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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 9: Reassessing Marlo's Putative Punk-Assedness

Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 10:28 AM ET

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

Tristan Wilds in The Wire

David,

Your hair look fine. Now can I just shoot you in the head already?

Snoop's death didn't mark the coldest killing in last night's episode. Honors go to Kima, who just committed a multiple homicide—McNulty, Lester, and maybe even Bunk, who knew what was going on but said nothing. Maybe he wriggles out of this, but I'm not so sure. And by the way, I am, generally speaking, pro-snitching in the matter of official police misconduct, but Kima's testing my beliefs.

Snoop's murder didn't make perfect dramatic sense to me, but this may be because I was hoping to see her character spun off to a new, network-television sitcom. Something based on the Gilmore Girls model but with more Glocks.

I didn't see her death coming, either, to tell you the truth, and I should take this moment to revise and amend my previous comments concerning Marlo and the potential consequences of his putative punk-assedness. My belief that we would soon see Marlo's demise was predicated on an assumption (and you remember, of course, what Felix Unger said about assuming?) that Marlo knew that Omar was calling him out and that, even with said knowledge, he refused to meet Omar in the street. It turns out now that Marlo didn't know he was being called out. This raises questions about his leadership ability (Chris and company have obviously built a Bush-like cocoon around the boss) but not about his, shall we say, manhood.

Clearly—I'm going to regret that clearly, I'm sure, come the 10^th and final episode—Marlo triumphs in the end, just as you Marxists would have it. Levy will discover the illegal wiretap and the Stanfield crew will be sprung from jail just as Lester is led inside. (McNulty, I assume, throws himself off a bridge.)

I found Michael's plight as moving as you did (I actually thought his parting from his little brother was the saddest thing I saw, sadder than his breakup with Dukie), but I thought the Bubbles-up-Dukie-down pairing a little too neatly TV-ish. Not that I don't root for Bubbles, mind you. I have a heart.

By the way, and I know you hate talking about this, but did you notice that the newspaper subplot has become even more ridiculous, as if that's possible? Gus hands off the investigation of Templeton to a presumably sophisticated, just-returned-home foreign correspondent who promises discretion and then immediately asks the library for everything Templeton has ever written!

It is simply impossible to believe that the reporters and editors of the actual Baltimore Sun, today or 13 years ago, when David Simon left journalism, could be so comprehensively stupid.

Best,
Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 9: Reassessing Marlo's Putative Punk-Assedness

Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 10:28 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

(To reply, click here.)

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