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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 6: Institutional Loyalists vs. Noble Rebels

Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2008, at 3:38 PM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

I know you don't want to talk about Jimmy and Lester, but my colleague Emily Bazelon had an interesting insight about their lunatic freelance plot. Usually The Wire has asked us to sympathize with the rebels, to relish the way Lester and Jimmy (and Bunny Colvin, and Teacher Prez) broke the rules of the system to do good. But this season the rebels have befouled everything. Their homeless killer mishigas is ruining the good, institutional police work of Bunk and Kima. The Wire has put us in the unprecedented (and uncomfortable) position of siding with the institutional loyalists against the noble rebels.

Now that we're sliding down the back slope of the season, with only four episodes left to go, we should play the Wire Parlor Game. In the final couple of episodes of every season, The Wire generally does two things: First, it unravels the major plot complication (Hamsterdam in Season 3, the ports murder in Season 2); and second, murders a sympathetic and/or fascinating character (Wallace in Season 1, Stringer Bell in Season 3, Bodie in Season 4). So the game is: a) guess how they'll unravel the Marlo/homeless murder/Omar mess and b) guess which beloved friend gets did.

With that in mind, here's my initial guess: Bunk's police work implicates Michael in his stepfather's murder. Feeling pangs of conscience, Michael agrees to help Bunk get Marlo, but Marlo has Michael killed first. Unfortunately, this does not help us with the homeless plot and Omar. I don't think Omar can die (because, as we've discussed, he's outside the laws of space and time). On the other hand, I don't think Marlo can die either. He embodies the evils of modernity, as Simon sees them: sociopathy, lack of feeling, greed. So he can't be brought low. Yet it's hard to see how Omar and Marlo both live. So I've talked myself into a corner.

Plotz

P.S. Speaking of great Sunday-night television, I watched the Grammys last night, too, and had an entirely non-Wire-related question for you: What's the deal with Amy Winehouse and Judaism? Can you go find out? Our readers may not know this, but you are also the founder of Jewsrock.org, the Jewish rock hall of fame. Can you please assign one your crack staffers to figure out: 1) What kind of Jew she is; 2) If there are any other Jewish rockers who have cracked up so spectacularly; and 3) Does she really recite the Shema in that crazy accent?

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 6: Institutional Loyalists vs. Noble Rebels

Posted Monday, Feb. 11, 2008, at 3:38 PM 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

(To reply, click here.)

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