I Am NOT the Beastmaster

"You could do a lot worse than give me a run"

The Wire has always been about politics--not just campaigning and government, but the interpersonal politics that make or, more frequently on this show, break institutions.

That's why the fifth season didn't truly begin until last night.  In the first pure Wire moment and already one of the best of the season, Stan Valchek comes angling for Burrell's job because he wants the pension bump (or because he plans to use the Acting Commissioner gig as a way of getting his foot in the door for the real thing?).  Stan, even if your ploy didn't work this time you're still the Craftiest Bastard in my book.  And you may have gotten rid of Burrell, a gift to the people of Baltimore.  It's funny how often Valchek's actions, always undertaken for the most selfish and venal of reasons, end up having a positive effect on the police department and the city:  he pulls Daniels out of Evidence Control and starts him on his path to colonel, indirectly creates the Major Crimes Unit and exposes the Greek's smuggling operation, helps Carcetti knock off Royce, and now hammers what I can only hope is the final nail in Burrell's coffin.  Stan, I take back the Delonda Brice crack--you've found a way to make your disfunctions work for the city.  Is that the definition of a real police?

That scene and everything that unspooled from it--that look in Rawls's eyes as he realizes Burrell has just buried himself, the chief of staff's plan to float Daniels in the press, Norman's commiserating with Gus Haynes, Daniels's fear over the cooked quote, and especially Carcetti's humiliation of Clay Davis--was The Wire firing on all cylinders after a typically slow build.  Some figures in the media have pronounced this season flawed for its handling of the newspaper (more on that later this week) but the angling over the commissioner's job is proof the show hasn't lost its touch.  So thank you for that as well, Stan.

When The Wire hasn't been about politics, it's been about mentoring:  the way institutional wisdom is passed down from senior to junior workers.  It's an efficient, natural way to quickly sketch the outlines of a subculture without relying on the stilted exposition that's weighed down so many of the newspaper scenes.  (The critics aren't completely off-base.  I never want to hear "we need to do more with less" again.  We get it already.)  This week's Biggest Asshole, Scott Templeton, is partially a product of bad mentoring.  His worst habits of sensationalism are encouraged by the top brass, while Gus Haynes, otherwise an ideal editor, seems to have already written him off.  I can see why Haynes doesn't like Templeton, but the lack of regard is so palpable that Templeton has to see it as well.  A few words from Haynes and Templeton might not have fabricated the quote that could scuttle Daniels's shot at commissioner.  (At this point I think it's pretty clear that he has been juicing if not outright inventing quotes and sources.  Though I wouldn't mind a little more ambiguity on this point.)

Those few words might have explained something important Scott is missing.  Roger Twigg gets the Daniels story because he knows his beat backwards and forwards, the kind of knowledge The Wire most respects.  (Remember Bunny Colvin's first question to all his men.)  Gus is handed the story because he knows Norman from Norman's days on the Sun.  Their journalism is rooted in deep connections to their city--and Scott, so anxious to work his way up to a big-name newspaper, probably hasn't bothered to set down any roots or cultivate any relationships.  Juicing is the only game he's got.

So many of the characters have been students of one sort or another:  Prez and Sydnor, D'Angelo and Wallace, Nick and Ziggy, Herc and Carver, Kima in homicide, Michael and Namond and the other kids.  Hell, Joe is even trying to school the unschoolable Marlo (and if he doesn't know by now that Marlo is trying to do an end run around him to the Greek, then he's a fool).  All of the noblest characters--my favorites Colvin, Freamon, and Waylon, along with Cutty and new good guy Gus Haynes--are mentors who know their professional and moral codes and try to pass them along.

Which is why--and I cannot believe I am typing these words--Lester Freamon is this week's Dumbest Asshole.

Freamon has always had a streak of intellectual vanity, a tendency to approach cases as puzzles and a weakness for "thrill of the hunt" mystique, and that's exactly what does him in this week.  He approaches Jimmy's fabricated serial killings as an intellectual exercise--a flawed but promising rough draft that needs to be corrected--not as a dereliction of duty and desecration of the dead.  Certainly not as a needless risk that could ruin several careers.  There's always been more McNulty in him than he would probably care to admit, including a willingness to pull the walls down around him, and now the two of them are reinforcing each other.  It's a perfect twist:  surprising, appalling, yet absolutely in character with everything we've seen of Lester over the past four seasons.  I hate it, and I'm loving every second of it.

