React Quotes

“How do you get from here to the rest of the world?” – Dukie

A juicy thickening of all the plotlines in this episode. Everybody gets deeper into what they’re doing and it doesn’t appear that there’s a way out for many of them. Lester, McNulty, Marlo, Chris, Scott, Omar… there’s no shortage of people on this show who are completely committed to what they are doing. You have to admire their dedication, no matter how twisted their agenda may be.

Something I picked up on a little in previous episodes was more apparent in “React Quotes”: Chris is not happy with Marlo. He’s more prudent that his petulant boss. He seemed skeptical about going after Bodie at the end of last season and doesn’t appreciate how the targeting of Omar – which is totally unnecessary from a business perspective – is screwing up his life. But he’s gotta be as ruthless as his boss demands (but hey, at least we saw Marlo smile in this episode as he saw Chris play with his kids. Had no idea he was a family man).

What’s so scary about him is how coldly professional he is. I didn’t understand until the second viewing that Monk was set up as bait for Marlo (of all the actors on the show, Jamie Hector – Marlo – is the most difficult to understand). Chris is always thinking a step ahead of his opposition. Besides the murder of Michael’s father, he has always executed people with a dispassionate efficiency. He even cautions his boss away from living the high life in the AC.

Outsmarting Avon wasn’t too hard but he’s ahead of Omar here and nearly ends his life. That jumping out the window though, that felt too much like it was out of a Batman or superhero flick. Can a guy jump out of a four-story window and just walk away?

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During the first four episodes, the Sun mostly ran a largely self-contained plotline. I think that’s why the whole world of the newspaper just doesn’t have the same gravitas and appeal that the world of the docks, the streets, the police or the school had. The Sun doesn’t have a mission that feels as vital or as important compared to what characters from previous seasons went through.

There’s a coldness, a distance to all the characters at the paper. None of them, save Haynes, I have found especially likeable. Scott is just an ambitious brat whose lack of idiosyncracies makes him wholly unlikeable. Alma doesn’t take enough initiative for us to want to root for her. We rooted for McNulty is Season One, the boys at the docks in Season Two, Bunny Colvin in Season Three and the kids in Season Four but who are we rooting for this season? The show lacks a hero now, which I suppose one could argue, is Simon’s point.
The central plot premise of the season – will McNulty get away with his serial killer story to boost the police budget to apprehend Marlo – didn’t really come into vogue until last episode but now, in the words of Scott, it’s got “juice.”

Great scene where McNulty calls his bluff in the newsroom. Scott now knows that McNulty is lying. My guess: Scott will ultimately get trapped in his own lie and will take McNulty down with him. McNulty didn’t have to second him at the meeting. He could have just let the reporter stand alone. Both are committed to perpetrating the small con to bring about the larger con. They’re the same but they just don’t know it.

Scott’s lying gets more elaborate. The homeless woman he interviewed “couldn’t stop stroking her daughter’s blond hair.” Classic.

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So far, I’ve found the Clay Davis plotline pretty straightforward. But this episode gave us something we haven’t seen too much of – if at all – on “The Wire”: the invocation of the race card.

Listen to Clay’s defense of himself on the radio show. He calls the host “my brother” and talks about “the people” and invokes “they” who are “pulling the strings” and “prosecuting, no, persecuting” him. He adopts the language of a Black Panther member from the sixties to beef up the “us vs. them” story to cover up his sizeable transgressions. He hopes this cloaking of himself in the narrative of the aggrieved minority standing up to the powerful white political establishment will get him off the hook. This is what Marion Berry attempted. Identity politics has long been a staple of African-American politics, and watching this scene makes you appreciate the breath of fresh air that people like Obama and Corey Booker, the Mayor of Newark, have breathed into this world (The New Yorker has made the link cold, but the article in the Feb. 4 issue about Corey Booker was fantastic).

Next, we see him standing next to Royce on Calvert Street who wears a tie to match his “Marcus Garvey” campaign approach from last season. It reminds me of something one of my professors said a few months ago: if you get people to buy into your metaphor, you get them to buy into your solution.

So, in this episode, we saw McNulty using sexual manipulation to get his non-story on the front page, Royce and Clay Davis using racial manipulation to defray their own corruption, and Scott using the pulpit of the press to advance his own career. “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” Bunk said. Amen.

- Levy the lawyer. It seems pretty obvious he’s using Herc to try and incriminate Marlo and get “some business for the law firm.” He’s not a dumb man.
- Great music in this episode (seeing Donnie, sing along to those Motown songs in the car) was a good character window.
- It was great to see Cutty back. That was a good, long conversation between him and Dukie. They both seek an alternative to the world they live in. “World is bigger than that,” Cutty tells his new disciple. “At least that’s what they tell me.” But what is the alternative to the world they live in and how do they get there?
- What will Daniels do with his frustration? If Carcetti had just took the money from the governor at the end of last season, much of all this could have been averted.