"Same blood but not the same heart." - Cutty

Transitions

“It matters. It all matters. I know we thought it didn’t but it does.” – Carver
“Singed, your true and loyal friend, Prop Joe.” – Prop Joe


This was easily the best episode of the season. Great, great writing in particular. I can think of few Wire episodes with so many memorable lines. It also somehow managed to keep up a brisk pace without feeling as rushed as previous S5 episodes.

This season has been exceptionally plot driven compared to prior ones – ostensibly to accommodate the stresses of a ten-episode season. What was sacrificed in the first three episodes was a focus on the personal lives of the ensemble cast – a badly needed texture if you ask me. “Transitions” went back there showing us the characters as they behave away from work and it worked very well.

There were many great “character windows” (to use a screenwriting term) in this episode. Greggs had really disappeared from the show emotionally. She had broke up with her partner, gotten used to the homicide detail. That is why her observations of the orphaned witness were so important. It just showed us a different side to her that we hadn’t seen in awhile. It added a fullness to her character that was missing.

Likewise the scene where McNulty goes home and gets chastised by Beadie. Yes, it was predictable, but it was an important scene that gives us a more human feel for our characters. We haven’t seen much of that with the newspaper people yet.

Of course, the best of all these “window” scenes was the conversation between Prop Joe and Cheese at the very end. “Why you live in this dump with all the money you got?” quips the codeless Cheese. “Your great grandfather was the first colored man to buy a house in Johnson Square,” Joe says. “That means something… something you youngins lost.” Then there’s the shot of his grandfather and his bride.

There’s no concept of history to people like Cheese and Marlo. And where do you learn to appreciate history? School. Parents. Family. And these are exactly the kinds of institutions that are lacking in the moral and economic emptiness of their neighborhood. And in the absence of this, they learn to get what they want through strength, by exercising raw, cold-blooded power. It’s like the return of the state of nature.

Beyond his ruthlessness evil, Marlo also is impossibly narcissistic. It’s always about him. “I treated you like a son,” Joe quips. “I wasn’t made to play no son,” Marlo replies in a memorable line. But I’m a little disappointed that through three seasons with this character, we haven’t seen any windows into him. We never learn anything personal about him, no personal tastes or preferences. But, perhaps that’s just the way he is, just a simple, one-dimensional, heartless gangster. Maybe what you see is really who he is.

It’s a shame to see Joe go, he was a great character. However, thinking back on it, he always yielded to the violent types. Every time Omar pressured him he gave in. And he eventually did with Marlo. It’s a surprise to me why this guy didn’t have more muscle around him. He just expected that people would behave decently showing respect when respect is given. But Marlo proved him wrong. There’s got to be a chapter in “The 48 Laws of Power” that Joe violated here. Points to the reader who can cite it.

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I’m very glad that the Daniels-Burrell-Rawls police commissioner plot line got resolved. It had been going on for awhile and badly needed resolution. And it was a satisfactory one.

Burrell’s speech to Rawls as he packs up his office was a great one. It sounded out of Macbeth. “You might think it would be different when you sit here, but it won’t,” he says. “You will eat their shit.” It ties into that pervasive theme in “The Wire” about the endless frustration of bureaucracies; that everybody is controlled by somebody else in this vast web of power that no body can quite understand nor control.

And when Daniels sits in Rawls chair later on, he sits there and smiles. He thinks it will be different. But experience says that it won’t.

Conflicts of loyalty were all over “Transitions.” Many people caught between being loyal – and what being loyal meant – and their own ambitions. The Greek and Vondas pondering what to do about Marlo and his suitcases full of neatly packed bills. “But he is not Joe,” Vondas says. “He will keep coming back,” the Greek says. “He is not Joe.” Their moral quandary, however, was resolved for them across town.

Daniels trying to assuage a silent Burrell that his force-out is not his fault, that he’s a good soldier after all. But, at the end of the episode, he looks pretty content sitting at Rawls’ old desk. And Carver, decides to write up that idiot officer Colicchio after he doesn’t accept the story Carver comes up with about what happened. He has a loyalty to standards even though he knows he will pay a price from the men he commands. (That scene was just like Season 1 where Daniels tells Prez, Carver and Herc what they should say to Internal Affairs after their ill-fated mission to the towers goes awry and Prez blinded that kid).

And of course, there’s Omar, who never flinches for a second when the question of loyalty comes up. He’s there, all the way through. There is absolutely no economic incentive in his return to Baltimore. It’s all pride and loyalty. With the moral fall of McNulty and Lester, he’s one of the few heroes left on the show.

- I related to McNulty and Lester this episode. Just for a minute. Once I wrote an article about crime in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I walked around the area near the foot of Haight Street and tried to interview homeless people and like McNulty, not too many people wanted to talk to me. And I wasn’t even wearing a suit and tie.

- One thing that is unclear to me: Did Cheese collude with Marlo in Joe’s death? When he walks out the door at the end, Marlo walks in and the business is finished minutes later. We’ll see whether the law of pride and loyalty to family win out with him, or whether the law of self-interest does. Judging by the sacrifice of Hungry Man, and seeing Cheese for four seasons now, he’ll choose the latter.

- McNulty showing off his badge at the bar like it was a medal he won. The man has fallen far. He needs a vacation.

- Viewership is down this season for the show. Oh yes, and that photo is from last episode's. I thought it was fitting for this one.

- Lastly, one thing I have to get off my chest. I just cringe every time I see Daniel Attias’ name up on the screen (he was the director for this episode and has directed several episodes). Why? Professionally, perhaps there’s no good reason. It just makes me think of that fateful night, seven years ago next month, when his son murdered four people with his car at my alma matter, UC Santa Barbara, while I was at school there. Lucky I was downtown that night. I’m very disappointed that the insanity plea worked and that he ended up in a mental hospital instead of jail.