They haven't lost a step.

Another Reason to Like Barack Obama

The man has excellent taste in television.  (Via Matthew Yglesias.)  His favorite character is Omar, whereas I'd go for Lester, Colvin, or Waylon.

The actor mentioned at the end of the article, Michael Kostroff, plays Levy.  How can Obama lose with Levy on his side?  That guy always--

oh god I hope Herc isn't working for Obama--

"Too good a story to check out"

Anybody else think The Wire has been getting a little too meta lately?  From the electrolite neutron magnetic scan last week to Lester's rhapsodizing about the career case to Whiting's idea that he can fix the schools (or at least win an award) with a series on the "Dickensian lives of the city's children," the show's been winking at us an awful lot.  Once or twice is fine, and they get a certain license for being in their final season, but The Wire is far better when it's about something other than itself.  Of all the facets of postmodern culture they've shown us over the past four seasons, I never missed relentless self-awareness.

Granted, it's going to be hard for a season focused on the media to avoid picking up some of their bad habits.  And I kind of like the bracing self-criticism of having Whiting pitch an obviously smug, condescending version of last season--although it's pretty clear Whiting wants to produce a very different sort of series, the antithesis of The Wire in much the same way that "When the Whistle Blows" is the antithesis of The Office, or "Jerry" of Seinfeld.

Which maybe makes Scott Templeton the antithesis of David Simon and everything he thinks journalism should be.  It's easy to see why Templeton is Whiting and Klebanow's favorite cub reporter.  He offers exactly the sort of maudlin heartbreakers and stock characters they're looking for:  every story is relentlessly personalized until it's no longer about anything but their desire to manipulate readers and pick up accolades.  Unlike Gus Haynes, who preaches the importance of social context (hey, more meta!), Templeton, Whiting, and Klebanow are so focused on reducing social problems to individualized tearjerkers that they trivialize every story they touch.  (Notice how Templeton ignores real angles that are practically flung in his face, like the increased toxicity in blue crabs or the fan who's bitching about steroids and lockouts, because he's trying to fit everybody into his preconceived, sentimental shlock.)

That incessant trivialization of the news is why Templeton is poisonous even if he hasn't been fabricating sources--and it would be a great twist if he hasn't.  A newsroom plagiarist makes an easy target, and a topical one, and a fair one, but the trivializers are much bigger and better examples of what's wrong with modern journalism.  The Sun editors look just as bad if Templeton has gotten played by some panhandling kid and they ran a weak story because they liked the way he dressed it up.  Save the obvious villains for the Scott Templeton stories.

The complicating factor here is that the writers of The Wire know they need to balance the personal with the sociological.  Whiting gets a couple of good rejoinders in on Gus about the importance of reining in the context (though he's too much of an ass in his other scenes for any of them to stick... best use of the word "truant" in all of 2008, by the way), and his and Templeton's idea of following one classroom to talk about the schools' problems is basically the approach taken in season four.  The writers know they need the personal element to capture viewers' interest and give shape to social indictments that would otherwise sprawl out of control; but they also know they need the social context to keep from falling into easy morality tales and cliches of the ghetto drug dealer, the hard-working maverick cop, the poor wheelchair-bound baseball fan, the noble, dead mother of four.  And to keep from trivializing the issues they write about, so they don't mistake social failures for purely individual problems.

Unfortunately, most of our stories are seriously out of balance.  The excessively personalized, creepily intimate focus of Whiting and Klebanow and Templeton has infected every other part of our public life.  When was the last time you heard a John Edwards speech where he didn't mention the health care woes of the same two real, average people?  (Not to single out John Edwards here.  Every politician does it sooner or later--I just happened to hear him do it twice in the same week.)  Everywhere you look, somebody is reducing societal problems to personal ones.

Except Bubbles.  It's entirely in keeping with the spirit of this show that the one guy who really needs to tell his story is keeping his mouth shut.

Asshole sweepstakes.  With Herc taking a week off, the field is wide open!  The US attorney is in the running for once again letting politics (party and personal) kill the Stanfield investigation, and Carcetti is retroactively in the mix for pissing him off so spectacularly last week.  Clay Davis is currently too weak to pull off any assholery but damn do I love watching him twist in the wind, and Burrell too.  Whiting's mandarin manners get under my skin, but the E.J. story isn't quite corrosive enough yet for him to take the prize; before the season is out he may yet earn the title of Royal Asshole.

