The Wire

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. Among the less pleasant side effects is Kima's detail to speak to the parents of the most recent "victim," an addict whom McNulty had driven down to a Richmond, Virginia, shelter in the previous episode...with both Kima and the parents having to deal with their anguish over their son's apparent murder. Even as Jimmy finds himself able to sponsor "real police" work under the cover of his investigation, Bunk's outrage over the fraud continues to grow, as he sees it interfering with actual work (and not seeing any useful payoff between the investigation of Marlo's gang and Bunk's own work on the muders they'd committed the previous year).

Meanwhile, at The Baltimore Sun, Templeton and his colleagues and bosses are thrust ever more into the limelight, as the corporate owners also shake loose extra money and commitment of other resources to allow for as much coverage of the murders, and Templeton's peripheral involvement, as possible...even as Gus's doubts about Templeton become ever more solid, not helped by Scott's self-glorifying Page 1 account of the events leading up to the phone call from the "killer." Meanwhile, at least some good reportage is likely to come of this, as Bubbles helps one of Scott's colleagues cover some of the same ground as Scott did, only in a more informed manner.

Clay Davis, having engaged good counsel and knowing his audience both in and out of the court, manages also to paint his own misappopriation of funds as a virtue, leading to his acquittal when he claims that essentially all the graft he was taking from his community projects was actually filtered out into informal constituent service by him.

Mayor Carcetti is also playing to an appreciative audience, gathering commitments from donors and other political backers for his imminent run for the governorship; the news splash over the phone call just makes their Robbing Peter plans to make the hunt for the serial killer that much more urgently in need of results, both for budgetary and political reasons.

And, on a more one-to-one level, Omar's crusade against Marlo, which seems to be taking as much a toll on Omar as on Marlo's organization, is becoming a sort of misappopriation of Omar's talents, as he begins executing Marlo's henchmen more randomly than he might've in previous years. Meanwhile, Bunk's continuing investigation leads to his interviewing Michael Lee, whose service to Marlo was in part a result of a heavy sort of favor Marlo's thugs did for his family...and the results of that service not only put him temporarily under Bunk's thumb, but also under Omar's.

Kima, taking on some regular custody responsibility for her ex's son, makes the mistake of buying some furniture that requires assembly...failing to master it, she lets her ward take her bed, and when he can't sleep, she gathers him up and takes him to the window for a session of Goodnight, Moon...

Often a charming and funny episode, particularly in that last sequence and in the corner kids discussion of what sort of "straight" jobs they might be able to get. And I'm sure there's an accounting somewhere of all the series that Belzer has played Munch in, as a guest or regular (and occasionally not been named as Munch, but clearly playing the role, as in this episode):
Homicide, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Trial by Jury, The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, The Beat, Friends, Arrested Development, The Simpsons...I'm probably missing something. (IMDb suggests Munch has been played by someone else on Sesame Street.)

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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 are rapidly losing. Realizing that one way they might shake loose some actual material resources for their case is in providing another corpses, McNulty speeds to site of another DOA found by Lester's old partner, only to find that the official support of the homeless murders investigation does mean that all available officers will arrive on-scene, making faking up another murder scene impossible. McNulty manages, however, to hatch a new angle on the supposed murders that will probably also get Lester the equipment he needs to intercept and view Marlo's crew's photos...the "serial killer" sends a photo of his next victim, who conveniently disappears in reality (since McNulty, having taken a photo of a particularly disabled homeless man, then drives him down to Richmond, Virginia, and drops him off at a shelter there under an assumed identity...a process which, even more than the rest of his "cover" case, gives Jimmy pause).

Meanwhile, Scott Carpenter, gaining attention from the national news sources as well as local for his role in the serial killer story (much to McNulty's amusement), takes it upon himself to actually go do some reporting on the lives of Baltimore's homeless...effectively killing the Baltimore schools' crisis story in the process, given the bosses' preference for "Dickensian" flash over complicated substance, but also turning it some genuinely worthwhile reportage, for a change. Scott's tendency to fabricate quotations and upbeat endings for his stories begins to come home to roost, as Gus receives and passes on complaints about factual inaccuracies in a previous Carpenter story.

