I Am NOT the Beastmaster: Mothers and Fathers

I'm beginning to think I don't give Delonda Brice enough credit.

One week out from the end of the season and her son is ready to renounce violence, renounce the corners, renounce everything his father was. Granted, a lot of that is Colvin's doing, but Namond just doesn't seem to have the killer instinct that's turning Michael into a monster; he's always been full of shit on that account. That's in large part because he was sitting in his room playing video games while Dukie's parents were selling his clothes and Randy's dad was off running dogfights on the East side and Bug's dad was doing lord knows what to Michael.

Then again, the money that kept Namond in Nikes was coming from Brianna Barksdale as a reward for Wee Bay's taking the rap for all the Barksdale murders, so maybe Wee Bay gets the credit. Delonda, as usual, hasn't done shit--except to skim off the top and play head games with her son as she pushes him into a life for which he, of all the kids, is the least prepared and has the least need. And that, plus her apparent conviction that she is the martyr in her family, is why she is again and forever the Biggest Asshole.

All four of the kids have surrogate father figures who are trying to look out for them, with wildly varying degrees of success and a general pattern of inverting their position at the start of the season. Randy began with the best maternal figure and he attracted Carver, the least attentive and least effective of the surrogate fathers. (Carver's done better by Namond than he has by Randy, even before this week's events.) Namond and Dukie, who started out with the most need for good parents, attracted Colvin and Prez, the most diligent and effective foster fathers. (Notice whose gestures of physical contact are accepted in this episode and whose are rebuffed.) And Michael--who was already a quasi-parental figure to Bug and Dukie and who seemed to be the most stable of all the kids at the start of the season--got Cutty, whose guidance is valuable but heavily limited by circumstance; he doesn't have the official standing or support network of Carver, Colvin, or Prez.

But The Wire suggests all those support networks and school programs may matter far less than the kind of home and social class the kids are born into. Michael's suspicion of all father figures leads him to reject Cutty, and then his mom brings back the worst possible surrogate father so she can pry her bank card away from him, and now he's ended up with Chris and Marlo instead. Namond had the most stable and comfortable family life of any of the kids (financially if not psychologically), and Michael had one of the worst, and that may determine their futures more than any adult interventions. If there's any ray of hope this season it's that Dukie, who started out even worse off than Michael, is now carrying himself with more confidence thanks to Prez. You can see it in the way he walks and speaks now. He might make it.

But there's another week to go.

Political watch: That was recently-defeated Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich Jr. playing the security guard who tells Carcetti that the stonewalling governor (implicitly Robert Ehrlich Jr.) will finally see him. Playing a self-mocking role on The Wire is pretty much the first thing Ehrlich has done that I like, but I'm not surprised that he would do a cameo on a show his ultimately successful challenger Martin O'Malley apparently hates.

Other Wire business:

I always figured Bubbles' story would end badly but this is a little too O. Henry, if O. Henry had written about junkies in West Baltimore. I saw Sherrod's fate coming the second he came along while Bubbles was heading out with the vials, and it wasn't the inevitability of institutions grinding down individuals that we normally get on this show--just the inevitability of a plot twist that was too obvious to be avoided.
Is that a flash of the old McNulty when he tells Freamon to go over Landsman's head? That's the Jimmy we know! Looks like the makeover isn't total...
In the same scene, Freamon takes excessive pride in chasing Marlo now that he knows how clever the kid's been about dumping bodies. It sounds like the "thrill of the hunt" spiel that McNulty tried on Theresa D'Agostino last season, and we knew that was bullshit as soon as he said it. He even knew it. Interesting to see that for all Freamon counseled McNulty to leave his work at the office, he can't let go of it either once a tough case gets hold of him. Freamon has always had a McNulty-like (i.e., Edgerton-like) streak of insubordination in him; could Marlo become his Barksdale?