However, the big winner... for Biggest and Dumbest Asshole, another two-fer for the second week in a row... is Jimmy McNulty.  I'd been assuming for about a year that he would stir up a shitstorm this season by leaking a story to the papers so he could keep an investigation running, but I had no idea he would take it this far.  Dishonorable mention to Bunk for letting him do it.  You can't just wash your hands of this one and walk away, Bunk.  A man's got to have a code and you both broke yours.

"How many years you figure we been doing this same shit?"

The weirdest part by far of the fifth season premiere of The Wire was watching the homicide detectives acting out a blow-by-blow replay of the "electrolite neutron magnetic scan test" stunt from a first-season Homicide episode (which was itself a replay of actual stories told to David Simon in Homicide the book).  Was this just another example of The Wire retelling an incident already dramatized in Homicide, like the Snot Boogie story that opened season one?  A little homage to commemorate Homicide regular Clark Johnson coming back around to the front of the camera?  A rather blunt foreshadowing of themes of gullibility and the "big lie" that will probably underscore this season's critique of the media?

All of the above, maybe, but the feature that truly makes it part of The Wire is its hinting at the endless repetition, the lack of any lasting change. The status quo has previously sunk all attempts at reform and now it seems to be claiming Carcetti and Daniels.  Notice how the last line of the episode is a detective answering a ringing phone with the word "Homicide."  That sound brought me so much joy back in the nineties but hearing it now, as Major Crimes has been gutted again and McNulty seethes in the place he once viewed as the promised land, brings only a bitter appreciation for this show's consummate skill.

And if The Wire is indicting its predecessor--or at least bringing it up in this rueful context where a criminal gets caught by a trick that was broadcast on network television when he couldn't have been more than four or five--then it isn't letting itself off the hook either.  The trailers for next week show the Sun's pompous editor calling for a series of articles on the kids who are let down by the city's school system.  It's a clever wink at season four, although The Wire didn't break its arm patting itself on the back for its patronizing attentions the way James C. Whiting III does.  (I don't think they ever self-applied the "Dickensian" label, for starters.)  Simon and company seem to be acknowledging that if nothing changes, well, they haven't changed anything yet either.  But at least they're telling stories with an honesty and a complexity that nobody else in the media can match.  The backlash has already begun, folks, but it's possible that The Wire will critique itself more elegantly than the defenders of the media class can manage.

On to the rest of the episode...

City editor Gus Haynes is apparently this season's Colvin--the veteran who knows his city so well he can pull a drug dealer's name out of a zoning bill, who's willing to poke his bosses when they compromise their integrity, and who looks out for his subordinates (giving Price credit he didn't deserve).  If the Sun ownership is anything like the Baltimore police department--and The Wire gives us no reason to think they won't be--that concern for his subordinates will probably be the last thing they use against him.  When corrupt institutions can't exploit your flaws, they will go after your virtues.  (Or they'll hit both at once, like Rawls and Burrell taking away Daniel's car while they kill the MCU--a power play if there ever was one.)

Interesting contrast between the reporters and the homicide detectives:  the reporters beg for stories and have to justify their own jobs with daily budget lines; the detectives duck calls and try not to catch the cases that pile up on the board.  Both have a habit of missing the big stories that fall into their laps or pass right under their noses.

As always, there's such a great economy of detail in the show's characterization.  Templeton and Gutierrez sitting apart from the veterans at the bar, and Gutierrez joining them and Templeton remaining apart, tells us a lot about who they are and where they want to be.

The opening titles suggest the focus will expand from print to broadcast media.  (Presumably once a story gets large enough to attract the TV stations.)  Kima's ex is a TV journalist, isn't she?

And, since there's no point delaying the ceremonies any further:

For working for Maury Levy, Herc is both the Dumbest and the Biggest Asshole.  This is the guy who stonewalled the detail after Kima was shot, then got Savino off with baking soda!  Carver should be calling him on it (if he even knows).  I may need to draft a "Herc exemption" if I'm going to do this every week...

