"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.

Michael K. Williams interviewed on "Fresh Air"

The interview with Terry Gross was broadcast on Tuesday. It's a great interview. I found it riveting from start to finish. Didn't know that he was homeless for an entire year. At the end she asks him if Omar dies at the end of the season. Williams' response, "It's Baltimore baby!"

This link also lists other features they've done with previous Wire cast members. Clarke Johnson (Haynes) was interviewed on Monday and Jermaine Crawford two weeks ago.

It's pretty amazing how much attention NPR gives to the show. Somewhere in that place is someone who is a Wire fanatic.

Not for Attribution

“He doesn’t get to win, we get to win.” – McNulty

It’s hard to think that things will end well for McNulty. The way he mocks Bunk to his face in the office, his overbearing petulance… he’s a model of self-destruction, of a man who has completely succumbed to his id. He used to be the hero of the show, committed to solid police work and now he just looks like a man in moral free fall.

In the scene in the bar where he hooks up with the blond, he catches a glance of himself in the mirror. It’s subtle but he can’t quite keep his own gaze. There’s a consciousness below, but he’s too deep into what he’s doing to get in touch with it. He is surrounded by people who don’t take pride in their work, who perform at the bare minimum to get through the day and he just can’t accept it. Despite all the things of ill repute he does, there’s something inspiring about his determination, his drive to win.

I have ambivalent feelings about the “red ribbon” murderer plot thread. As I said about it last week, something about it feels forced. Through the last four seasons we’ve seen McNulty and Freamon wait patiently for cases to hatch, sitting on rooftops for hours. For them to suddenly create this serial killer to make a point and get the money to take down Marlo just doesn’t feel plausible given the pace and deliberation we’ve gotten used to on this show.

Particularly from Lester: He’s always been the calm one. It doesn’t seem a part of his nature to do anything rash. I’m crossing my fingers, but if “The Wire” will prove to have a “Jump the Shark” moment, the scene where Jimmy creates a murder scene at the end of “Unconfirmed Reports” could be it.

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We’ve seen it a million times on this show: people don’t control their own destinies. Still, it was at no time more powerfully shown than in the layoff scene at the Sun. The decision about a case, about what your job will be always comes from above. It’s not the Sun editors making the layoff decisions: it’s Chicago. According to Carcetti, it’s not him cutting the police budget to the bone, it’s the mean Republican governor in Annapolis who’s responsible for not giving him the money to get the city in shape.

Watching this show doesn’t make you exactly want to go out and work in a bureaucracy, or at a large corporation. But that’s what the show is documenting, how these large institutions, which (in theory) used to provide a measure of comfort and security for its members can’t promise that anymore. There’s just too much bottom-line pressure.

(I could talk about this much more but “Supercapitialism” by Robert Reich is a great non-fiction companion piece to this show. Many of the between the show and the book are perfectly congruent. It’s a great, highly readable and original work that I highly recommend it).

By the way, it doesn’t always happen this way. The editor at the LA Times was just forced out because he refused to make newsroom cuts. And the guy he replaced refused to do the same. And maybe that’s why the LA Times is a much better paper than the real Baltimore Sun.

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If there’s a weakness to “The Wire” – one that has held constant in every season – it is a propensity to nostalgize about the past. There’s often this sort of “Greatest Generation” subtext to the show, as if the characters are saying, “Man, things used to be great around here. What happened?”

True, Baltimore has lost a lot of its population over the last four decades, has one of the highest murder rates in the nation and is no longer a big player on the national scene. However, Simon and Burns never point to a new direction. They never seem to point to a new way of being, a second act, for the city. Instead we receive an endless solemnity about the “lost” Baltimore, for the blue-collar work ethic, for pride in one’s work. We have all these illusions to how great everything was in the past.

