only goes so far: Mama Barksdale will bring her boy some nice take-out fish, but when Avon suggests that D'Angelo will have to go to prison so Brianna can maintain her lifestyle, she seems ready to go along with that.

• Yet another thing that I noticed for the first time watching the episode again this week (it's at least the 10th time I've seen it over the years): Bodie and Poot's moment on the staircase is later mirrored by McNulty and Daniels after the arrest of Avon. This time, it's the man at the bottom of the stairs (Daniels) nodding for the man at the top (McNulty) to join him. And like Poot doesn't want to let go of his friendship with Wallace, McNulty doesn't want to take that step and let go of a chance to take down Stringer.

And now let's talk about how events in this episode foreshadow things coming down the road:

• Simon has said that he introduced the file on Daniels' days in the Eastern knowing (or, rather, hoping) he would one day get to have Burrell actually put into play, which he does by giving it to Nerese Campbell in season five.

• Jimmy's confession about his motives for the Barksdale case will be echoed again in his justification to Bunk for the Marlo/serial killer scam: "He does not get to win! We get to win!" For Jimmy, it's always less about justice than it is about being the smartest guy in the room.

• Bodie will, ironically, be killed for the same reasons as Wallace (albeit in a very different manner, as he goes down fighting). Yet even shortly before his death, he continues to justify Wallace's death in arguments with Poot.

• Just as Santangelo shouldn't be so confident about his job security, Herc shouldn't be counting those sergeant's stripes just yet. It's a good thing he doesn't actually get the promotion until season four; when you see how much damage he did then, imagine how much more he could have caused with two additional years of rank.

• In hindsight, Carver's absence for in-service training -- and Daniels' comment about Burrell not knowing about the bug in Avon's club -- should have been an obvious tip-off about the identity of Burrell's mole. Ah, well. It wasn't the first time I didn't see a "Wire" development coming, nor would it be the last.

• This is the first real interaction between Stringer and Bodie, and the first time Stringer sees some potential in the young man from the Pit. In coming seasons, Bodie will become something of a protege to Stringer, often misunderstanding or disagreeing with the lessons, but paying closer attention than anybody else in the crew.

• Not only is Prez a good code-breaker, he can do somewhat complex math in his head, which will come in handy when he winds up teaching eighth grade math.

• This is the last we'll see of Sydnor for a while, as he's the only surviving season one character of any significance to not appear in season two. (No doubt the racial makeup of the stevedores union made his presence less imperative than when Daniels needed someone to do hand-to-hands on the Barksdale case.)

Coming up next Friday: "Sentencing," the end of season one and the end of this summer flashback.

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The Wire, Season 1, Episode 11, "The Hunt" (Veterans edition)

We're in the home stretch now of our summer plan to look back at season one of "The Wire." Once again, two versions: one for the people who have seen and want to talk about every episode from every season, and one for relative newcomers who don't want to be spoiled about things down the road. This is the former; scroll down for the newbie-safe edition.

Spoilers for episode 11, "The Hunt," coming up just as soon as I recycle this can of Slice...

"Today, a message has been sent." -Commissioner Frazier

We have all seen some version of that press conference dozens, maybe hundreds, of times on the evening news. (Or on other cop shows, for that matter.) "The Hunt" exposes them for the glorified, meaningless photo ops that they usually are. Messages have been sent, sure, but they roughly translate as this: 1)Hey drug dealers, be more cautious with how you do business so it becomes harder for us to catch you; and 2)Hey Barksdale detail, prepare for any and all of your hard work to be sacrificed for the sake of public appearances whenever is necessary.

In fairness, the men behind the decision to raid the main stash house and put some dope on the table are depicted as human. You can see how much it pains Burrell and Foerster and even Frazier to listen to the tape of Kima being ambushed, and you can understand their desire to do something to make up for that impotent feeling. But this is a time when caution is called for, not hasty showboating -- the Lester Freamon philosophy instead of the Ervin Burrell approach -- and we all know who has the decision-making power here, don't we?

In a strange way, Kima getting shot screws both Avon and the detail about equally. Yes, it gives the Barksdale crew a much-needed kick in the ass to tighten up, but it's still too much attention and it costs them the services of Savino (in jail), Little Man (dead) and Wee-Bey (in hiding in Philly). The detail loses Kima (though at least she's still alive, if in a lot of trouble) and though they allegedly get the full resources of the department at their disposal, it comes at the cost of more attention and more pressure to do something ASAP. Look how much they were able to accomplish while they were forgotten in their little City Hall dungeon, and look how much of that progress got wiped away as soon as Commissioner Frazier learned Daniels' name. (And, after some confusion, figured out that he wasn't a white guy like Norris.)

The one exception to the uselessness of the department brass is a real surprise, as Major Rawls shows what happens when he chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil. He's the only one who can chase all the useless bodies away from the crime scene, the first one to realize how the street signs got turned around, the only one to notice McNulty sitting in a corner, covered in blood. And he shows an amazing level of compassion, considering that he is, in fact, Bill Rawls. His speech in the hospital to McNulty is one of the most inspiring bits of oratory I've ever heard to include a line like "You, McNulty, are a gaping a--hole. We both know this." Rawls can be mean and petty and vindictive, but he is not stupid and he is not a monster. He sees his archnemesis hurting, and rather than pour salt in the wound, he tries to help him. (Jimmy has too much of a martyr complex to listen, but at least Rawls tries.) Every character on this show is allowed some level of humanity, even something as small as cold killer Wee-Bey having named and attributed personalities to all of his fish. Rawls is a bastard, but even a bastard has limits.

Though Kima and Orlando (and Little Man, I suppose) are the obvious victims of the shooting, Bubbs suffers from some serious collateral damage. He had hung his entire sober future(*) on Kima, and on the day he expects to get money for a new place, he instead gets a beating from Det. Holley and, even worse, gets handed a 20 by an oblivious McNulty. Where Kima knows junkies in general and Bubbs in particular well enough to quickly suss out that Bubbs is trying to stay clean, it never occurs to Jimmy, who sees Bubbs only as a source of information. (As Ronnie puts it, he'll use anybody.) "The Wire" shows that everyone has some level of humanity, but most of the characters rarely see that in each other -- especially in characters from other social strata. Bubbs still has that crumpled-up 20 by episode's end, but you can see on his face that it's only a matter of time before he spends it, and Jimmy has no idea what he's done.

(*) In talking with Simon and Burns about this storyline years later, they noted that it's common for junkies to come up with "a very thin plan" that relies on a whole lot of unlikely if/then's to work, and which is quickly abandoned whenever one of those unlikelihoods inevitably falls through. It takes a lot of willpower as well as good circumstances to get clean and stay clean.