Wire Links

Some reading to tide you over that long, agonizing wait for season five:

First, be sure to check out this New Yorker profile of David Simon, a career-spanning piece that ranges all the way from the DC suburbs to the Baltimore Sun to the last episode of The Wire.  (You'll want to let your eyes glaze over a few potentially spoiler-laden paragraphs.  I certainly did.)  Margaret Talbot clearly knows her Simon--no features writer who was not conversant with The Corner would use "off-brand" as a pejorative.  Added bonus:  the real-life Marimow.

Then head over to this Rolling Stone interview from last year for the hilarious story about how Simon managed to keep the show in Baltimore.  Reads like a lost script page from seasons three or four.

Wrap it up with a nice leisurely read of this extended version of a George Pelecanos interview in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages.  Pelecanos, a Washington, DC-based crime novelist and Wire writer, fires off the truest, most damning line you never heard in season two:

The dock locations were literally disappearing as we were shooting. There is no working class anymore. The working class is a myth that people use to sell Ford trucks.

Don Draper wishes he could be that hard boiled.

The Re-Up

For those of you who enjoy the bourgeois luxury of basic cable but don't run with that ivory tower premium channel horsey set, BET is running The Wire from the beginning of the series starting this week.  It's a great chance to catch up on the best show on television.

Feel free to use this as an open comment thread on the show.  Since I just finished season one on Netflix, I may even join in...

Final Examinations

Politics.  Everybody can find something to like in The Wire. Liberals can nod ruefully with the show's lamentation of the collapse of civic institutions.  Libertarians can get behind its savage critique of the war on drugs, and of bureaucracies in general.

I didn't think conservatives would find much to root for until I started reading other Wire blogs and found commenters--usually anonymous ones--using the episodes as pretexts to rant about teachers' unions or pronounce "Our urban institutions are in decline" and other such coded, sanctimonious twaddle.  It's not the urban institutions that are in decline, it's all of them, after twenty-five years of conservative governments ripping the guts out of unions, schools, manufacturing jobs, and social services, while promoting a drug war that militarizes our police and treats all of us as potential enemy combatants.  You could find enough drug use, unemployment, political corruption, and educational failure in rural areas to do a season of The Wire set entirely in the country:  the only thing you'd be short on would be the major crimes unit.

And the cast.  Despite its admirable and unparalleled variety of black characters, The Wire still shows black people dropping out of school and taking drugs, and for some people that's enough to reinforce one of the central, race-baiting tenets of the conservative revolution.  It certainly reinforced the unsuccessful re-election campaign of Maryland's Republican governor, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who ran so hard against Baltimore crime and Baltimore schools that he could have used selected clips from The Wire as a campaign ad.  No wonder he did that cameo.

The show's relationship with the victorious challenger, Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley, is more complicated.  It's been critical of his zero-tolerance approach to law enforcement and it gives parts to O'Malley critics like Ed Norris.  David Simon likes to intimate that O'Malley or someone underneath him in the commissioner's office was behind the firing of Northeastern District commander Gary D'Addario after a Wire appearance, but O'Malley aide Richard Burton, coordinator of the mayor's high-profile Believe campaign, played a recurring role as Stringer Bell's lieutenant Sean "Shamrock" McGinty (who has the best street name ever) with no repercussions.  Maybe Burton was too close or too high-profile or too effective to be canned. (This last, I doubt; if The Wire teaches us anything it is that the effective are the most likely to be canned.)  I can only imagine that most city officials are deeply ambivalent about The Wire.  As much as it might tarnish the city's image and their own, it also brings in the kind of media jobs and cultural capital that are one of the only strong sectors in our postmodern economy.

The Wire could only be a conservative indictment of O'Malley or of Baltimore's "urban institutions" under a very selective reading; when the show comes at O'Malley, it comes at him from the left.  Even criticisms specific to the mayor (like Carcetti's refusal of the governor's school bailout, almost a blow-by-blow recap of an O'Malley-Ehrlich struggle in 2005) only work when taken out of the larger political context.  For all that The Wire advertises Baltimore's problems, it also tells us they are really everybody's problems and its solutions are fundamentally libertarian or left-wing:  legalize drugs, burn all the standardized tests, stop focusing on statistics, abandon wars both figurative and literal, and reform the campaign finance system.  But the show is too jaded to pretend that any of this will be possible without a major shift in the nation's priorities and its political discourse.

