"Slow on the draw he was"

Spoiler alert.

No fucking joke.

We all knew Omar wasn't going to outlast this season, didn't we?  Given that he was originally supposed to die after just seven episodes back in season one, I didn't think the writers would be inclined to pull any punches.  And given that he was the ultimate individualist in a world where the institutions always win, I think it would have been a cop-out if he'd lived to rob another day.  His death was almost necessary for the show's critique of the postmodern economy.

But the way he died... that was a shock.  Alone, friendless, gradually abandoning the stalwart code that had always set him apart. Gunned down by Kenard, the show's youngest character and one of its most odious, not in any dramatic showdown--no newspaper-tumbleweeds blowing across the alley this time--but in a liquor-store ambush free of any heroism.

That, too, was necessary.  The Wire has always been dangerously attached to Omar, willing to inflate him to legendary stature while it knocked everybody else off their pedestals.  Some episodes it seemed like there was nothing he couldn't do:  he out-policed McNulty, out-informed Bubbles, out-lawyered Levy.  Back in season three, Bunk made a noble effort at showing Omar, and us, the dangers of romanticizing a stick-up artist, but it didn't take. [*]  (My one regret about Omar's sudden death is that we didn't get another Bunk confrontation.  Although I did love Crutchfield rubbing his framed arrest last season in Bunk's face--asshole, though far from the episode's biggest.)  Before long Omar was back to plotting epic heists, dissecting organizations that eluded Lester Freamon's panoptic bespectacled gaze, pulling some Spider-Man shit.

This season has ground down Omar the way it grinds down everyone else, showing him the cost of being a loner.  First it showed him he wasn't really alone.  When Marlo couldn't strike at him, he struck at those Omar cared about, just as the authorities do every other time they are confronted with someone who thinks he can buck the system.  Marlo's strategy is no different from Rawls threatening Colvin's subordinates or gutting Major Crimes--just a little bit bloodier.

With his allies left behind or quickly killed off, Omar had to operate as a true loner for the first time since the end of season one.  (As an aside--why didn't Renaldo come back with Omar, and maybe bring a cousin or two?  Granted, he'd probably be dead by now if he had, but a few more guns might have turned the tables in that apartment ambush, or dictated a different strategy.  It's telling that Omar refused Renaldo's help; he had to know he was coming back to Baltimore to die.)  He still made an amazing run, escaping Marlo's ambush and subsequent manhunt, disrupting several of his corners and stash houses, killing a couple of enforcers, destroying all the drugs he seized, and putting the fear of God into Marlo and his soldiers.  It was a holy retribution, the hero posed against exploding cars--the stuff of the spaghetti westerns Omar had always half stepped out of.

But something was different this time.  Omar was cursing.  Breaking his promise to Bunk that he wouldn't do any more murders.  His code was fraying, either falling apart out of desperation or becoming subsumed into the Omar Little caricature he was playing.  All that was left was the violence and the vengeance, and this week's episode made it clear just how little that was worth.  His epic battles against the westside drug dealers ended with him standing alone on a deserted corner, howling for an enemy who would never face him. A gunfighter without a gunfight.

At least the other self-made caricatures--and there have been many this season--provide a little more levity.  This week's best comedy comes at the FBI profiling unit in Quantico, whose director has remade himself into a living, breathing basic-cable cliché.  (I thought it was a great touch to give him a southern accent--aren't these characters, the homespun directors, always southerners?  At least in the Bush years?) The director is selling the same thrill-of-the-hunt bullshit McNulty fed Teresa D'Agostino back in season three, but Kima's Unabomber comeback reminds us that real police work is more often a matter of diligent legwork or simple luck.  And, indeed, while McNulty has been casting himself in the hoary role of tormented cop hunting a serial killer, Bunk has come tantalizingly close to nailing Chris Partlow through sheer dogged investigation.

In a great reversal from their self-promoting director, however, the unit's profilers know their job; their profile exposes the gaping holes in McNulty's serial killer plot and nails his frustrated ego.  Wasn't it Bunk who said a couple weeks ago that he might learn something about himself?  The FBI profile tears down all the pretenses Jimmy lives by, not just the ones he built in season five.  No wonder he suddenly starts coming clean with Kima and Beadie; all his fictions lie in ruins.

Which brings us back to why Omar--the gunfighter, the superhero, the last honest criminal in Baltimore--had to die.  His death is a renunciation of fiction and its comforts.  Which, in true postmodern form, still follows the rules of the fiction it renounces:  as one character says in Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring, "in your Westerns, the gunslinger is always bested, ultimately, by an upstart."

