The Wire: Cleaning Up (S1:E12)

“What are you, a boy or a man?”

            First off, a fun fact about the production of “The Wire.” See, most shows on television pre-2000 were not serialized (that is, left little plot runover episode to episode), but the ones that were predictably ended each season the same way. The big drama would all happen in the season finale, possible even in a cliffhanger (such as “Dallas’” “Who Shot JR”). “The Wire” took a decidedly different approach. Showrunner David Simon would task his friend, crime author George Pelecanos, with writing the penultimate episode of each season. In general, that would be when all the action would take place, with the finale left to sort through what it all meant.

            Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this is basically what we’ve been building towards all season. D’Angelo and Avon are arrested, but “The Wire” lets the two arrests occur with a decided “meh.” D’Angelo is more concerned with Wallace’s fate (more on that later), and Avon spends his last moments pre-arrest mocking the SWAT team coming to get him. The investigation goes out not with a flash bang, but with a whimper, as McNulty and Daniels arrest them personally.

            Of course, we have to get there first. The investigation has gone haywire, as Stringer springs for cellphones (2002 alert!), making the wiretaps functionally useless. Freamon, however, has another trick up his sleeve, using Shardene to map the geography of Orlando’s and let them slip a bug into his office. Things work shockingly well: they get wind of D’Angelo going to NY to pick up the next big shipment, and catch him.

            Their success, however, is also their undoing. When they begin to look up campaign finance documents, the entire world comes crashing in. The DA immediately returns some checks he got (potentially from Barksdale), and we get our first glimpse of the gloriously corrupt Clay Davis. He chews out Daniels for doing, uh, his job, and demands that Deputy Burrell drop the hammer. The Deputy tries, threatening to unveil Daniels’ corrupt past, but Daniels refuses to relent, knowing the deputy wouldn’t risk the PR fiasco that might follow. They’re clearly on the right track, judging from the 250 million dollar contract awarded to what very well may be a Barksdale front, but being right means very little.

            In the rush to unveil the extent of the Barksdale organization’s crimes, things go awry. The police realize, a week too late, that they’ve lost track of Wallace. Stringer, after D’Angelo refuses to give information about Wallace away, goes ahead with the hit on Wallace (after getting rid of other “loose links”) under D’s nose. He appeals to Bodie’s performed masculinity, and convinces him to take out the hit on his childhood friend.

            The entire sequence is perhaps one of the bleakest things “The Wire” has ever done. Wallace’s return is obviously foolish, yet the way Wallace describes his “home” makes it seem inevitable, too. Bodie and Poot, isolated from much of the serious trouble for the season, end up having to commit the ultimate betrayal of killing their friend. Never has “it’s all in the game” sounded so hollow (and it always sounds hollow).

            Curt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse V” has an alternate title, “The Children’s Crusade.” It’s inspired by a (potentially real) character remarking on how war novels always glorify soldiers while forgetting that it’s basically children dying in them. And so it is here. The last two things we see Wallace doing are reminiscing about his mother taking him for fast food, and playing a game of hide-and-seek. He’s clearly not ready for adulthood, even after all the crap (his alcoholic mom, his drug habit, his witness of a murder). The scene of his death is done just about perfectly, from his trembling pleas to Bodie’s hesitation and Poot’s coup de grace.

            “The game” is not for gentle souls, even ones who have killed before, like D’Angelo. He’s concerned, not about the time he faces, but that Stringer killed a clear innocent, a 16-year-old kid who D wanted to see go back to school and “go to Harvard or some shit like that.”  People are who they are, and sometimes they stand up for what they believe. It usually doesn't work out all that well for them.

“This is me, yo, right here” – Wallace

Big Miss

n  I’m going to call out the entire way by which Avon gets caught as being just (and just) a little too convenient. Yes, sometimes you hit a lucky break, but something seems off about being able to feed a wire into the Barksdale HQ, and immediately getting actionable evidence. It’s a minor, minor complaint: I’m really searching, because this is in all probability the highlight of the first season.

Big Hit

n  It has to be Wallace’s execution. All three principals, Wallace, Poot, and Bodie play everything just right. It’s the obvious culmination to what’s been building the past few episodes, but it still shocks to see the murder of a high school aged kid by his friends. It’s so beyond Wallace that this could happen, this way, and yet somehow you feel minimal anger at the people killing him. It’s a tragedy, even for those doing the killing.