The conversation between Haynes and Twigg brought this to light. They have so much pride in what they do, but it’s that brutish force of capitalism to “make more with less” and serve the bottom line that shortchanges them. They talk about all the things that made them become journalists. And then Twigg quotes the finest journalist Baltimore has ever known, the famous H.L. Mencken. But Haynes says, “Fuck Henry Mencken.” I didn’t get that, why he would say that.

Mencken and Simon’s lives both have some parallel to each other but I’ll leave that for another post.


And short comments:

- I believe that this was the first episode penned by Chris Collins, who according to the New Yorker article, is the youngest writer for the show. He always appears as “Staff Writer” in the credits. However, in the New Yorker piece, Simon claims to rewrite much of the episodes himself so it’s difficult to know how much of the script originated with the writer itself.

- In a season that has been devoted to the process and effects of public manipulation, the scenes with Clay Davis have a different tint to them. There are no lies in these scenes, no sense of irony, no greater agendas that are being advanced. You just have the slow process of justice. Of course, you could say that Pearlman is trying to manipulate the jury, but at least she's using the truth.

- The Marlo scenes didn’t provide me with any new windows into his character. He doesn’t seem to change too much. We already now how unsocialized he is, how he doesn’t trust anybody, how ruthless he is, how his weakness is pride. At least we got to see the hottest woman ever on this show (the bank teller in the Carribean).

We’ll see what Omar going after him does though. Omar is back. What more do you need to say?!? Interesting to see how he and McNulty fare considering they have the same agenda.

Unconfirmed Reports

“You got to let it out or let it go.” – Waylon

A very solid episode. This season needed some focus and traction after last episode and “Unconfirmed Reports” (aka “CSI comes to Baltimore”) provided that. It did what “More or Less” failed to do and filtered out the noise and honed in on a few characters’ journeys.

In particular, the world of the Sun really came into being. Last episode, it felt clunky with too many people talking too much jargon (anybody know what an “e-dot” is?), but the scene where the executive editor talks about his desire to have a “Dickensian” series of articles on the city schools brought the season’s theme as well as each character’s ambitions and agendas into focus.

It appears that Haynes is to this season what Bunny Colvin was to the last: the consciousness of the season, the consummate, old-school professional trying to enforce a sense of decency and professionalism in a Machiavellian world obsessed with results.

Haynes line, “I think you need a lot of context to examine anything,” reminded me a lot of Colvin telling the superintendent, “We pretend to teach them and they pretend to learn. They’re learning for their world, not ours.” They both spoke truth to power and failed to make an impression.

One could make the case that Haynes’ line sums up what “The Wire” is essentially concerned with: capturing the context of modern, urban life. And that’s largely responsible for why the show is beloved as much as it is: this obsession with portraying this context as accurately as possible.

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But this episode belonged to McNulty. It’s hard to know immediately what to make of the gut-wrenching final scene. This incredibly grotesque act he commits shows the man in complete free-fall, corrupting the main source of his pride: his work. After the FBI agent tells him, “Fish and fucking Wildlife couldn’t help you,” as he tries to reignite the Stanfield case, he just loses it.

And yet, this act of desperation, of utter frustration has happened so soon. Before, McNulty has displayed a lack of control over his drinking and his womanizing, but it’s always been accompanied by a great commitment to police work. We saw his frustration building, but by attempting to make that death into a murder, what are his intentions? The way the scene played out, it just felt like he wanted to say, “Fuck you” to the city bureaucracy the loudest way he could.

At the very least, for a show that has always avoided cliffhanger episode endings the way a network show like “Lost” is so fond of doing, this dramatic turn feels just a bit rushed. I feel that it’s also lacking context. Two episodes ago, the guy was fine, and now he’s reignited his alcoholic womanizing ways with a vengeance. Is his relationship with Beadie going badly? Do his kids hate him? It has all happened a little too quickly, we didn’t see his breaking point build up quite enough to justify his actions.

(For those of you who watched “Six Feet Under,” it reminded me a little bit of the episode in Season Four where David (Michael Hall’s character”) picks up a hitchhiker who almost murders him. It felt like a radical and unnecessary plot twist at the time. The show took a while to recover from that.)

