The Wire, Season 2, Episode 12: "Port in a Storm" (Veterans edition)

And so we've come to the end of our look back at "The Wire" season two, and that means it's the last time (for this summer, anyway) that I'll have to tell you that we're doing this in two slightly different versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to discuss it from beginning to end, and one for people who've only gotten through season two (or, at least, haven't made it all the way to the finish line) and don't want to be spoiled. This is the veteran version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for the season two finale, "Port in a Storm," coming up just as soon as I look at a table full of heads...

"The world just keeps turning, right? You guys move onto something new. No one looks back." -Beadie

"Always" is a word that comes up several times in "Port in a Storm." The episode's epigraph is of The Greek, amused, telling an airline ticket clerk that his travels are about "Business. Always business." When Prop Joe expresses concern about the dope Vondas is leaving on the docks, Vondas assures him, "Always, there is more." And when Avon is lecturing Stringer about how the rules of business school can't always be applied to the drug business, he tells him, "The street is the street... always."

David Simon (who co-wrote the script with Ed Burns) is a former newspaperman who chooses and uses words carefully. There's a point to that repetition of "always," and that point is driven home in the closing montage(*): There is no changing any of this. No matter how clever or well-meaning the cops might be, there will always be men like The Greek ready to exploit human weakness. There will always be people looking to buy and sell guns, and drugs, and even human beings. There will always be little guys left behind by progress. There will always be toughs and gangsters and soldiers, and there will always be a new case for people like Lester and Bunk to move on to, no matter how hard that is to process for someone as relatively un-jaded as Beadie Russell.

(*) This season's montage brought to you by Steve Earle's "I Feel Alright."

There's a sense of hopelessness throughout "Port in a Storm," which is structured much like season one's finale, "Sentencing." The detail gets some mid-level players, but the big targets get away, and it's clear that our heroes didn't even make a dent in things. The FBI's presence causes more problems than it solves, the death of a key witness (Wallace last year, Frank this year) prevents the detail from getting to the major players, and a talented investigator (first Jimmy, now Beadie) is wasted aimlessly driving a vehicle around the port. And there's also time devoted to setting up the following season's storyline, as Bubbs turns Kima and Jimmy onto Joe and Stringer's new business arrangement.

But in many ways, it's even grimmer than "Sentencing." While it seemed obvious that Frank was walking to his death at the end of "Bad Dreams," we (and Beadie, and the stevedores) still have to get an up close and personal look at his mutilated corpse. (And damn if his eyes don't seem to be looking right at Beadie, even as Chris Bauer is doing a good job of playing dead.) And where the season one montage at least climaxed with a laughing Omar - the one character on the show who follows the rules of more traditional filmed entertainment, and the one allowed to exist outside The Game - sticking up a drug dealer, here we end on a grieving Nick shuffling through the rain, trailed by the U.S. Marshal who's preparing him for a new life far away from the one he's always known.

As I asked last year at this time, why do we watch this show if it's going to give us nothing but tragedy and despair? And as I answered myself, we watch it because it's so profound, and moving, and funny, and well-acted, and thrilling even as we know things aren't going to end well except for the worst of the worst.

This was a controversial season at the time it aired, and it remains one. The port story was such a jarring shift from the drug case of season one. And (don't worry, newbies, I'll be vague here) most of these characters will be ignored, or only seen briefly, in later seasons, creating the sense that this season had little to do with the larger picture of the series.

Me? I love season two. The performances by people like Chris Bauer, Al Brown and James Ransone are among the best the show will feature in roles big or small. Sobotka is one of the more complex characters on a series that prides itself on giving depth to even the worst people (like Vondas' affection for Nick). There are so many standout moments from this year that come to mind when I look back on "The Wire" as a whole, whether it's Ziggy struggling to light his cigarette after killing Double-G, or Frank under the bridge, or Brother Mouzone going all Dirty Harry on Cheese, or Jimmy trying to recreate his car accident.

And whether or not the stevedores factor into the narrative down the road, I think this season is just as important thematically as any other. This is not just a show about drugs, or cops, or gangsters. It's about a city, and it's about America, and it's about showing how the system is letting so many people down, whether they're black dope slingers like Bodie or underemployed white guys like Nick.

But even if you want to focus on the drugs, season two is an essential part of the puzzle. Season one is about how a drug crew operates, and later seasons will show how cops and politicians have failed to adequately deal with the drug problem, how kids grow up to be soldiers, and how the media's failure to cover this (and the public's disinterest in the small bits of coverage) allows the problem to perpetuate itself. Here, meanwhile, we get a sense of how the drugs come into the country in the first place, and how men like Vondas and The Greek enable men like Stringer and Prop Joe. Like the poster says, it's all connected, and even if Nick Sobotka and D'Angelo Barksdale never got to meet before one went into witness protection and the other was killed, their lives were as intertwined as they were parallel to one another.

And because "The Wire" on so many levels is a critique of a purely capitalist society, attention must be paid to a season in which the chief villains represent capitalism at its purest and most cruel. They're fake - Vondas is using an alias, The Greek isn't really Greek, the rosary beads are just an affectation and not something he cares about, etc. - in every way but one: they will do anything and hurt anyone to keep the money rolling in.

Always.

Because I've been on vacation most of this week, and because I've hit a lot of the larger plot and thematic issues in my reviews of the previous episodes, let's move straight to the bullet points:

• Getting back to the idea that Frank's death prevents the detail from nabbing Vondas and The Greek, does it really? I know it seems that way, but even if he had shown up at the detail office the next morning, he doesn't know The Greek's name, nor Vondas' real name, nor does he know what hotel they could be found at. They only discover the correct hotel because Lester and Bunk are able to scare Sergei with the death penalty, and the timetable on them gathering all the evidence to make that work wasn't really affected by Frank's death, was it? Nick gives them the Philly info on the same day Frank would have.

• The focus on the port story meant that some of season one's characters got short shrift. Omar is gone for most of the season's mid-point, and the finale is the first we've seen of Bubbs and Johnny in a long time. Meanwhile, the appearance by Detective-turned-Officer Santangelo leaves Sydnor as the only surviving season one character of note to not pop up at any point this season.

• One minor quibble with the finale, though I acknowledge it's something that had to be glossed over given everything else that was happening: given the difficulty the detail had even finding, let alone tailing, Stringer and Avon a season ago, how did Kima and Jimmy get a tail on Prop Joe and/or Stringer so easily?

• Though Valchek may be the petty bastard who set much of this tragedy in motion, and though his absolution of Prez is tied up in his own pride (the apology letters have to explain that Stan could only be hurt by a sucker punch), he does have a very human moment when he looks at the latest photo of the surveillance van and realizes he did, in fact, have some affection for Frank. Can anybody translate what he says in Polish at the end of that scene?

• Robert Colesberry, the series' lead non-writing producer, made his directorial debut on this episode after a long and distinguished career behind the scenes, but not behind the camera, in movies and TV. As the man whom David Simon credits the most with helping come up with the series' visual style, Colesberry unsurprisingly was a natural in his first stint in the director's chair; I especially love the shot of the stevedores standing over Frank's corpse, and the way Nick's confession to the cops is shot with Frank's photo directly over his shoulder, with the shot shifting focus between the living nephew and the dead uncle at various points. Tragically, Colesberry - who also dabbled in acting on the show as bumbling Homicide veteran Ray Cole - died before season three really got up and running.

• Frank's death, and Ziggy's incarceration, and the disintegration of the union are among the season's bigger tragedies, but on some level I'm just as upset at that shot of Beadie driving aimlessly through the stacks. She went from someone who didn't know or care much about being a real cop to someone who displayed a real talent, and at times passion, for investigation. Emotionally, she's probably better off - the crimes always weighed harder on her than they did on the rest of the detail - but it still seems like a waste.

• I wouldn't call Pablo Schreiber a weak link exactly, but because the show's casting is so uniformly good, and because most of the other actors come across so naturally, Schreiber's more mannered performance as Nick often seemed a half-step out of sync. But the man really brings it in the finale, both with the rage burning in Nick's eyes as he sits in Frank's trailer and thinks about killing Vondas to the anguish on his face as he stands at that fence and contemplates his past and his future.

• As I said when Agent Koutris first appeared, some fans initially believed that he was corrupt. But the idea was always supposed to be that he was an honest agent who had done a moral calculus and decided the intel he thought he was getting from The Greek was worth more than whatever crimes The Greek committed because Koutris kept him on the street. The fact that Fitz is mad at himself, but not at Koutris, once he realizes what happened, suggests that this is just the way things work at the Bureau.

• One of my favorite things about the storytelling style that Simon, Burns and Colesberry created is that they're happy to simply stop and show characters thinking. There's a lovely extra beat after Stringer asks Brother Mouzone who shot him, and you can see the very sharp Brother wondering why Avon's number two is so curious.

