So we return to Baltimore for season 5 of arguably the best show on television The Wire and we are straight into Bunk in the interrogation room with a young black man. Bunk and the other murder police prey upon the stupidity of their suspect by making him think that his mate has ratted him out and then they pull the old Xerox machine as lie detector gag that we last saw way back when in Homicide: Life on the streets. Apparently this is based on a real incident that David Simon wrote about in his book Homicide.
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe.” – Bunk Moreland
Seems that we may get some of the threads left hanging from season 2 of the show tied up as the credit sequence features a photo of the late Frank Sobotka and we get a mention about McNulty’s undercover vice operation that went all the way to home base shall we say.
Seems that in the year and a bit since the events of season 4 that Sergeant Ellis Carver has been given a promotion to Acting shift Lieutenant in the Western. I think Carver has come a long way since the early days when he was partnered up with Herc and has become a really good officer first under Bunny Colvin and now Lieutenant Dennis Mello. But he’s facing a tough time of it trying to maintain the discipline and morale of his officers what with the city fucking them over on the promised pay increase and the rescinding of overtime payments.
Why is Carcetti so fixed upon the idea of running for Governor so early? He believed he would damage his chances of running for Governor if he took the money from Annapolis, which would have meant kowtowing to the current governor. But in refusing the $50 million he’s fucked up any chance he had of actually fulfilling his pledges on cutting crime and so looks to have damaged any Governor bid he might be considering anyway. Surely he would have been better placed a few years down the line having turned the city of Baltimore around and the people of Maryland would not look toodisfavourably on his having down it with money from the state.
Wow Dukie’s grown some in the past year, he looks taller than Michael now although he still needs to fill out a bit if he’s to survive working on the corner.
It was great to have a weak Lieutenant on the Marlo case because it meant that Lester could run the case as he saw fit, but now the budget restrictions that weakness means that the Lieutenant is not able to support them and help them get their overtime pay for what must be the biggest cases that the department is running.
The cutbacks are not just restricted to the police in Baltimore as The Baltimore Sun like many newspapers in the US is facing the same fate. Took me a while to realise that it was Clark Johnson portraying City Editor Augustus “Gus” Haynes, I’ve not seen him on screen since Homicide in which he played DetectiveMeldrick Lewis, looks to be very well suited playing a journalist now.
Bloody hell Mayor Carcetti really is determined to burn all his bridges and refuse all possible outside help be it state or federal isn’t he even now that things look bleak after a year with a police force on a restricted budget.
The police may be on Marlo but they are still completely unaware of the existence of the co-op, if they’d been closer to taking down Marlo the cops may have unwittingly found themselves bugging the co-op and they might have had a chance to seriously cripple pretty much all the drug dealing operations in the city. However things in the co-op aren’t as harmonious as Prop Joe would like them to be as Marlo is stirring things up and is probably seeking to divide and conquer.
Reginald aka Bubbles has been clean since the accidental death of his protege Sherrod and though his life is somewhat better in terms of his circumstances he is not emotionally well as he is still feeling heavy guilt overSherrod’s demise.
Do more with less I think will be one of the underlying themes of the season as every institution in the show is feeling the pinch and ironically The Wire itself is having to more with less as they only have 10 episodes in this final season to tie up the storylines although this being The Wire you can’t expect everything to reach a conclusion as the reality of the world is everything is caught in an ongoing cycle. If the Major Crimes Unit do succeed in taking down Marlo then yet another player will rise to take his place as did Marlo after the fall of Avon Barksdale.
The show is definitely hooking back to Season 2 with Chris going to the court house in order to track down information on Sergei Malatov the ‘Russian’ hitman for ‘The Greeks’. Looks like Marlo is looking to deal directly and is trying to find a way in.
Finally the moral of the story seems to be if you are dirty incompetent police then you can do fine in the private sector as Herc has having been kicked off the force he is now working for the slimeball lawyer Levy.