Academics.  A couple of months ago Simon told the Baltimore Sun, "At the end of the 13 episodes, I think Ed [Burns, a former police detective and schoolteacher and the lead writer for the fourth season] was frustrated that we let the school system off too easily."  I agree.  The test-obsessed administrators of the Puzzle Palace didn't come off well, nor should they have, but almost everyone we saw at Tilghman Middle was a saint.  There had to be some bad teachers--incompetent, unqualified, spiteful, drunk, stoned, larcenous, resistant to change or simply all too willing to go along with whatever the Palace mandated--but except for one brief scene in week four we never got a look at them.

I can understand why the show would be reluctant to criticize the teachers.  Much like the patrol officers, they don't set the broken policies and they can often do the most good on the interpersonal level that The Wire prizes.  Yet The Wire has shown us bad police, even on patrol.  Anyone who's willing to teach middle school automatically earns my praise, but there have to be some failures at the classroom level to go with all the Prezes and Colvins and Grace Sampsons.  Without acknowledging that, the show's examination of the school system is incomplete.

I'm of two minds on Marcia Donnelly.  She knows her kids,  she cares about them, she backs Colvin's program all the way up to the top, and she runs her school with a well-oiled disciplinary machine.  The HBO character guide points out the similarity to good police work, though it's your choice as to whether that similarity is amusing or just sad.

But sometimes she's so focused on the big picture, protecting the school from state takeover, that individual kids fall through the gaping cracks.  She socially promotes Sherrod and her truant program, though cleverly funded, fabricates stats as baldly as any district DEU.  She tries to get Prez to follow the fixed curriculum when he's found another way to get his kids to learn math.  (Admittedly, there are probably some teachers at Tilghman who, left to their own devices, would teach badly or not at all, and that's why the curriculum is there--but we never see those teachers.)  Worst of all, her summary graduation of Dukie ends up sending him straight to the corner.  His parents' disappearance and Michael's fall contribute more, but she takes him out of his support system.

This is a criticism of the character, not the acting or the writing.  Even when Donnelly does something that seems callous or misguided, she does it in service of her larger mission to the school.  She doesn't always make good decisions but she has clear reasons for doing so.  She's far from perfect but that only makes her more plausible and, in most cases, more admirable.

With one exception. What was she thinking, sending Dukie and the other top students to high school before the state standardized tests?!  Introduce this woman to Jay Landsman pronto--clearly Donnelly could still learn a thing or two about juking the stats.

Akademiks.  Every day, my train rolls past an ad for Akademiks Jeanius Level Clothing featuring Bodie, Marlo, Chris, and Omar.  I don't know whether to be pleased that The Wire has finally gotten its carefully targeted promotional push (I see more ads on and under Georgia Avenue than I do on HBO) or sad that we'll never get to see those four meet in-character.

Language.  The slang of The Wire is infectious; after thirteen weeks I'm talking like the characters without quite realizing what I'm doing.  When I'm working a suspected plagiarism case I "get up on" Google or Turnitin.com.  "Juking" has become part of my professional lexicon.

The other side of the law is equally seductive.  Today, in the produce section, I decided I needed a re-up on some broccoli.

Analogies.  My finest pearl of wisdom from a holiday party last night:  "Rudy is like the Namond of the Cosby Kids."  Discuss.

Class.  There's your big hint for the Rudy question.

Who was saved this season?  I like to think Randy might make it out of that group home, but he's going to have a rough go of it.  I like to think Prez might put those MCU skills to work and surveil that corner in some attempt to save Dukie, but I don't see it happening.  And even my most quixotic fancies can't think of a way to pull Michael back.  Michael and Dukie are both well on their way to becoming another Wallace, another Bodie.  Maybe Bug is, too.

Who was saved?  The kid with the best surrogate father?  Maybe.  Colvin knows how to game the systems, finding a way to come straight to Wee Bey while Carver keeps taking "no" for an answer from social services.  But the other kids, especially Dukie, have competent surrogates on their sides.  Why is Dukie, who seemed so confident in the next to last episode, out slinging at season's end while Namond is getting ready for school?

Because Namond has one parent who's looking out for him--I think you can guess which one I mean--and Dukie and Michael have nothing.  And because Namond grew up with the Nikes and the throwbacks and never wanted for anything, never developed that hard survivor's instinct that all three of his friends have.  Because he is, from birth, lower middle class and they are crushingly poor.

