The Wire: Hard Cases (S2:E4)

“This ain’t back in the day”

            Louis C.K. has a great standup bit about how, in his estimation, unmarried people mean nothing to the world. “You can die and it actually doesn’t matter…I have two kids and my wife doesn’t work, so I don’t get to die,” C. K. says. Ziggy Sobotka could die in one of his amateur robberies, and it wouldn’t really matter to everyone on “The Wire” (and everyone watching “The Wire, probably). Nick, on the other hand, so when he’s stealing, the stakes are much more intense. When Beadie goes to work everyday, she’s doing it to provide for her kids. She was lucky: her chosen industry, policework, is probably the only legal industry experiencing any growth in Baltimore, but it’s not hard to see another world where a legitimate offer doesn’t come around and Beadie has to do something as unethical as the Sobotka clan. “The Wire” isn’t a family-centric show (because almost all involved come from broken ones), but Season 2 is a little different. It’s a season about legacy, about leaving something behind, and the consequences of what happens when there’s nothing left to leave.

            Frank is miffed, understandably, at his nephew and son for stealing, although the show makes it clear that it’s less a matter of crime, and more a matter of timing (they can’t afford frustrated customers when they’re already in such desperate straits…pun not intended). Nick understands, but because he needs the money to provide for his family, he decides he’ll just be stealthier about it. Want makes people innovative, and if Nick could get rid of his idiot cousin, who’s too busy showing off his ridiculous Italian leather jacket, he might be able to get away with everything. I think it’s easy to say that, even if Ziggy is Frank’s actual son, Nick is much closer to him in character. The real tragedy is that if Nick were born when Frank was, he’d easily be able to support a family, like Frank did. But that’s not how the world works.

            Meanwhile, the police work is starting to heat up. “The Wire” is pretty good at setting up highly plausible explanations to keep its cast around, and one of the ways it does so is with a tremendous amounts of patience. Instead of finding a deus ex machine to get the whole gang back together, it waits until episode four, and even then leaves McNulty out in the docks. Daniels and Greggs pose an interesting counterpoint to Nick’s predicament. Nick thinks he can’t get work elsewhere, while Daniels (and presumably Greggs after she gets her law degree) has the ability to go into another industry. And almost does. In the end, though, the pull of policework, plus a better pension opportunity, makes it impossible to leave. A lot of the constrictions our characters face are often subtle like that.

            We see another one of these explanations occurring inside the prison. Avon is, per usual, a damn good druglord, and has managed to kill two, possibly three birds with five dead bodies. He uses the crisis surrounding the “Hot Shots” he got shipped into prison to both get rid of the guard harassing Wee-Bay, and reduce his sentence to functionally a year. Prison is a fact of life in the drug war, but unfortunately it’s a little too static for a work of drama (“Oz” might disagree, but this isn’t that show), so seeing momentum on that front is always good. He even gets D’Angelo off heroin, although in the process D’Angelo has decided that he can no longer handle associating with Avon. D’Angelo’s character arc in prison is interesting: between the drug use and the comic books, I almost think he’s trying to live Wallace’s life for him. Freedom, in many kinds, is on the horizon for at least a few of our characters. But a girl I knew had something to say about it just being another word for having nothing to lose.

“If I hear the music, I’m gonna dance” –Greggs

Observations and What-Have-You’s

n  I’m pretty sure Ziggy takes what is, in all probability, one of the earliest dick picks in recorded history in the bar. I think I blocked out how much Sobatka penis there was in this season.

n  First female nudity of the season (at least, on a non-corpse), though, so there’s that.

n  Fantastic mid-episode scene of Greggs and Daniels telling their respective spouses that they’re going back onto detail work. It’s a little showier than most “Wire” scenes, what with the shifting camera and the cuts between the two locations, but it works wonders. Dinner-table montages have been the stuff of great drama since “Citizen Kane,” and this one is probably the highlight of a solid, if unspectacular episode.

n  I’m relatively “meh” about McNulty’s in the episode, even though he’s really trying to do three things. I don’t care about his wife’s separation papers at all, as I’ve mentioned, nor the tracking of the family of the first dead girl. However, his enlistment of Bubbles in finding Omar leads us to the great, almost slasher-movieesque scene of Omar confronting Bubbles. Never too much of either of those two characters, and Omar testifying against Bird is probably my favorite scene of the season.

n  Freamon and Bunk, meanwhile, are working with Beadie to try and make headway on the 13 murders. It’s done well, and I like the more-informed, almost organized crime response the union has to the police. They resemble the mob more than any criminal organization on the show, which probably says something about what has happened to the heydays of unions and mobsters.

n  One last thing: it may have been a quirk of the weather, but the greys of Baltimore in winter are even more pronounced in this episode than most. It’s almost beautiful, in a horrible way.