The Wire: All Due Respect (S3:E2)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The Wire: Time After Time (S3:E1)

“Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone”

            And like that, they’re gone. The Towers, that is, and with it, a new era opens for the Barksdale Organization. Like all seasons of “The Wire,” there is a ton going on here (it would be unfair to characterize Season 2 as just being about “industrial decay,” instead of being about “familial bonds,” or whatever else you could come up with), but this season seems more to be heavily invested in connecting the past with the future, looking at what changes, and what doesn’t, in a city like Baltimore.

            The cold open, by the way, is a thing of beauty, even by “The Wire’s” lofty standards. Bodie and Poot ranting about the good times (Poot, at the old age of 17, reminisces about losing his virginity in the Towers), as Mayor Royce celebrates the collapse of the Towers. Is it a little unbelievable that no one would have heard about this project beforehand? Probably, but it’s worth it for the moment where the applause for The Tower’s destruction is cut short by the dust from the explosion. In a quite literal sense, Mayor Royce chokes on his own words. It’s on point, but it sets up the season like gangbusters.

            As with the show itself, the first few reviews of the season have to do a bit of housekeeping to set up the show’s plot. Something something “the show’s an investment” something “tablesetting.” Therefore, we’re introduced to a few vital players in this episode, too, so it’s important to understand where they’re coming from. We met Bunny Colvin briefly in Season Two, and he spends most of this episode just looking pissed at the inadequacy of the police’s efforts. Once you see where he’s going, the buildup is worth it (I love his storyline, but my impression is that it’s a divisive one), but for now he’s just the old Major who’s got nothing to lose when he retires. Tommy Carcetti (you may know him best as the CIA agent who is the victim of Bane’s violence and shitty one-liners in the opening scene of “The Dark Knight Rises”) is an upstart politician, and a deft one at that, maneuvering Burrell into a PR fiasco over Baltimore’s crime escalation. In essence, this is merely a warning: keep an eye on them. Both are forward-looking leaders who are trying to do right, although their actions could probably not be more dissimilar this season

            The last character, Dennis “Cutty” Wise, is the one who struck me the most on the rewatch of this episode. For a season that largely ignores the events of the past one to return us, functionally, to the status quo of Season One, introducing Cutty into the mix works wonders to keep us off our game. The viewer really is as out of place in Baltimore as Cutty is after 15 years, and his random wandering and nervous nature shows us that, even in the time we spent on the docks (a time that comes up, but rarely, as the show progresses), things have changed. 

            Of course, this isn’t just a show that looks to set up plotlines. It’s establishing its messages, slowly but surely, and I think Daniels collapsed relationship with his wife shows that as well as any. His marriage is no longer the shell it once was: it's now fully gone, at best keeping up appearances. Baltimore is a wreck, too, in almost every way: how it can pick up the pieces and change is now the more important topic of discussion. (Note: I had some trouble with Blogger the last week, so apologies on A. The unfinished nature of this post originally, and B. The lack of updates. I will try to do better as well)

"Don't matter how many times you get burnt, you just keep doin' the same" -- Bodie

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  New season, new version of “Down in the Hole,” and unfortunately, I think this is the worst one the show would ever do. It’s flashy, which is sort of the point for this political season, but it just sounds…soulless? It’s certainly the most different, but unlike with most of the risks the show takes, playing it safe might have been a better call.

n  Also, I’m reformatting the way I’ll handle epigraphs for the season. I still sort of like the dual epigraph format, but I’m going to try and use song lyrics to open up the reviews, with the episode’s actual epigraph closing out the episode.

n  Herc, Carver, and (shockingly) Omar are finally billed in the opening credits. Although that sounds ridiculous, seeing how many actors are listed as starring explains why it is so difficult.

The Wire: Port in a Storm (S2:E12)

“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.

The Wire: Bad Dreams (S2:E11)

“It didn’t happen overnight”

            Why even watch “The Wire”? It’s a fair question to ask. I have no doubt in my mind that “Bad Dreams” is among, at least, the 50 best episodes of television ever produced. It’s a perfect culmination of everything that has come before it, and it feels more “true” than most pieces of entertainment I could think of. Yet I’m sure tonight I’ll be in a miserable mood because of it. I still am, after taking an hour break between watching it and writing about it just to catch my nerves. It’s almost purely about pain, despair, etc. It’s not just evil triumphing over goo, but apathy, callousness, douchebaggery and many other crappy things winning, and winning permanently.

