The Wire: Episode 60 "-30-"

Agree with this. A CEO type wouldn't be the one popping Cheese in front of 10 other dudes -- dudes in The Game or not. That's a loyal soldier/"company man" move...and I loved seeing that flip-flopping weasel Cheese get his, especially at Slim's hand.

 

Aside from offing Cheese, Slim never struck me as the stone-cold killer type, like Wee Bey and Chris were.

 

Cheese's death surprised me, just because it was a bit un-Wirelike....Simon's love for bleakness would seem to be better served by letting Cheese live. But with that said, Cheese's death -- and the fact that Slim Charles was the man to do it -- was a huge relief to me. "Flip-flopping weasel" pretty much sums it up.

What about Marlo? Are we to believe he's back in the game, even with so much to lose? Sepinwall's point -- that Marlo got what Stringer Bell always wanted, but for him, it's a terrible fate -- was very well put.

 

Guy from slate nailed the way I was thinking about Templeton the Rat.
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"Newspapers do terrible things—Simon is dead right about their prize obsession and their indifference to local expertise—but encouraging liars is not one of them. As we've seen this week with the pair of faked memoirs, fabulists get caught. Newspaper fabulists disgrace their papers. No editor would willfully ignore evidence of a reporter manufacturing stories the way The Wire's Sun editors do. It would never be worth it. The New York Times and Washington Post would trade any number of Pulitzers to wipe the stains of Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke from their histories."

 

Good point.

 

I actually think that was Sepinwall quoting Simon. It was an interesting point though -- that's all Stringer ever wanted, whereas all Marlo ever wanted was his name to ring out on the street. I think his fate was the most ambiguous (intentionally) of any character. Does he return to the game? Would he risk having his case being put back on him? Does he even have the muscle to get back to the top? Or was that just his last moment on the street, proving to himself that he could still be the king if he wanted to be?

I really don't have an answer. It seems like he needs to be on the street, but he isn't about to be a lieutenant. Yet, he's given up the connect and doesn't have loyal muscle and his name has been hurt in the street.

 

This is my last chance to do this, so apologies for the long post.

For starters, I want to say that it's been a real pleasure the last two seasons to come here each week and debate and discuss and even fight over this show. I'm truly going to miss it. I can very specifically remember trying to start a topic about the Season 2 premeire on the Anything Goes board, and it received exactly one reply. From Sandy. Who wanted to let me know that he didn't watch the show and didn't really plan to, and that me calling it as good or better than the Sopranos was laughable. I'm not going to take credit for drawing some of you in with my relentless promotion of the show, but for those of you who were like "Fuck, enough already, I'll watch the show" I'm really glad you did. I appreciated all of your insights, and looked forward to reading the analysis of Zeke and Wingman and Dedo and Boobie and Omar Don't Scare and Good Doc and Ragu and STLIrish and countless others (even dickhead Whitlock for a time) as much as I did Sepinwall (who didn't really even care about the show much until midway through Season 4, sadly). The Wire never gets enough credit for being a collaborative project, because as smart as Simon is (just ask him!) the show wouldn't be as brilliant without Burns, Lehane, Pelecanos, and others, something Simon tries to point out, and these threads have always been a wonderful collaborative project. Thank you all.

At the end, I felt like I'd woken up from a dream. A really vivid, really complex, powerful dream. The kind you have occasionally where you wake up and all you want is to go back to sleep right away and keep dreaming, but you know you can't because it's gone.

I don't know that it was perfect, but I thought it was beautiful and sad and satisfying in all the ways it needed to be. This has been written about a lot over the course of the last few days, so forgive me if I plagarize some of it subconciously, but it's interesting how, in a season where "Dickensian" was repeated several times as a meta joke (because the NYT called Season 4 "Dickensian" Simon and Co. decided to use it) the series wrapped up very much like a Dickens novel. I stand by my enjoyment of the Sopranos finale, but I liked the fact that this five-season arch ended in a traditional storyteller's way. If David Simon believes, in his heart, that he is a newspaper man until death, then endings matter. All the pieces matter, as Lester Freeman once said, in a quote that summed up the entire series from a storytelling aspect.