Marlo makes it clear, at the first (and last) monthly meeting of the drug lords after the murder of Prop Joe, that he is now in command, and blames Omar for the deaths of both Joe and Hungry Man, something that none of the others believe. He attempts to push Hungry Man's old territory onto Slim Charles, who declines, and then onto Cheese, who cockily accepts. Marlo also offers a huge bounty on Omar, and notes that the price of the dope he's now buying from the Greeks in Joe's place is going up. None of this sits well with the other gang leaders, who are not yet ready to challenge Marlo...but clearly won't miss him if he goes.

Despite fairly extensive efforts to find Omar after the trap didn't quite catch him, Marlo's lieutenants come up empty; Omar turns out to have hobbled himself literally in his jump from the balcony, but was able to hide in the building's maintennance closet and make his escape with some improvised first aid tools. Though not 100%, he makes his present felt in bracing Fat-Face Rick and in shooting the knee of a corner-boss (and destroying the days proceeds and their SUV) with instructions to let Marlo know that Omar is calling him out.

Meanwhile, Bunk, while disgusted as much by the way the system apparently can be played as by McNulty's playing of the system, decides to review all of the known actual serial murders of Marlo's lieutenants, which are the actual targets of McNulty and Freamon's work. Bunk discovers that part of the reason that the lab work on those scenes is a year overdue is a result of mismanagement of the crime lab, which led to all the crime scene findings being mixed together, and that even review of a possibly related separate case will have to wait its turn...until McNulty's serial murders are done, since they clearly take priority. Another part of Bunk's reinvestigation of the murders also puts him on the trail of some of the younger folks involved with Marlo's corners...including Randy and Michael. Kima also makes it clear that the three murders that she's been working are also the work of Marlo's crew.

And, while Mayor Carcetti is heckled by some port workers from season 2 as he attempts to get good press for a renovation project, he discovers that an impromptu passionate speech on behalf of the homeless may be the tack he can ride into the governor's office...and the City Attorneys discover that Prop Joe had access to their most secret documents, via some sort of mole in their office, even as they are about to close in on Clay Davis.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, given that this is The Wire, it's a real question of how much of this is likely to end happily for anyone involved...and the likely answer it, not too much...

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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 into Marlo's apartment, but Omar himself seems to make a miraculous escape, perhaps jumping from the several-stories-high balcony to the ground...at least, Marlo's crew (including young Michael) can't find any trace of him.

Previously, Michael had been trying to help Dukie find a way of dealing with his antagonists...but neither learning how to fight nor how to handle a gun seems to be working out for Dukie, who's clearly tired of being told he has other strengths...that might mean something for him if he could get out of ghetto streets.

Meanwhile, with Alma's help at the Sun, McNulty and Freamon's planted evidence pays off for their attempt to get Major Crimes up and running again...except it doesn't pay nearly well enough. The evidence of a serial murderer is alarming enough to get McNulty unlimited overtime for himself and a partner out of Homicide, rather than a detail as he and Lester had hoped...and the other Homicide detective assigned to Jimmy's case is Kima, which pulls her off the home-invasion slaughter she'd been working. This pushes Bunk past endurance, and he pulls McNulty aside and chews him our for his various sorts of irresponsibility; something his ex-wife Elena (Callie Thorne) will do later in the episode, after Jimmy has blown off seeing one of his adolescent sons in a school play. Both Bunk (onscreen) and Elena (off) have heard from Jimmy's soon to be ex Beadie (Amy Ryan), a uniform cop who sees the handwriting on the wall and is more than inclined to speed the process along. McNulty, while dealing rather haphazardly with his personal business, at least tells Kima to continue working on her triple-murder case, and that he will cover for her in terms of paperwork.

Ethically-challenged careerist Scott accompanies Alma to a meet with McNulty, as the detective carefully dribbles out what he wants to plant in the stories; this leads to editor Gus detailing Scott to gathering reaction quotations from the homeless, as a sidebar story to Alma's continuing coverage of the apparent serial killer. Scott, finding it difficult to find lucid homeless people to interview, fakes up quotations from a mythical father and husband who shares the real name of one of the stranger actual people he's spoken with. Scott also attempts to gain leverage by placing a call to himself from a pay phone, and pretending to interview the murderer. McNulty is sent down to the newspaper to debrief Scott, and Jimmy soon realizes that Scott's fraudulent phone call makes Jimmy's planned fake call unnecessary.