Class is one of the few forces so powerful even The Wire can only approach it indirectly, by example.  Colvin created the circumstances to save one kid and he went far above and beyond the call of duty to do it--emerging, once again, as the season's moral conscience and one of its few signs of hope--but it only worked because Namond, and Namond alone, was born to a station that would allow him to be saved.

The Game is Rigged

Warning:  Spoilers for the final episode of Season Four of The Wire.

Slate: If you had to sum up what The Wire is about, what would it be?

Simon: Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

Slate: How so?

Simon: Whether you're a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It's the triumph of capitalism over human value.

• David Simon, Slate, Dec. 1, 2006

Listening to Garvey over drinks that day, I came to realize that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by—a police department or a newspaper, a political party or a church, Enron or Worldcom—you will eventually be betrayed.

It seemed very Greek to me the more I thought about it.  The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional.   In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings—be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled Eastern European sex workers—are destined to matter less and less.

After watching what was done to my newspaper, and to the Baltimore homicide unit, I began to write the pilot for a new HBO drama.

• David Simon, "Post Mortem," Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, 2006 ed.

Bodie: I been doing this a long time. I ain't never said nothing to no cop.

I feel old. I been out there since I was thirteen. I ain't never fucked up a count, never stole off a package, never did some shit that I wasn't told to do. I been straight up. But what come back? You think if I get jammed up on some shit they be like "A'ight, yeah. Bodie been there. Bodie hang tough. We got his paid lawyer, we got the bail." They want me to stand with them, right? But where the fuck they at when they supposed to stand with us? I mean, when shit goes bad, and there's hell to pay, where they at? This game is rigged, man. We like them little bitches on the chess board.

McNulty: Pawns.

• The Wire, episode 50, Dec. 10, 2006

Four years ago I never would have thought I'd feel sympathy for Bodie Broaddus.  But somewhere over the last two seasons, the kid who shot Wallace became one of most appealing characters on The Wire, the mordantly funny court jester of the corner boys. Not the show's moral conscience, exactly--I'm not sure Bodie developed a conscience until Marlo killed Little Kevin--but its spokesman for the codes of behavior that are supposed to govern the street just as surely as other codes do the police.

In a show where every institution will break its own rules and let down its most loyal workers, only those individuals who follow their own personal codes (Colvin, Freamon, Omar) come off well.  (And not always then, as seen in McNulty's destructive individualism of season three--but McNulty was violating higher principles of loyalty and respect for Daniels and his fellow detectives.)  Bodie probably wouldn't think of himself as following a personal code, just the way the street was supposed to run, but when the rest of the street decides anything goes even that dogged loyalty to the rules becomes a kind of ethics.  The ethics of a corrosive, destructive business, to be sure, but he spoke for it with wit and something I can only call integrity.

It isn't lost on me that he died for doing exactly what he killed Wallace for, but it's hard to see any poetic justice in that when his death leaves Marlo out on the streets.  Really, my own gradual warming to his character is what killed him:  if McNulty weren't equally amused by Bodie's mouth and his slinger's ethic--always business, no personal animosity between cop and criminal--he never would have started those sit-downs and Bodie would be returning for season five.

But Bodie's also dead because Little Kevin's murder drove him to rail against his boss's casual disposal of his workers.  Lives are worth so little to Marlo that he dumps them in vacants at the slightest provocation, or none at all.  Bodie knows this violates the ethic that's supposed to govern them both and that's why he talks to McNulty--but he faces the consequences and Marlo, being the boss, doesn't have to.  Bodie's speech to McNulty is as close as any character on The Wire has come to being a mouthpiece for David Simon:  it's an elegant, effortless, enervated rant about the tendency of postmodern, late-capitalist institutions to chew up their own best workers with no respect for loyalty or ethics.  They demand but they never give back.

The system breaks its promises to its workers but it serves itself well, creating a steady supply of new workers to replace those it grinds down and destroys.  Bodie's dead and Marlo already has two new middle schoolers to replace him. Nothing changes:  that's why this season was relentlessly circular, from the images in the opening titles to the many direct references to season one (including the chessboard meditations at Bodie's last supper, recalling a lesson taught to him by another pawn sacrificed for the kings, D'Angelo Barksdale).  From the corners to City Hall, systemic reform is difficult and halting if not downright impossible.