The episode closes with a pair of scenes tied together by similar-looking computer read-outs: the detail's computer recording Wallace's call to Poot, which Prez doesn't understand the gravity of; and the heart monitor in Kima's hospital room. Though Wallace is ambulatory and alert and healthy, his decision to leave the cricket-infested farm country and go back to West Baltimore places him in just as much danger as Kima currently faces.

Some other thoughts on "The Hunt":

• Jimmy's "What the f--k did I do?" catchphrase is usually used as a joke, but when he whispers it to Rawls at the crime scene, it's anything but funny.

• Cheryl, like the other spouses and significant others, hasn't appeared that much, but we've seen enough of her for her devastation in this episode to really hit home. Every scene with her was just about perfect, from her denial when Carver turns up at her door to the shame and hurt when none of the cops would talk to her (and Burrell got his own human moment when he picked up the ball that Frazier dropped) to the moment when she touches the blue marker stain Kima made on the couch in "Old Cases" and finally lets out all the tears. Really nice work by Melanie Nicholls-King.

• Also the usual brilliance from Larry Gilliard in the sequence where D is convinced Wee-Bey is going to kill him, even though he hadn't done anything particularly mistake-worthy of late. (Maybe he thought Stringer and Avon found out about D giving Cass and Sterling a pass for dipping from the stash?)

• Like Rawls, Maury Levy is such a loathsome creature that it's easy to miss how good he is at what he does, but he responded to McNulty's threats by talking and working rings around the cops in the Savino proffer.

• Also good at what he does, and far more likable? Cool Lester Smooth, who for a while is the only member of the detail (other than maybe Daniels, but he's understandably detained) to understand how they might be able to use their resources to catch the shooters, and who pulls off another investigative miracle with his "pull" of the Slice can.

And now it's time for some thoughts about how this episode reflects on events down the road:

• Given the dire prognosis for Kima in this episode, she's remarkably hale and hearty by the time season two begins. Admittedly, quite a bit of time passes between seasons for her to heal and do PT, and we rarely see her doing anything very strenuous in the future (no foot chases or beat downs), but she still comes out of this shooting very well, physically.

• This is, I believe, the only appearance for Dick Stillwell as Commissioner Frazier. By the start of season two, he'll be retired and Burrell will be angling to permanently replace him. Note also that a black mayor (Royce) could get away with having a white commissioner (just as Nerese Campbell will in the series finale), where a white mayor (Carcetti) has to choose a black commish.

• This will also be the last time we see Savino until season five, when he pops up as a soldier in Marlo's army, having apparently served every day of the three year charge (and therefore missing most of the destruction of Avon's empire). To be honest, I didn't recognize it was him until Omar referred to him by name in his final appearance. As Kima said last week, Savino was always the runt of the Barksdale litter.

• One more last: this is the last time Bubbs is sober until he's forced to dry out at the end of season four.

• The Slice can thing no doubt helps Lester get one of the few happy endings of season one. You could see how impressed Landsman was -- and how embarrassed he was that a cop this obviously talented had been exiled to the pawn shop detail for 13 years (and four months).

• By taking some money from the stash house, and by (as we'll learn in two weeks) becoming Burrell's new pet, Carver fulfills all the pre-requisites to become the new Lt. Daniels, a transformation that will be complete by the end of the series.

• I don't disagree with a thing Jimmy says in his rant to Ronnie outside Maury Levy's office, but in the end of the series, Ronnie goes above and beyond the call of duty to salvage Jimmy's mess with the Marlo wiretap -- and is ironically rewarded with the judgeship she would have needed many more years to get had she stuck to her usual M.O.

• "Where's Wallace?" God. Part of me doesn't even want to watch the next one. And speaking of which...

Coming up next Friday: "Cleaning Up," the season's penultimate episode and one that many fans consider to be one of the best "Wire"s ever.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 10, "The Cost" (Veterans edition)

Time once again to hop in the wayback machine and revisit episodes from "The Wire" season one. As usual, we'll be doing this in two editions: one for folks who have seen the whole series and want to talk about how season one stories tie into things down the road, and one for people new to the show who don't want to be spoiled. This is the former; scroll down for the newbie-safe version.

Spoilers for episode 10, "The Cost," coming up just as soon as I load up on junk food...

"Buy busts, lieutenant. It's what I asked you for, months ago. It's what we do, successfully, time and again, to make these cases." -Burrell

And here is Ervin Burrell, and the Baltimore PD, and every other institution on "The Wire," in a nutshell. His protege, Lt. Daniels, has done his best to convince Burrell that they need to think outside the box in their dealings with the Barksdale crew, that doing what they've done, time and again, won't work with these guys. And Burrell doesn't want to hear it. He wants this case to go away, fast, and he genuinely believes that business as usual will get him what he wants. Instead, he orders an undercover operation that's as futile as Daniel knows it will be -- and, worse, it gets Kima and Orlando shot.

Because "The Wire" deals with so many lofty sociological issues, critics (and I put myself in this company in the early seasons) sometimes did a poor job conveying just how well the show could work as pure entertainment. But I defy anyone to look at a sequence like the botched undercover and not leave deep claw marks on either the nearest upholstery or the forearm of their significant other.

This kind of sequence is such a staple of cop shows that I'm struggling to put my finger on what it is in either David Simon's script or Brad Anderson's direction that makes this one feel particularly tense. Is it that Kima had been established as such a three-dimensional, likable character through the season in general and this episode in particular? Is it that, as "The Wire" tends to do, we spent so much time setting up how this was supposed to go that it was doubly chilling when the plan went awry? Our knowledge of how Avon operates casting a pall over things? Savino's ice-cold, nearly-silent demeanor throughout? The darkness and the bleak, unfamiliar neighborhood? Or, again, our knowledge that all this risk was basically for nothing?

No matter the reason for it, the sequence works like gangbusters -- even though I know what's coming next, this is the first time in the rewatch process where I got frustrated that I didn't have time to immediately watch the next episode -- and caps off one of the busiest episodes so far. Each season of "The Wire" is structured in such a way that nothing seems to be happening for a very long time, and then all of a sudden lots of things are happening all at once as you realize how much of those slow-moving episodes were paving the ground for all this action.

After several months (in both real time and show time) of little progress, the detail now has a line on the main Barksdale stash house, which in turn could give them a line on every major drug player in West Baltimore. They have Stringer, Wee-Bey and Bird all implicated in Brandon's murder, courtesy of Wallace. They have a line into Avon's various real estate holdings, and if complacent boobs like Burrell don't get in their way, they could actually make one hell of a case here.

