The Wire Season 5 Episode 4

Spoilers abound for this review of Episode 4, which premiers Sunday, January 27 and is available now on Comcast OnDemand.

McNulty and Freamon are deeper into their fabrication of a serial killer who prays on the homeless. I’ve said plenty about this in reviews of earlier episodes, and will take a pass on my mostly displeased feelings about this element of Season 5’s plotline.

There’s a knockout scene, albeit a short one, in the last half of the episode between Beadie Russell and McNulty and it’s the scene I’ve been waiting three weeks for. First the leadup to the scene: McNulty has been out drinking and flirting with women at a local bar. He gets a call and heads out to look at a homeless body to see if it can fit into his plans. It can’t, and he goes home to Beadie. He’s knocking back (actually swallowing) some Listerine when she enters, upset. She can’t believe what he’s turned into, she tells him, adding that when people would tell her about McNulty’s past, she didn’t believe that he could have been that person. And now he’s that person all over again. McNulty is going to drive her away, the same as he drove away his first wife. Early in the season we saw Beadie waiting up for Jimmy at night, and the porch light in Episode 1 told us she was sticking with him–for the time being–but when will she break? I wish we were seeing more of Beadie this season, especially with her current domestic situation and also because I think the actress Amy Ryan is one of the best on the show. (Congrats to her on picking up an Oscar nom for Best Supporting Actress for the grossly underrated Gone Baby Gone.)

The question I keep running through my mind is: how are we going to see Jimmy McNulty when it’s all said and done, and the last frame of The Wire has been broadcast? Will we hold him in high regard or low? Because David Simon has done such a complete job of painting the portrait of McNulty–and so many other wonderful characters–he’s left somewhat open for our interpretation. Jimmy McNulty is, all at once, a brilliant detective, a stubborn ass, a father, an ex-husband, a raging alcoholic, a philanderer, a cop capable of working the street and a crime scene but not the inner-office politics of the police department, a sometimes negligent but caring father, a charmer, an intolerable dick, highly independent, incapable of working with anyone who doesn’t share his point-of-view, and a lot more.

Which McNulty will we remember? He’s so complex that he can’t be summed up easily. But in the end what we take from him will depend on how his story is left after Episode 10 of this season, and whether he’s vindicated by his current actions, in jail, fired, or dead. Just as the character is complex and multi-faceted, where he could go in the next 6 hours of Wire time is rife with possibilities. I like the idea of McNulty, dead, having one of those Baltimore Detective wakes, laid out across the bar with every cop from the show drinking over his corpse, and several of them refusing to drink, understanding the irony of such a closing chapter in the book of McNulty. But I also like the idea that at such a wake most Baltimore cops would not appreciate that irony and would drink themselves silly. I also like the happy ending, where the McNulty of Season 4 comes back–the McNulty who was sober and happy. Either one is fine, as long as it’s true to the character. The only ending I can’t deal with would be the McNulty who is vindicated and celebrated for catching Marlo Stanfield via a series of grand lies. I don’t think I’ll be disappointed, because I can’t fathom David Simon giving that ending to McNulty: even if he succeeds in his rogue mission, in The Wire your successes are typically canceled out by the bureaucracy surrounding you.

We’ve heard so often from so many–Omar, Avon, Marlo, Joe–an understanding that “The Game is The Game”, or “It’s all in The Game.” Theirs is a mindset, an understanding, that McNulty and almost none of the other cops can quite get their brains around. McNulty is a mess because, as a detective, he cares in a way that is borderline pathological, and he wrecks his mind obsessing over his job. The guys who run the drug trade couldn’t be cooler, though. They know it’s all in The Game. Prop Joe knows it at the end of Episode 4, when Chris Partlow holds a gun to the back of his head and Marlo lets him know that his time is up. Joe doesn’t get emotional, just makes a calm plea for mercy, and when Marlo says no Joe closes his eyes and Chris puts a bullet in the back of his head. All in The Game. Because every person involved in The Game from the street side understands how it’s played–and is perfectly fine mentally and emotionally with those rules–there are no McNulty’s on that side of the coin. There are no rogue dealers who want to shake things up and play by their own rules. The only player in The Game who wanted to shake things up was Stringer Bell, who was killed when Avon gave him up at the end of Season 3, and Avon gave him up because Stringer was out of line with Avon’s plans. Most importantly, though, Stringer had to die because he wanted to reform The Game.

There are and have been other reformers in The Wire, most of whom have failed. Carcetti was going to be a reform mayor who fought crime and now he’s pulling money out of the police department as fast as he can. Waylon has been trying to keep Bubbles on the straight-and-narrow for a couple seasons and the jury is still out on how that chapter of The Wire will play out. And again, while Simon admires a reformer he’s usually quick to squash their reform with obstacles, bureaucracy and the intentions of others within a given institution.

The shot of Marlo’s face that closes the episode is one of the best I have seen in The Wire. The way he looks at Joe moments after Joe is killed is pretty creepy, and contains a complete understanding by Marlo that he now has what he’s worked for the past 2.5 seasons: the crown is firmly atop his head. He will make his deal with Vondas and will run the entire Baltimore drug trade. Barksdale is in jail, Joe is dead, as is Hungry Man, Cheese has changed his loyalty from his uncle Joe to Marlo and now Marlo has all the pieces in place……except one.

Omar is back from Puerto Rico, ready for revenge after learning of Butchie’s death. The next several episodes of The Wire are set up to be amongst the most violent, with a one-against-many war between Omar and the Stanfield crew. In the past, Omar meant something. A thief among criminals, who believed in and practiced their coda–”It’s all in The Game”–more than anyone else. Omar played by his own rules only to a small degree, and existed entirely within the rules of The Game. Over the first four seasons of The Wire Simon showed us why the police department could not keep up with the drug trade: the members of the drug trade followed their rules and their code to their death, while the police department was backed up with bureaucracy and politics. And while we did see the bureaucracy of the drug trade, the leaders of that trade never allowed it to stand in the way of their doing business. And if Simon was often brilliantly subtle in the use of his metaphors highlighting one side of the law against the other, there was never any such subtlety regarding Omar. He robs and kills drug dealers without apology and for a living. But he does it according to the rules–rules that are not written but understood and followed–in a system that governs itself by violence. Omar was the example of what the police department could be if it simply said: here are our rules, break them and you’ll be disciplined, and if you play the game hard and to win you can be successful. Omar showed us that he could win by playing hard, and that the police department can’t be as successful as he–or Barksdale, or Marlo–because they are too bogged down in inner-office politics to just go out and play the game hard and to win every day.

So what, I ask, does Omar still have to show us? If the above was his purpose, then what can he have left to give us, other than fighting a war with Marlo et posse? One of the hallmarks of The Wire has been it’s large revolving cast of characters–there are 76 of them on the show’s website’s “Cast & Crew” page and that does not count characters such as Johnny, Namond’s mama, some of the girls from the school, Wallace, Brianna, and many many more. And while all of the characters were well-written (except the newspaper staff of this season, see my blog from last week on Episode 3) the two who stand the tallest are McNulty and Omar. They are the ones who have illuminated more than any others in the show, the differences between the street and the police station. They are multi-faceted like no others on the show are (except possibly Stringer) and they have been the ones from whom we best learned this story of Baltimore cops vs. robbers.

What do they have left to tell us? What does David Simon have up his sleeve? I don’t know, but this has been my favorite Season 5 episode so far, and I think it’s setting up the last 6 hours of The Wire extremely well.