If The Wire offers any relief it's in those rare moments of grace when one individual reaches out to help another--when Landsman can say "Fuck the clearance," when Waylon shows up out of nowhere because he knows Bubs needs him, when Colvin works the game to save one kid.  These are the most moving moments on The Wire, because they are so scarce, and unlikely to repeat.

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?

Morning in Baltimore?

Everything's looking up this week.  Carcetti's getting the city government working, Daniels has reconstituted Major Crimes, Freamon has finally learned where Marlo's dumping his bodies, and Omar knows damn near everything.  Sounds like a new day.

Clearly this can't last.  Obviously the plans for turning the police around from stats-juking to investigation won't go as well as Carcetti and Daniels promise, but there are plenty of clouds on the horizon:  the Herc mess, the power plays for commissioner, the possibility that Daniels' past corruption or his relationship with Ronnie will come back to haunt him.  The most immediate question is whether Lester can get some movement on the Barksdale subpoenas before Carcetti gets hooked on that developer money.  The crosscutting between Lester dusting off the Major Crimes office and Carcetti making the rounds at the charity ball is more blatant than a lot of Wire comparisons, but it works as a basic suspense-film race against time.  The race is to keep Carcetti from becoming Clarence Royce.

Everything else will rise or fall on that--on the citywide level.  On the individual level, over at Tilghman Middle or Bubbles' Depot, people continue to fall like there's no new day at all.

Sweepstakes:  Looking for the biggest asshole can get tiresome week after week, so I thought I'd change the game.  (With some caution--look how that turned out for Stringer Bell.)  I contemplated looking for the nicest guy, the person who treats people with the most decency and who's working the hardest to make the city a better place, but that's too easy:  Bunny Colvin, two years running.  That affectionate horseplay in the hall with Namond kills me, because I know it can't last either.

Let's look instead for something The Wire does even better than the biggest asshole:  the craftiest bastard.

• Tommy Carcetti?  I loved his rampage through the city's public works departments (pure O'Malley), but he's still on the learning curve.  Burrell's played him on this Herc thing, when Herc might have given him an opportunity to start turning the ministers against Burrell.  (Who ordered the double in street busts, after all?)
• Ervin Burrell?  He finally shows us how he got his job--nothing to do with police work, everything to do with politics--but if he were that crafty he wouldn't be in hot water in the first place.
• Herc?  Hahahahahahahahaha!  I kid.
• Jay Landsman?   He sees right through the sky-high promises (McNulty plays the same role in the Western) and his quip about the "cute couple" may foreshadow how Daniels will be cut down.  He is a master at protecting his own position in a division where the bosses know his name, but ultimately he's just treading water.  He is but an apprentice next to the real winner.
• Lester Freamon?  Not really in the running, though I did love watching him unravel the mystery of the vacants.  Time's up, Marlo.
• Omar?  He knows more about Marlo and the co-op after a couple weeks of tailing cars than Freamon did after a year of investigation.  That bothers me to the extent that it furthers the show's uncharacteristic romanticization of Omar, but presumably his competence is the result of a brutal Darwinian selection:  this is what he does, and he wouldn't still be around if he couldn't do it.
• Bill Rawls?  For once he's caught off guard.  The look on his face when he realizes he won't be the next commissioner is almost, almost justice for four years of assholery.
• And that leaves the man who broke the bad news... nobody, and I mean nobody, plays the game like Stan Valchek.  Rawls questioned his competence when Carcetti proposed him for Deputy Commissioner for Administration, but the guy's incompetent like a fox.  Valchek might have thrown the election to Carcetti with his tip-off about the "witness homicide," and now he's a Deputy Commissioner because of it.  He read the weather for Herc earlier in the season and now he's reading it for Rawls.  In so doing he angles Rawls against Daniels, who went out on a limb for his fuck-up son-in-law three times, so no points for loyalty--but when has anybody ever been rewarded for loyalty in The Wire?  Just ask Clarence Royce.

Valchek may be treacherous, he may be spiteful, he may even be incompetent, but the crafty old bastard does get what he wants.  He's like the old, white, Polish police version of Delonda Brice.  Hats off to you, Stan.