The show had spent so much time following Wallace's guilt over the Brandon killing that the episode actually skips over McNulty's initial interrogation of the kid, and it's okay. We know what Wallace knows, and we know how guilt-ridden he is about it, and in some ways it's more dramatically satisfying to come in the next morning with an exhausted Jimmy telling Bunk what went down. Besides, we get to rehash most of the material -- including Wallace's refusal to rat out D'Angelo, the only player with anything close to Wallace's own levels of compassion -- a second time when Daniels meets with him, so any blanks we haven't already filled in our heads get filled here.

Even at this late date in the season, though, Simon and Burns are willing to take their time on the stories that need it. Bubbles essentially spends the entire episode sitting on the same park bench, day after day, soaking in the sights, sounds and smells of the straight life and fighting the urge to get high. He has conversations with Walon and with Kima (who, to her credit as both detective and human being, quickly figures out what Bubbs is doing without having to be told), but mostly it's about watching Andre Royo sit on that bench, looking around, trying not to give in to temptation. The moment when we finally see him leave the bench and tell one of the touts that "I ain't up" is all the more powerful because we've seen so much of his journey already this season, and then because we spend so much time just watching him sit there. And our knowledge that he's placed so much of his future in Kima's hands only makes the botched undercover operation seem that much worse.

"The Cost" features three different characters attempting to get out of The Game. Wallace winds up with his grandmother, Bubbs is on his bench, and Omar gets on the bus, having realized he pushed his vendetta as far as it can go. Admittedly, Omar doesn't seem in a hurry to switch professions, but even his willingness to leave Baltimore seems revolutionary on a show where so many of the players seem uncomfortable if they wind up on the other side of town, or, in Wallace's case, in a rural neighborhood where the sounds at night aren't of breaking glass and rough language, but good old-fashioned crickets.

Some other thoughts on "The Cost":

• Though Daniels is right in his argument with Burrell, we've seen throughout the season that he can be just as guilty of business-as-usual thinking. Note that his insistence on trying to follow Avon in "Game Day" because that's how things were done in Narcotics -- despite Jimmy's warnings that this would be pointless -- only encourages Avon and Stringer to be more careful than ever before. This viewing was also the first time I ever noticed Avon's line about where that cat-and-mouse chase would have led the cops had they kept up with him: to the barbershop.

• I know David Simon went to U of Maryland, so when Kima's girlfriend Cheryl began boasting about what bad-ass drinkers Northwestern journalism students were, my eyebrows raised. Then I spent 30 seconds on Google and discovered that Laura Lippman (aka Mrs. Simon, and a former Baltimore Sun reporter herself) studied at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism.

• I should also say about that scene that, in retrospect, I should have been prepared for Kima to get shot, given that she had just been shown in this moment of pure happiness, delivering an anecdote from her earliest days on the force and then making out with her special lady friend. Between that and her promising Bubbs that she'd help him out starting tomorrow, I should have been able to spot the neon "DANGER!" arrow pointing straight at her, but I was thunderstruck at the time.

• Note that, among Carver's snack binge in the surveillance van is a bag of Utz potato chips, something of a regional junk food delicacy, particularly in the Pennsylvania-Maryland corridor. On "Homicide," Stan Bolander would occasionally pledge his alliegance to Utz.

• My one beef with the episode: Bubbles looks around the neighborhood and sees kids playing with actual bubbles. A little too on the nose, even if they looked purdy.

• Have I mentioned how much I love Prop Joe? That's some shameless shit he pulls off in this episode. Having set up Omar's failed attempt to kill Avon, he now gets Stringer to pay him to guarantee Omar's safety, while pretending to have never met Omar before. If it seems obvious to us, it's only because we know things Stringer doesn't.

And now let's talk about how some of this episode's developments will play out down the road:

• Herc is absent from this episode as he's away from the detail doing in-service training. I'm assuming this was a cost-saving measure to keep all the cop actors from appearing in every episode, but it also becomes a plot point when Carver's own stint in in-service training finally clues Daniels into how Burrell is so knowledgable so quickly about the detail's activity.

• Again, we know that Bubbs' attempt to clean up won't work out this time, but his conversation with Walon plants the seeds for everything that's going to happen in season five, from Walon being HIV+ (a fate Bubbs will be stunned to learn he avoided) to Walon telling Bubbs that the only way this will work is if he finds a way to forgive himself for all the bad stuff he's done.

• Wallace's reaction to the crickets will echo near the end of season five when Michael brings Bug to his aunt in Howard County. I can only hope that Bug managed to make a go of it in suburbia instead of running from it the way Wallace will in a few episodes.

• Thank goodness this wasn't Omar's final appearance on the show, nor the last time that Michael K. Williams and Idris Elba would play a scene together. (In addition to Stringer's final scene, the two parley in season two when Stringer is pitting Omar against Brother Mouzone.)

Coming up next Friday: "The Hunt," in which the department puts all of its muscle, for good or for ill, into finding the shooters.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 9: "Game Day" (Veterans edition)

In case you missed it -- and, judging by the minimal comments, I'm guessing many of you did -- I decided to double up on "The Wire" reviews this week in order to get back on schedule. (If you didn't see 'em, here are the Veteran and Newbie editions of the review for episode 8, "Lessons.")

Same drill as usual. We're revisiting season one in two editions: one for people who have never watched the show before and don't want future episodes (or seasons) spoiled for them, one for people who have watched from first episode to last. This is the latter; scroll down for a newbie-safe zone.

Spoilers for episode 9, "Game Day," coming up just as soon as I put on my sun visor...

"I just don't wanna play. Don't wanna play no more." -Wallace

"Game Day" lives up to its name with all kinds of games being played -- or not being played -- by most of our characters.

There's obviously The Game itself, and this week both Wallace and Bubbs express a desire to stop playing it. By getting high to blot out the guilt over Brandon's death, of course, all Wallace is doing is becoming a different kind of player. Bubbles, after nearly dying over what turned out to be a burn bag, seems to be taking the wiser route by crashing with his understandably wary sister.

Then there's the game that Lester teaches Prez and Sydnor how to play, the scavenger hunt (as Prez aptly describes it) wherein they try to track down all of Avon's assets, as well as any contributions he might have made to politicians like Clay Davis. We got a hint of how a game like this might end last week when Burrell ordered Daniels to give back the money they took off of Day-Day Price, and Daniels doesn't look like he particularly wants to keep playing, either, even though he knows he has no choice.