One of the places Scott had canvassed for reactions from homeless people was the soup kitchen where Bubbles has been volunteering; when Bubs is asked to consider serving food there, he seeks out his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor to accompany him to a free clinic for an AIDS test. When the test comes back negative, Bubs can't bring himself to believe it.

Clay Davis, while still making all the public noises of a man falsely accused, is getting the Dutch Uncle (or Aunt) treatment from his colleagues in their Baltimore political machine; City Council President Nareese Campbell lays it out plainly for him (and she isn't the last to do so in the episode): He should take the fall for his corruption quietly, and if he does so, the other members of the machine will see to it that he's financially taken care of, to at least some degree, even if he has to serve some jail time first. (The ruthless efficiency with which Campbell particularly manipulates and excises her colleagues seems to me to resemble nothing so much as the white collar version of Marlo's depredations.)

And Marlo's cell number reached Lester via Ellis, from his old partner Herc...who, while willing to work as an investigator for Levy the lawyer, won't even pretend to tolerate Marlo, who lightly taunts him in turn. Levy, like the Greeks, seems quite content to swap the late Prop. Joe's business relation for Marlo and his crew's...though unlike the Greeks, Levy seems smugly confident that their less cautious nature will simply mean more business for him.

How Scott could even begin to volunteer to spend a night in a homeless encampment, as the teasers promise for the next episode, is something I very much look forward to learning about...

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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 faking the bites, with the demand that Freamon never tell McNulty's mother nor his priest about what he's about to do, to which Freamon agrees. Also in the course of the pseudo-investigation of the "serial killings," McNulty ventures out among a homeless encampment, and is depressed by what he sees among the people, working and unemployed, sane and disturbed, that he meets. Deciding he needs a drink, he manages to get home, late as usual, to a very frustrated Beadie, who's getting ready to put him out.

Prop Joe takes Marlo under his wing, apparently with the notion of keeping your enemies closer, while suspecting his upstart nephew "Cheese" for being the informant to Marlo and his crew as to the whereabouts of Omar's friend Butchie. We first see Prop Joe in the episode picking out a funeral bouquet for Butchie's service, and his conversation with his most trusted lieutenant continues with Prop Joe's suggestion that since Omar might well be gunning for Joe first and foremost, PJ intends to make himself scarce for a while, and to leave his operation in the hands of his two lieutenants, after the next day's drug lords' association meeting. At the meeting, one of the elders takes issue with Cheese impinging on his territory; Marlo takes note of this, and of the nephew's resentment of Joe's gentle but firm slapping down of the upstart. After the meeting, Joe introduces Marlo to Levy, the favored lawyer and investment counselor of the druglords; Herc, working as an investigator for Levy after being fired from the police department, and Joe discuss the fate of Police Commissioner Burrell, whose resignation is all over the news (Burrell and Joe had attended the same high school, a grade apart...Joe had never been impressed). Later, Marlo has his lieutentants turn over the elder, Hungry Man, to Cheese for execution, with the notion of one hand washing the other...and later that day, the nephew betrays Prop Joe to Marlo and Chris.

Marlo had already made successful overtures to the Greeks, convincing them that they should consider doing business with him...as insurance, just in case anything should happen to Prop Joe. The Greeks remain wary, however, of how stable a partner Marlo is likely to be.

The investigation of State Sen. Clay Davis finds a major violation in some of his fast and loose transfers of funds, including taking loans from relatives, which emboldens the State's Attorney to subpoena him before the grand jury. He storms out, and does his best to finesse the questions put to him by the tv news crews awaiting him outside the courthouse.

Meanwhile, the mayor and his staff are dancing as fast as they can in their attempts to dump Commissioner Burrell, temporarily in favor of Deputy Comm. Rawls, and then shortly thereafter the new Deputy Comm. Daniels...but the same political machine that includes Clay Davis, while willing to deal away Davis on the one hand and Burrell on the other, still wants to be greased sufficiently to allow all this to happen.

Television coverage leaves Gus and the other old hands at the Sun wondering why no one called them about the Clay Davis "perp walk"...while scrambling to catch up, Templeton's absence is noted. He's interviewing at The Washington Post, which turns out to have a busier and more prosperous but still very similar newsroom to that of the Sun...a bit more pompous, as well, as Templeton discovers, as he's patted on the head and told to try again later.

