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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 6: The Sublime Bunk Moreland Soldiers On

Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET

Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.

Dear Jeff,

Evan threatens Lily and Lucinda with a poison syringe. Margo finds out the hostage taker is Evan Walsh. Lucinda promises to fund Evan's research offshore. Lily tries to save Lucinda. Evan is stabbed with the poison syringe. Lily blasts Lucinda for her scheming and blames her for Dusty's death. Holden admits he'd be lost without Lily. Lily feels the same. Chris tells Emily he never wants to see her again. …

Oh, wait, that's from As the World Turns.

I'm beginning to think Wendell Pierce is all that stands between this season of The Wire and farce. While all around him turn into parodic versions of themselves, the sublime Bunk Moreland soldiers on, exasperated by the incompetent crime lab, bullying Michael's mother to give up information about her boyfriend's death, and, in what was the most affecting scene in the episode, vainly trying to persuade a sullen Randy to cooperate in a murder investigation. Randy was the most delightful and promising of the Season 4 schoolboys—a joyful little bundle of entrepreneurial energy. His fall is as sad as anything The Wire has ever shown us. What's astonishing is that it takes only a few brilliant shots to show us his ruination: Randy muscled up in his wife-beater, Randy walking out on Bunk into the hellish chaos of the group home, Randy gratuitously shoving a little kid on the stairs. The destruction of an entire life, compressed into 15 seconds. Too bad it was shoved into such a stinking mess of an episode.

A quick journalistic procedural question for you, since you've been a daily newspaper reporter and I haven't: Do we really think Gus and Scott managed to check out that PTSD Marine's story in one day? Did they really manage to get the Marines to confirm that this guy was a Marine, that he has PTSD, that he was in an explosion outside Fallujah where someone lost his hands … etc. Because judging by what my friends at the Washington Post go through, it would take about three weeks to get the military to confirm a story like that.

I'm sorry to see that my prediction about Marlo and the co-op came true. That was our last gathering of the drug dealer board, because, as Marlo says, "I ain't really one for meets no how."

Also, does Jimmy McNulty ever listen to anything besides the Pogues? (Not that I'm complaining: I'm going to the Pogues' D.C. concert next month.)

Your increasingly vexed colleague,
David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 6: The Sublime Bunk Moreland Soldiers On

Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor. Andy Bowers is the editor of Slate V. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. Melinda Henneberger is a Slate contributor and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear. David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at . John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor. June Thomas is Slate's foreign editor. You can e-mail her at .

Entry 1: Photograph of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 8: Photograph of Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress, and Tom McCarthy by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 21: Photograph of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Jamie Hector, Method Man, and Robert F. Chew by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008. Entry 27: Photograph of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 42: Still of Wendell Pierce by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 52: Still of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 57: Photograph of Sonja Sohn, Wendell Pierce, and Dominic West by Nicole Rivelli © 2008 HBO. Entry 61: Still of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008.

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Remarks from the Fray:

I hope Goldberg and Plotz move on to discussing the idea that the press is complicit in allowing the inner-city (especially black inner-city) to decay by not paying attention to the problems that caused its sharp decline. Maybe newsroom characters feel cliched, but shouldn't we discuss how they enter into the "War on Drugs"?

--tsell89

(To reply, click here.)

So far as we've seen most of the newspapermen are indeed stock characters, but that's nothing to worry about. Except for a few leads each season, very few characters have conflicting motives. Think Clay Davis, Mayor Royce, Herc, Horse, Burrell, Rawles, Weebay, Chris Partlow, Snoop, the school administrators, even Marlo.

The strength of the show isn't in the complexity of the characters; it's in the multi-layered coherent vision, the way these somewhat two-dimensional characters all affect one another. Granted, that's a formula for pedagogy, but what saves the show (and not only saves it but really does make it the best show ever) is the one thing that fools everyone into thinking that Snoop, with her paucity of lines and sole motivation of kill-everyone-Marlo-tells-me-to, is a great character -- namely, style.

All the characters have great style, great lines. It's what makes the show fun as well as edifying. And from what I can tell, the newspapermen are going to have as much style as anyone. "Stay hungry. Good things come... when they come." C'mon.

--jamessal

(To reply, click here.)

I don't doubt that the busyness of the first episode had a lot to do with the retards at HBO deciding to cut the Wire from 13 episodes to 10 for its final season but I know Simon will make it work in spite of his bosses stupidity.

As far as Jeffrey's weak defense of the Sopranos, give it up man. The show lost its way after 3 seasons, so the claim that the Sopranos was on longer is not much of an excuse. Of course it is probably true that the Sopranos was a victim of its own massive popularity, while the Wire has been able to stay on course precisely because nobody was watching. Maybe if David Simon had gotten all the money and all the ball licking from critics that David Chase received he would have turned into a hack writer as well.

--sir biff

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