The most obvious game, of course, is the annual West side vs. East side hoops contest, with an Avon-backed team going up against a bunch of guys supported by Avon's biggest rival, the very old (by standards of The Game), very wise (ibid), very sneaky (op cit) Proposition Joe Stewart. It gives me no end of pleasure to watch actor Robert F. Chew work as Prop Joe, but the real fun of the basketball story is the humanity it gives to Avon. Yes, he's a drug lord, and a killer, and he's not above cheating even at something as relatively small-time as a basketball game. (He just isn't as good a cheater as Prop Joe.) But he also has genuine pride for his neighborhood, can be very funny ("You can't even read a playbook! Be for real!") and does appear to hold some rules and roles to be sacred. Witness his tirade at the ref over the decisive non-call at the end of the game. Avon is furious at what he believes to be sloppy officiating, but he gets even angrier when the guy's terrified reaction makes it clear that he thinks Avon might kill him over it. That sort of thing's just not done, even by someone as cold and ruthless as Avon, and so instead he yells at the guy for not having the guts and referee-like demeanor to get right back in his face.

And the basketball game in turn leads to a game of hide-and-seek, as Daniels and the other guys in the detail attempt to get their first good look at the target. It's an exercise in futility; not only is Avon too good to get caught by them (love him wagging his finger at Daniels as he rolls by in the opposite direction; as I learned when I saw him play Jimi Hendrix a few years before this, Wood Harris has some of the most expressive fingers in the business), but, as McNulty explains to Prez, there's no value in it. They're not going to catch Avon doing anything remotely illegal, certainly not right after such a public appearance, and so all they accomplish is to remind Avon to be careful about police surveillance.

As I've written a few times before, Avon -- and Stringer, for that matter -- doesn't have as much screen time as you would expect given that the show is devoting an entire season to them as the detail's target, but episodes like this one give him enough stature that he has a presence even in others where he doesn't appear that much. And Jimmy's assessment of Avon -- "You know what they say: stupid criminals make stupid cops. I'm proud to be chasing this guy." -- and his dispassionate approach to him reminds you that, to Jimmy, this entire detail is little more than a game.

Meanwhile, Omar continues to show off his own playful side, disrupting Barksdale business in as loud and colorful a manner as possible. Last time, he whistled "Farmer in the Dell" while shooting at Stinkum and Wee-Bey; here, he threatens the crew at the Pit (minus D, Bodie, Poot or anybody else recognizable; they must have been on a food run) with "Y'all need to open this door before I huff and puff!"

But Omar's game turns deadly serious when he makes an overt play for Avon outside of Orlando's, inadvertently supporting his own argument from last week that "You come at the king, you best not miss." Given how pathologically careful we know Avon to be, Omar's not going to get such an open look the next time, will he? And Stringer's probably not going to have so easy a time telling Avon to be patient with Omar, either.

Some other thoughts on "Game Day":

-When Kima picked Shardene's face out of the photo array last week as a potential witness to turn, she had no idea how on the money her instincts were. Not only is Shardene as moral and malleable as she and Lester had hoped, but they find out that she's been dating D'Angelo -- and that she's not immune to Lester's charms.

-Getting back to the property scavenger hunt, that montage is something that doesn't exactly fit with the series' house style, but I imagine it was the only way to make Lester's long explanation about corporate charters palatable for the audience. Even nine hours into a show that has made it clear it expects you to think about what you're watching, that speech is asking a lot of the viewer. The upside is that, when we see cops in the future try to follow the money trail (and it's not a spoiler for the newbies to say that money trails will be followed in the future), we're now relative experts on this unglamorous type of policework, and so the show doesn't have to spend much time explaining what's happening.

-Along similar lines, because the show has spent so much time explaining the rules governing the wiretap, it then allows for scenes about what happens when the cops bend or break those rules, like Jimmy pretending Sydnor monitored the call about the stash house, or Herc and Carver's eavesdropping of Poot's phone sex leading to a tip on Wallace that they shouldn't be allowed to use.

-I don't know if the homage is intentional or not, but Prop Joe's tactic of keeping his ringer on the bench for the first half so he can jack up the wager at halftime reminded me a lot of the football game from "M*A*S*H" the movie, where Hawkeye and Trapper deliberately keep Spearchucker Jones out of the game long enough to inflate the rival coach's confidence. The guys in the 4077th have less respect for the sanctity of the game than Avon, though, as they wind up neutralizing the other team's ringer through less-than-legal means.

And now let's talk about how events in "Game Day" will ripple throughout the rest of the season and the series. In terms of foreshadowing, this is a good one:

-As mentioned above, Lester is going to keep chasing the money trail, season after season, and will always get shut down before getting far enough. The last time will be his own fault, of course; without his and Jimmy's shenanigans, Ronnie could have used Maury Levy to finally get at the cash.

-Bubbs' sister is right to be nervous about him. When we see her again at the start of season five, she reminds him that the last time she let him attempt to get clean under her roof (presumably this time), he eventually went upstairs and pawned her silverware. Seeing these scenes in light of what happens in season five makes them a little less painful, and in turn makes those later scenes more rewarding. Bubbs' eventual victory is that much sweeter for seeing how close he came once before.

-In hindsight, it's obvious that the seeds are being planted here for Shardene to wind up with Lester, but was it that apparent at the time? I remember being more surprised when we find out in a few episodes that they've hooked up, but I'm admittedly clueless about romantic signals sometimes.

-The fans who didn't like Marlo point to episodes like this one as an example of why Avon was a more interesting character. Marlo was all about The Game and wearing the crown, while Avon had more of a personality and outside interests. I would argue that this contrast is what made Marlo so fascinating; he was a generation younger than Avon, and several generations scarier. Marlo had no interest in geographic loyalty and likely wouldn't have cared about this basketball game, but had he gotten sucked in somehow, the ref would have been very justified in fearing for his life. One thing both drug lords have in common: their refusal to be patient when it comes to getting revenge on Omar Little.

Coming up next Friday: "The Cost," in which the detail tries to find the stash, Stringer reaches out to Omar and Kima has a night out.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 8: "Lessons" (Veterans edition)

Okay, in an attempt to get these season one review of "The Wire" back on schedule and hopefully finished before Labor Day, I'm going to try to double up here and there. So we'll get one review today, and another one in the regularly-scheduled Friday morning timeslot. Not sure yet if I'll double up again next week or a little down the road, as I also intend to take a vacation at some point in August, but we'll get this done close to on time or your money back.

As usual, we're going to do this in two versions: one for people who are new to the series, one for folks who have seen every episode from first to last. This is the latter; scroll down for a version where you can safely read about and discuss only these early episodes.

Spoilers for episode eight, "Lessons," coming up just as soon as I teach my daughter how to front-and-follow...

