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“It was worth it. Wasn’t it?” – McNulty

It’s a wrap. Hard to believe, but it is. I had a lot of anticipation for this episode; I had high expectations. I purposefully avoided reading anything on the web this week that would give away its contents. And I was mostly pleased with the results.

I was expecting Simon to end the show on a more pessimistic note. The man who said that “’The Wire’ is a show about the end of the American empire” had his contrasting plotlines end rather neatly. Just about every character makes their swan appearance in the ending montage with a full smile. I didn’t see Dukie becoming a junkie – and his transition to this was too sudden – but Michael becoming the next Omar was the logical choice after his association with Marlo ended.

The general lesson? Things don’t change (that was the vibe from the montage, which reminded me so much of the ending montage for Season One). Everybody who gets their bread from the system finds a way to scratch the back of the other guy to make sure that nothing changes. Everyone’s incentive is to cooperate, to go with the flow of events no matter how immoral it is. Valchek put it best counseling Herc about how to deal with his discovery of Royce getting head in the mayor’s office last season, “Just shut up and play it up.”

At the end of the day, that’s what everybody does. Rawls, Washington, the Sun staff and Carcetti do it and ride it to success. Anybody who cared more about accomplishing a mission and “po-lice” work – Daniels, McNulty and Lester – finds themselves forced into retirement.

Now this tide of events is not surprising. Simon and Burns have always been interested in showing how “it’s better to be clever than good” and how people in institutions operate in this self-reinforcing game of back scratching. I’ve written about this theme before. So how the characters ended given their dispositions is not at all surprising.

Would there be room for a Sixth Season? As much as I love this show, my gut is to say that there might not be. Another season of watching bureaucratic in-fighting, of valiant individuals being crushed by expediency would be too predictable (it was oftentimes this season). For the show to continue, it would have to turn a new page in its tonality and approach the urban experience in a different light. The show would have to focus on something else besides decay and a blue-collar city’s fall from grace and embrace recent demographic and labor trends.

I read once somewhere that if Simon were to do a Sixth Season, it would be about the influx of Latinos in Baltimore, and more broadly, in the U.S. That would be perfect. Instead of showing something rotting, it would show something new and coming into being. The time is ripe for the first great television show about the experience of Latino immigrants in this country – and to be executed in that gritty, uncompromising Burns-Simon style. So, it’s too bad that they won’t be doing this - though I think Baltimore wouldn't be the right setting for a show like this.

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I’ll also say this: the plotline of the Sun was the weakest in the series. It had its moments but it never had the same legs as the world of the docks, the police, the Hall or the streets. Why? It lacked good characters. None of the characters ever became really three-dimensional. We mostly saw them at work. Scott was nothing more than a pip-squeaking lying reporter. We could have seen a personal scene where he’s visiting some successful college buddy or his parents to better understand his motivations. This would have added a lot of texture.

Likewise with Alma and Fletcher. Besides one scene where Haynes is at home, we never really got a feel for who they were. Perhaps in a 13-episode season this would have been different.

I was particularly disappointed in this episode. Haynes has all this evidence against Scott and it never fully comes out. Scott never has to defend himself in front of the editors who presumably make excuses for his work. There’s all this tension building and building – and then nothing comes of it. Just a lame montage scene of him accepting a Pulitzer at Columbia. There needed to be a climax scene like there was between Levy and Pearlman.

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A funny thing about this season: it was all shot during the spring and summer months. I don’t know any other season that did that. The Baltimore of this season looks more inviting than seasons past.

I always have a bit of envy watching summer scenes where all the characters wear short sleeve shirts at night. Can’t do that in San Francisco save five freakish nights of the year. That scene in the park with Bubbles and Waylon was particularly well shot.

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As for the Fayette Mafia boys? Michael becomes Omar, Dukie-Bubbles, Namond looks poised to become like Bunny or Carver, and who knows what Randy will become. Sadly, only Namond will become anything. The rest will flame out at some point.

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I liked that scene at the end with Marlo. He’s like Greggs or McNulty: he’s just meant for action. He can’t really change who he is. He doesn’t feel right in that suit at the downtown cocktail event. Instead he has to crack heads at some forlorn corner in his own neighborhood. After he scatters the hoodlums, he wears an expression that seems to say, “Damn that felt good!” The corners are all he knows. Like we’ve seen with Omar or Greggs or a thousand other characters: you can’t change who you are. This man will always be a man of the streets. His background is his destiny.

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It's always been unclear to me what exactly Daniels' transgressions were at the Eastern District when he was coming up. Obviously, they were big enough to warrant his dismissal. It's been around since Season One but it's never been explained exactly what he did. We've just seen a binder being waved around with menace by different officials. A rare overlooked detail on the show.

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I'll close with this thought:

At the end of the day, “The Wire” isn’t about Baltimore or corrupt bureaucracies and drug organizations: it was a 60-episode lament of the decline of community, of trust and the social and moral decay that results from this. While Robert Reich’s “Supercapitalism” could be read as the catalyst for what we’ve seen over the last six years on our televisions, Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” would be its social result. When Putnam writes, “Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century” it might as well be Simon talking.

Simon wants there to be a tighter social cohesion, where people don’t just get ahead by “shutting up and playing it up” but have an incentive to do the right things – as Daniels wanted to do with the police department – to make social institutions function more justly and with greater competence. Only then will people trust each other more, and have incentives to act in the public interest. People shouldn't just want to earn enough money to shut themselves away in a gated community but should be fully engaged in their surrounding communities.

It was an amazing show and I’ll be re-watching it for a long time.

- I’ll post more when I have more time and when I’ve gotten the chance to watch the episode for a second time.