• Again, the show is always very fair about seeing multiple sides of issues. Even though it's very clear that the writers are in favor of the patient, cerebral Ed Burns style of policing, and even though Herc and Carver are supposed to represent the reckless, pointless head-busting approach that's largely ruined the Baltimore PD, their frustration at having to play pack mule for the detail is understandable - and funny. I think anyone would be justified in asking for a transfer after spending an entire case doing the scutwork - note who had to do all the hard labor for the warrants judge a few episodes back - and after being left sitting on Nick's house long after Nick had turned himself in to a member of the detail.

• The brief scene at Daniels' home confirms what was already clear back when he assumed responsibilities for the 14 Jane Does in "Backwash." His marriage to Marla is over in everything but name, as he's now sleeping in a spare room and she couldn't possibly be colder to him. The irony, of course, is that Daniels' unit did turn those 14 red names to black, and in the process boosted his standing with Burrell and Rawls, but Marla has already decided that the man running the newly-official Major Crimes Unit is not the man she thought she married.

• The scene where Louis Sobotka shows up at Frank's trailer and tells Nick "Let's go" is a real testament to the economy with which "The Wire" creates characters. Here's a guy who's had only a handful of scenes throughout the season, but we know him (and we know the Sobotka family) well enough by this point that it's a big moment when he tells his son it's time to stop messing around and face the consequences of what he's done.

And for the final time this season, here come some veterans-only thoughts on how the events of this episode will play out through the rest of the series.

• As alluded to above, this is the last we'll see of most of the port characters in any kind of significant role. Beadie gets involved with McNulty, and Vondas and The Greek come back into play with Marlo and Joe in the final season, but aside from brief season five cameos by a now-homeless Johnny 50 and by Nick protesting the opening of new waterfront condos, we're done with these people. And to reiterate a point from that Nick cameo, David Simon told me that the idea was Nick left the witness protection program, as many people do, because he missed his old life; if Vondas or The Greek know he's back in Baltimore, they don't much care, because the case is years old and they feel confident they can get out of town quickly should any new problems arise.

• Vondas' "My name is not my name" line works as the antithesis of Marlo's "My name is my name!" speech from season five, and nicely illustrates the difference between the two organizations. Vondas and The Greek care only for money, where Marlo's primary concern is power and respect. Marlo's name is all he cares about; Vondas' name is just a tool to use so he can remain anonymous and count his cash.

• And getting back to Johnny 50's homeless future, I wonder if Simon and company had that in mind at all with the brief clip during the montage of Lala dragging a plastered Johnny away from a corner. With the union taken over by the feds, with his two best friends either in jail or in witness protection, and with the general level of alcoholism among the stevedores, it's not at all hard to imagine Johnny climbing inside a bottle for a few years and emerging to find himself living in a shanty town.

• The Major Crimes Unit becomes a more or less permanent thing, and will operate out of that off-site building in the Southeastern for the rest of the series' run.

• Once again, we see a police document referring to Cheese's last name as "Flagstaff," when in season four it will become Wagstaff to tie him to unacknowledged son Randy.

• Carver and Herc leave for the Western district, where Carver will learn how to be a good cop from Bunny Colvin, and where Herc will stay ignorant as ever.

Well, it's been fun. With any luck, we can finish up the series next summer with a look back through season three, which was the last one to air before I started my second career as a blogger.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 11: "Bad Dreams" (Veterans edition)

Almost to the finish line on "The Wire" season two, folks. As always, we're going to look back in two slightly different versions: one for the people who are watching the show at roughly the same pace I'm writing about it and don't want to be spoiled on what comes down the road, and one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to talk about all of it. This is the veteran version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for "Bad Dreams" coming up just as soon as you get me two hot dogs and a strawberry soda...

"You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make s--t in this country. Build s--t. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket." -Frank Sobotka

When we get to this point of each season of "The Wire," I tend to rail a lot against the screenwriting crimes committed by George Pelecanos. In season one, he killed off Wallace. Here, he sends Frank Sobotka walking to his apparent doom. In later seasons... well, you veterans are probably already cringing in memory of what Pelecanos did to your favorites.

But it's reductive to single out these penultimate/Pelecanos episodes just because they often (but not always) feature the deaths of beloved characters. Yes, the deaths hit, and they hit hard, but all the non-lethal parts of them hit nearly as hard. This is the point in each season where things that had often seemed like intellectual abstractions start to take on emotional heft - when you see how much misplaced faith Nick has put into his relationship with Vondas, when you see Beadie smile at a job well done in tailing Vondas to his hotel room, when Frank nails Bruce and the state of the American industrial economy to the wall with the line I quoted above.

David Simon likes to compare each season of "The Wire" to a novel, and Pelecanos' episodes always have the sensation of reading the last 70 or 80 pages of a really good thriller - one like, say Pelecanos' own "The Turnaround" or "The Sweet Forever." What may have taken a long time to read in the early going now flies by. You know the players, the conflicts, the stakes, and now you just want to see what happens next, and whether people come to the end you want for them or not(*). So some of the power of these episodes tends to come from their position in the season, but it also comes from the fact that Pelecanos is really, really good at this. Simon has said that in season one, several of the big moments that wound up in Pelecanos' "Cleaning Up" were originally going to be in the Simon-written finale, but George's take on them was so strong that Simon let him handle it.

(*) What's funny is that, for all the talk - including by me - about how Pelecanos and Simon are such kindred literary spirits, his books on average tend to be more optimistic than "The Wire." They're operating on a much smaller scale than what the show is doing - "Drama City," for instance, is what a season of "The Wire" would be like if it were only about Cutty - and not everyone's story turns out as well as they deserve, but the success rate is generally higher, and the overt bad guys (as opposed to the systemic problems) tend to get bumped off in the end. Pelecanos is always much more brutal to Simon's characters than he allows himself to be to his own.

Obviously, the killer sequence here comes at the very end, as Frank's fate is irrevocably changed during the long walk from his truck to where The Greek and Vondas are standing. It's a testament to how well the series has trained its audience that Pelecanos' script and Ernest Dickerson's direction can mine so much tension from a point of view montage of a fax being sent, transferred by mail cart to a secretary, and entered into a computer.

There are shows that try to get a lot of mileage out of springing surprises on their audience - only giving them a small part of the story so their minds can be blown when they find out the whole truth. "The Wire" rarely operates that way. Like the Greek dramas Simon likes to talk about, it tends to lay out everything that's going to happen well before it happens. It doesn't cheat, doesn't hide. It turns you into an omniscient observer of this world, and then it drives you crazy because you know how badly things are going to go, and when you see characters who don't know as much as you do. There are so many moments in "Bad Dreams" alone where I wanted to scream (or have screamed) at the screen, trying to warn characters about fates that in my head I know are unavoidable.

I want to tell Omar not to trust Stringer. I want to scream for Kima to pay attention to the old man in the sweater walking past her in the parking garage. I want to tell Ronnie to not let Sobotka leave the detail office under any circumstance, even if that would require Herc and Carver to entertain him with a song-and-dance number while they waited for Frank's lawyer to show up. And you know I shouted like hell the first time I saw Frank walk toward The Greek, even as I knew the info in Fitz's fax was slowly, inexorably making its way to Agent Koutris' computer.

But it's a TV show, not an interactive experience. Ronnie can't hear me any more than Stan Valchek can listen to reason, and so Frank walks out of the detail office and into the hands of a couple of ruthless international gangsters.

Dammit.

I like that even in this episode, even as Frank is being set up for what looks like a permanent fall, the show allows him the depth that marks him as one of the more complicated characters in the show's history. As Rafael Alvarez said in his comments about "Backwash," "Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain." And so the show is allowed to admire Frank's ends - as it does when he puts in a hard day's work in place of Little Big Roy, and as it does when he gives Bruce a piece of his mind - even as Louis Sobotka is invited to cut right through all of Frank's self-rationalizations, and to tell him that trying to save the union doesn't justify turning Louis' son into a drug dealer. (Imagine how angry Louis would be if he knew about the role his brother played in the deaths of the Jane Does.)

An incredible performance throughout the hour, and the season, by Chris Bauer as Sobotka. He's gotten more post-"Wire" work (including his current stint on "True Blood") than someone like Larry Gilliard, but none of those parts have been as rich, as complicated, or as compelling as Frank.

As we did at this point in season one, we see the case coming together, but not as strongly as it should be. Ziggy not only killed off Double-G, he gave The Greek advance warning to clean out both the warehouse and electronics store - the latter because Jay Landsman was too tunnel-visioned to alert Lt. Daniels, or secure the scene, or do anything that might have led the detail closer to those 14 open murders. (To Landsman's credit, he at least recognizes how badly he screwed the pooch, where he wasn't quite as remorseful when he failed to alert Jimmy about a Barksdale-connected murder in season one.) They had Frank in the office, ready and willing to cooperate, but they let him go because Ronnie wasn't stubborn enough to tell Frank to call a lawyer then and there. And thus far, the only person in custody who seems willing to talk is White Mike, who probably wouldn't recognize The Greek any more than Kima did.

It'd be enough to make you cry... if, that is, "The Wire" hadn't already told you that tears won't be enough.

