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The Wire Final Season

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from: Emily Bazelon
to: Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and Slate staff

Week 10: What About Cutty?

Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2008, at 2:39 PM ET

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

Hey, everyone,

A few weeks ago, I elbowed my way into David and Jeff's hugely enjoyable conversation to express my frustration that, earlier this season, David Simon seemed to be messing with the moral universe he'd created. McNulty and Lester's crazy made-up serial killings seemed to suggest that the mavericks were no longer the good guys—instead, they'd gone so far beyond the bounds that they'd become a force of destruction. Which felt to me like Simon eating his young.

Now, at season's end, the world of The Wire has righted itself. Bunk, Kima, and Sydnor are left to represent the best of the police department—knowing, disillusioned, but also honorable. McNulty and Lester are partially redeemed, which feels like the right amount. They're making nice to the women who love them again. Lester ensnared Maury Levy, which salvages some of the Stanfield drug case and gave Rhonda that great scene of Levy smack down. McNulty refused to do Rawls' bidding and pin six murders on a crazy guy who'd done two, and then, of course, he went to rescue the poor homeless man he'd shipped out of town. And Lester and McNulty have made their peace with Kima, and she with them. Melinda, I'm sure you're right that cops rarely forgive other cops who turn them in, but, like you, I loved that scene of mutual forgiveness outside the bar. Especially because McNulty left instead of getting drunk and getting laid. At the same time, I was also with Rhonda when she told Lester that it was on him, not her, that Marlo Stanfield would walk. Who says David Simon doesn't write great women characters?

I also appreciated the last episode for saving the Sun plot for me, at least a bit. In moving from St. Gus and Vile Scott to reporter Michael Fletcher (presumably named for this real and accomplished Washington Post reporter), Simon partially redeemed his and our tribe in the same way he did McNulty and Lester. (Ah, more parallelism.) When Fletcher gives Bubbles the story he's written about him with the promise to pull it if Bubbles doesn't want it to run, my heart embarrassingly swelled. I don't want to hazard a guess about whether there are more lying slime journalists or more who do their job with Fletcher's compassion, but I was relieved that this good guy (plus Alma) got to make an appearance. Which isn't to say that Fletcher would have given Bubs the out if he'd really thought his source—and three weeks of work—were about to go out the window. That felt real, too.

As a Sopranos fan who could only appreciate its ambiguous ending after its brilliance had been explained to me three times, I exit The Wire entirely satisfied. With one tiny exception: What happened to Cutty? As the ex-con-turned-neighborhood-do-gooder, he deserved a cameo in that montage ending. Since he didn't get it, I'll imagine one for him: He's at his boxing gym, urging on a couple of hoppers, while a nice-looking woman his own age smiles on them all.

Emily

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from: Emily Bazelon
to: Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and Slate staff

Week 10: What About Cutty?

Posted Tuesday, March 11, 2008, at 2:39 PM ET
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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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