            The answer, I think, is one of two things. One, we’re all masochists, in which case bring out the whips and chains. Two, which I also think is more probable, is that there is some innate value in understanding the (WARNING, GRANDIOSE AND BULLSHITTY PHRASING APPROACHING!) fullness of the human experience, even when it’s as abjectly horrific as an entire family of fundamentally good people going under.  We need to understand what’s down in the hole in order to either fix it or enjoy what lies elsewhere.

            That aside, wow. What an episode. There are other things going on than the Sobotka’s, but this is really all about their story (I’ll talk a bit about Omar and the police in the Observations section). No one on “The Wire” was ever nominated for an acting Emmy, and I think in terms of submission episodes Chris Bauer might have the best in the show’s history (although looking at the nominees from that year, with this show up against Season 5 of “The Sopranos,” which may very well be its best, I can understand why he didn’t). You see the fullness of his life here, as he wakes up to go to work like any other day. He’s already broken, then, seeing Ziggy on the frontpage of the paper for his murder arrest. The cops serve the warrants on all involved on the docks: only Nicky is spared, because he was sleeping with Prissy (which the show hides wonderfully by not showing exactly who is holding onto Nicky until the end of the cold open. In the context of what follows, Nick’s infidelity is a minor issue, but it’s a crushing detail in an episode filled with reasons to despair).

            Frank is arrested at the docks, paraded in front of the media, and promptly released on bond. He has to visit his son (it’s bad when an arrest brings you to where you were already planning to go) in prison. Ziggy’s beatup from his time in prison, and the father-and-son talk in the jail. I trashed Ziggy a lot, which is largely the point of the character, but I’ll be damned if his final scene here wasn’t crushingly moving. We see all that has been left unsaid between the two all season, the way in which Frank remained with his union while leaving his actual family, mother and son, to decay more than the docks he patrols. Ziggy was, in the final estimation, too weak for the world he grew up in, and could never convinced himself he was truly a Sobotka (Frank even denies that he could have done anything for him).

            The heartbreaks continue. Frank’s brother chews him out for his lack of concern of his family. Beadie cries when she sees what has happened to Frank, and reminds him that what’s hitting him today is the accumulations of years of struggle. The grain pier vanishes because of the scandal. Each scene is as powerful as the last, and it’s only the pragmatic concern for space that forces me to summarize them in a sentence. In terms of emotional impact, each one deserves chapters of a book.

            As I come to the conclusion, all I can think about is what else could Frank have done. Without his actions, those dockworkers would all be unemployed, struggling in some other way. Nick couldn’t leave his family behind, either, and neither man had the mindset to leave. And that’s what really makes the final scene under the bridge unbearable. Everything had to go wrong, in the way it went wrong, to bring us to this point. Ziggy had to collapse, Nick had to get caught smuggling drugs, Frank had to be corrupt, because what else could have happened? Without that corrupt money, no grain pier, and the docks go under anyway. The tragic truth of it all is that we are all subject to these brutal societal forces, gentrification, economic decay, corruption (the FBI agent leaking information) we could never possibly anticipate. Frank doesn’t know he’s walking into, but he’s too good of a man to leave his son behind. The episode fades out as the Greeks come to the bridge, and it’s only out of a sense of mercy that David Simon cuts away…because we all know what is coming.

“I’ve got to get clean”

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  The sins of the father haunting his sons is a recurrent theme of the season, but who, exactly, is the father? Frank seems to be raising a whole union, in addition to Ziggy and Nicky. He didn’t understand the fully F**ked nature of what he was getting into, how dock-crime was a different game than what it used to be, and it brought Ziggy and Nicky down, as his brother reminds him. Although, sympathizing with Frank, his brother’s inaction might have been just as much of a crime, only one that comes with plausible deniability.

n  It’s a testament to how I feel about this episode that I didn’t write about the great Omar scene in it. Omar is good at what he does, and manages to have a killshot on Brother Mouzone, only to realize that he’s been conned. Omar’s moral code combined with a general badassery has never been clearer than when he shoots a man, and seeing a man with a similar view on life, calls an ambulance to save him. Just splendid.

n  This episode really did shake me, even more because I knew where it was going the whole time. More than anything, it makes me dread rewatching “Final Grades” in Season 4, because my memory is that it’s the best thing the show’s ever done.

n  Also, a reminder of the crucial fact about “The Wire”: all the shit goes down when George Pelancanos is writing the 2^nd-last-episode, and here we stand. The breather that follows will hopefully allow me to take better stock of all the important thematic material on decay and family I missed here.

n  Beadie clearly could be a good homicide cop, if she wanted to, but I think the way she treats her tail indicates just how much this type of work horrifies her.

n  Time for me to take a long shower. 