Some other thoughts on "Bad Dreams":

• The other major story of the episode pits our two larger-than-life bad-asses against each other, as Omar buys into Stringer's story and goes after Brother Mouzone, only to realize that the gut-shot man calmly praying to his deity couldn't possibly be the same one who tortured and mutilated Brandon. Though if Omar is savvy enough to see this, why would he believe Stringer in the first place? Butchie could smell something off about things when Joe approached him in the previous episode, and it's not like Stringer didn't have a previous face-to-face opportunity to share this information with Omar.

• The HBO.com recap of this episode takes a literal reading of Ziggy's line about how "the same blood don't flow for us, pop" and suggests that Ziggy is letting Frank know that he knows they're not biological father and son. But there have been enough mistakes in various recaps on that site over the years (on this show and on "The Sopranos") that I don't take them as gospel, and I always viewed that as a metaphor; Frank is Ziggy's father, but Ziggy inherited none of his father's abilities or temperament. Either way, a haunting scene from both Bauer and James Ransone, particularly when Frank has to watch his son walk back into the holding pen and realizes he can't protect the kid anymore from the awful fate he's trapped in. (And it's a fate that Frank set up, by putting Ziggy's cousin and best friend in business with The Greek in the first place.)

• Though nobody on the detail recognizes The Greek (they assume the man in the fancy suit must be the boss), it's still a pleasure to watch Beadie successfully tail Vondas - and, almost as importantly, to see that Bunk and the others trust her to do it. As The Bunk says, she has come a really long way from the clock-puncher we met at the start of the season.

• While The Greek seems to be utterly without emotional attachments (making him more like Stringer), it's interesting to see that number two man Vondas is (like Avon) capable of letting business be complicated by his affection for certain underlings, in this case through his odd surrogate father relationship with Nick.

• Don't blink or you'll miss David Simon as one of the reporters out for Sobotka's perp walk. He's the one shouting out, "Is it just you or is it the whole union?"

• Even amid the tragedy of this one, we get some good nickname-related humor, including Sergei lamenting, "Why always Boris?" and more wacky stevedore nicknames like Big Roy (a small guy) and Little Big Roy (a huge guy).

And now we've come to the veterans-only part of the review, where we talk about how events in this episode will play out in the finale, and over the course of the series:

• Sergei will again have to suffer being called "Boris" by Marlo in season five, though as I said at the time, I felt that was an attempt at stretching out a running gag at the expense of character, as Marlo doesn't seem the type to be aware of the existence of "Rocky & Bullwinkle," let alone Boris Badenov or any other stereotypes about Russia.

• As Nick learns in the finale, Frank was a fool to listen to Vondas' pitch, because there's no way he could have made Ziggy's confession go away. That does raise the question of what would have happened without Koutris' urgent call. Maybe Frank survives that initial meet under the bridge, but Vondas gets to him once he realizes they can't make the case go away.

• Stringer, of course, has gotten far too cute with Omar and Brother Mouzone, and that will come back to bite him in season three - while leading to the greatest superhero team-up since Superman and Spider-Man took on Doctor Doom and the Parasite. In retrospect, I wonder how things would have gone down had Stringer just bluntly told Avon, "Look. You're in here. I'm out in the real world. I see how things are going. Muscle, even Brother Mouzone's muscle, isn't going to solve our long-term problem, because everybody knows we've got no product, and the only person willing to sell it to us is Joe. I've just arranged to make us a ton of money, and if you have a problem with that, we can talk about it after you've gotten out and I've handed you your cut." Or would that have just ended the partnership even sooner? It's "The Wire." You can't change the fates. I just really want to sometimes.

Coming up next: The season comes to an end with "Port in a Storm," as the detail tries to put a charge on Vondas and The Greek, while Stringer has to deal with the mess he made with Brother Mouzone.

In theory, you'll see that review a week from today. But, as mentioned in several other posts this week, I'm going to be taking some vacation days next week (and will be away for all of the following week), so no promises. Worst comes to worst, you'll get it sometime during that week after Labor Day, when I'll be back at work full-time.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 10: "Storm Warnings" (Veterans edition)

Okay, press tour's over, and we've got three episodes of "The Wire" season two left to re-visit. As always, we're doing this in two versions: one for people who have watched the whole series from beginning to end and want to talk about this episode in the context of what's to come, and one for people who don't want later episodes/seasons spoiled for them. This is the veteran edition; click here for the newbie version.

Spoilers for episode ten, "Storm Warnings," coming up just as soon as you get me my copy of Harper's...

"He wasn't saying 'Please don't shoot me.' He was more... begging." -Ziggy

"The Wire" season two aired back when I was still teamed up on the TV beat with the great Matt Zoller Seitz, and I remember him coming into work the morning after he had watched "Storm Warnings" raving about the sequence where Ziggy murders Double-G and stumbles back to his car.

"That," he said, "was like a Springsteen song come to life."

For all the grief that Ziggy takes from "Wire" viewers, new and old, for being so pathetic, that sequence wouldn't be half as powerful without all the past humiliations we'd witnessed. If Ziggy wasn't terrible at everything - if he wasn't constantly being laughed at, and dismissed, and shouted down - then it doesn't make sense that he would snap like this, killing one man, wounding another, and throwing his own life down the drain. But because Ziggy has been the lifelong butt of a cosmic joke, because we've seen his frustrations mount as he's failed at living up to his father and his cousin, we understand how he gets to this breaking point when Double-G shorts him on the money and then laughs at (and gut punches) him. Ziggy has always bottled up his anger, and has always been prone to rash decisions (fighting Maui, buying the duck), and with a gun in his hand(*), he makes another one that he can't undo. The duck's not coming back, but nobody really cares about the duck. George Glekas, on the other hand? Ziggy has to answer for that, and he knows it, and in one final understandably screwed-up decision, Ziggy embraces the deed, so long as the official record makes it sound like Glekas was the coward begging for his life, and Ziggy was the bad, bad man who put him down.

(*) A gun that, as I pointed out in the previous veterans edition, he was only in a position to buy because Double-G wouldn't front him some cash for the theft and Ziggy had to go pawn the duck's necklace.

I don't know that James Ransone ever got the credit he deserved for being so convincing as such a deliberately irritating character(**). But watch a scene like Ziggy struggling to light his cigarette, or an empty Ziggy giving a disbelieving Jay Landsman exactly what he needs because there's no point in fighting the tide, and you can see that this is one of the most indelible performances of the season, if not the series.

(**) Though his work in "Generation Kill" as chatterbox Ray Person seemed to help. I remember reading a lot of "I had no idea this guy was a good actor" comments last summer.

Ziggy's rampage is the most noteworthy event in "Storm Warnings," but the episode as a whole is incredibly busy, moving the plot along more than in the previous weeks combined. It's so busy, in fact, that it opens with a quasi-break from the show's usual rules about music and editing, as we see the detail's investigation take several leaps forward in a montage scored to Johnny Cash's "Walk the Line." Because Prez puts that song on his portable stereo at the start of the montage, and because the montage is depicting the various developments that Prez is logging on the case board, it's more bending the rules than breaking them. But as with most seasons of the show, you get the sense that David Simon and Ed Burns are more interested in setting up the plot than in actually showing the plot -- that it's more important to them, from a character and a thematic perspective, to show the growing pains of a project than to dwell on the period when things are working smoothly -- which is why we get an episode like this nearly every season. And at times, so much is happening that a montage is the only way to show it all.

Yet "Storm Warnings" never feels especially rushed. We still linger on Ziggy's dazed point of view as he stumbles out of Double-G's shop, still get the long pause as Lester and Bunk jokingly stare down the feds, still get to hear Brother Mouzone deliver his whole Dirty Harry monologue to Cheese, still get to see Nick and Prissy Catlow getting drunk at the playground and crying as they swap Ziggy stories.

To fit all of this in - in terms of both time and tone - Burns and director Rob Bailey take more stylistic liberties than we usually get on a series where each episode more or less looks and feels like every other. In addition to the Johnny Cash montage, Ziggy's stumble back to his car is shot in an impressionist style where the series usually strives for documentary realism, and the playground scene feels oddly stage-bound, as if Nick and Prissy had briefly wandered into a Tennessee Williams play. I'm enough of a "Wire" purist to note the departures from the usual form, but not enough of one to be irked that this episode features so many of them.

After all, what show other than "The Wire" could end an episode with the good guys furiously typing even as we see the bad guys destroying most of the evidence our heroes are trying to obtain?

Some other thoughts on "Storm Warnings":

• Because "The Wire" loves its parallel structures, "Storm Warnings" offers us a second surprise explosion from a dorky supporting character, as Prez clocks Valchek in front of Daniels, Lester and half the Baltimore FBI field office. As with Ziggy, Prez's outburst has been a long time in coming - we've seen from the second scene of the season premiere that Valchek has no interest in listening to what his son-in-law thinks about policework - and while the result of this one isn't quite as permanent as what Ziggy does to Double-G, we know from this season that Stan Valchek is a man who knows how to hold - and pursue - a grudge.