Bunk’s reaction was also telling. Earlier in the episode when McNulty grabs a body that has come in, he deplores him for “ giving a fuck when it ain’t your turn to give a fuck.” But that is what is so winning about McNulty: he does give a fuck in a world where everybody is consummated by self-preservation. And that’s exactly what Bunk does: flees the scene in an act of self-preservation. A professional who wanted the job done right would have intervened.

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There was more than one parallel between McNulty and Bodie in this episode. “There are no fucking rules. Fucking game is rigged,” sounds a lot like Bodie telling him that he felt like “those little bitches on the chessboard” in last season’s finale (did Bodie say “game is rigged” too? I forgot). Neither man can accept being ground down by the higher-ups, and both commit a brazen act of self-destruction when they feel that they have lost total control over their situation.

The deference of Haynes stands in stark contrast to McNulty’s self-implosion. Like McNulty, he is contradicted and betrayed by his superiors, but instead of insolence, he follows the chain of command.

Of course, Scott’s “E.J.” probably has about as much validity as Stephen Glass’ “Juke Micronics” or Jayson Blair’s description of Jessica Lynch’s front yard (Glass and Blair are two of the most famous cases of journalistic malfasence in recent years), but he’s a good soldier and follows orders. But, like McNulty, he’s haunted by the idea that the job wasn’t done right, waking up in the middle of the night.

You never hear it being discussed, but one of the things that Simon seems concerned with the most on the show is the American work ethic. Hell, he devoted Season Two to it. All the heroes on the show are the professionals who show the highest commitment to their work. The show is full of characters who are obsessed with their work and derive much of their identity and sense of self-worth from it. It’s a far cry from one of the current business books in vogue, “The Four Hour Workweek.”

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Great to see Avon back. That scene with him and Marlo reminded me of how great an actor Wood Harris is. He is so much more likeable than his former nemesis who only grows more and more petulant. “I’m what you might call an authority figure around here.” He brings so much life to Avon’s character.

Avon shows something that Marlo lacks: respect. Marlo shows no loyalty, no trust of anybody he does business with. Avon, by contrast, has “nothing but love” where he came from. He and Marlo battled, they played the game, and Marlo won fair-and-square by their rules. Avon respects that. But, sitting in that prison waiting room, you don’t get the impression that Marlo cares one bit for Avon’s West side pride. He’s simply the conduit with which he will use to cut out Prop Joe.

I liked the way the triple-homicide of Junebug and his crew was shot from Michael’s perspective. You just hear shots and screams, you only see the blood and carnage from the police view. The scene was shot to show how the murder of these three people effected Michael.

He’s being groomed to be as cold-blooded and remorseless as Snoop and Chris but he’s not there yet. He questions the perverted honor code of Marlo and his environment where any perceived disrespect is a capital offense. As Chris explains to Michael, “It doesn’t matter if he said that Marlo (sucks dick), it only matters that people think that.” But there’s no one in his world to tell him how disgusting and destructive that logic is. There is no economic advantage in killing Junebug, no territory to take, it’s just about demonstrating toughness and demanding complete subjugation.


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A good Bubbles episode. Poor guy just is not ready to take on any responsibility in his life. He just can’t seem to decide whether he’s meant for this world or not. People ask him to fill bigger shoes but at the end, he only feels comfortable doing the dishes. I liked how the end of the episode contrasted him and McNulty: two frustrated men who can’t quite deal with the uncomfortable realities they face.

More With Less

“What kind of people stand around watching a fire?” – Haynes

And so, off we go…the much talked about “media season” – which was the subject of glowing write-ups in the LA Times and the NY Times Sunday – finally begins.

We know that this season is going to largely be about manipulation, particularly about how the media sets the public agenda by what they choose – and don’t choose - to cover.