One of the dominant themes of "The Wire" is the tremendous waste that the drug culture has created in inner-city America. Men and women who might have otherwise gone on to great things -- or, at least, to something resembling the middle-class lifestyle familiar to the majority of the show's audience -- are either deprived of opportunity, or else seduced away from those opportunities, by life on the corner.

Look at the moment where one of the abandoned kids in Wallace and Poot's care asks Wallace for help with his math homework. It's a fairly simple, culturally-relevant word problem about the number of passengers on a city bus, and yet the kid has no idea in how to solve it, or much interest in trying. Yet when Wallace translates the problem in terms of keeping the count on the stash, the kid gets it quickly. Math as a concept is an abstraction that has no real place in his world, but getting the count right? Do it or risk a beating.

And in this episode, Simon and Burns establish Stringer Bell as either the greatest example of this wasted potential, or perhaps the greatest counter-example. Maybe both.

Where Wallace's young charge can only relate to the world at large when it's placed in a drug context, we discover in "Lessons" that Stringer is trying to master the drug world by using knowledge gleaned from the real world. We already had a sense from earlier chapters (notably when Stringer and Avon discussed their plans to take over the Edmonson corner, where Omar kills Stinkum near the end of this episode) that Stringer had more business savvy than your average TV druglord. But the idea that he takes macroeconomics courses at the local community college, or that he insists on running his copy business as a real business and not simply as a front? That's the genius of Stringer Bell, and of the show. In another life, Stringer could have gotten a job on Wall Street, but in this one, he applies principles like elastic vs. inelastic products to catering to West Baltimore's dope fiend population.

There's a very interesting moment late in the episode, after Stinkum's death, where Stringer tries to caution Avon about seeking immediate retribution on Omar. Avon's head is in The Game, where you don't let something like this slide, or even appear to slide, or risk losing face. Stringer's approaching the problem from a more calculated point of view -- his plan still ends with Omar being killed -- but you can also see on his face that he's done a mental cost-benefit analysis of the entire Omar affair and is starting to wonder whether the stick-up man is worth all the trouble.

"Lessons" also establishes that there's more of a connection between the real world and the drug world than Stringer's college classes, as the detail picks up Day-Day Price -- driver for state senator Clay Davis -- with a trash bag full of cash handed to him by one of Avon's soldiers. We don't know yet why a state senator is accepting cash from a local drug lord, and thanks to Deputy Ops Burrell, we may never know. It's worth noting that Burrell's reaction to this development in the case doesn't automatically suggest that Burrell himself is corrupt, just that he's politically astute enough to know that no good can likely come to the department from messing with the business of an influential politician. Regardless of his motivation, Daniels appears to be just as screwed with Burrell as McNulty is with Rawls; if the two of them could stand each other's company, maybe they could hoist a beer over the irony of that.

Of course, Jimmy gets plenty of drinking in with The Bunk in this episode, and Bunk sums up his partner and friend in one devastating sentence: "You're no good for people, man." McNulty has been set up as our protagonist, and is played by the exceedingly likable Dominic West, but by the end of this episode -- by the end of this run of episodes -- it's obvious that The Bunk ain't wrong. Jimmy asking his sons to tail Stringer is the sort of thing that seems practical and amusing to him but is an even bigger parental breach than bringing the boys with Omar to the morgue a few episodes back. And he screws over Ray Cole in order to protect both the wire and Bunk's own murder case, big picture decisions that might be more palatable if he had the guts to be honest with Cole about it. I know Jimmy's afraid of the wrath of Rawls, but own your actions, man. Please.

I'll give Jimmy credit for this, at least: when Omar leaves the detail office free and clear, having made it quite obvious (without ever coming out and saying it) that he killed Stinkum and intends to keep hunting Barksdale people, Jimmy at least has the awareness to ask Lester if they're still cops at this point. It's a mark of the series' measured pace that we're eight episodes in, and the detail only has significant charges against two mid-level Barksdale people -- one of which gets taken away when Omar kills Stinkum. Omar is, like McNulty, a tremendously colorful and charming figure -- and a hell of an investigator, to boot -- but an episode like this, with the murder of Stinkum and Kima's realization that Omar probably didn't directly witness the Gant killing, is a reminder of the shady moral territory the cops enter when they deal with someone like him. Omar puts his life in simple terms for the cops -- "The Game is out there, and it's either play or get played." -- and how are upholders of a strict legal code supposed to operate around that?

Some other thoughts on "Lessons"

-Again illustrating the depth that the show tries to give all its characters, this episode shows two very different sides to Wee-Bey. Early on, we get him out with D'Angelo and the guys at the crab shack, having a good time, cracking jokes and getting made fun of for his affection for the too-hot hot sauce. It's a very humanizing scene -- and then we see him drunk (or high, or both) at Stinkum's party, dragging the barely-conscious Keisha into a bedroom and not even noticing that she died later in the evening.

-Earlier in this season, while discussing the opening titles, I pointed you towards Andrew Dignan's essay at The House Next Door about the series' various credit sequences. Andrew, Matt Seitz and Kevin B. Lee have now turned the idea into a five-part (one for each season) video essay for the Museum of the Moving Image, and you can see it at the Museum's website. As I write this, entries for season one and two are up. The season one entry is fairly newbie-safe, but I would avoid anything after that; the season two entry gives away major developments for both that season and season three.

-At one point in the episode, you can see Bunk reading a mystery novel by Laura Lippman, a Baltimore fixture who also happens to be Mrs. David Simon. This will become a running inside joke on the series, as later seasons will show characters perusing books by members of the extended "Wire" family, whether it's a George Pelecanos thriller or a first edition of "Generation Kill."

-If you haven't made the name connection by now, Det. Ray Cole is played by the late Bob Colesberry, executive producer of the show and the man responsible for much of the series' visual style. Though Jimmy notes hear that Ray's clearance rate this year is good enough that he can absorb the Stinkum whodunnit, for much of the series he's treated like just as much of a clown as Santangelo. In one of the prequel short films that were produced to tease the final season, we see McNulty, new to Homicide, explaining to Bunk that he got assigned to this elite unit, despite minimal training and service time, because he solved a case that a Homicide veteran was screwing up. That Homicide detective? Ray Cole.

-By this point, I probably should be keeping my copy of "Homicide" the book handy for reference. I can't swear that a drunken, guilt-ridden Bunk burning his clothes to get rid of the trace evidence is an incident from the book, but I feel reasonably confident that the book is the first place I encountered the idea.