• And how hilarious is that shot of Lance Reddick's eyes bugging out at the sight of Prez's punch? For that matter, is there a phrase on this show, other than McNulty's "What the f--k did I do?," that comes up as often, and in so many different and amusing circumstances, as hearing Daniels seething as he utters the words "Detective, my office"?

• There were some complaints in the last review that Brother Mouzone's arrival gave the series one larger-than-life character too many, and his assault on Cheese - which, again, is an homage to the most iconic scene of Clint Eastwood's career - certainly keeps him operating on a different frequency of reality than anyone on the show other than Omar.

• And speaking of Omar, we not only learn that he's tight with Blind Butchie, who operates as Omar's bank, but that Prop Joe is aware of this relationship and wants to use it to deal with the Brother Mouzone problem.

• Brother Mouzone is played by Michael Potts, one of many "Wire" actors who's so memorable in the role (and was so unknown to me beforehand) that it becomes impossible for me to see him in another role (say, on "Flight of the Conchords" as Joseph Saladou, the one Nigerian on the Internet whose request for money isn't a scam) without immediately flashing on him lecturing Cheese about the "copper-jacketed hollow point 120 grain hot streak load of my own creation." Also, Mouzone's sidekick Lamar is played by DeAndre McCullough, who was one of the main characters of Simon and Burns' non-fiction epic "The Corner." (Sean Nelson played him in "The Corner" miniseries.)

• Prissy is played by Merritt Wever, currently one of the funniest people on television as nurse-in-training Zoey on Showtime's "Nurse Jackie."

And now, a few veteran-only thoughts on how the events of this episode will play out over the course of this season:

• You can look at Double-G's murder as a parallel to when Omar shot Stinkum and ruined a lot of hard work by the detail, but next week we'll learn that the crucial mistake was made by Jay Landsman in not alerting the detail to this event so they could secure and search the store. Had Glekas not been killed, Vondas' people still would have emptied the place.

• Or, if you prefer, the real mistake - not that anyone realized it at the time - was in letting the FBI in on the investigation, which in turn alerted Agent Koutris, who alerted The Greek, etc., etc.

• Herc and Carver are nearly at their own breaking point about being low men on the totem pole, and of course that will lead them to transfer to the Western district, where Carver will become a good cop and Herc will become... the same idiot he always was, but now a dangerous one who destroys Randy's life.

• It's pretty clear by this point that Kima and Cheryl's relationship is doomed, as Cheryl practically has to cuff Kima's hand to her own to get Kima to feel the baby kick.

• As with the blinding of Kevin Johnson in season one, Daniels will bail out Prez for the punch. And now as then, Prez - who will stay on the detail until he accidentally kills an undercover cop - probably would have been better off had Daniels stepped aside and let Prez ruin his own career.

Coming up next: "Bad Dreams," the penultimate episode of season two, which means two things: George Pelecanos on script, and a whole lotta tragedy. Hopefully, we can stay on the Friday schedule for these final few weeks.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 9: "Stray Rounds" (Veterans edition)

We're in the home stretch on our trip back through season two of "The Wire," and as always, we're doing it in two slightly different versions: one for people who have never seen the show before, and one for people who want to be able to discuss not only season two, but everything that's coming later. This is the veterans version; click here for the newbie edition.

Spoilers for episode 9, "Stray Rounds," coming up just as soon as I say "No thank you" to drugs...

"This is about Frank Sobotka!" -Valchek
"The case is bigger now." -Pearlman

"Stray Rounds" contains one of my absolute favorite scenes in the run of the series, the one quoted above: Daniels and Pearlman brief Burrell and Valchek on everything that the detail has accomplished -- all these near-miraculous feats of investigative genius, having taken what was a simple petty grudge and used it to get a line on smuggling, drugs, prostitution and possibly 14 open murder cases -- and all Stan wants to hear about is Frank Sobotka.

This, in a nutshell, is why nothing ever gets done in the universe of "The Wire." Good work is damned hard to do, and if it doesn't help someone in power either stay in power or protect his own interests, then it doesn't really matter, does it? Daniels could close the 14 open murders, could nail the entire Barksdale/Bell gang, could find a way to put a charge on the Irsay family for moving the Colts out of Baltimore, and none of it would matter to Valchek if Frank Sobotka weren't charged as an accessory to it all.

There's a lot of hopeless, myopic, institutionalized thinking going on in "Stray Rounds." Bodie's shoot-out with the rival crew kills a little boy, and though Major Bunny Colvin, commander of the Western District, knows the usual War on Drugs tactics are pointless, Rawls tells him to go bust heads and take doors anyway. Norris and Cole assume Bodie is another idiot drug dealer, and so they fall into the trap they think they've set for him. Avon refuses to see Stringer's persuasive arguments about the Prop Joe deal, and instead arranges to hire legendary enforcer Brother Mouzone (and gets him down to Baltimore much quicker than String was expecting). And we see that The Greek is stringing along an FBI agent named Koutris by pretending to give him "terrorists" (actually, a difficult business partner) in exchange for being informed about threats to The Greek's business.

Hell, Ziggy even manages to get his duck to drink itself to death, because it never occurred to him that giving booze to a waterfowl was a health risk.

If it wasn't for McNulty's latest R-rated shenanigans -- or for the joyful performances of people like Al Brown as Valchek and J.D. Williams as Bodie -- this would be one of the darker hours of "The Wire" in which no major character actually dies.

Part of the reason "Stray Rounds" feels so hopeless, of course, is that it's our closest look to date at The Greek and his operation. While the smoke-filled dinner with The Greek and his lieutenants could resemble a gathering of the Injustice League, "The Wire" isn't interested in concepts like good and evil. The Greek does terrible things, but not out of malice -- or even out of the pride that leads to so many terrible outcomes in the drug world (like Bodie and company's stray round). Rather, as David Simon has said many times, The Greek is capitalism in its purest, most ruthless form -- a man who will do anything to keep his business viable, and the money flowing in.

While he and Vondas have their blind spots -- they're a bit too confident about being able to elude the Baltimore PD -- he's still clever enough to recognize what Fitz told Jimmy in the series premiere about the FBI abandoning the War on Drugs for the War on Terror. He has Koutris on the line, not because Koutris is corrupt, but because he's made Koutris believe he can give him information on terrorists, and Koutris has no idea that he's being played.

Against a man with that long a view, with his finger in so many pies, what chance does the detail have to make a case? And against a generation of Bodies and Avons, what chance do men like Bunny Colvin have to make a dent in the human cost of the drug trade?

Some other thoughts on "Stray Rounds":

• Maybe the most heartbreaking part of the opening sequence isn't the mom finding her dead son (though that's brutal), but the moment right before, when she has no idea what's happened and is just telling him to get to school, because the drama's over -- as if this sort of thing happens so often in the neighborhood that they treat it like just another of life's routine inconveniences.

• As if to symbolize the Valchek/Pearlman exchange, Frank is largely spectator in this one, showing up only to witness Koutris' raid on the can with the Colombian drugs, but we do learn that his plan seems to be working, as the new budget will include concessions for the port.

• McNulty is pure comedy in this one, from Dominic West -- a Brit whose American accent is sometimes spotty -- having to do a fake horrible British accent, to the reactions of McNulty and Kima at his situation during the raid, to the flare of Ronnie's eyes when she reads the incident report over Jimmy's shoulder.

• Speaking of the raid, there's a nice small moment where the uniform officer assumes that the only way to take a door is to knock it in, where both Kima and Bunk realize they can just knock and get the same result. This isn't a drug house; you can't flush hookers.

• Herc and Carver have been getting the short end of every assignment all season (down to washing windows in the previous episode), and their frustration is starting to overwhelm them at this point.

• I love the way Frankie Faison plays Burrell in the scene with Valchek, because Erv knows exactly the position Stan is in, having previous assigned Daniels to a detail that sprawled far beyond what was expected.

• We can talk more about Brother Mouzone next time, but note that the character is given the kind of dramatic entrance "The Wire" doesn't usually do -- that is, unless the series' other larger-than-life character, Omar, is involved.

• Bunny Colvin's mustachioed sidekick is Lt. Mello, played by the real-life Jay Landsman, who was the inspiration for both the character of the same name played on "The Wire" by Delaney Williams, but Detective Munch on "Homicide." He has one of the thicker (and authentic) Baltimore accents on the series.

And now we come to the veterans-only section, where we can talk about how developments in this episode will play out later in the season, and the series:

• It's not as grand an entrance as Mouzone gets, but the introduction of Bunny will of course be more important to the series, as he becomes one of the main characters of season three, an important part of season four, and -- depending on your views on drug decriminalization -- one of the more purely admirable characters the show will ever feature. And, yes, all of Bunny's frustration here was designed by Simon, Burns and company to lay some groundwork for season three's Hamsterdam experiment.

