The Wire: You look good, girl.
I wasn’t going to blog anymore until my relocation to Nashville was complete but after rewatching last night’s penultimate episode of The Wire, I’ve got to say something. First and foremost, for a show whose bread and butter is unavoidable despair, I found this episode particularly sad. Well, maybe that isn’t entirely true. One of the times when I almost broke down in tears was a positive reaction to Bubbles’ sobriety. (Honestly, I never thought he’d make it out of this series alive. I’m happy to be proven wrong.) But Michael and Snoop and then Michael and Dukie? That is some bleak, dreadful shit, and so it goes that as Bubbles is freed Dukie is enslaved, now on a trajectory to fill that role.
The rest of the episode — the nuts and bolts that will eventually reveal who the leak is in the DA’s office (Is it Rhonda? Is it the judge who started this whole thing off back at the beginning of season 1?), how McNulty does or doesn’t make it out of this intact, how Levy again skirts the law and how Marlo and co. will inevitably go free — was just as brilliant. Crime writer supreme, George Pelecanos filled the episode with so many hard-boiled detective scenes (Lester and Clay Davis at the bar, Gus and the vet at Walter Reed) the story moved with a breakneck pace and was loaded with dialogue so rich all I could do was think about rolling in it. And of course there was the prison scene where for the first time ever we see why Marlo is Marlo. Terrifying.
One week to go.
NOTE: I just called Comcast in Nashville and found out that I won’t be getting my cable until March 11th. So my series wrap-up won’t be published until at least the 12th. Sorry.
