The Wire: Episode 58

You know if you talk to the police. I always knew when a bigshot was arrested or killed. Might be a couple of days later, but it comes up.

 

True, but isn't Omar's fame more or less confined to the streets? Even the cops -- aside from Bunk and McNulty -- didn't really seem to know much about him when he was arrested in Season Four...

 

Exactly. It's just like Nick Sobotka at that downtown ceremony. A guy who's a key figure in one world isn't worth a damn in another.

That was a very good episode. Let's hope the next two follow suit and this series rallies for a strong finish. It's the best TV series I've ever seen, dammit-- it deserves a proper ending!

There's no doubt now that Marlo's organization will fall, with help of the police or via an insurgency--probably both. It would be ironic if this serial killer stuff blows up in McNulty and Freamon's face just before they get the drop on the only criminals to slip through their fingers-- the Greeks. I can envision a final episode in which they are sitting on Vondas and the Greek again, but get called on the carpet for their misdeeds just as they're ready to spring the trap. They get disciplined, the Greeks continue to flood B-more with dope and coke, and Michael Lee assumes the role of young Avon Barksdale-- and, in the long run, nothing changes.

 

su-i-cide

 

Maybe. But it wouldn't have been unrealistic if the old cops reporter, the guy who took the buyout, got turned on to that story if he'd still been there. Gus has been behind a desk for awhile, but that guy knew the street cops, knew the districts. He had the context and the sources and the institutional memory, and it's lost, gone to help Tribune Co. make its quarterly numbers.
That's the newsroom story this season should be focused on, instead of dicking around with a fabricator story line and kvetching about prize-hound editors. Really, they're not the problem.
The real reason the stories the Wire tells don't get told better in newspapers is because getting and telling those stories is hard. And too many reporters are either too green (Alma) or too lazy (Templeton) or too overworked to get them (and yes, I'm as guilty of that as anyone). And too few editors push us to go find them. And we're perfectly content to run the standard institutional fare. And so Omar's story never gets told. But it's nice to see maybe Bubbles' will, though this being the Wire, I'd bet something interferes.

 

Does anybody see anything coming out of Freamon's encounter with Clay Davis? The feds basically told him to go F himself, but he went to Davis anyway with that stuff from Prop Joe's desk. Maybe its Davis that works to keep the heat off the cops. In exchange, Freamon promises not to release the new material (don't forget Davis doesn't know its already been shopped to the feds)?

 

Two of the three prequel stars: Dead.

 

Anyone got a good guess on Omar's morgue tag switcheroo? Again, I don't get what they were aiming for at the end of one of these episodes. Sad to see him go, but that whole scene had a feel of impending doom, didn't it?

McNulty's killing himself before this thing's over.

 

Point is, Simon would have known. Trust me.

 

Brilliant thats all I can say about the episode.

 

My guess is it was just a way of saying that, to the "straight world," Omar's worth so little they barely got his name right.
As for a McNulty suicide, damn, that'd be a dark way to end things. I don't know. A little on the climactic side for this show. I'd bet he loses Beadie, and maybe gets shuffled off out of homicide, or even the police department, but the world of Jimmy McNulty keeps turning.

 

I say it will end in that bar they go to all the time. McNulty will be there and then his wife, daughter and Marlo will show up to end it all. Then the screen goes black and we all go straight for the remote before we know its over.