The Wire: Storm Warnings (S2:E10)

“He’s your son.”

            The docks have been, in some odd way, a respite from the normal world of East Baltimore. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there still is crushing poverty, violence, crime, etc. But it hasn’t seemed, so far, like death and prison are the only two routes out of there. Even for a schmuck like Ziggy, it seemed like the stakes were lower, although it’s not exactly like he’s God’s favorite child. That couldn’t remain the case for long. In an instant, Ziggy throws away his life, his father’s dream, not to mention the life of an (admittedly scummy) businessman. All for a second of power, of dominance over another. Ziggy was always going to lose something in his quest to be respected, a marriage, a family bond, but he loses everything here.

            Frank is coming down off the minor triumph of getting funding for the grain pier when Nicky tells him the news. Both Sobotkas are in shock over the news, but respond in different ways. Nick’s breakdown is crushing, more for his disbelief that this could be his family, staying in prison for life. Frank is so single-track minded that he can’t see that his son, while he was busy doing everything else, went off the deep-end. Out of all the legs in Frank Sobotka’s deck of cards, that it’s his son who gives out for no real reasonable…well, it just makes the collapse all the more brutal.

            What we owe, and what we leave, for the next generation is a question that runs through the entire episode. Kima’s isn’t exactly the idea supportive wife during Cheryl’s pregnancy, and seeing her clear apathy at Cheryl’s pregnancy is one of the more numbingly horrifying scenes of the episode. We know Kima, we like Kima, but that she could be so fundamentally unconcerned with her soon-to-be-born child is a flaw that we rarely have the guts to depict in any medium. Good people don’t always make good parents, which often means the continue the cycle of damage onwards and onwards.

            It’s a concept Prez is intimately familiar with. Although he isn’t his father per se, merely his father-in-law, Valchek often acts as though he is, ordering the young detective around like a child at a playground. Valchek is clearly a shit among shits in the command, caring less than zero about anything but his own personal grudges (this whole season wouldn’t have happened if Valcheck didn’t have church-donation penis envy). When he starts shoving Prez around, that’s about all the young guy can take. Like Ziggy, there’s a limit, although Prez’s retaliation merely ends with him punching his superior officer who controls his entire career.

            On the streets, it’s the new same-old. Prop Joe’s drugs are clearly working, as Bodie sees an explosion in profits after the new stuff. Of course, everything comes at a cost, so Cheese takes over three of the towers in return for the drugs, an idea which at first makes Bodie furious. Bodie, however, is a rather smart bloke (he grew up on the crime side, the new york times side, staying alive was no jive), and when he realizes that the cost of the good drugs is the towers, becomes a hard-nosed businessman more concerned with beating Cheese “fair and square,” such as it is, than with violence.

            Unfortunately, Cheese isn’t surrounded by just upstanding gents like Bodie. Brother Mouzone makes his first real appaearance, standing down and shooting Cheese for taking over Avon’s territory (as Avon and String can’t come to an agreement). I have to admit, I think the Brother is one of the worst characters the show came up with: he’s just a little over-the-top, too mannered and just an inferior version of Mr. Little. Nonetheless, the game’s the game, and Cheese and Prop Joe know there is only one man for the job. It’s safe (dangerous?) to say: Omar comin’.

“It always pays to go with the union card.” – Ziggy

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  Highlight of the episode: Daniels showing more emotion than I can remember, laughing and horrified at Prez knocking out Valchek. It’s nice to see the hardass smile once in a while.

n  Kima’s conversation with Beadie shows just how much the latter is out of place in the unit. Everyone else (McNulty, but also Daniels, Bunk, Freamon and Prez) is addicted to policework, and can barely see a life without it. Beadie, meanwhile, couldn’t imagine sacrificing her kids for the job.

n  Landsman is wonderfully sympathetic in his scene with Ziggy. Gotta feel for the guy: he’s a politician, yeah, but he’s also a concerned policeman too.

