Black Monday S1 Ep 6: 122

from Vibe.com

https://www.vibe.com/index.php/2019/03/black-monday-episode-6-122-recap

Erin Simkin/SHOWTIME

'Black Monday' Puts Self-Identity Against The Truth: Episode 6 Recap

March 5, 2019 - 11:59 pm by Keith Nelson Jr.

Blair and Keith question their sexual identity while Mo puts on an engagement party for Blair and Tiffany, putting a number of relationships in jeopardy.

On Black Monday, identity can either make or break you. In order to mask his homosexuality in Jammer Group's aggressively heterosexual environment, Keith buys his colleagues prostitutes and refers to Dawn as “Rodney Dangertits.” On this week’s episode, Black Monday plays with the sexual identity of two of its main characters: Keith and Blair.

Blair’s sexuality appeared to be clearly heterosexual in this season's first five episodes. But, at the end of episode “243” and much to his bemusement, Keith confronted Blair about accusing him of being gay and how interesting it is given it came from Blair. In this week’s episode, Blair uses his relationship with Tiffany to prove to Keith that he’s not gay and has another climactic kiss, further complicating his sexual identity. But, the handling of Keith’s own sexual confusion was handled a bit oddly by the show’s writers.

Episode “122” takes place 121 days after last week’s episode when the first intimation of Blair’s homosexuality was made, and even that was vaguely memorable. Yet, in the first five minutes of this week’s episode, Blair’s already  willing to change his favorite color from pink to “gunmetal grey or camo” and gets flustered when Tiffany mispronunciation of Uruguay sounds like “you’re a gay.” Perhaps the Black Monday writers wanted to show how the seed of doubt Keith planted in Blair’s head grew into a full-fledged paranoia over the last four months. While that would be a rather clever use of the time jump between episodes, this felt a bit more contrived.

The best message on identity from this episode actually involves a toupée and vomit. In the episode, Keith is reluctant to go to a predominantly gay aftershow party with his boyfriend in fear of being seen by people that may know him. Keith is willing to make himself violently sick to the point of projectile vomiting in order for him to skip his family trip and see his boyfriend’s show; He can’t simply go to the party. When he finally arrives at the party near the end of the episode, he’s no longer donning his signature toupée and decides to pierce his ears to fit in. Doing this allowed him to not only be less recognizable but also freer; a very profound take on identity.

Unfortunately, it’s this newfound sexual freedom that could cost him his legal freedom as more people know his secrets.

Erin Simkin/SHOWTIME

The Language of Secrets

Whether it’s Dawn’s husband secretly poking holes in condoms after voicing his desire to have a child in previous episodes or Blair questioning his relationship with Tiffany after his kiss with Dawn in the past, Black Monday characters in this episode wear their secrets on their skin. The escort Mo brought as his date to Tiffany and Blair’s engagement party knows Tiffany’s father’s name even though they presumably just met.
Black Monday used the language of secrets in previous episodes.

In episode “364” Keith’s former colleague Ty told Blair that Keith quit because he sucked, which made Keith visibly uncomfortable. Later in the episode, Ty told Blair he was talking about Keith quitting due to Ty finding him performing oral sex on another man. Secrets being such a foundation of the Black Monday world means the writers can give seemingly unimportant characters with wild connections to the main cast of characters.

But, the fun in Black Monday starts and ends with its leading man, Mo.

Erin Simkin/SHOWTIME

The Stench of Mo

The 1987 Wall Street crash gives the show its purpose, but Mo is Black Monday. His vulgarities and amorality permeate almost every character on the show. This episode was a 29-minute example of the good and bad of having Mo’s stench on you. Dawn rationalizes not having sex with her husband without a condom by stating “I bought a bunch of Trojan stock, so I’d kind of be working against myself.” This mirrors Mo’s joke in episode “364” about keeping stocks in condoms even as former First Lady Nancy Regan downplayed the AIDS epidemic as he knew AIDS was going to be around for a while. These little Easter eggs are what keeps the Black Monday universe believable.

Mo’s stench can also linger in the funniest ways. The episode starts with Jammer Group traders Yassir X (Yassir Lester) and Wayne waking up in a hotel room to a dead body after a wild night of drug binging. At the end of the episode,  the pair find out it was all a prank schemed by Mo. Yes, Mo waited nearly six months since Wayne’s LaGuardia Spread risk in episode “295” to execute a complex and dangerous revenge plan, which didn’t take into account factors he couldn’t control like Wayne pointing a gun to his head and pulling the trigger to avoid his arrest. But, for a guy like Mo who lives in a God complex, this makes more sense than it should any regular human being.

We’ll have to wait until next week’s episode to see if Mo’s stench wears off on Dawn or suffocate the last bits of their relationship’s life.

The Wire S5 Ep 7: Took

from Slant Magazine

https://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/the-wire-mondays-season-5-ep-7-took/

The Wire Recap: Season 5, Episode 7, “Took”

Of course, McNulty won’t evade punishment if Bunk has anything to say about it.

February 18, 2008


By Andrew Johnston
Photo: HBO

“They don’t teach it in law school.”—Pearlman

The Wire is usually pretty good about not talking down to its audience, but early in “Took” there’s a scene in which Lester Freamon goes over the whole scheme involving the tap on Marlo’s cellphone and that on the phone of the “homeless killer” in which he and McNulty are pretty much telling each other stuff they already know. It’s a little annoying, and while I’m generally a big fan of Richard Price, I think it’s a scene that other Wire writers (David Simon and Edward Burns, for example) might not have made so obvious: Price is perhaps more used to writing for a general audience than for a cadre of obsessives; here he seems to be erring on the side of safety. It’s the one scene that feels like a clunker in an otherwise fine episode that ratchets the momentum up even further, yet manages to end on one of the most peaceful and introspective moments in the series’s run.