And Kima, still working the case of the home invasion, sees that the only surviving innocent witness, orphaned and in shock, is still too withdrawn to deal with any sort of questioning; it reminds her of how little she's seen her son, in the custody of her ex, and so Kima calls up and volunteers to spend some time with the boy while his other mother attends to some urgent business.

A typically packed episode, with its effortless transistions from storyline to storyline still a joy to behold, and the death of Prop Joe, and Omar and associates being convinced of Marlo's primary responsibility for Butchie's death, being perhaps only the most dramatic developments among many.

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; buried on page three of the Metro section, as opposed to merely cut down by half, if still on the front page.

While still trying to go behind Prop Joe's back and make direct business contact with the Greek drug smugglers who supply all the Baltimore gangs, Marlo also seeks Prop Joe's advice on how to figuratively and literally launder his money (an approach-bribe Marlo attempts to make to the Greeks is rejected because the cash is literarlly filthy, proceeds taken directly from the street dealers). Prop Joe does what he can to "civilize" Marlo in how to effectively channel his proceeds, down to helping him set up an offshore bank account in the Antilles, but can't convince Marlo that putting a bounty on the predator on predators Omar is not a good idea.

In fact, Marlo's chief enforcers find Butchie (S. Robert Morgan), the blind tavern-owner who has helped Omar in various ways in the past, and shoot up his establishment and his help as they get down to trying to torture Omar's whereabouts out of the old man. They fail to get him to talk, so shoot him in the head and advise his semiconscious employee across the room that he'd better tell Omar everything that's happened here. As they leave, Snoop wonders aloud if dragging Omar out of retirement, particularly with a grudge against them personally, is the best way to go about this; Chris, apparently almost ridiculously loyal, points out that it's what Marlo wants. Meanwhile, one of Prop Joe's lieutentants, who has not enjoyed their encounters with Omar, has already told them of his willingness to help bring the avenging thief down.

Meanwhile, the Grand Jury testimony in the ongoing investigation of Clay Davis continues, as closer and more important aides to and cronies of Davis are deposed. PD Major Stan Valchek (Al Brown) brings the mayor crime statistics that demonstrate a slight rise in activity, probably in part due to the budget-cutting in the department, and Valchek volunteers to be the Mayor's temporary replacement for the current, hidebound and scandal-implicated Commissioner Burrell and his Assistant, Rawls; Mayor Carcetti, knowing he can't install his eventual choice Col. Daniels immediately, wonders if he can slip Rawls in temporariy, and feeds a story to the Sun to see how that might play politically, particularly with the African-American power brokers in the city. When the story comes to City Desk, Gus Haynes passes over Templeton for one of the (soon to be laid off)veterans who actually knows the background on all the principal players; Templeton somewhat sullenly accepts the task of getting reaction quotations from various persons to the announcement. He also blatantly falsifies his best quotation, but Gus isn't quite ready to press the matter. Meanwhile, Daniels and his ex-wife, now on the City Council, wonder what Burrell might do with some vaguely damaging information about the Danielses that he holds, now that it seems likely that he'll be fired.

Michael and Dukie take their young charge out for a day at an amusement park, in part to help Michael clear his head after the massacre; they find themselves flirting with similarly high-school-aged girls and otherwise engaging in age-appropriate behavior...only to find that Michael will be chewed out by his boss upon returning home, for letting his drug corner go all day without direct supervision.

Bunk, who has been railing at Jimmy throughout the episode against the risky gambit of faking up a serial killing spree among the homeless, is relieved to hear Lester, when he hears Jimmy's story, also suggest that Jimmy isn't doing the right thing. Unfortunately for Bunk, Lester suggests that Jimmy hasn't made this splashy enough, and instructs Jimmy how to make it a more lurid and gaudy set of crimes so as get more attention, and temporary funding, for the Major Crimes unit, so that they can close a case on Marlo and his crew.

And Omar, living somewhere on the beachfront in the Spanish-speaking Americas (Puerto Rico? Mexico?) gets the word, and clearly is ready to take revenge.