Sorry if I concentrated a little too much on the recap portion instead of the analysis this time

The Wire: Stray Rounds (S2:E9)

“But them wolves is at that door”

            “Six Feet Under,” a much-lauded show that is nevertheless correctly regarded as inferior to its early 2000’s HBO brethren (“Sopranos/Wire/Deadwood”) began every episode much like this episode. A random set of characters would be shown, and sure enough, one of them would end up dead, beginning each episode with an epitaph instead of an epigraph. The deaths were alternately funny, hopeless, depressing, and even uplifting, but the sense of dread that hung over each cold open made for a tremendous viewing experience. There’s no doubt, given the episode’s title (“Stray Rounds”) and the camerawork in the mother’s house what’s coming: the only question is who catches the stray. We see the body, and the scream of an already-ruined mother leaves us feeling even worse than we normally do. On a show where random tricks of fate often leads to demise, this death seems perhaps the cruelest, the most inexplicable.

            One other innocent goes down in this episode: Ziggy’s duck. Apparently, whiskey and waterfowl don’t mix all that well. Ziggy just wants to be one of the guys, giving shit about New Charles (“Tilt’s”) lost limb, which would be cruel if it weren’t so encoded in how these guys, and I emphasize the word guys, live their life.  Ziggy gets some of it, but he takes everything far too far. As inevitable as the death at the episode’s beginning, we know he’s going to ruin the car deal. We just don’t know how.

            The police keep at it, jumping at any and all leads they can find. They do a pretty good job of it, too, finding hints about John Doe’s missing hands and faces, wiretapping Spiros’ (who remains an enigma to them) phone, and more. Unfortunately, they’re a little too good, as when they send McNulty after FBI files, it seems as though some dirty Fed in Southern California (is there any other kind?) tips off the Greek.

            The centerpiece of their investigation, however, remains a relatively light-hearted journey into the world of prostitution (or, rather, as light-hearted as a story about human trafficking could be). McNulty’s fake British accent is splendid, made all the better by the knowledge that Dominic West is actually a man from the United Kingdom in the real world. Faking a bad version of how you actually sound, especially when there are two naked women on top of you? Now that’s acting!

            Meanwhile, we return to our boys at the Barksdale Organization, although Avon remains unseen. Stringer decides, after the shooting of the 8-year-old, that drastic measures are called for, and agrees to Prop Joe’s deal over the towers. He gets 3 (including “221,” which was the subject D’Angelo’s funeral floral arrangement), Barksdale keeps 3, and all is well. However, Avon does not respond to Brianna’s overtures on String’s behalf, and sends down Brother Mouzone, an apparently badass assassin from NY, to provide muscle for the Organization. This leaves Prop Joe’s boys at risk, especially when the assassin arrives at the end of the episode before he’s expected.

            We’re introduced to one more character in this episode: the clearly disillusioned Bunny Colvin, Major in charge of the Western District. He’s asking the questions the viewer is asking: what good does it do to solve crime murder by murder, while letting the underlying drug violence continue? He’s a little simplistic here, merely sounding like a Baltimore policeforce Hamlet, contemplating his own futility, but it’s an important thought. Regardless of what happens with the Towers, conflict is bound to erupt somehow in the drug trade. Brother’s arrival just hastened it is all.

“The World is a smaller place, now.” –The Greek

Observations and What-Have-You's

n  Rhonda’s look when she sees the pictures of Jimmy intimate with those prostitutes is just priceless. Although I’d doubt it if I hadn’t seen it, he’s not lying: those girls really were too aggressive to stop him.

n  There’s a certain perversity to Stringer using a mother who just lost her son to try and fix up his drug trade that’s screwed, at least partially, by their accidental shooting of a young child. Also, because he killed D’Angelo, but that’s a little more on-the-nose.

n  Nick continues to deal drugs, and doesn’t mess it up. Surprising how that works, for now, the whole not being Ziggy thing.

n  The Greek is clearly dealing with serious dough if that amount of crack is coming through the docks. It’s so much cocaine, the cops don’t realize it even when they’re holding it.

n  Frank can’t leave good enough alone, as he gets funding for the grain pier but lobbying for another term to get the canal dredged. His position doesn’t get anymore precarious today, but it doesn’t get any less, either.

n  Valchek: still a simple-minded dick who only wants revenge against Frank, even in the face of a massive drug conspiracy. 

The Wire: Duck and Cover (S2:E8)

“It’s a new world, Frank.”

