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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 9: The Saddest Scene The Wire Has Ever Given Us

Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 6:46 AM ET

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

How my hair look, Jeff?

Omar. And now Snoop. That's too much for any Wire-lover to bear.

But of course her murder made perfect dramatic sense, and I'm embarrassed I didn't see it coming. Omar and Snoop were dark mirrors of each other. They were both street eloquent, but her eloquence sprang from profanity, his from the absence of it. He mesmerized with his soulful criminality; she mesmerized with her soulless murderousness. Omar was gay; I can't remember if Snoop was ever explicitly identified as gay, but she certainly suggested it. He was an independent businessmen; she was a classic organization woman, mindlessly obeying orders. It's also fitting that their young murderers are mirrors too. Kenard, conscienceless and psychopathic, kills thoughtful Omar. And Michael is at war with himself, his sweet soul blackened and hardened by his sick work: He is having exactly the kind of battles with himself that Snoop didn't.

Incidentally, wasn't that final goodbye between Michael and Dukie the saddest scene The Wire has ever given us? Michael cannot, or won't let himself, remember their gleeful hijinks of two years ago, because he knows that happiness can never be reclaimed, so there's no use wallowing in it. And then Dukie trudges forward into Boschian hell, his first step on his way to becoming Bubbles.

They threw that word Dickensian at us again, but the right literary adjective is Shakespearean. This spectacular episode vibrated with brilliant speechifying—Bubbles facing up to Sherrod's death, Snoop musing on how no one "deserves" to die—and Marlo roaring at the discovery that Omar had been calling him out on the street. For much of the past two seasons, Marlo has been a cipher: Snoop and Chris did so much of his dirty work that it was hard to understand why he was in charge, instead of them. The jail scene clears up any doubt. As Marlo rages at the idea that his name was mocked in the street, he reminds us of the violent intensity that brought him to power. "Let them know Marlo step to any motherfucker. … My name is my name!"

("My name is my name" could, in fact, have been the episode's title, what with the Rumpelstilskin-like excitement when Bubbles reclaims his given name, Reginald, and finally faces up to his sorrow about Sherrod.)

Do you still think Marlo's going down? I'm not cashing in my chips just yet, but I think The Wire's pointing toward exactly the ending I've expected, given the show's neo-Marxist philosophy: The only redemption will be individual. We've seen Namond's salvation; Kima and Bunk will retain their honor; and Bubbles will save himself. But at the institutional level, everything will get worse: Marlo and crew will walk free because of the corrupted investigation, and they will reclaim the streets.

You look good, boy.

David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 9: The Saddest Scene The Wire Has Ever Given Us

Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 6:46 AM ET

DISCUSS

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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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