"Clarifications"
This episode, with a script by Dennis Lehane from a treatment he co-wrote, is all about exposure, and what one has to do to cover over that exposure.
Omar, particularly, could tell you a thing or two about overextending one's self, and leaving one's self excessively exposed, when one of cockiest of the youngsters working Marlo's corners manages to shoot the crusader in the head, just after he raids another of the drug sales units. Suddenly snuffed out, he goes from being the scourge of the city's underworld to, in the final scene, just another corpse in the morgue, accidentally mis-tagged. But at least his hand-written list of harrassment targets, recovered from his corpse by Bunk, is passed along to the former Major Crimes investigators, to aid them in connecting the dots in the Stansfield mob.
Bunk also benefits by finally signing on to McNulty's scam investigation, gaining some priority for his lab work which fingers Marlo's right-hand thug Chris as the murderer in the beating death of Michael's stepfather that Bunk has been working; in return, he offers to hold off on executing a warrant for Chris's arrest for two days, to allow Jimmy and Lester's investigation of the Marlo gang to come to some sort of fruition. Less sanguine about the fraudulent investigation is Kima, who simply can't believe everyone involved has no ethical qualms about doing business this way, and Beadie, who doesn't want to but sadly can believe that McNulty would put himself so deeply and irresponsibly in jeopardy, when she was hoping to depend on him. And these aren't the only tricky negotiations Jimmy faces, given that one of more useless homicide detectives blackmails Jimmy into funding a Hilton Head golf outing for himself.
The episode begins with McNulty making the case for funding and giving a progress report before the top brass of the police department, including his old lieutenant at Major Crimes, Daniels, and Mayor Carcetti; the mayor, gunning for the governorship, offers anything the police department needs that will lead to the capture of the killer, even at the expense of other crucial city agencies, notably the schools. Carcetti discovers that this apparent crimewave isn't the only exposure he has, when he learns that a Prince Georges County politician is readying himself to challenge him in the Democratic gubernatorial primary; reluctantly, he turns first to that district's US Representative, and then to Narese Campbell and Clay Davis, to help him shore up support in the African-American communities. Campbell and Davis apparently ask less than the House member does, and Carcetti makes the deal.
Meanwhile, Templeton's shortcuts and punch-ups (and fabrications) are brought fully out into the open when the subject of one of his better, more honest stories, the homeless Iraq War vet, comes down to the paper to complain, and demonstrates that he has a better grasp on the truth than Scott does. Gus refuses to back down on a further abuse by Scott, even in the face of the clueless Managing Editor's reflexive support of the paper's theoretical new star.
With only two episodes to go, that this episode had the time for a clever setpiece at the FBI HQ in Quantico, wherein Kima and Jimmy get to hear a profile of the supposed serial killer that uncomfortably closely describes McNulty himself; and to introduce two bits of local color that a non-local like Lehane presumably picked up from either the regular staff or from prized research: the "araber" junk collector with his horse-drawn cart who provisionally hires Dukie, who finds he's too young to get even a retail job of the sort some ex-corner boys have picked up; and the breaking of the clock code the Stansfield gang have been using for their meets, via cellphone photos of clock faces, which actually refer to the page and grid numbers of the most common set of street maps available in the Baltimore/DC area.
Well, as Carcetti said a few episodes back...It's Baltimore...no one lives forever. I have a suspicion, but only a suspicion, that Marlo and McNulty, at very least, won't be whistling too many happy tunes by the end of the series...and what exactly Freamon will exact from Clay Davis in return for the evidence he offered is likely to be key to something big...
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