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“The Wire” notes and analysis – Episode 56, “The Dickensian Aspect”

Please note that this episode is available only at HBO On Demand and has not yet aired; it will premiere on HBO on Sunday, February 9^th. Also be forewarned that as “The Wire” contains adult language and themes, my post will reflect these elements; reader discretion is advised.

Finally, this post contains spoilers about episode 56; please do not read further if you have not yet seen it and do not want details about this episode.

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The episode (tagline: “If you have a problem with this, I completely understand.” – Freamon) opens with someone from the Medical Examiner’s office carrying a body away from the apartment building where the shootout in the last episode took place. For a fraction of a second my heart sank because I thought it may have been Omar, but then I realized it was more likely Butchie’s friend Donnie, who had been killed in the shootout. This becomes even clearer as both Chris and Snoop hunt all over the city for Omar—Snoop visits every ER in the city, figuring Omar must have injured himself and sought care at a hospital, but comes up with nothing. Nothing is found in the Dumpsters or sewers in the area, either. There’s even a besuited young man whom I don’t recognize posing as a detective and asking questions, who also comes up empty. Omar seems to have quite literally vanished.

Chris reluctantly goes back to Monk’s apartment building to meet Marlo, who is incredulous not only that they let Omar get away, but the manner in which he did so: “Don’t seem possible … some Spiderman shit there.” On closer inspection it seems Omar jumped from the 5^th or 6^th floor balcony (I had guessed 3^rd floor in last week’s post). Marlo also has a sense of the enormity of their failure, and shows real exasperation and perhaps even worry for the first time I can remember in the series: “We missed our shot. Now he gon’ be at us.”

In the first scene after the credits we see Omar in a janitor’s closet, sobbing in pain as he tries to tend to his right ankle or leg, which seems to have been badly broken in the leap from the window. As he uses a long-handled mop as a crutch and makes his way out of the janitor’s closet and outside the building, we realize he was in Monk’s apartment building the whole time. It’s difficult to imagine how Chris and Snoop could have been so hyperopic that they would have searched all over the city for Omar and missed the fact that he had dragged himself back inside the building.

Bunk, who is reexamining the 22 bodies case (now 25, given that the triple-murder from earlier this season has now been linked to Marlo’s crew), utters a line to McNulty a line that he’s said at least three times before, in a variety of situations (it even appears as a dialogue clip on the Wire soundtrack CD): “You happy now, bitch?” McNulty replies, “I am content, yes.” Bunk guesses that Jimmy has called the reporter, but Jimmy corrects him: “No, actually – that asshole’s making up his own shit.” This is the first time we get confirmation that McNulty realizes Templeton is cooking his stories.

Cut to The Sun, where Executive Editor Whiting and Managing Editor Klebanow are thrilled with the ongoing homeless murder pieces by Scott Templeton. Scott is busy admiring his all-caps, banner headline appearing above the fold, “SERIAL KILLER PREYS ON CITY HOMELESS,” when his bosses come up to give him an “atta boy” and ask about where he’ll be taking the story. Scott’s idea is to spend the night with the homeless and “see what they see.” Klebanow also notes that the national news and cable outlets have been calling to try and secure comments and appearances from the star reporter; Klebanow advises Scott to avoid local media but that he should feel free to make national media appearances “in a responsible manner.” Scott, who cannot possibly mean what he says, says, “I’m just not all that comfortable having myself in the center of the story like this.”

This bit of unmitigated bullshit, given his fabrications, is all the more incredible since we know Scott has a “hot nut” to get out of Baltimore and secure a more prestigious job. I have an updated prediction for the end of the season: Scott’s fabrications will become obvious to only a few at the paper (Gus, for sure, and Alma and Fletch, perhaps) but he’ll receive such accolades from his series on the homeless murders that his bosses will remain oblivious—or in denial. Templeton will land a job at The Washington Post will Gus and the rest of the staff are left to pick up the pieces.

Soon thereafter, Whiting pulls Gus aside and lets it be known that the coverage of the homeless murders should “reflect the Dickensian aspect of the homeless, the human element.” The look on Gus’s face says it all—he is tired of the buzzwords, tired of the paper being run by people who wouldn’t know real news if it was sitting on their faces.