Lots of groundwork for the grand conclusions laid in this episode...I might even look at the next one as soon as it's available.

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 as an old friend from the Baltimore County police, who demonstrates to him with her current case how a fresh corpse can show misleading signs of strangulation or related violence.

At the Baltimore Sun, ambitious and somewhat brown-nosing reporter Scott Templeton (Thomas McCarthy) makes noises that senior editor Whiting (Sam Freed) likes to hear; Whiting had previously locked horns in the morning editorial meeting with Metro editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) over how deeply to work the context of why Baltimore public schools seemed to be failing, with Whiting overruling Haynes in arguing for a close focus on the schools themselves rather than a wider focus on the failures of society generally, particularly in Baltimore's poorer neighborhoods. Templeton having been detailed to begin writing a series focusing solely on the schools, he's also assigned a puff-piece for the Orioles' opening day, with the pitch that he'll seek out someone with a compelling human-interest angle on seeing the season's first baseball game. Finding such a person to interview, however, proves difficult, so he comes back and files a story that ever more clearly appears, to Haynes and his other coworkers but not to the oblivious Whiting, to be fiction. When Haynes points out that no evidence can be found to support Templeton's story, Whiting pushes it through anyway.

Lester, having staked out one of Marlo's gang's usual haunts, discovers that they, as he predicted, have gotten incautious once the Unit is no longer obviously keeping them under surveillance. Lester then contacts Jimmy, to see if he's also game for some extracirricular gang-busting; they together seek out an FBI friend, with the offer of a major bust that might take perhaps two weeks worth of more sophisticated surveillance than the Baltimore Police choose to afford at the moment. Unfortunately, the US Attorney, peeved at the mayor's unwillingness to play along with him previously, makes it clear that the city police will get no federal help from any agency he can control.

For his part, Mayor Carcetti is underwhelmed, in a meeting with his aides, to learn that the major good news is a 15-point improvement in third-graders' reading scores; he notes that if he manages to be elected governor in two years' time, the next mayor will have it easier, and meanwhile it might be held against him that the current probable candidates for mayor might well be touched by the corruption scandals around Clay Davis. Davis, for his part, pays a visit to his old crony, Police Commissioner Burrell (Frankie Faison), to see if he'll quash the investigation; Burrell points out that no one in the city hierarchy could do so at this point, and that all Davis's allies, including himself, are under scrutiny. Davis leaves, with promised to remember this betrayal.

Marlo (Jamie Hector) is pleased to be able to operate more openly again; he orders his lieutenant Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and primary enforcer Snoop (Felicia Pearson), along with thug in training Michael (Tristan Wilds), to go ahead and punish the street pushers working some corners "belonging" to distributors who refuse to take their product from Marlo, as well as to assassinate rival gangsters June Bug (for supposedly talking trash about Marlo) and Omar (for his theft from Marlowe). Chris notes that to get at Omar, they'll have to draw him out of his apparentl "retirement"; he's instructed to do just that. Marlo's trio go do his bidding, first shooting at least one corner pusher, then laying in wait at June Bug's rowhouse for him to arrive; Michael wonders if killing June Bug for supposedly talking about Marlo is justifiable; he's instructed to keep his qualms to himself, and, while Chris and Snoop go in for the kill, to go around the back and kill anyone who comes out. When the only person who runs out the back is a young child, Michael shakes his head and walks away. Later, Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and her partner are the detectives called in on the massacre; the uniformed police who first arrived failed to find the child cowering and bloodied in the closet; she carries the kid away from the sight of his parents' corpses.

Meanwhile, Marlo finds that his attempts to contact the Russian gangster Malatov (Chris Ashworth) in jail, as a means of getting at the Greek drug importers, will require a little more negotiation than he expected; Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), whom Malatov has worked with and goes to for advice, cuts himself into the transaction for a sizable finders' fee, while making noises about West Baltimore solidarity with Marlo. Marlo, while clearly thinking himself Barksdale's superior, acquiesces, and gets to make initial overtures to Malatov.