• "Stray Rounds" foreshadows not only Hamsterdam, but season three's other grand, doomed experiment, The New Day Co-Op, as Prop Joe mesmerizes Stringer with the story of Charlie Sollers, a heroin dealer who cared only about money, not street rep or violence, and had a long and productive career by staying off everyone's radar.

• While the name of the dope brands tended to change from season to season, Bodie's crew will still be slinging WMD in season three, leading to one of the funniest lines of the series, Santangelo telling the junkies, "I hear WMD is the bomb."

• Because The Greek's people aren't as disciplined about phone use as Avon's crew (and, in the future, Marlo's crew), Sergei dooms himself to a life in prison -- and gives Lester the necessary tip to close the 14 murders -- by reassuring White Mike that anyone he killed would be missing his hands and face.

• Yet another link in the chain that will lead to Ziggy's end: had Double-G just fronted Ziggy the cash that he asked for, Ziggy wouldn't have had to pawn the duck's diamond necklace, and therefore might not have had the opportunity to eye, then buy, the gun he uses to kill Double-G. (Then again, perhaps that's what he intended to buy all along with the cash he asked for.)

Coming up next: "Storm Warnings," in which Brother Mouzone asks Cheese a question, Valchek makes a federal case out of Sobotka, and Ziggy gets pushed around again.

Not sure when that review will go up, as I used my last free evening before the start of press tour to write this one. Could be next week, could be a few weeks. But it'll get done.

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

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 8: "Duck and Cover" (Veterans edition)

Vacation's done with, so let's get back to revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode eight, "Duck and Cover," coming up just as soon as I get some scrapple with that...

"But on a good case, running front of the pack? That's as close as the men comes to being right." -The Bunk

If we accept, as we should, that Baltimore is the true star of "The Wire," then Jimmy McNulty was the city's leading co-star in season one, which is why it was so jarring to see him be sidelined for so much of this season. Oh, he set some things in motion by sticking Rawls with the Jane Doe murders, but mostly he's been directionless, and drunk, and irrelevant. In the episode before "Duck and Cover," he was virtually absent, and it was only when he appeared near the end that I realized he was missing.

But McNulty returns to the center of the narrative in a big way in "Duck and Cover," an hour that showcases the many negatives and positives of our favorite drunken Irish bimbo.

I've been accused in past "Wire" reviews of being too hard on McNulty, so I should say upfront that I don't dislike the guy. As impeccably played by Dominic West -- one of those actors with a gift for becoming more appealing, not less, the worse his behavior gets -- how could you not find Jimmy likable on some level? And in the grand scheme of "The Wire," Jimmy's sins are far lighter than those committed by an Avon Barksdale, or even an Ervin Burrell.

But fairly or not, I find myself holding McNulty to a higher standard than almost any other character on the show. Part of that comes from the way that he is, in fact, held out as the closest thing "The Wire" has to a true lead, but more of it comes from Jimmy's position in the show's universe, from his awareness of that position, from his abundant intelligence and talent, and from the way he presents himself to the world versus the way he actually is. While there's hypocrisy throughout the show's characters, I guess I expect more from McNulty than I do from the likes of Avon or Burrell -- and, like all the characters on the show who continually give him second and third chances because he's so smart, and so damned charming, I feel far more disappointed when he fails to meet those expectations(*).

(*)Now, some of this is obviously being considered with 20-20 hindsight over what Jimmy will do, and what other characters around him will do under similar circumstances, over the course of the series, which we'll save for discussion in the veterans comments if you like. My recollection is that, the first time through the series, I was completely on McNulty's side in all his early disputes with Lt. Daniels, where going back over that first season, I found myself sympathizing with Daniels more often than not.

"Duck and Cover" presents McNulty at his worst, and at close to his best, all in the course of an hour that manages to be more character-driven than usual even as it's significantly moving the plot forward. The pre-credits sequence is astonishing, horrifying, and hilarious: "The Lost Weekend" in four minutes, as we see just how low Jimmy can sink without either work or family to ground him. Exiled by Rawls, rejected by Elena, he is staggeringly drunk, even by standards of past Jimmy/Bunk alcoholic escapades. He can compose himself enough to convincingly lie to his favorite bartender about calling a cab, but is so sloshed that he gets into a hellacious car wreck -- and so stubborn, drunk or sober, in his belief in his own abilities, that he then recreates the car wreck in an attempt to prove he could have avoided it(**) -- then passes out in an all-night diner and is lucky enough to find a waitress desperate/dumb enough to take him home for a quickie.

(**) Jimmy's pantomiming of the angles required to hit/miss the bridge supports was like a parody of any scene -- notably the legendary all-F-word sequence from "Old Cases" -- where Jimmy or Bunk or another cop will silently recreate a crime scene, try to figure out the bullet trajectory, etc.

McNulty in those circumstances is no good to himself or anyone around him (I still try to fill in the blanks on how the waitress reacted when she got a look at Jimmy's car), and even The Bunk admits he's not always much better when entrenched in a case. But it's a step in the right direction, and from the moment Lt. Daniels liberates him from the boat, we see a Jimmy who's making an effort, and who's particularly self-aware (if, at times, self-loathing).

Yes, it's funny that he happens to enter the detail office at the exact moment when they're trying to pick the ideal undercover operative to infiltrate the condo/whorehouse. But as his comments to Kima in the surveillance car about the marital status of the aptly-named Robert Johnson make clear, it's funny because Jimmy's so very much like these pathetic jerks. He knows about lying to yourself, and your wife, and your kids -- about pursuing your own selfish needs at the expense of the people you care about -- and in his behavior at Beadie Russell's house, he suggests he's not a total lost cause.

Beadie and Jimmy both go back to her place fully aware that they're going to have sex, but when Jimmy gets a look at her place -- with the abundant evidence of Beadie's role as a single mom doing what she can for her kids -- he backs out. In many circumstances, a man bailing over kid-related imagery would seem cowardly, but it's the most morally upright thing Jimmy does all episode. He knows he's bad news -- as Bunk told him last season, "You're no good for people, man" -- and that even vaguely sober, he'll bring Beadie and her kids nothing but pain, so he backs out before it can go anywhere serious. When he's on the phone with the whorehouse madame, she asks him what kind of girl he wants, and we see him looking at the exact kind of girl he wants: Beadie Russell. But he knows, deep down, that he's not the kind of guy she would want if she got to know the real him -- at least, the real him at this moment.

Because the rest of the ensemble is so rich, the other actors so talented in their own right, I can't say I was disappointed to have McNulty out of action for so much of this season, but it's still nice to have him back, and at a relatively high-functioning level.

Some other thoughts on "Duck and Cover":

• As Jimmy's putting himself together, Ziggy is falling apart. He's humiliated by Maui and all the stevedores who goaded him into the fight -- And how funny is James Ransone as he stands on top of the can and spews "BAD ADVICE!" like it's the toughest insult he can think of at the moment? -- and now Nick is trying to turn him into a glorified mascot in the drug operation that Ziggy wanted so desperately to run. Everyone in Ziggy's world, it seems, is better than Ziggy at just about everything -- except, that is, clowning himself. Because Ziggy is one of the few characters on the show able to recognize that the game he's been asked to play is rigged -- that he and all the guys he knows have had their wings clipped like the pigeons -- he reaches a point in "Duck and Cover" where he understands that the guys all view him as comic relief, so the only way to survive is to take control of the joke, which he does with his bizarre bit with the diamond necklace-wearing, beer-sipping duck.

• This episode introduces McNulty's deep and abiding love for the music of The Pogues, which the series shares. Jimmy's rocking out to "Transmetropolitan" as he gets into his fender re-bender.

• After writing season one's brilliant "Cleaning Up," George Pelecanos became a full-time "Wire" producer in the second season, and "Duck and Cover" is the first of his two scripts for this year. (He also, as he does every season, whether a producer or just a writer, handles the penultimate episode.)

• Because the writers spent so much time in season one explaining how the detail goes about its business, season two can pick up the pace and assume we understand how things work. Case in point: the discussion with Ronnie about needing to meet the legal standard of exhaustion before a judge will authorize a wiretap.

• And that judge offers one of those great small moments that you know was drawn from real life, as we discover the guy is much more amenable to authorizing a warrant if he can get some free housework -- done, of course, by low men on the totem pole Herc and Carver, who get some early karmic punishment for their ongoing Fuzzy Dunlop scam -- in exchange.

• As with the Barksdale case, where a simple drug assignment eventually involved real estate, state senators, etc., the detail is finding that this new assignment goes a lot deeper than Stan Valchek's grudge against Frank Sobotka. It's a really interesting contrast to see them go against a non-street target, and to see that Vondas and The Greek have weaknesses that Avon didn't (they don't expect to be wiretapped), but also strengths he doesn't (they can afford to waste lots of time and money dumping clean cans to try to shake the detail loose).

• One of the things "The Wire" does so well, and that's so rare in the rest of popular entertainment, is spending time simply showing characters thinking. Here, we dwell for a long time on Frank as he starts to put the pieces together about the police surveillance -- aided, in large part, by the fact that the port police and the phone company are both large bureaucracies where the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing and therefore secrets aren't properly kept. It's also cool to see both sides of the case think they're outwitting each other, when in fact it's about 50-50 (the detail doesn't know Frank is on to them and dumped a clean can on purpose, while Vondas and Double-G don't know that the detail has a tap on Sergei's phone).