The story moves to Lester and Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson), who were on the Stanfield case. Lester is preparing to tell Sydnor about the deceptions that are being orchestrated in the name of securing wiretaps. The cynical opening of Lester’s speech prompts Sydnor to ask if Lester’s going to retire, but he assures Sydnor that he’s not retiring (“yet,” possibly a bit of foreshadowing). Lester says, “When they took us off Marlo this last time, said they couldn’t pay for further investigation, I regarded that decision as illegitimate.” As a result he’s going to press the case “without regard to the usual rules.” Lester has enough gravitas and experience to make such radical statements and still sound reasonable, and Clarke Peters has been doing an outstanding job in a role that has seen more focus this season than perhaps any other.

Lester comes clean on the illegal wiretap and uses the show’s tagline, “If you have a problem with this, I completely understand,” as a way to offer Sydnor a clean exit, but Sydnor is in.

In explaining the wiretap to Sydnor and later McNulty, Lester begins to unravel the import of the “silent” or seemingly scrambled phone calls: “When they talk is bullshit, but there are calls when no one says a thing,” which he later determines, with the help of surveillance, to be picture messages.

Bunk, who has found Randy Wagstaff’s (Maestro Harrell) name and photo in a file about one of last year’s murders, decides to pay a visit to Randy at a Baltimore group home and see if he can extract any new information or cooperation. He finds there a young boy who has ensconced himself within walls of sullenness, posturing, and anger. Randy, whose foster mother was killed in a fire set by those who suspected him of snitching, was lost the moment he walked into his group home and saw “snitch bitch” written on his bed, then desperately tried to fight off the beat-down that ensued. Randy refuses to be manipulated, coaxed, or coerced by Bunk, as he’s been failed by police before: “That’s what y’all do, ain’t it? Lie to dumb-ass niggas?” He’s been hardened utterly, and one wonders if it’s too late for him to be “saved.”

Carcetti, whose news conference opening a new, upscale harborside condo complex is attended by scant few—save for a disorderly Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreiber), who shouts “Fuck you!” at the mayor and is quickly arrested—must now hold a press conference about the homeless murders. It’s not lost on Carcetti that this press conference if far more well attended than his earlier one, even drawing national media: “It would appear that media attention is always focusing on the negatives when it comes to Baltimore but you guys aren’t around when we’re making real progress.” The harbor story—which assuredly is good news for a few, but certainly not for the dock workers and many others—will now be buried in the Metro section because of the front-page homeless coverage.

Carcetti then delivers an impassioned and apparently impromptu speech that surprises even Norman. He notes that his administrative tenure will be judged most correctly by how the weakest and most vulnerable citizens are treated, and states that the killer will be found. Carcetti hands it over to Rawls, who quickly hands it over to Daniels, the commissioner-in-waiting. Daniels is smooth, composed, and confident: “a natural,” according to Rawls.

McNulty and Pearlman (who used to be an item, way back in season one, I believe) go to see Judge Phelan (Peter Gerety of “Homicide” fame) and get a wiretap on Scott Templeton’s phone. After noting that the reporter’s First Amendment rights might be violated by such an act, Phelan explains the reason for his hesitation in challenging The Sun: “Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrelful,” a long-held maxim that perhaps reflects a bygone era in newspapers in terms of primacy and might.

Back to The Bunk, who is being chastised by Kima for his tentativeness in handling the Medical Examiner’s office, who have still not provided lab analysis of the evidence in many of the vacant murders. “Well, what would the Bunk do? Take no for a fuckin’ answer?” Soon Bunk is down talking to Ron, who is spewing a litany of excuses and woes that led to the ongoing delays, including staff shortages, malfunctioning equipment, and much more. Bunk responds, “My heart pumps purple piss for you,” a marvelously alliterative rejoinder and an example of the colorful and delightful language that makes “The Wire” the gem it is. In truth, the Medical Examiner’s office is a shambles. A temporary worker (or “temp,” which I have been more than a few times in my life) has been hired to catalogue evidence and do paperwork. In a fantastic twist of fate and an example of the bureaucratic absurdities that often prevent even the most pedestrian of progress from being made, the temp didn’t understand the abbreviation “et al” (short for the Latin “et alia” plural meaning “and others”) and the evidence on the murders can no longer be differentiated. The budget crisis, along with mismanagement and good, old-fashioned human error have collaborated to create a five-alarm clusterfuck—and in encountering it, Bunk and Kima are exasperated, but sadly, not surprised.