The opening scene with Bunk (rewatching the Fourth Season, the opening scene usually does little to advance the plot, it’s all about setting the theme) was a harbinger of this: how do you manipulate the truth? How do you get the outcomes you want with the information that you have? As we’ve seen with how the institutions run on “The Wire, ”it’s not about truth, it’s about results. Everyone – from the cops, to the dealers to the journalists – has got to hit their numbers. You do what you have to, even magically turn a Xerox machine into a polygraph.

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Still, overall, I thought “More With Less” was one of the weakest of the five season premieres we’ve seen. The parallels between the police department and the Sun newsroom were too transparent. Unlike Season Four’s “Boys of Summer” which was mostly interested in the emergence of Carcetti and setting up Randy’s involvement in Lex’s murder, this episode had a bit of a didactic feel to it. There was a lot of repetitive, expositional dialogue in this episode, particularly about explaining the effects of budget cuts and demonstrating low morale.

We didn’t get a feel for too many of the characters at the Sun except the two cub reporters, the managing editor and Haynes. Rewatch “Boys of Summer” or “Ebb Tide:” we get a much stronger feel for the new characters of those respective seasons (four and two, respectively) than we got in this one.

It was difficult to tell the journalists apart, what their jobs were and what each character wanted. But of course, in a show as masterfully crafted as this one, I’m sure that patience will reward the viewer over the next few episodes. Haynes’ character was the exception: you get a good feel for what he’s about right away.

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The plot thread with Marlo appears to be promising. Despite his overwhelming brashness, his saving grace is that he is careful.

This quality has saved him from many traps that way with Barksdale and the police. But he is no team player. His petulant manners at the Co-op meeting and the look that Cheese gives him at the end suggest there will be blood between East and West Baltimore this season.

As Bunny tells Wee-bey in jail in last season’s finale, “there’s no code, no family, no trust” in the game today. Marlo is front and center on this. He’s the unfettered capitalist, ruthless and almost completely lacking in empathy. He has shown little in the way of hobbies (Dozerman’s remark), and is just interested with expanding territory and the bottom line. How it was before doesn’t matter.

Again, it’s all about results. He’ll short anybody and put someone in a vacant if they present only the slightest threat. It will be interesting to see if these qualities will give him more territory or if he will perish from overstretching himself too much. If this were a normal cop show, he'd of course fail and die a miserable death. But this is "The Wire" and it's nice to know that the ending won't be so predictable.

I’m not sure how Sergei, the Greek’s jailed henchman, will play into things but it’s good to see Season Two dragged back into the picture. This will be an interesting plot line.

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And yet, we still have the believers among us. “Promises were made and promises will be kept,” Carver says to the disgruntled men in the Western District. Daniels invokes Carcetti’s promises as evidence that things will change. Everyone keeps waiting for things to change, but political considerations and expediency always get in the way.

This theme, of the valiant underlings working their hearts out at the docks (take your pick), the corner (Bodie) and in the police (McNulty) while their superiors subvert them, gut their operations for political or financial considerations, has been present in every season. We can already see it on display in Season Five.

I just wonder, and hope, that there’s some expansion of this theme. I don’t think it’s merely enough to see it happening in the same way in a different sector of society. The theme has to be expanded or augmented somehow. We’ve seen plenty of superiors hijacking the hard work of good men on this show. What’s beyond this?

And some random points:

- Looks like Dookie has grown about 6 inches from last season! He towers over Michael and yet commands little respect. Michael doesn’t look any different though. Dookie still has that look of resigned sorrow on his face; the only difference now is that he looks man enough to do something about it.

- Carcetti looks doomed in a way. There’s not enough money and he’s unwilling to compromise with any element that could jeopardize his political future. And, all of a sudden, he’s worried about stats. He looks panicked in this episode. Norman is a great character, his political conscious.

Just a reminder that the Fifth Season is now available On-Demand. It was a good thing to wake up to New Year's Day - got my brain humming better than a pot of coffee. I'll post about the episode Sunday. Happy New Year!