I feel better, in retrospect, about the fifth season looking back at it. I see now where all the pieces fit. In several interviews, Simon has made the point that the purpose of the Templeton storyline wasn't solely revenge or to say that fabulists are one of the biggest problems facing the media, but to point out all that we don't know. All that we miss. He makes the point about Prop Joe and Omar and juking the stats, but really it's true of the entire series. There is so much about American life that we, as storytellers, can't do justice. The port closes, the politicians make backroom deals, the schools lie, the addicts die, kids kill each other in the street over bullshit. We know, in general, that this stuff happens but it's pretty damn hard to get the time, the resources, the intelligence, the experience, to tell it right. The fifth season started really making sense to me when I was leafing through a copy of my favorite book, The Things They Carried. In it, O'Brien talks about how emotional truth is sometimes more important and more honest than the real truth. As a journalist, I kept watching this season thinking "Is that Klebenow guy Bill Marrimow? How much of John Carroll is in Whiting? How much shit did Jim Haner really make up? Is Martin O'Malley really a piece of shit like Carcetti?" But that was missing the point. I do think Marrimow and Carroll are better journalists than Simon makes them out to be, but I think the institutions that own and run newspapers really are as soulless as the one we've seen in Season 5. I think politics, as an institution, can be as ambitious and uncarring as the one in The Wire. I also don't know that every stick up boy has the humanity of Michael Lee or an Omar. But it's the emotional truth that matters.

Using the Blind Boys of Alabama version of "Down in the Hole" from Season 1 to close things was the perfect way to complete the circle. The stuff about "____" is the new "____" feels a bit too literal for me. If you think about the Greek tragedies that Simon said he based The Wire on, when a warrior was felled in battle, someone always rose to take his place. (Sometimes, he even wore the guy's armor.) It didn't mean he literally became that person, but that fate had just as likley brought him here. So I don't look at it like Sydnor is now the next McNulty, just that there will always be a cop who is frustrated by the bullshit and tries to go outside the traditional channels to get shit done. Kima, like The Bunk, is always going to try to work within the system to do shit the right way. Michael was always a fearless kid with street smarts and school smarts (remember when Omar talked about Ares and how he used to "love them Greeks in school") who cared about his people, and it will probably ultimately do him in. There will always be good cops (like Daniels and Carver) who did the wrong thing early in their career, but became good honest police as they got older and wiser.

A lot of people talked about this show's bleakness and its cynicism, and yes those are obviously evident. But his episode, and this series, was really a love letter to Baltimore. To truly save something you love, I think you have to be willing to strip it down bare for all the world to see. You have to point out all its flaws, all is sad, corrput, ugly warts, and show its humanity. The last shot, where the cars are driving by, the drivers inside oblivious to all that we've witnessed, was beautiful. You can't really know about a city's demons or its humanity just by looking at it from a glance as you drive by it, and that's America. We chose to ignore it because to confront the truth would be too horrible to comprehend. And so nothing changes. But there is some black humor and beauty and courage behind those city walls amidst all that despair.

I really liked Bubbles climbing those steps to share a meal with his sister. Simon is right. That moment was earned. I really did get glassy-eyed. I really liked Marlo needing a taste of the streets so badly that he whipped those two corner boys in his suit. Some people have criticized Jamie Hector's acting, and I think that's madness. From the "My name is my name!" scene to this final one, it was a mini Tour de Force by him.

I loved that Bunk used the line "There you go again, giving a fuck when it ain't your turn" that he used in the pilot when he and Kima were investigating a murder that occurred in the exact same place that William Gant was killed. I loved that Cool Lester Smooth -- truly one of the greatest characters in TV history -- gets to spend his days with Shardene, making those miniatures. I thought it was perfect that Valchek became commissioner. I liked the fake wake scene at the end, and it was good to hear the Pogues one last time.

I have a few more thoughts for later, but I'm going on a bit too long here and will cede the floor to others.

Why?

Gots to. This is America, man.

-30-

 

Mini flashback to Ep. 59... I LOVE that McNulty explained what "evacuated" meant to the other cop.

 

Masterful post, DD. I started watching The Wire the first night it premiered, and thought I was the only one who knew about it, until I came here and got the chance to discuss it with you fine folks. I thought I felt down after the final episode of The West Wing, but it's nothing compared to this.

 

Every fan of "The Wire" has their favorite character. Some identified with McNulty's flawed-but-sincere dedication to being a rebel with a cause, some preferred Omar's bravado with a code. Some liked Bodie's simple eloquence, or Bubbles' eternal optimism, or Stringer's grand intentions, or Cool Lester Smooth's cool smoothness, or Bunk's, well, bunkitude.

As for me? My favorite "Wire"-related personality was Double Down. And right there behind him were all the other posters who made these threads so enriching since the second season. I've been mainly an every-day lurker on this site since it started up, rarely taking the time to post, but I always made an exception for "The Wire" threads. Sadly, I've never been able to convince any of my friends to watch the show, so the only way I've ever been able to discuss it was here.

Like DD said, if it wasn't for this board, there's no way I would have enjoyed the experience of watching the show as much as I did. Every week, I gleaned something from these threads I wouldn't have thought about otherwise. Sometimes I had something decent to offer, and sometimes I pulled a Herc and just got in the way, but I even liked being set straight when I was wrong.

So thanks to everyone. It's been a privilege. Now play the damn song.