And now let's talk about how some developments in this episode that will play out over the run of the series:

-Stringer and Avon's debate about Omar is far from the last time we'll see these two friends get into it over watching the bottom line vs. maintaining your rep. Stringer is a criminal who wants to be a businessman, while Avon is a good businessman who knows he's just a criminal, and it's that fundamental divide that will destroy them both by the end of season three.

-I love comparing McNulty's relationship with his sons here versus the last time we see them in season five. Here, pre-adolescence, they revere their old man, even though he's rarely around, and think doing surveillance on some scary criminal type is an exciting adventure. By season five, they're old enough to recognize that all the cool things he does are far, far outweighed by all the ordinary things he fails to do.

-Oddly, I remembered this episode's epigraph -- Omar saying, "Come at the king, best not miss" -- as being not from this episode, but the next one, and Omar recognizing that he screwed up his best chance at killing Avon. I guess over the years, the image of two different sequences with Omar shooting while Barksdale people crouched behind the safety of nearby cars blended together.

Coming up on Friday: "Game Day," in which the detail finally gets a good look at Avon (sort of), while the audience gets its first look, period, at a fella by the name of Proposition Joe.

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The Wire, Season 1, Episode 7: "One Arrest" (Veterans edition)

Okay, it's a Friday morning and I actually have a review of "The Wire" for you. Can't promise the same for next week (I usually take a few days off at the end of press tour), but right now we're back to business as usual, in which we talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode of the series to last. This is the latter; scroll down for the newbies edition if you want to be protected from discussion of things that are still to come, both this season and in later seasons.

Spoilers for episode seven, "One Arrest," coming up just as soon as I explain to Fienberg that I'm Batman and he's Robin...

"A man must have a code." -Bunk

There are several types of codes at work in "One Arrest." One is Omar's code, spelled out more explicitly in his conversation with Bunk than it was in previous episodes, in which he declares that he would never put his gun on an ordinary citizen who wasn't a player in The Game. There's the code that the Barksdale crew uses to communicate, and which Lester and Prez are proving so adept at cracking. And then there's the unwritten code of conduct that players on both sides of the drug war are expected to follow -- and the consequences that befall those who don't.

Rawls is out to get Jimmy for starting the Barksdale ball rolling in the first place (thereby depriving Homicide of a detective for the rotation system) and for giving Daniels ammunition to defeat Rawls in an argument before Burrell (thereby violating chain of command and the notion that Rawls can strike fear into the hearts of all his subordinates).

The detail tries to go around the usual code of conduct by not arresting Stinkum with the package; it's such a stark departure from how things are usually done that Lester has to repeatedly explain it to Herc. But Lester proves too clever for his own good, because Avon and Stringer are smart enough to know there has to be a reason why the cops didn't track Stinkum down later to arrest him. And that in turn starts revolving the wheels in Stringer's head, which leads to him ordering the destruction of the courtyard payphones at the low-rises. As things are going, it's probably the lesser of two evils -- giving Avon's lawyer a look at the charging document would have blown the entire case -- but in retrospect, there was probably a better way to handle their tracking of the re-up.

Again and again and again, "The Wire" shows us people in long-standing institutions who try to think outside the box, and who get mocked or outright attacked for doing so. The Game is The Game, and you're only supposed to play it one way, right?

Look at what happens when Lt. Daniels tries to reach out to Kevin Johnson, the kid Prez half-blinded back in episode two. Kevin listens to Daniels' pitch for a minute, but the pressure to behave in a culturally-correct way is too much for him, and so he turns to Carver and mocks Daniels' entire offer and belief that there's another way out for a kid like him. Maybe if Prez isn't hiding in an adjacent windowed office at the moment, he considers it a little more, but I doubt it.

(While Kevin just happening to be the runner in Stinkum's car could have seemed contrived, it fit into the show's philosophy that everything is connected, and it also served as a reminder that past actions will not be forgotten. Other shows would happily stick with the more likable, puzzle-solving geek that Prez has been the last few episodes and try to forget his original sin. Not "The Wire.")

On the other hand, when you expect everyone to play The Game by your rules, you occasionally become vulnerable. Just look at how dangerous Omar has become to the Barksdale crew. They get over by instilling fear into the citizenry and punishing anyone who might speak out against them, but they would never count on someone like Omar -- someone brave and tough enough not to fear them, and well-connected enough to have intel to offer up when someone like Bunk asks -- cooperating with the cops. Omar's beef with Bird isn't specifically about Bird killing a citizen -- it's about Bird as representative of the crew who tortured and killed Brandon -- but you can tell that sort of standard 'yo behavior disgusts him just the same.

With Polk now drying out or on vacation or whatever, our focus shifts to the lowest man on the detail totem pole: Michael "Santy" Santangelo, who fits the classic hump mold of many of the original detail members. In Baltimore Homicide parlance, a "dunker" is a case that any idiot should be able to close with minimal effort, and yet Rawls notes that Santy, at best, nails 6 to 7 out of every 10 dunkers, and is all but useless on the more difficult cases.

But if Santy isn't that bright (see also him missing a chance to photograph Avon in the previous episode), he's not that bad a guy. (It's interesting to see the bit where Jimmy calls him an a-hole when he has to cover for Santy, when we know that Santy is specifically ducking out to try to save Jimmy. It's a small moment, but one of those vintage "Wire" bits where our knowledge of everyone's perspective deepens our understanding of what's really going on.) He busts his hump, by Santangelo standards, to close one of his open whodunnits, and when luck -- and Bunk and Omar -- bail him out, he recognizes that the time has come to warn Jimmy, no matter the blowback from Rawls.

Getting back to the notion of how The Game is expected to be played, behold what happens when Bubbs accompanies Johnny to his court-mandated 12-step meeting. While Johnny thinks the whole thing is a joke, something to be endured until the judge forgets about him, Bubbs' eyes are open by the sight of all the ex-junkies he hasn't seen in so long, he assumed they were dead. Even though he gets high later that night, you can see that the group speaker Walon (Steve Earle, who will sing the theme song in season five) makes a connection with Bubbs. Johnny cares about nothing but getting high, but Bubbs sees, even for a moment, a possible way out.

But whatever progress Bubbs may briefly make is canceled out by the incredibly sad sight of Wallace getting high, doing anything he can to block out his memory of Brandon's corpse and the role he played in his death. As I've said many times over the course of these reviews, Wallace is just a boy. He shouldn't have to carry this kind of emotional weight (even though he made a conscious choice to place that call), shouldn't be in an environment where the only comfort he can find is in a bag of dope. God, that kid breaks my heart.

