“Lambs go to slaughter. A man, he learns when to walk away.”
Frank
Sobotka was many things. He was a good uncle, a crappy father, a friend, a
criminal, a loyal union man, and a believer in the ability of the common man.
It is perhaps the cruelest blow of all that after all Frank had done to shield
most of the union from his illegal activities, his corpse had to be discovered
by them, the stevedores who only had a vague idea of how much trouble Frank was
in. There was little doubt where Frank was going to end up before this episode
(we can even be relatively sure it was Spiros cutting his throat, judging from
past events), but having to watch his corpse (and watch the stevedores) be
dredged up from the water was painful. It’s not the surprises on “The Wire”
that cut deepest: it’s the things we see coming from a mile away.
Now that,
and I’ll be vague here, we’re mostly finished with the docks, I think the
question has to be asked: why did we come here in the first place? What do
D’Angelo Barksdale and Frank Sobotka, similar fates aside, have to do with one
and other? 12 episodes later, I’ll take a shot at it. The docks are a link, a
link between countries and cities, certainly, but also between past and
present. The show made no effort at hiding the similarities between the slave
trade and the trafficking of prostitutes, and the docks too serve as a symbol
of the industrial past of Baltimore. They’re a reminder of the original sins
that brought much of African-American Baltimore to this country, and they attempt
to situate Baltimore in a grander narrative. Without this season, the show is
merely dealing with the fall of a once-great city. With it, we see just how
widespread the rot is. D’Angelo probably knew nothing of the docks, but the
drug trade needs the docks, even if the people living in West Baltimore don’t
realize how important, and how toxic, an artery they are.
The finales of “The Wire” often serve more as
codas than as climaxes, and this episode is no exception. Nick Sobotka has, in
a tremendously short period of time, lost most of what he cares about. He has
lost Ziggy, Frank, and now presumably will lose Baltimore as well as he goes
into witness protection. He proves to be clinically useful for the police,
revealing the location of the murderer of the 14 Jane Doe’s corpse, and getting
them a picture of the Greek, but the cops have essentially hit a dead-end.
McNulty et al. are Baltimore cops, no more, no less, and they lack the leverage
necessary to track Spiros and the Greek (who we learn is, amusingly, not even
Greek). Those two are far too brutal, far too mobile, and just a bit too lucky
to be broken.
Everything
else, though, functionally resets by the season-ending montage. Nothing
changes, really, in Baltimore, except for the things just underneath the
surface. Beadie has shown she can be a damn good detective, but she’s back at
the docks. Baltimore’s docks continue to decline, as Clay Davis breaks ground
on the condos where the grain pier would have stood and the union house is
shuttered. The drugs, and the women, keep coming in, and Poot takes a bit of
time off from dealing to watch cops drive by. The docks continue to disappear,
and then ultimately, the Sobotkas as well, as Nick walks off into the rain,
towards God-only-knows-what. Nick’s safe, but it’s as cold a comfort as one
could find.
“Business. Always business.” – The Greek
Observations and What-Have-You’s
n
The nerd in me can’t help but to crunch the
numbers on how happy Rawls and Landsman must be. If their clearance rate was at
50%, but would have dropped to 30% if the cases weren’t cleared, it follows
that it would simply go up to 70% if they were cleared (its true, even if it’s
not immediately obvious). Additionally, given that its clearly winter AND that
the next season states that Baltimore should have 275 murders amongst its at
least 4 distrcts AND 20% of the murders in the district=14 implies there are 70
murders there at this point, it seems likely that the year is almost over. So,
congrats to Rawls and Landsman on owning the statistics. Stats (yes) become
important going forward, so that exercise is…well, still really pointless.
n
The Major Case Squad gains a direction through
Bubbles’ information on Stringer and Prop Joe sharing the Towers. Same as it
ever was.
n
Omar coming…for Stringer, ONLY THIS TIME, ITS
EVEN MORE PERSONAL. Crap jokes aside, it’s nice to see the show’s most
entertaining character have a purpose for the season coming, as he was largely
absent from this season.
n
I wish I wasn’t breezing through these recaps,
because I think this episode has a lot of interesting stuff to say about how
organizational priorities oftentimes have unexpectedly crappy outcomes.
Focusing on terrorism and unions in the FBI, for example, allows for the Greek
to escape prosecution and forces the Union into shutting down. Only Horseface
leaves with prison time. It seems, to me, possible the Greek had useful
anti-terrorism information, but more probably such foci within government
organizations seem to lead to the powerful being able to play the game more
easily.
No comments:
Post a Comment