In the same manner that was established in season one the last episode of this season is what would usually be the off screen postscript to a typical police drama once the police have caught and charged their suspect with the crime. But of course The Wire is more than just a police drama and this is the last ever episode of the series it is within this postscript that we see the resolution to so many of the storylines that we’ve watching over the years.
We start in the Mayor’s office with Carcetti speechless in apoplexy upon learning the truth behind the serial killer, Kima having gone to Daniels with the truth in the last episode. Aidan Gillen does a great job here and you can almost see the cogs spinning in his head as he grapples with this news and tries to see all the angles on how to deal with it.
There’s no help from Norman Wilson as he’s cackling at the sheer audacity of the detectives involved and the fact that they themselves have traded off the lie of the serial killer in order to strengthen Carcetti’s run for Governor of Maryland.
I wish I was still at the newspaper so that I could write on this mess. This is too fucking good!
Chief of Staff Michael Steintorf takes charge and explains that should the truth come out that they are all fucked. Rawls and Daniels as the senior police officers bear responsibility for the conduct of their detectives, State’s attorney Bond and ASA Pearlman for signing off on the illegal wiretaps and it cuts off at the knees Carcetti’s bid to be Governor. But of course things being the way they are only Daniels and Pearlman would lose everything as their superiors would be hurt but would ultimately keep their jobs through the sacrificing of their juniors.
Freamon unaware that the shit has hit the fan keeps on being the fantastic detective he is and finally through following the money trails uncovers the leak in the Grand Jury it is Prosecutor Gary DiPasquale and through him Freamon gets evidence implicating drug lawyer Maurice Levy. Unfortunately having gotten himself involved in Mcnulty’s idiotic fake serial killer scheme Smooth Lester Cool has ruined any chance he had in following the money trail all the way and taking down the drug lawyers of Baltimore.
Levy and Pearlman have a great back and forth with Levy thinking he has the upper hand with his knowledge of the illegal wiretap because of Herc’s betrayal of his former colleagues and a bit of digging himself. Knowing that the State’s Attorney’s office will not want this to go to trial he thinks he can get everyone off other than Chris who is going down for the unconnected murder of Michael’s stepfather. But Rhonda has ammunition thanks to Lester Freamon and plays the tape of him bribing Gary DiPasquale and with the threat of this one party consent call and DiPasquale’s cooperation coerces him into a deal that sees everyone but Marlo go down for the crimes they are charged with including the 22 bodies in the vacants.
So Marlo goes free as long as he stays out of the game otherwise the charges that have been shelved will come back and ever the business man he buys his way out of the game by selling off his connect with the Greeks for a cool $10 million.
The truth of the serial killer is agreed to be hushed up by everyone that knows of it in the police, state’s attorney and mayor’s offices, but Lester Freamon and Jimmy McNulty are not allowed to do real police work ever again at least nothing that would result in them having to go to court. I wonder if they think that all this shit was worth it well at least they are not likely to do jail time as there is nobody that really wants this all to come to light.
Great to see that Roland Pryzbylewski has found an environment to thrive in and now with beard is making a teacher respected by the inner city kids of his school even though the reason for Mr. Prezbo’s appearance is so that Duquan can lie to and beg money off him. It’s a damn shame as I believe that had Dukie asked for real help Prez could have sorted him out and got him back into school even if it did mean the horrors of the group home that Randy ended up in surely that’s better than living on the streets as a junkie.
It is the power of the writing and the fantastic acting of Jermaine Crawford that makes Dukie’s fate so painful. And as Dukie has become the new Bubbles his former cohort Michael has indeed taken up the mantle of Omar and become a smart talking stick-up man or perhaps stick-up boy.
Shit! You just a boy.
That’s just yer knee!
Yet despite the demise of Omar and thus the likely fate of Michael I was pleased to see what he’d become and there’s a sense that this was a happy ending for him.
A theme of the show has been about the cycles of life and society and that even though things change “Shit’s as it ever was!”, the players just change. And so it goes with Marlo who was for the past couple of seasons the new Avon Barksdale but is now the new Stringer Bell or at least what Stringer would have been had he survived to take that final tiny step out of the game. Yet I wonder if Marlo can ever feel comfortable in his new role post-game and the scene where he takes back a corner unarmed and wearing his smart new suit from a couple of corner boys that don’t even recognise him underscores this. In a way Omar has beaten Marlo as he’s become an urban legend but Marlo ‘my name is my name’ Stanfield is forgotten in a very short space of time.
Jimmy’s serial killer scheme has spawned a copycat or at least someone who wanted to divert attention by making his victim through tying a ribbon round his wrist look like a victim of the serial killer. The killer is one of the other homeless men and is not really fit to stand trial. A bit deus ex machina but it gives a credible reason for the department to close the serial killer case and with that final bit of business done both Freamon and McNulty take retirement.
Lester Freamon goes out with 32 years of service and so will have a very tidy pension, he has his model furniture sideline that he can now devote more time to and he has the love of a good woman Shardene. Despite not being able to go all the way with the money trail and not bringing down Marlo I think he can die happy.