            Welcome back, Kotter Jimmy McNulty, it’s good to have you. After a season adrift at sea, we find everyone’s favorite British-actor-playing-a-Baltimoreite at his lowest. It’s in turns heartbreaking and hilarious. Drunk driving is played for laughs a few times, and its no funnier than when Jimmy nearly totals his car, backs it up, and does the same damn thing again. Of course, McNulty being McNulty, he goes to a diner and immediately picks up a reasonable-looking (but not stunning) girl for a one-night stand. I don’t always like McNulty’s roguish side, but this is its pinnacle, and I’m along for the horrifying ride.

            McNulty is, at his core, a wounded, likeable puppy, one that Bunk can’t help but take pity on. McNulty comes as close to saying he’s (depressed, suicidal, worthless. I’d say pick one, but the truth lies somewhere in the void between) to Bunk drunkenly at the tracks. From there, Bunk uses his own charming nature to convince Daniels, the hardass with a heart of gold, to get Rawls’ permission to detail McNulty. And, 8 episodes in, we have our man back on the job. Is it the most thematically exciting plot? No, but I loves me a good alcoholic cop story as much as the next guy, so I’m damn pleased about it.

            Meanwhile, the cops as a whole have a pretty successful week.  Not “Law and Order” done in 43 minutes successful, but “The Wire” successful nonetheless. They’re dealing with the Sobotkas, not Stringer Bell (who is absent for the first time ever this week), and manage to get and execute their wiretap. Frank isn’t that slow on the uptake: when he can’t afford his cellphone bill, he realizes that something is amiss when they refuse to cancel it. He realizes something is wrong just in time, and sends along a bogus package to see if the cops will follow it. Although the plan works, Lester Freamon catches both Frank and Sergei’s boss calling Spiros, leading them further down the trail. “The Wire” isn’t a procedural, per se, but it does find its own take on making policework exhilarating, Even if that exhilaration comes from, say, number-crunching and mountains of paperwork to get a wiretap.

            This episode also does a fantastic job fleshing out further who Frank Sobotka is, even as he’s already a wonderfully fleshed-out character. We see, first, his frustration at his brother for denying the cushy job he’s gotten for him. This could be a simple scene, of Frank’s brother calling him out for his sins, but it’s played a bit differently. Both of these men are hardheaded and stuck in their ways, and can’t see why their family member would want anything different from what they have. It goes both ways, but for Frank it explains why the only future he sees for Ziggy is on the docks, even if that’s as piss-poor a plan as any.

            That’s Frank’s fatal flaw: not seeing any other angles. In his quest to save the docks for his son, he barely pays attention to what Ziggy is actually up to. Ziggy tries to take on Maui, and fails miserably with a sucker punch so terrible I for once thought “yeah, I could hit harder than that.” Ziggy isn’t cut out for a world of strict masculinity; he’s too easily manipulated into humiliation for the other worker’s entertainment. He’s not the most beautiful or most talented creature, but he needs to get out of there. Unfortunately, Ziggy Sobotka wasn’t raised to think that way.

“How come they don’t fly away?” –Ziggy

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  I didn’t mention it in the review proper, but I’m a huge fan of the scene of McNulty going back to Beadie’s place (it’s an all-around Dominic West showcase week). McNulty is not irredeemable, nor is he addicted to self-destruction in the way that, say, Bubbles is. He realizes he would probably just damage Beadie in the way he usually does, and that now is a terrible time to engage in anything like a relationship with a single mother. Beadie, meanwhile, plays the disappointment as he leaves just perfectly, with only the slightest hint of sadness covered with a smiled chagrin. She closes the door on him, walks away, and goes onto the next thing, not even looking out the window or the camera. It’s great work by both actors.

n  Herc and Carver are at it again! They hatch an unsurprisingly eggheaded attempt to recoup some of their losses, and it works, even though Daniels clearly knows what the shake is.

n  Ziggy buys a duck, since apparently his other fowl source of entertainment, his cock, is no longer appreciated by the bar. 

n  No Avon, no Stringer this week. I think the lack of the drug game proper this season really makes it a divisive one, and an episode like this goes to show how difficult a commercial sell “The Wire” is. Most shows wouldn’t drop one of their biggest plots for a full episode that still has about 8 other threads running through it.

n  Bodie and Poot, however, do show up, fretting over territory and trying to make money with their crap drugs. Both guys are good at what they do, and realize that something has gotta give. They have their corner back for now, but it might not be for long, especially if they can’t sell anything of good quality.