At the co-op meeting, Joe’s chair stands empty, so Marlo takes it upon himself to address the group. He admits he is responsible for killing Prop Joe, thereby establishing himself as the de facto leader of the co-op—and as a target for anyone who is loyal to Joe and would dare come at him. Marlo also doubles the bounty on Omar: “100 large for a whiff of that dick-suck; 250 for his head.” And in this briefest of meetings, Marlo decides to suspend the meetings indefinitely—no big surprise since his intense dislike of them, and of the co-op in general, has been all too evident from the start. (As a man who would generally rather set my own head on fire than attend a meeting of any kind, I am right there with him.) “Anybody got a problem from here on out, bring it to me or sit on that shit.” He doesn’t want to manage anything but his own organization, and doesn’t want to hear about petty squabbles or turf battles. And finally—the price of the product is going up. So far, Marlo’s tenure in leading the co-op does not seem destined to be a popular one. With his attention distracted further by Omar, it seems likely that he’ll be brought down by the end of the season.

Back at the newsroom, the guys are watching Scott Templeton’s appearance on the CNN Headline News show “Nancy Grace.” The odious Grace guest-starring on “The Wire” is ironic and rather brilliant given the conversation among Lester, Bunk and Jimmy earlier in the season that yielded the tagline, “This ain’t Aruba, bitch.”

Her obsessive coverage of the Natalee Holloway case and sensationalistic style of “journalism” are a symptom of the problem of being dead “in the wrong zip code,” as Fletch put it earlier in the season. On the show, Grace calls Templeton the “Jimmy Breslin of Baltimore,” alluding to the Newsday columnist’s correspondences with the “Son of Sam” killer in the 1970s. Breslin once famously observed, “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Templeton plays the ostensibly spotlight-shunning professional perfectly, insisting that “as a reporter you expect to be in harm’s way at some points. It’s what we do.” Gus, it should be noted, walks away from the television screen dejectedly, rejecting the attention that is being lathered on his reporter. Gus is fed up with the dropping of the Pulitzer-baiting schools piece, the undeserved celebrity of Templeton, and the erosion of journalistic standards. At some point, will he explode?

Meanwhile, McNulty and Lester are reaching an impasse in their fabricated serial killer case. “They need another body, don’t they?” McNulty asks, which is going to be more difficult than it seems. When Rhonda visits Lester in the former Stanfield investigation headquarters, Lester needs to usher her out quickly to protect his illegal wiretap. His comment that “you’d be surprised what you can get done when no one’s looking over your shoulder” is brilliantly offhand and captures one of the essential themes of “The Wire”: the near-futility of trying to escape the suffocation of bureaucracy to do important, vital work.

Omar spends much of the show’s last half sending strong messages to Marlo that he is not to be trifled with. He points a gun at Rick’s head and delivers the message that he doesn’t believe Marlo has it in him to go after Omar. Later, the still-limping Omar robs one of Marlo’s corners and demands the bag full of money—today’s haul. But instead of taking it—“it ain’t about the paper”—he dumps it in one of Marlo’s SUVs and torches the vehicle. Omar sends a similar message to the corner boy he has shot in the leg: tell Marlo “he ain’t man enough to come down to the street with Omar.” I am left wondering if it’s wise that Omar continues to bait Marlo in this manner. I almost can’t bear to think it, but it seems as though Omar has placed himself a path that can only lead to his destruction. (In the “Next on The Wire” montage: is that Omar sticking a gun into the back of Michael’s head to send another message to Marlo? Is that Michael in the “box”? Stay tuned!)

Bunk, having struck out with inscrutable Randy Wagstaff, is going to work the murder of Michael Lee’s stepfather, whom we know was brutally bludgeoned to death by Chris. He meets with Michael’s mother, who puts Bunk onto Michael, and reveals that Michael is running with Chris and Snoop now.