Jimmy McNulty gets a great send off and mock wake at the Irish pub they frequent plus a fine eulogy by his Sergeant Jay Landsman. He goes out with only 13 years service and so ends up without a pension I guess he couldn’t stand to work in the pawn shop or another place in the department where he was likely to do no harm for the seven years required for his 20 years and full pension. So not as happy an ending as Lester but it looks like he may be able to salvage his relationship with Beadie and being out of the police will mean he’s no longer as self-destructive as he was. As Jay says Jimmy was natural police but what an asshole. “What the fuck did I do?”. A helluva lot Jimmy, a lot of good policing but also a bunch of fucked up shit. I’ll miss ya Jimmy.
With all the shit in the department dealt with Daniels thinks he can finally get on with turning the department around no more easy arrests just to improve the stats. But of course shit’s as it ever was and Nerese Campbell the likely new mayor should Carcetti become Governor somehow gets the dirt on Daniels from his past and declares that he either gets in line with her wishes or he’s out. So he leaves with his honour and puts his law degree to good use and Nerese gets the compliant Commissioner she wants in the form of Stan Valchek.
Bubbles has been one of the great characters of the five seasons of the show and having reconciled his feelings somewhat over his role in the death of Sharrad he gets the ending that he does so richly deserve. Mike Fletcher of the Baltimore Sun has been trailing Bubbles for a while and has now written a wonderful portrayal of his life both the bad and the good. Given a copy to read before publication Bubbles is in two minds about it as it is an incredibly honest picture of him and as he says to his sponsor Waylon he ain’t worried about the bad being out there and Waylon retorts are you worried about someone calling you good? Waylon then hands him a piece of paper that he’s been carrying around for a long time with a quote from ‘Fonzie Kafka’.
You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps the holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.
This quote I feel is the crux of what the creators of The Wire were trying to do with the show. They embraced the suffering of the world and examined it by way of a fiction in a way that they believe the news media have failed to do.
So finally we get to the contentious portrayal of the Baltimore Sun in season five of the show. Initially I felt that perhaps David Simon was too close to this issue and had an axe to grind with particular former senior editors of the newspaper. In addition I thought that the Paper storyline seemed far too divorced from the rest of the show in the way that the Port, the School and the Hall hadn’t been in previous seasons. I have changed my view somewhat now I’ve seen all ten episodes.
The creators have always had an axe to grind about the institutions they have examined and laid bare in the show and so the newsroom is no different. I think the failure to develop the characters of Whiting, Klebanow and the other minor characters in comparison to their equivalents in the police department is primarily down to the fact that we’ve had 50 hours more of time over 4 seasons on the police characters. I wish that we had some of the newsroom characters in previous seasons particularly Fletcher as he has turned out to be quite a significant character at the end of this season and yet he still feels underdeveloped. Roger Twigg as the police reporter would have slotted in naturally somewhere in previous seasons and by having established characters at the Paper we would have had some fixture from which to get to know the others.
I think the disconnect between the Paper and the rest of The Wire is deliberate or at least I hope it was as it does work as a way of illustrating the purpose of the season i.e. that the news media are not covering the stories that matter. The Sun gets the big story of the season, the serial killer, and Templeton wins a Pulitzer for his coverage. But the Sun has missed all the important stories of the season, the political machinations and corruption, the significance of the murders of Proposition Joe and Omar Little, and of course the fact that the serial killer was fake and merely the creation of a couple of rogue detectives. If Templeton had been a better reporter and not gone down the route of embellishing his stories until it got to the point where he was so caught up in the lies upon lies that he needed to keep going and if the paper had kept Roger Twigg the veteran police reporter then they might have finished up with the real story of the serial killer.
However that seems to be the way of the world as like the police department and the city council it becomes a numbers game. The newspapers are suffering from budget cuts as sales fall and inevitably they will be predominately printing the easy stories as they will not be able to allow a reporter the time to get to the meat of a story and if they’ve laid of all their veteran reporters then they might not even have the necessary inside contacts to get the scoop.
With the fates of Gus and Alma we see the parallels yet again withe the rest of the world of The Wire troublemakers that undermine the games that the bosses play will get demoted or sidelined even if they are on the side of what is right. At least thankfully unlike the street this doesn’t mean they get offed. The cycle of life is present again with Fletcher cruising of the acclaim of his ‘beautiful’ piece on Bubbles into Gus Haynes’s chair as the new City Editor.
Back to the police and we see Ellis Carver continue in his deserved rise up the ranks as he is promoted to Lieutenant, he’s come a long way since the early days of rousting corner boys with Herc and is now very much real police in the mould of Bunny Colvin or Daniels. Leander Sydnor has somehow come out of the mess of the serial killer thing with no dirt on him at all thanks no doubt to his mentor Lester Freamon and now seemingly is occupying the McNulty role of doing the end run around the bosses and going to Judge Phelan. Hopefully more of Lester than Jimmy has rubbed off on him and lacking McNulty’s self destructive streak I’m sure Sydnor will be a real damn excellent detective.
To the street and we see Slim Charles finally step up and give Cheese the fate he so richly fucking deserves, it was a beautiful unexpected moment and oddly also a feelgood moment in the way that the equally unexpected killing of Omar by Kennard was gut wrenching. The montage at the end sees Kennard being arrested with Detective Crutchfield in the background so the pint sized assassin seems to have got his just desserts too.
Finally the feel good moment of the entire season was seeing Reginald aka Bubbles walking up the stairs out of the basement to eat dinner with his sister and her family. A well earned beautiful simple moment.