"-30-" indicates the end of a newspaper article, in the early stages of production. And this was the end of The Wire, with both bangs and whimpers and the lives of the characters mostly just going on... with not a few surprising and unsurprising twists.Jimmy McNulty and Lester Freamon are made aware that their jig is up... their bosses at all but the immediate supervisory levels know about the fraud that they've been running on the department. Freamon learns just as he's reporting the last bit of useful investigation from the Clay Davis affair, the identity and the testimony of the leak in the Baltimore courthouse, who's been feeding confidential information to drug lord defense lawyer Levy and a number of his colleagues. Even as the false pretenses of the wiretap on Marlo and his gang make that bit of their investigation easy grounds for appeal by Levy, Levy learns that if he tries to pursue that route, he'll be hit with criminal charges that will put him away for years. Prosecutor...
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With only one episode left in the series, all the chips are coming home to roost, all the chickens are falling where they may, and the opera is very nearly over. George Pelecanos, the current dean of DC-based crime fiction (particularly since the death last week of Stephen Marlowe) wrote this one, from a treatment David Simon and he put together, and it's another episode that, while packed, allows us a little time to feel the import of these late moves, as we approach (to indulge in another cliché of the sort this show loves to mock) endgame.The biggest news in the episode is the successful execution of the arrest of most of the important players in Marlo's organization, including such de facto Marlo lieutenants as Cheese, by an operation under the direction of Lester. Lester's jubilation is tempered only by his cool as he makes a great show of confiscating Marlo's cell phone and the clock Marlo used to designate the coordinates of their meeting sites. Marlo, Chris and other up...
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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 d...
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In an episode more given over to relatively leisurely setpieces than usual this season (and marking the return of scriptwriter Richard Price to the series, and a cameo by Richard Belzer as Munch, another reference back to Homicide: Life on the Streets), this one was all about the misallocation of resources. Of course, every episode of The Wire deals with that, but rarely so completely.For example, McNulty and Freamon fake up a call from their fictional serial murderer to Templeton, the reporter who is their unwitting partner in the fraud (or, more correctly, is running his own parallel fraud to theirs). This leads to both precisely the kind of unlimited funding Lester and Jimmy were hoping for in police department funds and humanpower commitment, and an embarrassment of riches (and the looming threat of close oversight scrutiny) that might hinder their real investigation...even as it allows McNulty to quietly fund and fold in the pet cases of many of his fellow homicide detectives...
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Catastrophic success is the upshot of nearly everyone's gambits on this episode of The Wire.McNulty and Freamon's fraudulent case of serial killing of homeless men in Baltimore get ever more attention, and ever more promises of support, from the mayor on down the hierarchy...but no more actually humanpower or technological resources, leaving them slightly hobbled in their real investigation, into the activities of Marlo's gang. Lester brings his Major Crimes underling into the conspiracy, and between them they manage to determine that the real business of the gang is being conducted through cell-phone photos rather than text messages or coded conversation, but that just taunts them in not having quite what they need to put Marlo and his enforcers away. As Freamon notes, when Assitant D.A. Rhonda Pearlman drops by about the investigation of Clay Davis, his "official" work, it's remarkable what one can do when no one's looking over your shoulder...a luxury that McNulty and Freamon a...
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Parallel lines run throughout this episode, as people push themselves down similar paths for similar reasons, even if their circumstances are rather different.Marlo meets with the primary Greek importer, who shows him, as it turns out, how to send email with his mobile phone...we discover that's what he's doing only at the end of the episode, as Lester discovers the same thing, after all the travails and blatant fraud to get a "wire up" on Marlo's new phone. But that's not the only new trick Marlo's working on, as he and his most trusted crew attempt to lure Omar and one of Omar and Butchie's old friends into a trap...since the latter two have been staking out an apartment where Marlo's crew has been congregating off and on for days, waiting to make their own move. (It's taken me a while to wonder if it's any coincidence that take-no-prisoners Marlo and criminal-with-rules Omar's names nearly mirror each other's.) The crew manages to get Omar's partner, when the avengers break in...
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You can feel the series winding up toward some serious payoff, with this episode if not before...there are only six episodes left, after all. And Prop Joe will not be returning. Nor, presumably, will be several key veterans at the Baltimore Sun...but their exits were less final.McNulty and Freamon, in their efforts to fake up a single serial killer focused on homeless men, enlist the aid of Freamon's old partner, an ex-homicide detective busted down to uniform duty, and spending most of night shifts sleeping so as to be ready for his daytime job as a realtor...he finds them one body to begin with, but it proves too far gone to make look like a homicide. Meanwhile, McNulty's research with the morgue opens his eyes to the extent of deaths among the homeless, particularly from narcotics overdoses; Freamon suggests a means of spicing up the serial killings with a set of false teeth, so that the "murderer" will be seen to have bitten "his" victims...McNulty has the thankless task of fa...
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Schemes, and how they don't always quite work out, on this week's installment.McNulty, having tampered with a corpse at the end of the last episode to make it look like the result of murder, researches similar deaths in the Homicide files and eventually plants evidence on the tampered-with corpse, in the form of a red ribbon tied around its arm, to bolster his attempt to drum up interest in investigating a potential serial killer. In purchasing the ribbon to plant at a convenience store, he crosses paths with and almost meets Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress), who is out trying to find a copy of the new Baltimore Sun, the first issue to feature a front-page solo story by her (that of the murder of three people by Marlo's henchpeople in the previous episode). Later, McNulty would call her to place the story of the serial killer (she's essentially the new junior Metro crime beat reporter), but McNulty's planted story is even more soft-pedalled than Gutierrez's front-page story was; b...
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An episode about cutting corners, figuratively and almost literally, to get what one wants.We begin in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, wherein Bubbles (Andre Royo) is encouraged by his sponsor (Steve Earle) to testify; he can't bring himself to do so, beyond a few jokes about the old days before sobriety. The Major Crimes Unit, now down to two detectives, keeps up their assigned duty of working the case against State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), although Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) isn't about to let go of their other major investigation, of the Marlo Stanfield gang, even if he has to work it on his own time. Meanwhile, Jimmy McNulty, even more than his fellow homicide detectives, is chafing under the restrictions on budget and his reassigment back to Homicide from Major Crimes. He takes on a slightly hincty-looking death investigation out of turn more to get out of the office than anything else; this eventually puts him in the pathologists' offices at the same time...
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The Wire's back, and as sharp and real and densely packed as ever. Most nights, it's the best television drama on now, and this episode does nothing to lower that average. This fifth season will, sadly, be the last...and in ten episodes, another major player is taken on as a partial focus, the press, most notably creator/producer/writer David Simon's old stamping ground, The Baltimore Sun, and other local news outlets (such as also-real upstart competitor The Daily Record)...along with the continuing story of what has become known as the Major Crimes squad, and their ongoing attempts to rein in major players in the West Baltimore drug trade. Amid so many other threads that even bare-bones notes on this season premiere episode fill a page.David Simon wrote this episode, and I believe that it's more than simple nostalgia that has the first vignette harkening back to a gag, one we first saw in the previous brilliant Simon series Homicide: Life on the Street, wherein a young, not too b...
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