Some other thoughts on "One Arrest":

• I like how the beating of the unrepentant, loathsome Bird is led by supervisors Daniels and Landsman, where you'd usually expect to see the rank and file doing it and the boss coming in to break things up.
• Daniels' trip to the expensive fundraiser shows that, while he's a good enough politician to be tight with Burrell -- so tight that Burrell thinks nothing of uttering a line like "In this state, there's a thin line between campaign photos and photo arrays" in front of him -- he's not really of this world, and is much more comfortable watching a ballgame with the blue-collar limo drivers.
  
• Speaking of which, note that thieving limo driver Day-Day Price is played by Donnell Rawlings, who would go on to greater comic fame a few years later as one of the supporting players (he was Ashy Larry, among other characters) on "Chappelle's Show."
• Jimmy and Bunk's scene at the bar reminds me of how much I love how the show depicts drunkenness, as the two of them always reach a level of sloshed that you almost never see in movies and on television. Also, Jimmy's line about how Bunk, um, made love to him gently is a verbatim quote from "Homicide" the book, with Jimmy saying Terry McLarney's lines and Bunk saying Bob McAllister's.
  
• Man, Omar gets all the best lines. Love the bit where he's telling them where Bird might be scoring dope: "That's if I happen to be constabulating like y'all."

And now let's look at how this episode reflects things going forward:

• Obviously, the biggest long-term development is the first meeting between Bunk and Omar, where Bunk is impressed enough by Omar's code to remember and believe in it after Marlo frames Omar for killing the delivery woman in season four.
• Rawls claims to be offering Santangeo two choices, but really he's only offering one. Santy closes a case, as demanded, and still winds up being exiled from Homicide by season's end.
• Ronnie lists a funeral parlor among Avon's assets; it'll become Stringer's headquarters in seasons two and three.
• Phelan predicts that Ronnie will become a judge within 10 years. Clearly, he underestimated her.
• We're introduced not only to Day-Day, but to Clay Davis himself, though it's such a brief appearance that I didn't even want to discuss him in the newbie portion of the review. Don't expect to hear the catchphrase this year; it first appeared in season three.
• Memory continues to play funny tricks with me about this season. I thought it took the detail much longer than a single episode to crack the pager code, whereas I remembered Bubbs deciding to get clean in the same episode where he hears Walon's speech.
• In retrospect -- and trying not to factor in what would come later this season -- more heartbreaking: Wallace getting high, or Dukie getting high?

Up next: "Lessons," in which Jimmy takes advantage of his kids, D'Angelo considers Orlando's offer, and Day-Day takes a drive. My guess is that one will be two weeks away, as I'll be wrapping up press tour, then flying home, then taking some time off to reconnect with my family.

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The Wire, Season 1, Episode 6, "The Wire" (Veterans edition)

As I mentioned on Friday, I had to postpone the latest review of "The Wire" due to some personal stuff. While that's still ongoing, I had some time over the weekend and needed the distraction, so I finished my write-up of episode six, also titled "The Wire." It's a little shorter than the others have been, but it should be enough to get the conversation going. Due to uncertainty about my situation, and whether I'll still be going to press tour (which in turn might make it tough to do these reviews for a bit), I don't know exactly when I'll be doing episode seven and on, but I promise to keep you posted.

Same rules as always. We're going to talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode to last. This is the latter; scroll down for the newbies edition if you want to be protected from discussion of things that are still to come, both this season and in later seasons.

Spoilers for episode six coming up just as soon as I clean some eggs off the sidewalk...

"It cost you?"

There's an episode coming up called "The Cost," but in some ways, that title applies better to this one, as the murder of Brandon illustrates the emotional cost of living in this police/drug world. The episode opens and closes with the image of Brandon, no longer beautiful after being tortured to death by Wee-Bey, and through the course of the episode, we see how much seeing that image -- and being aware of the role they played in creating it -- costs Wallace, Omar and Daniels.

We'd had hints before now that Wallace was just a kid playing at a deadly, grown-up game, but the episode's opening sequence simultaneously shows off his childlike and adult sides. He and Poot live together in an abandoned, boarded-up rowhouse, siphoning off electricity from a nearby house through an extension cord (as much a titular wire as the tap on the courtyard pay phone), as they take care of a group of younger, similarly parentless neighborhood children. Wallace makes sure they get up on time, get their snacks, and get to school every day so the social workers don't get suspicious. (In "The Wire" world, the west side kids have good reason to fear social services.) Wallace is too young to be playing this role -- he still plays with toys, and unlike the sexually-obsessed Poot, hasn't moved onto girls yet -- but he's all these kids have. And just as we've seen him successfully get them off to school, he walks past the public tableau of Brandon's corpse, and his childhood innocence overwhelms the jaded would-be adult, and wrecks him. Yes, as D'Angelo points out, Wallace works in The Game and knows how violent it can get, but he's still just enough of a kid that he never imagined someone might die because he made a phone call, let alone that that death would be so brutal, or that the evidence of his sin would be deposited so close to his own doorstep. Wallace should be in a real home with real parents who send him to school, instead of playing parent to other abandoned corner kids and slinging dope in the Pit, but this is him, right here, and he can't handle it.

(Interestingly, while Poot was the one who was afraid to make the call about Brandon's whereabouts, he has no problem dealing with the body outside the window, and can be seen laughing at McNulty after Jimmy spills his coffee approaching the crime scene.)

If Wallace is the one who called in Brandon's executioners, Omar is the one who put him in a position where someone might want to kill him. The cast of "The Wire" is so uniformly wonderful that I could fill up each and every one of these reviews with nothing but praise for the various actors, and so instead I've mostly taken their greatness as a given, but hot damn is Michael K. Williams brilliant. There's no truth to the rumor that Omar originally had a small role that expanded once David Simon saw how great Williams was -- the series in general, and each season in particular, is too meticulously planned out for that -- but when you watch a scene like Omar howling in the morgue, and then follow it with Omar being slightly more relaxed, even a little funny ("Bad time for y'all?") but still incredibly dangerous in his visit to the detail office, you can understand why people might have wanted to believe that. As the man outside the system, and the show's lone character drawn slightly larger than life, Omar would stand out with almost any competent actor playing him, but Williams is, indeed, superb.

As for Daniels, he didn't cause Brandon's death, and even his inaction on pushing Burrell for a wiretap sooner likely wouldn't have saved him. But there's no way to know that for sure, and so when McNulty shoves those pictures in Cedric's face, the lieutenant finally recognizes that he can't half-ass the case anymore. Either he needs to go all the way, or not at all. When Lester asks Daniels if going up against Rawls cost him, he's talking about the political ramifications, but one look at Daniels' face as he studies those photos makes it clear that any potential cost to his career doesn't remotely approach the cost his soul has suffered in realizing what he may have failed to do.