• Where was Jay Landsman to offer up a fashion critique when Bunk traded in his usual pinstriped lawyerly affectations for his Edmonson Lacrosse sweats?

• Getting back to last week's discussion of Sobotka's blind spots, note that he'll grease a job for his brother (albeit one that would give the guy walking-around money at best), but not for his son.

• Note that the dolls Double-G winds up with are Bobbie, not Barbie, as I suspect the Mattel people wouldn't want their product associated with this show.

• The Bodie/Poot subplot about a neighboring drug crew stealing all their business with a superior product not only reinforces Prop Joe's argument from the previous episode about product trumping real estate, it features more comedy of traditional business thinking being applied to the drug world, as the two slingers whom Bodie fires (and who wind up working for the rival crew) demand "separation pay."

• The Emmy voters ignored her for her brilliant work as Holly on "The Office," so I want to briefly sing the praises of the wonderful Amy Ryan in her role as Beadie. Just check out how many emotions wash over her face as she realizes Jimmy is about to walk out the door: disappointment that she's not going to have sex with this man she's very attracted to, guilt that perhaps getting a look at her cluttered, kid-friendly house was a turn-off (even though she knows Jimmy has kids), but also a bit of relief that her new job isn't going to be complicated by an office romance, as well as the stiff upper lip attitude that's carried her as far as it has raising two kids on her own. Great, great actress.

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how events in this episode will reverberate later in the season, and the series:

• By the time Jimmy goes back after Beadie, at the end of season three, he's finally turned himself into a man who might be good enough for her. Of course, he has his backsliding moments -- as in, all of season five -- but it was really gratifying to watch this relationship simmer over time.

• Louis Sobotka's refusal to take the no-show job Frank arranged for him will echo in his reaction to finding out the extent of Frank's criminal enterprise, and in finding out what Nick's been up to selling drugs.

• Like Ziggy, Marlo Stanfield knows his way around a Baltimore pigeon coop.

• Rawls' homoerotic insults -- here with Daniels -- become all the funnier once you know what will be revealed about him late in season three.

• Bodie's feud with the rival crew will have fatal consequences -- and lead to the first appearance of Bunny Colvin -- but note that at no time does he go to Stringer or Shamrock or anyone else higher up the ladder to consult about the clash. So, should he have? Or is the guy running the towers supposed to take initiative in matters like this? If it was Wee-Bey or Stinkum, would we assume they had authority to act on their own?

• The Greek's speech to Frank at the end about buying something you can touch seems to fly against what little we know of the man and his sidekick. He and Vondas seem to live without flash -- making money without seeming to need the things that come with it. Of course, we really know nothing about either man -- including both of their real names, and The Greek's true nationality -- so this could be like when McNulty found Stringer's apartment and was stunned to realize who he'd been chasing all those years.

Coming up next: "Stray Rounds," in which Bodie's feud reaches another level, The Greek gets careful, and Jimmy has problems remembering a magic word. Can't promise when I'll be able to do the review, but it'll get done sooner or later.

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The Wire, Season 2, Episode 7: "Backwash" (Veterans edition)

We're now into the second half of our trip through season two of "The Wire." As always, we're doing this in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode seven, "Backwash" -- including some thoughts from the episode's author, Rafael Alvarez -- coming up just as soon as I enter the modern urban crime environment...

"What do you think they grew up to be? Stevedores. What the f--k you think?" -Frank

The drug characters who were so important to season one of "The Wire" have mostly been sideshow players in season two. And even in "Backwash," they're only slightly more prominent than they were in the season's first half. But before we get to talking about the stevedores, and Daniels putting his career (and marriage) at risk, I have to start with Stringer Bell.

How cold is Stringer? He moves through this episode, visiting the loved ones of D'Angelo Barksdale, the man whose death he ordered, and he's as calm and smooth as if he were waiting on a customer at his copy shop. He puts into motion a deal with Prop Joe -- some of their superior real estate in exchange for the superior package Joe is getting from Vondas -- and even though Avon clearly wants no part of it, you can see that Stringer is going to go ahead with it, anyway. Hey, he killed off D'Angelo without anyone the wiser; what else can he get away with?

Because Stringer so rarely shows emotion -- and when he does, it's anger -- it would be very easy for him to come across every bit as robotic as the Rotterdam equipment Frank Sobotka is so afraid of. But Idris Elba shows Stringer always thinking, always calculating the angles in any encounter, whether he's seducing D's girl to get more information on him or offering a comforting hand to Brianna Barksdale while she suffers a tragedy that he knows he caused. Though Avon was technically the boss of the organization, there's a reason the first season focused more on Stringer, and it's the same reason I suspect Stringer was left free at the end of that season while Avon went to jail: he's the more original, compelling character, and Elba's is one of the show's most electrifying, if subtle, performances. (Which isn't a knock on the terrific Wood Harris, by the way.)

Great as Elba is, though, the episode still belongs to the stevedores -- particularly to Frank, whose motives begin to seem a bit less pure, and Nick, whose actions begin to seem a bit less clever.

While Frank's actions with The Greek have always been questionable, there wasn't previously much chance to argue with the goal he was trying to achieve with those actions. He wasn't buying anything for himself, was using Vondas's money either to pay for Bruce the lobbyist or to help out union men down on their luck. But two sequences in "Backwash" suggest that he's not only a criminal, but a tunnel-visioned one.

When Frank gets a look at the documentary about the robot-equipped Rotterdam port, it's like the worst horror movie he's ever seen. The speaker ducks his question about stevedore hours, because both men know that these robots will be putting men like Frank and Nick out of business. But at the same time, the man's comment about the increased safety of these machines is driven home at the episode's end, when New Charles loses a leg during a night off-load. Robots aren't at risk like that -- and, for that matter, they can't steal cans and aid smugglers the way that Frank and Horseface can.

As Frank notes, "Can't get hurt if you ain't working," and the robots would certainly put more of Frank's union brothers out of a job. But as we see in his argument with Bruce, what Frank should have been concerned about -- and a long time ago, at that -- wasn't the fate of himself and Horse, but that of younger guys like Nick and Ziggy and Johnny 50. As I've written before, these guys were raised in an environment where they were taught that this was the only possible lifestyle for them, when other men in similar situations made sure their kids were prepared to do something different, and better, than his old man. Maybe the kids with the stolen Tang couldn't have grown up to become astronauts, but they surely could have grown up to be something with more of a future than a stevedore. But Frank doesn't want to see that. He thinks his way is the only way, and he's become so obsessed with his plan that he's willing to violate the long-standing black/white turn-taking arrangement so he can run for a second term as union treasurer.

(Rafael Alvarez will have many more thoughts on the subject of Frank's goals in a bit.)

Whatever you think about Frank, there's no question Nick isn't thinking smart with his foray into the world of drug dealing. Sure, he's better-qualified and more competent than Ziggy -- frankly, I think I'd have a better chance of moving a package than Zig -- but there's too much risk for this reward. We see Nick already starting to develop a big head as he sits on the stoop lecturing Frog (even if he's briefly shamed by the disapproving look from the woman next door), and then he has to go and ignore Frank's advice -- not to mention the warnings Nick himself gave to Ziggy -- about not flashing around money. It's one thing to help Aimee get a nicer apartment, and another to be driving around in a brand-new truck for all the world -- including two knuckle-headed cops by the name of Herc and Carver -- to see.

And if Herc and Carver are going to have trouble explaining how they found out about Nick's business relationship with Frog, let alone how he connects with the murdered girls in the can, at least the detail has started to make enough progress that Daniels can let Lester guilt him into taking the 14 Jane Doe murders off of Rawls' hands.

The inner battle between Cedric Daniels, politically-ambitious ladder climber and Cedric Daniels, natural police, was a running theme in season one. From the moment Valchek rescued him from evidence room purgatory, it seemed like Daniels had struck some kind of balance between the two. He declined Burrell's offer of a district command post in favor of turning the detail into a Major Crimes Unit, but he also refused to make the murders part of the Sobotka case because he suspected it would ruin his MCU plan before it started.

But as we saw last season after Brandon's death, Daniels will, in the end, always choose the right path over the politically-expedient one, even if it hurts his career, and even if it puts a massive strain on his marriage to Marla, who loved that other Daniels more than this one.

Before we get to the bullet points, we're going to do something a little different this week. This episode was written by Rafael Alvarez, who was one of David Simon's old colleagues at the Baltimore Sun (and who has authored the short story collection "Orlo & Leini," and "A People's History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore," which you can read more about, along with Alvarez's own story, by clicking on his name). Alvarez also write "The Wire: Truth Be Told," the only official companion book the series ever got, and after some readers last week asked me about rumors that Alvarez would be doing an updated version covering all five seasons, I e-mailed him for confirmation. He explained that an updated "Truth Be Told" would, in fact, come out by Christmas -- albeit only in the UK, through Canongate Books, but there are easy ways to order that here through the series of tubes -- and then we got to talking about "Backwash."