Drinking and otherwise carousing out of his frustration, a hungover McNulty is ordered to go with his partner Bunk (Wendell Pierce) to investigate a homeless man's death; Jimmy, still smarting over the further frustrations of trying to get funding or attention to the gang murders the Major Crimes Unit had been investigating, uses his new knowledge of how to rough up a corpse to make it look like a murder victim, and suggest to Bunk that he's intent on establishing a false scare that there's a serial killer loose in Baltimore (quite aside from the gangsters, that is). Bunk wants no part of this, and leaves, but makes no effort to stop McNulty.

Among the new cast for this season, it's always good to see Clark Johnson's easy charm and odd mix of caginess and straightforwardness on display; it's probably a pity that Johnson apparently prefers directing to acting. Steve Earle is probably the most famous of the non-actor actors in this season; the show's ability to make canny use of essential or previous non-actors, such as Felicia Pearson, so seemlessly with veteran cast members is one of the obvious strengths of the show.

Among the antic character naming this time out, "Whiting" takes the cake; interesting that an "Avon" is being challenged, however indirectly, by a "Marlo" for supremacy, given how much like a John Webster play
The Wire can sometimes be.

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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 bright suspect is convinced that a photocopier, prefed with "True" and "False" sheets, is a highly sophisticated lie detector. As homicide detective "Bunk" Moreland (Wendell Pierce) notes, "The bigger the lie, the more they believe [it]," and this becomes this episode's legend/quotation (every episode has one). It's more than nostalgia in that this season will have a lot of threads to weave together, and Simon acknowledges this in several ways.

As the Sun staff is introduced, one of the veteran staff who are taking a smoking break out back at the loading dock wonders "what it would be like to be working at a real paper"; by the end of the episode, with the Major Crimes squad disbanded as a result of budget-tightening among other political factors, Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), perhaps the closest this series has to a single protagonist, similarly if somewhat more angrily wonders what it would be like to work in a real police department.

Between these, we see the Baltimore police disgruntled by receiving chits in lieu of payment for their overtime; the Major Crimes squad being manipulated in their attempts to keep tabs on the operation run by Marlo (Jamie Hector), the would-be Napoleon among the city's drug lords (who are otherwise mostly content with a status quo administered by old hand "Proposition Joe" [Robert F. Chew]); ambitious new Mayor Carcetti (Aidan Gillan) finding he won't accept the terms of the local FBI office any more than he would last season's strings-attached offer of aid from the Maryland governor; and the Sun editors and sub-editors finding some stories quashed (in one case by a senior editor playing old boy games on behalf of an influential friend) and others falling into their laps, as when the City Council president Naresse Campbell (Marlyne Afflack) is found to be cozily trading city properties with another criminal boss, one who's also contributing heavily to her campaign funds.

But it's in the small details with which The Wire takes on much of its heft; vignettes about former informant and junkie "Bubbles" trying not to burden his suspicious sister too much, while trying to keep "straight"; the cascading outrage (occasionally tempered by resentful glee) down each level of the city hierarchy as the only vestige of the Major Crimes squad which is allowed to continue to work is the pair of detectives investigating State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), so the squad has to ignore both their drug gang targets and the slew of murder victims they suspect are related; and threads within threads, such as how Marlo's lieutenant Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) steals a photograph, of imprisoned murderer Malatov (not seen since the second season), from a police file, just after coincidentally asking characters from another thread, who happen to be talking in the lobby of City Hall, where exactly the criminal records office is. For that matter, Councilwoman Campbell sees the Sun story about her unsavory connections in a copy she buys from Bubbles, making his money from newspaper sales in the morning traffic jams. And McNulty, falling prey yet again not only to his alcoholism but also to his weakness for one-night stands, after a certain point forgets that a woman with two young children to worry about can't yet quite decide whether he's worth leaving the front door light on for, or not.

Perhaps the most sinister return from the past in this episode was the discovery that embittered ex-cop Herc (Dominick Lambardozzi) is now working as an investigator for the same lawyer who was the primary criminal-trial mouthpiece for the Barksdale drug gang in the first season...

And this only touches on most of what was going on in the episode, which, by the way, HBO made available through On Demand on Monday of the week before the official premiere date of January 6; they'll continue with these early offers, along with previous-season episodes and a host of short promotional documentaries and vignettes providing amusing glimpses of some of the characters as children (those characters, that is, who aren't still children, themselves).

By the way, this season's version of the theme song, written by Tom Waits, is a pretty straightforward reading by Steve Earle.

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