And for now, it seems as if Daniels' passionate argument against Rawls will hurt McNulty more than himself. Not that Jimmy -- who finally got past his own arrogant prejudices to realize his new boss is good police -- would have wanted Daniels to go in firing anything less than both barrels, but by naming McNulty as the one who pointed out the truth behind Rawls' quest for paper clearances, he put Jimmy squarely back into Rawls' crosshairs.

The detail as whole, on the other hand, is trying to take at least one step forward for every step it takes back. Rawls tries to screw them by wanting a paper charge on D'Angelo, but Daniels manages to fight him off for now. They miss all the calls related to Brandon's murder, but at least they have a wire up now and are gathering good intel for a conspiracy charge. Polk bails rather than doing actual police work, but he wasn't contributing anything, anyway. But there's nothing in the episode to compensate for Santangelo taking an extremely long piss at the exact moment when Avon, Stringer and Stinkum march through the Pit and have a chat with D'Angelo. Would be nice to have a more current photo of the target, and to have one of him and his chief underlings appearing to talk business with another chief suspect, no?

Still, Lester gets to utter another of the series' mission statements with his speech to Prez about building something from scratch, and how "all the pieces matter." Much like the chess game in episode three, the detail itself functions as something of a metaphor for the series. Both are half-forgotten, half-unwanted members of a larger institution (the Baltimore PD, the television business), ridiculed or flat-out ignored for choosing to approach the old profession in a more thoughtful and thorough way (one where, indeed, all the pieces matter), and yet, when it's least expected of them, both are capable of performing absolute miracles in their field. Many of the detail's miracles are yet to come, but evidence of the series' miraculous powers have already been apparent in just six episodes.

Some other thoughts on "The Wire":

• I understand Rawls' argument about Jimmy being out of the rotation system and therefore overworking the other Homicide detectives. It's the same one that was made against Ed Burns, and Harry Edgerton, in "Homicide" the book, and I can see being frustrated if I'm the commander of a unit -- or member of a unit -- charged with bringing down the clearance rate if one guy goes off on a mission that seemingly has nothing to do with that and leaves everybody else picking up his slack. But I'd have a lot more sympathy for his argument if he didn't make it in the same episode where he proves how ephemeral the idea of clearances can be. Charging D'Angelo with those murders might have turned three names on the board from red (unsolved) to black (solved), but those charges would almost certainly not lead to convictions.
• So after we see Jimmy try to do the right thing for his kids in the previous episode and get screwed over by an mistrustful ex-wife, here we see exactly why Elena's wary of him, as he takes the boys to the morgue on a school night to listen to a grieving stick-up boy howl at the top of his lungs. I can see Jimmy's dilemma -- he's trying to turn Omar into an informant, and maybe Kima couldn't be reached just then -- but there had to be some way to put the guy off until morning without losing him, right?
• Note the black and white gangster movie playing in the background of the sequence where D'Angelo takes forever and a day to get himself decked out in a style of which Jimmy Cagney likely wouldn't approve, but which typifies many modern-day gangsters. On the other hand, his confrontation of Cass the thief, where he threw her eggs one by one onto the sidewalk until she confessed, was very old-school, as was D'Angelo's refusal to sell out Cass and Sterling for committing a crime that was only caused by Stringer's plan to smoke out a non-existent mole. A modern gangster like Stringer or Avon would have had those two beaten or killed for daring to skim off the stash, but vintage '30s gangsters (in the movies, anyway) still had some kind of standards about whom to hurt and why.
• So when I talked about the show's music rules -- outside of the season-ending montages, there's supposed to be no background music that doesn't have some kind of practical source, like the portable stereo in Daniels' office or the radio in Herc's car -- several people reminded me of the one time in the series' history where Simon and company violated that rule, with Avon's jazzy, slo-mo walk through the Pit. It seemed less out of place at the time -- six episodes in, it wasn't so obvious to me that the show was doing without a traditional score -- but now it's really jarring.
• The two Homicide detectives working Brandon's murder will become very familiar faces throughout the run of the series. In particular, keep an eye on the white guy, Ed Norris, played by... Ed Norris, who at the time this episode was filmed was still working as the commissioner of the real Baltimore PD. As he does here, Simon and Burns will often use Norris as their mouthpiece to complain about the state of the department in the bluntest terms possible.
• Bubbs and Johnny's scam with the copper pipes will be familiar to anyone who read/watched "The Corner" and remembers all of Gary McCullough's escapades involving the scrounging or outright theft of copper pipes and fixtures to pay for his habit. True story: when I was in Montreal last weekend for a family wedding, a cousin who lives in Baltimore, who's a fan of "The Wire," told me that she recently discovered that the copper pipes in her apartment had been stripped. While she was upset at the inconvenience and the expense, she was glad that "The Wire" at least made her understand why it had happened, and she tried to make herself feel better by imagining that it was Bubbles himself who robbed her.

And now let's talk about how the episode relates to events down the road in the season and the series:

• Norris' joke about being willing to give up half his overtime if it would fix the department seems especially funny in light of season five's story about the department gutting overtime pay in the budget crisis.
• Getting back to our discussion from episode 4 about whether we should have known that D was lying about killing Kresson, his reaction -- or lack thereof -- when Wallace first brings up "that girl" is, in retrospect, a blinking neon sign that D didn't do it. Knowing the man that D is, and the guilt that he carries, if he had actually committed that murder, he would have immediately gotten the reference when Wallace made it. But because Wee-Bey killed her, D'Angelo needs Wallace to elaborate.
• What's that saying about tragedy plus time equaling comedy? It's amusing to see how Carver gets so torqued about Bodie's constant escapes (both legal and illegal) from the law, yet by season four it's something he'll be able to crack jokes about.
• Question for the legal scholars: in light of how the rest of the season goes down, would the missed Santangelo photo have really made a difference? They get Avon on drug conspiracy anyway, but would the picture have somehow netted them Stringer?
• So what exactly does Polk choose to do? Obviously, he's out of the detail, and we know he's still on the force four seasons later -- he's the property room clerk Cedric and Ronnie go to see in the penultimate episode to check out Marlo's cell phone -- but he just doesn't strike me as the type who would have been willing to report to Medical and sober up on the spot like that. Daniels didn't seem to leave him a third option, though, and he seemed tired but not necessarily drunk when he showed up for his final season encore, so maybe he did take the Medical option.

Coming up next:"One Arrest," in which Bubbs and Johnny explore the world of 12-step programs, Omar meets Bunk, and Rawls keeps pressing Santangelo to get dirt on McNulty. Again, I don't know exactly when that review will appear, but it'll come at some point, and hopefully soon.

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