Alvarez grew up in a family with connections to the Baltimore ports, and had worked there himself, which made his expertise invaluable to the writing of this season. I asked for his own take on the nobility of Frank's goals -- particularly in light of New Charles' injury and the argument with the lobbyist -- and if he had any other memories of the making of the episode. Here's what he wrote:

Frank Sobotka was a very smart man who often mistook his heart for his brain.

A problem with technology is that it now moves faster than the span of a single human lifetime.

One of my first assignments as a 19-year-old reporter in Baltimore was a longshoreman's strike (1977) over complete implementation of containerization on ports that had been worked by muscle for 200 years.

An old union man named Gilbert Lukowski (told me) that no matter how convenient and affordable new technology made life for management "you can't just take a man in the middle of his working life and throw him on the junk pile."

I never forgot that and I tried to instill as much of that philosophy as possible into Frank Sobotka as we built that character. Frank was prescient enough to know that the future was coming no matter what he did but soft-hearted (some might say soft-headed) enough to see a dependent family in the face of each of the men he was responsible for.

(The bigger irony to me is how much of a "dutch uncle" or father figure he was to the union men while his blood son went awry because - in part - frank was so distracted by union business.)

There were two main themes of my childhood as the grandson of a seafarer turned union shipyard worker and the son of a seafarer turned union tugboat engineer: hard work and education.

My own experience was much more Bruce the lobbyist than Frank the union man. My father always held education above everything because he knew it was the only way a man could respond to changes in the economy beyond your control. He never wanted my brothers or I to work on the waterfront with him. And when my one brother (a natural mechanic) truly desired that work, my old man made him get there through a respected maritime academy instead of just following him down to the waterfront the way Ziggy followed his father.

So my argument would be that if the waterfront (or any industry) is a pie, technology is going to change the way that pie is made, sold and distributed. If union men are willing to put some of their hard earned salaries and whatever influence a father can have with their children toward education, the next generation can have a piece of that pie even if it doesn't resemble anything the old man would recognize.

They may not be running the show, but at least they'll be able to get in the door.

It might be noted (by me if not Simon) that Frank Sobotka had a little bit of a Messiah complex, even to the point of laughing when the polish priest asked if he had been to confession lately.

The most memorable story I would tell about writing "Backwash" are two things that please me greatly.

No. 1 - I was able to get Robert Irsay's face in the middle of the union shack dartboard (it flashes on the screen for half a second when Bruce leaves Frank's office). Maybe six people in the country got that when it first aired and I promise you that all of them are scholars of pro football Baltimore.

No. 2 - The story that Bruce the lobbyist tells frank (I liked that the lobbyist was Italian-American and not a WASP because it proved my point about education serving a working class eager enough to get a degree any way they can) about his grandfather pushing the knife sharpening wheel, that was taken directly from a story Frank Zappa (born in Baltimore Dec. 21, 1940) told me in a 1986 interview about his early Baltimore roots.

When Zappa's grandfather (Charlie Colimore) died in 1941, Frank and his family moved to a rowhouse apartment in the 4600 block of Park Heights Avenue. Zappa remembered there was "an alley in the back and down the alley used to come the knife sharpener man-you know, a guy with the wheel. And everybody used to come down off their back porch to the alley to get their knives and scissors done."

Some other thoughts on "Backwash":

• Getting back to the idea of season one characters taking a backseat so far in season two, McNulty makes his first appearance of the episode at the 55-minute mark. And as much as we all love Dominic West in the role, and as crucial as he was to the first season, it's a testament to how strong the ensemble is -- and how well Simon and Burns and company have already established the city as the real star of "The Wire" -- that I didn't even notice his absence until he turned up in Elena's backyard.

• Herc and Carver provide particularly strong comic relief in this one with their misadventures in "the modern urban crime environment," and Carver's fake British accent as he declares Herc to be "Head. Dick Head." Also, Herc raving about the wonders of technology is nicely intercut with Frank's reaction to the Rotterdam film.

• Bodie's visit to the florist was more in the "so sad it's funny" category, but I have no doubt that there are many inner-city florists that have a back room featuring Uzi-shaped arrangements made up of flowers with "strong colors."

• Wee-Bey's line about how D'Angelo killed himself in a way he knew his loved ones would have to carry is very similar to a line from both "Homicide" book and show about cops who commit suicide knowing that colleagues will have to deal with the crime scene.

• Ziggy gets punked by Maui with the fake paternity suit papers, whose obsession with playing "Love Child" on the jukebox over and over and over should have been a bit of a tipoff, no?

• Joe says his philosophy is "Buy for a dollar, sell for two," which makes him an ideal business associate of Vondas and The Greek, who say it as "Buy for a nickel, sell for a dime."

And now we're up to the veterans-only section, where we talk about how developments in this episode will echo over the rest of this season, and the series:

• The florist Bodie visits is the same one Prop Joe will use when arranging Blind Butchie's funeral in season five.

• That light going out in Marla's bedroom more or less signals the end of the Daniels marriage. I'm not all the way through the episodes yet, but as I recall, we don't even see her again until we find out Cedric's sleeping on the couch, right?

• As one marriage ends, another is born, with Prop Joe planting the seeds with Stringer that will grow into the New Day Co-Op.

• Based on the way the rest of the season plays out, how necessary is Fuzzy Dunlop, anyway? It's not like they actually hear anything valuable on the mic before Frog throws it away. I suppose an argument could be made that Herc and Carver wouldn't have bothered watching Frog at the moment when Nick drove up if they weren't listening in on the mic. Either way, ol' Fuzzy will not only provide additional comedy, he'll serve as the template for Jimmy and Lester's homeless killer scam in season five.

• Here we see the first bits of bad advice that Ziggy will complain about after he fights Maui in the next episode. And speaking of which...

Coming up next: "Duck and Cover," in which McNulty practices a new driving technique, Frank pays his bills, and Ziggy gets a lift.

As to when you'll see this review? That's an open question. Like I mentioned earlier in the week in the "Sports Night" review, I'm on vacation next week, and late the following week I'll be heading to California for Comic-Con and then the Television Critics Association summer press tour. So these reviews are going to be published on a very irregular schedule from now until at least early August, if not for the rest of the summer. You may not get any reviews in a given week (and I wouldn't be holding my breath next week), or you might get two in one week, at any day or time when they're done. It's unfortunately the best I can do given all the time I'll either be off or occupied with other business. But we'll get it done, fret not.

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The Wire, Season 2, Episode 6: "All Prologue" (Veterans edition)

Once again, we're revisiting season two of "The Wire" in two versions: one for people who have watched the entire series and want to be able to discuss it from beginning to end, and those who aren't all the way there yet and don't want to be spoiled about later developments. This is the veteran post (click here for the newbie version).

Spoilers for episode six, "All Prologue," coming up just as soon as I light a $100 bill on fire...

"He's saying the past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it -- all this s--t matters." -D'Angelo Barksdale

Designed as a novel for television, each season of "The Wire" is usually greater than the sum of its weekly parts, but every now and then you get a particularly extraordinary part of the whole. Season one gave us "Cleaning Up," with the death of Wallace, Avon's arrest and Daniels standing up to Burrell and Clay Davis. And midway through season two, we get the brilliant "All Prologue."

"All Prologue" moves the plot along a fair amount: the detail figures out what the checkers are doing and how to track it, Nick gets deeper into bed with Vondas (and prepares to embark on a third career as a drug dealer), and Stringer makes a bold move of his own in hiring a hitman to murder D'Angelo. But it's also as character and theme-driven as any episode of the season so far, densely packed with one hilarious, or moving, or outright tragic moment after another.

It gets much of its power from focusing on McNulty and D'Angelo, who were the defacto co-leads of season one, and who have been intentionally marginalized to this point in season two. After trying to think outside the box of their respective institutions, each was severely punished: D'Angelo by having to take the biggest fall of anyone in the Barksdale crew, Jimmy with his exile to the boat. And "All Prologue" -- which is actually something of an epilogue to season one -- sees both men approaching what could or should be the end to their respective stories.

D more or less severs ties with his family and the larger Barksdale organization. The tragic irony of his death is that, while this decision is the last straw for Stringer, it plays out to us as evidence that Stringer had nothing to fear from D'Angelo. When you see D telling his mother to leave him alone -- in a moment as wonderfully played by Larry Gilliard Jr. as the famous "Where's Wallace?" scene -- you see that he is stronger, and better, than the family that raised him. He doesn't need them, not even to get out of prison sooner, and had Stringer not hired his hitman, D very likely would have spent the decade leading up to his parole hearing being a model prisoner, not worrying about selling out his family for a deal. This is the bed he made, and he was going to lie in it for 10-20 years. But because Stringer was so paranoid, D'Angelo is dead. And, as it does whenever a good person (as good as anyone can be, especially someone we met when he was skating on a murder charge) dies on "The Wire," it hurts, deeply, even though we know it's a fictional character.