And Omar might just get a little postmortem revenge.  Yes, that scrap of paper will help Lester take Omar's organization down, if there's still time, but I'm thinking more of the lasting damage he's done to Marlo's reputation.  The kingpin of all Baltimore went into hiding when one man with a broken leg came after him.  A man who was ultimately shot by a ten-year-old, doing what Marlo and his soldiers couldn't.  People have to notice that.  You can be sure Michael has, with the lectures he got about Junebug and the importance of maintaining your reputation.  All this season I've been wondering if, just as the corrosive Barksdales were replaced by the sociopathic Marlo, Marlo might himself might be replaced by a budding sociopath named Michael Lee.

Now the stakes are even higher.  I wonder if someday soon, sooner than we would think possible, Marlo or Michael or their successors will be replaced by a full-blown psychopath named Kenard.

May his reign be short.

Other Wire business:

• Give it up for Leander Sydnor, this week's craftiest bastard.  I guess that Prez consultation won't be necessary after all.  Clearly Sydnor's been learning at the feet of Freamon (for good and ill--I love Kima's shock and disgust when she learns he's in on the scam too).  In fact, his able management of the surveillance teams shows that he's becoming a good teacher and supervisor in his own right.  If any shred of the MCU survives this scam--and it may be as doomed as Omar--Sydnor might be the only guy who can carry the torch and start training a new unit.
• Loved Freamon's bluff in the bar, even if it shows a disturbing willingness to compound his lies.  I guess once you start fabricating, you can't stop.  In any case, I'm glad the Clay Davis plot isn't quite over.
• Leaden expository dialogue makes an unwelcome return to the Sun scenes. Jeff Price has been a reporter for at least four years; would he really not know the Pulitzer schedule?
• And then we have Terry Hanning--the one good story Templeton got, and he still couldn't write it clean.  Does Templeton have any redeeming features?
• Also, when was the last time Gutierrez had a line of dialogue?  She brought the serial killer story to the Sun, and Templeton has run off with it.  How does she feel about that?  I bet that would be a much more interesting conversation than the Pulitzer infodump.
• I wanted to use Terry's line about "A lie ain't a side of the story" for this week's post, but it didn't have much to do with Omar and the writers snagged it for their epigraph anyway.  And so, as always, I go running back to the Bunk...

[*] Update:  Alan Sepinwall reports that one of the kids who was playing Omar back in season three--the kids who were Bunk's best argument against the romanticization of Omar--

was Kenard.

And that would be one reason why The Wire, even in this problematic season, is still the best television show ever made.

Comments

[Isaac]

"Spoiler alert...We all knew Omar wasn't going to outlast this season, didn't we?" !Damit I really need to stop reading this bog until the Wire ends.

That is all.

[Marc]

Don't say I didn't warn you, Isaac!

[Ken Lowery]

If any shred of the MCU survives this scam--and it may be as doomed as Omar--Sydnor might be the only guy who can carry the torch and start training a new unit.

I'm not so optimistic. The entire thread of the show is about how institutions eventually become bureaucracies whose primary concern is self-preservation, and we see the MCU is doing the same thing. Its integrity is being cast aside for the express purpose of finding that one magic bullet that will take Marlo down, that one magic bullet that never seems to materialize.

McNulty and Freamon are now in the business of keeping themselves in the game, just like everyone they think they're spiting.

I doubt Templeton has any redeeming features re: journalism. Some folks are just born fabulists.

[Marc]

I disagree with some of that. McNulty and Freamon are keeping the unit running because they want to do the work of the unit, and because they are specifically out to shut down Marlo, not because the unit itself offers any career or financial benefits. They aren't careerists--far from it.

There was a great scene a couple weeks back--I forget which episode--where a drunken Jimmy starts rambling about the promises that were broken, specifically the promise that the vacants would be worked like a real case. Jimmy took himself out of a good job in the Western, and a good situation with Beadie, to go back to the MCU. He put himself in an investigation that he knew was going to wreck his relationship and send him back into the bottle because he wanted those murders closed (because he felt guilty about getting Bodie killed--brilliant that he's been McNulty's primary motivation this season even though his name hasn't been mentioned once). When the department pulls the plug, he finds a way to keep it going. It's not about bureaucracy. It's not even about all that good stuff in the Quantico profile, although that's knocking around in his head too. (Imagine how this season might have played out if he'd gone to the Sun with his real story about the Stanfield case getting shut down?) It's about Preston "Bodie" Broaddus and everything McNulty gave up to work his case.

[Ken Lowery]

Mmm.. yeah, I agree with you there. But I wonder if any of that nuance will come through if/when the press busts McNulty and co? I am doubtful.

This whole thing feels awesomely meta to me, too. Like Simon's saying "Fine, you won't watch the show when I'm laying out real, horrible mass murders? I'll sensationalize it with a serial killer and see how you like it THEN."