Carcetti, meanwhile, has found his core issue in homelessness; his impassioned speech at the press conference kicked it off, and it resonates in a potential gubernatorial campaign because of the current Republican governor’s failure to address homelessness. The irony here, of course, is that the entire issue is based upon a series of lies: McNulty’s fabricated homeless murders case, picked up by the serial fabricator Templeton, is now informing the mayor’s campaign strategy. “The bigger the lie, the more they’ll believe,” said Bunk in the opening scene of the first episode this season, and the theme is carrying through.

Back to the ongoing homeless murders story, which clearly has “legs,” or ongoing appeal, we find Scott wandering awkwardly under a bridge looking for the true “homeless experience,” running away from a charging German shepherd, and generally looking out of place. My feeling initially was that he’d simply go home and make the story up, but later we see him doing actual reporting, talking to a homeless Marine vet. The man describes the shell shock he still endures from his time served in Fallujah, Iraq; when his vehicle was hit by an IED (improvised explosive device) and the driver’s hands were blown off, the driver laughed and said, “look, ma, no hands!” He is clearly haunted by the experience and clearly knows the lingo and terminology of the armed forces, but because it’s Scott, I just expect it to be made up (by the interviewee, in this case) or otherwise hinky.

Once the story is filed (or submitted to by copyedited), some of the editors—including Gus, notably—are gushing over the piece. Gus calls Scott over and says, pointedly, that it “feels like the real deal” because he didn’t “overwrite” it. To overwrite is to write with too much elaboration, to use superfluous details, to employ too many adjectives; it’s a problem faced especially with younger journalists who are used to writing flowery English papers with meandering and sophisticated explications. Good journalistic writing is simple and direct but impactful—and hard as hell to do. Gus praises Scott’s use of “no extra color, no puffy adjectives” and his reliance instead on “tight, declarative sentences” to tell his story. “No extra color, no puffy adjectives” means that Scott doesn’t spend an inordinate amount of time padding his story with unnecessary descriptions of setting and context. “Tight, declarative sentences” are sentences with very few clauses or commas that are designed to convey information or make direct statements. While most of my sentences here are declarative—as it is by far the most common type of sentence—most of them would not be described as “tight,” since they contain myriad clauses, em dashes (the double dashes that crop up frequently in my writing), commas, and ornate, copious adjectives.

Speaking of Scott, he is questioned by Gus about a piece he wrote a few weeks earlier about a woman who died due to a seafood allergy; Fletch had been told something by a community member that called the facts of his article into question. A bit later, when pressed on the matter by Gus, Scott insists he made some calls and confirmed that his article was sound—but Gus seems to remain unconvinced.

By the end of the episode, McNulty and Lester seem to have reached another level of depravity in their fabricated serial killer case: they’ve kidnapped a disabled homeless man, whom they’re calling “Donald,” but whose name may or may not be Donald, and stowing him in a D.C. shelter. It’s very confusing and very troubling, and seems certain to land one or both of them in serious trouble. The plan, it would seem, is to take cell-phone pictures of the homeless man, bound and with a ribbon on his wrist, and send them to Templeton, who will think they are from the killer. Once a warrant is approved to surveil and/or decode cell-phone picture messages, Lester will use this illicitly to crack or access Marlo’s picture messages. Judging from the scene shown in “Next week on The Wire,” in which McNulty says to Lester, “Get me out of this, Lester, as fast as you can,” it’s all going to go horribly wrong.

There’s an interesting scene near the end that was almost brief enough to overlook, but which seems destined to have serious repercussions in the final four episodes. Assistant state’s attorney Rhonda Pearlman visits the state’s attorney (Rupert Bond) and presents him with sealed affidavits taken from the desk of Prop Joe; Rhonda had gotten them from her boyfriend Daniels, who had gotten them, I believe, from Bunk. “We have a leak,” she said.

Over all it was an exciting episode, and one that makes me feel both a sense of anticipation and one of impending loss for the final four episodes of the series.

END OF EPISODE 56 NOTES