It took some bravery on the part of David Simon, Ed Burns and company to bump off one of their two original leading men -- most showrunners would have seen how white-hot flaming incredible Gilliard was and contrived an excuse to keep him around -- just as it's brave to have McNulty be such a non-factor to this point of season two. Even Jimmy recognizes how useless he's become as a cop (the only thing he's ever really cared about being), so after failing to identify his Jane Doe and seeing Omar through the Bird trial, Jimmy prepares for "retirement." He'll still wear the badge, but he knows he has no hope of getting off the boat so long as Rawls has power, so he's just going to put his head down and slog through the days until he gets his 20-year pension. This would, appropriately, take about as much time as D would have needed to serve before being eligible for parole.

And where D'Angelo tries to separate himself from his kin and is killed for it, Jimmy desperately wants back in with his own family -- if he can't be a cop, maybe he can be a husband and father, and better than he was the first time around -- and is cast out by Elena (after one for the road, of course). No one trusts either man's motivations, even though D seems resolute about carrying his burden, and even though a Jimmy who isn't working murders might be capable of being a more functional human being.

Simon often compares "The Wire" to Greek tragedy (and has offered us a remorseless criminal organization whose head man is known as The Greek). He talks about how the characters are all set on a specific path -- by their families, by their socio-economic circumstances, by the institution they belong to, and by their own past actions -- that is all but impossible to get off of. The characters are only occasionally aware of how their lives are governed that way, but as D'Angelo discusses "The Great Gatsby" with the prison English class, he gets it -- even though he doesn't recognize how soon fate and his own past deeds are going to catch up to him.

But before we get the tragedy of D'Angelo, and the continued purgatory for McNutly, we get the comic masterpiece that is Omar Devone Little (who is himself a fan of Greek mythology) versus Maury Levy, JD.

Every other time we watch Maury at work, we have to cringe at his complete amorality even as we admire his tenacity and gift for turning pathetic-looking hands into winning ones. But damn, it's so nice to see him go up against a man who's not only just as smart, but beholden to no one and nothing but his own conscience. Maury can't outwit Omar, can't apply any sort of institutional pressure on him, and is left utterly speechless when Omar turns Maury's accusation of being a parasite of the drug game around on him: "I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It's all in The Game, though, right?"

But that moment is only as fun to watch because we're aware of what an anomaly it is -- that the Omars of this world are few and far between, and that it'll likely be a long, cold time before we see Maury go down in utter defeat like this. The criminal justice system, for all its good intentions, is ideally set up for opportunistic parasites like Maury to make a meal of it, all while being treated as a respected (and feared) upright citizen of the community, where Omar is a loathed outlaw (albeit one who knows how to buy a snazzy track suit while still sticking to the letter of Ilene Nathan's "Anything with a tie" request).

I have so much more to say about "All Prologue," but I'm trying to get this done in advance of a holiday weekend (and I sincerely hope most of you have more exciting outdoor activities to do today and are reading this post on Monday), so we're going to go to the bullet points.

Some other thoughts on "All Prologue":

• Kima and Cheryl's relationship, and Cheryl's frustration at Kima's decision to return to active detective-work, comes to the forefront again beautifully as she insists on tagging along for Kima and Prez's strip club scouting mission. I particularly like the scene where Kima shows Cheryl a can like the one the girls died in to explain why she cares so much about these cases, because of the complicated way Melanie Nicholls-King plays Cheryl's response to the gesture. Cheryl does understand the importance of the case, but she also fears for her lover's safety, doesn't want to go through another shooting (or worse) like she did in season one, and would be much more comfortable if Kima's job didn't lead her to hanging around strip clubs. And, as Shardene's friend points out, can you blame her?

• On the Sobotka side of things, we see Sergei intervene with Prop Joe (who turns out to be Cheese's boss). And as Nick explains to Vondas why he doesn't just want to have Cheese taken out, Vondas' respect for the intelligence of Frank's nephew grows -- enough that he offers to pay Nick, Ziggy and Johnny 50 (who wants no part of it) in dope for the chemicals used to make it, since he knows Nick is smart enough to make a bigger profit on the drugs. Frank is a means to an end for Vondas, but he sees other possibilities for young Nico, no?

• Having yelled at and/or smacked Ziggy around for most of the first five episodes, Frank finally has a real conversation with his son here, and we get a much better understandings of the origins of the resentment that fuels so much of how Ziggy behaves. Though we've seen that Ziggy is good with computers, he didn't get to go to community college like his brother, but was instead drafted into the family business -- for which he was so ill-equipped, and for which he received virtually no benefit from being the son of the mighty Frank Sobotka. Most of the time, Frank seems like a noble villain -- he's working with The Greek for the good of the union, not himself -- but a scene like their conversation at the docks makes you wish he had been a little less selfless at some point, or at least willing to extend his beneficence to his real family at least as much as to his union brothers.

• Beadie continues to show growth as a smart detective, as she's the first member of the detail to recognize the criminal value of what the checkers do.

• Between Vondas (Greek), Sergei (Ukrainian) and now Etan (Israeli) -- not to mention Prop Joe (East Baltimore) -- The Greek has himself quite the international crime cartel, doesn't he? No concern about national or tribal loyalty -- just a shared love of profit.

• Dominic West has a lot of fun in the scene where McNulty is undressing the mannequin to distract Elena.

• Given how much of this episode functions as a season one coda, it feels appropriate -- and funny -- to have Judge Phelan back to tear into Bird during the sentencing. ("Are you Jesus Christ come back to Earth?")

• The ceremonial eyef--k that McNulty and Omar give Bird is a detail from David Simon's "Homicide" book, and was mentioned once on the "Homicide" series, though there it was referred to as "the ceremonial eyescrew" by Beau Felton.

• The prison English teacher is played by Richard Price, whose Dempsey novels are thematically very similar to what "The Wire" is doing -- and who will begin writing for the series starting in season three.

• I love Prop Joe's gift for turning a phrase, like when he tells Nick that, if not for Sergei, he and Ziggy would be "cadaverous motherf--kers."

And now it's time for the veterans-only section, where we talk about how things in this episode will play out later in the season, and the series:

• Stringer arranging D'Angelo's murder is the beginning of the end for him. That he gets away with it emboldens him to cut the deal with Prop Joe behind Avon's back, which leads to him pitting Omar against Brother Mouzone, etc. And while Avon eventually accepts the logic of Stringer's position after he finds out what happened to D, I don't know that he so easily rolls on his best friend if Stringer hadn't killed his nephew.

• At the time of this story, Kima is still faithful to Cheryl, but Cheryl will be proven right in the end about her partner's wandering eye.

• Here's a question: given how we saw Jimmy behaving with Beadie and her kids after he went back in uniform, might things have worked out for him and Elena had she taken him back here? He'll go on an alcoholic bender a few episodes from now, but that's only after she gives him the boot again and he feels completely hopeless. We see at the end of season three, and throughout season five, that his drinking and bad behavior are inextricably tied to him working as a detective. Had he and Elena reconciled here, he would have stayed in the stress-free life of a marine unit cop, would never have needed Bunk and Lester to plead for Daniels to rescue him from that purgatory, would never have been in a position to go after Marlo, etc., etc. I know with "The Wire" I'm always asking "What if?" even as David Simon tells me that the characters can't escape their destinies, but... what if?

• There was some debate in later seasons about whether Cheese was always written as Prop Joe's nephew, since early in season three there's talk of a mid-level dealer named Drac being Joe's nephew. But here, Joe complains about having multiple nephews in the game, all of them bumbling in some way, which allows for both Cheese and Drac to be kin.

• D'Angelo's killer is clever enough to fool the disinterested state cops, who'd rather not add an unsolved homicide to their stats, but not clever enough for McNulty, who'll figure out what really happened within minutes of entering that prison library next season.

• Omar will make use of the Get Out Of Jail Free card Ilene Nathan gives him in season four, and for a much greater charge than aggravated assault, after Chris Partlow frames him for murder.

• Nick's decision to take half the payment in dope is yet another brick in the path that will lead to Ziggy's ruin. Had Nick not chosen to sell drugs -- and proved to be so much better at it than Ziggy -- Ziggy would have one less resentment brewing inside himself when Double-G insults him for the final time.

• This is the last we'll see of Shardene until the series finale, I believe. Not a lot of room in "The Wire" to tell continuing stories of the characters who get a happy ending.

• Both Joe and Shardene's stripper friend say "Sheeeeeeeeit," which won't become Clay Davis's catchphrase until season 3.

Coming up next: "Backwash," in which Bodie goes flower-shopping, Joe has a proposition for Stringer and Rawls tries to dump the Jane Doe cases on the Sobotka detail.

I have jury duty early next week, and depending on how long it lasts, the next review may be pushed back a few days. Based on my past experience, I'm probably not going to get paneled, but if I do, I hope we get a witness one-tenth as colorful as Omar.

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