When McNulty calls Scott Templeton to fuck with the reporter’s head, pretending to be the killer he’s invented, it seems the game may be over for a second when Homicide’s Vernon Holley intercepts the call. It’s soon clear that McNulty intended for the call to be recorded at homicide; even so, it’s the first of several moments in “Took” in which the house of cards seems about to crash down on McNulty. At the Sun, when he meets with Klebanow, Haynes and Templeton once again, McNulty is peppered with questions from Haynes that leave him scrambling for quick answers and suggest that the city editor would see right through McNulty if he wasn’t so distracted by his problems with Templeton. When McNulty and Rhonda Pearlman meet with Judge Phelan again, the jurist observes that the killings coincided with the tough-on-crime governor gearing up for a reelection campaign. “You may want to check the governor’s alibi,” Phelan says, making a wisecrack which reminds us that there are a lot of smart folks in Simon’s Baltimore, and for every three people who accept McNulty’s scam at face value, there’s going to be at least one who can immediately tell that things don’t add up.


Clay Davis has always seemed like someone whose success is due more to his mouth than his brain, but honey-tongued loquaciousness means little without smarts to back it up. Badly hurting for cash, Davis shows his intelligence by persuading one of Baltimore’s top attorneys to represent him for well below his usual fee, pointing out that the publicity he’d get for representing Davis would be worth well more than his billable hours. Davis’s trial is one of a number of scenes in “Took” that feel like “The Wire’s greatest hits”: The limo driver’s testimony (and, to a lesser extent, that of Davis himself) echoes Omar’s moment on the stand in season two, one of the funniest scenes in the series’s history.

Even though Davis makes a fool of himself on camera by quoting from “Pro-mee-thus” Bound by “Uh-silly-us”, there are only 12 people he really has to impress, and they presumably lack access to TV. The limo driver mentions misdeeds of Davis’ that fall outside the purview of the trial, as the judge is quick to point out; but by keeping the case’s focus ultra-tight, she makes it that much easier for Davis to work his magic on the jury (comprised of 10 African-Americans, one Asian woman and one white man). The incident garners Quote of the Week honors for Pearlman; her observation that they don’t teach this shit in law school is nothing if not an understatement.


McNulty’s success with the ruse, meanwhile, certainly seems to be going to his head, as he uses the case as an opportunity to become everybody’s new best friend, throwing handfuls of overtime at his fellow cops in a manner that recalls Clarence “Bumpy” Johnson throwing Thanksgiving turkeys to a Harlem crowd at the beginning of American Gangster. McNulty is so transparently happy to be able to play the role of OT Fairy for his fellow officers that you have to think it’s only a matter of time until they realize how suspiciously unshaken he is by the supposedly disturbing case he’s investigating.

Of course, McNulty won’t evade punishment if Bunk has anything to say about it. Everyone’s favorite Homicide curmudgeon repeatedly gets in the grills of McNulty and Freamon this week, railing harder than ever against them for diverting resources from real cases such as Kima’s triple homicide (which, via an informant’s leak, she has tied to Chris and Snoop). After Carver hauls in Michael Lee (who, in another reference to episodes past, gets to deliver McNulty’s immortal “What the fuck did I do?” line), Bunk, following up on his re-investigation of the rowhouse murders, presses Michael to give up Snoop and Chris. Later, back on the street, Michael finds himself in the middle of Omar’s latest attempt to intimidate Marlo into a public confrontation. In the eyes of most, Michael is still “just a kid”, but he knows all too well that he’s descended far enough down the dark path for Omar to have no qualms about killing him, and he thanks his lucky stars (as well he should) that he wasn’t recognized from the shoot-out at Monk’s apartment.

One might argue that the scene in which Gus Haynes gives a bunch of pointers to Sun reporter Mike Fletcher is a time-waster—Gus’s credibility as a journalist has been long-since proven with the audience—but it’s still nice to see evidence of how good he is at what he does. His insights into Fletcher’s story and what the younger reporter needs to do to hone his craft lend extra credence to his sincere praise for Scott Templeton last week—as well as to his criticism of Templeton for going too far this time with his “To Walk Among Them” story, which makes the homeless sound like extraterrestrials.

Haynes’ level-headed Sun colleague Rebecca Corbett, who has also previously displayed suspicion of Templeton, again takes Haynes’ side, but that means nothing when Klebanow decides to pull rank and run Templeton’s story unchanged. While most of this week’s allusions to the past harken back to earlier seasons, this week we get parallels to scenes from just a week ago as Fletcher spends time with the homeless (and the non-homeless Bubbles) himself, in what seems like an honest, “this-is-the-right-way-to-do-it” version of Templeton’s night under the freeway. If Templeton had interacted with Bubbles, the beloved addict would surely have been reduced to a lurid stereotype in the resulting story; Fletcher, one expects, is much more likely to treat him as a human being.


In the past, there have been amusing parallels between McNulty and Kima as, once the pressure of the job ruptured her relationship with her partner Cheryl, Kima herself took to drinking and skirt-chasing. This week, Kima reenacts one of the all-time classic Wire scenes when, upon getting to spend a weekend with her son, she buys an Ikea bed and has a hell of a time trying to cobble the damn thing together while under the influence, a task that severely tried McNulty’s patience when he took a shot at it back in (I believe) season two. Kima’s struggle to turn a pile of particle board into something usable gives way to a wonderful final scene in which she lulls her son to sleep with a ghetto version of Goodnight Moon. It’s a peaceful, deeply moving moment—and, given the pace of events, probably one of the last tranquil moments that anyone on The Wire will experience for quite some time.

A couple of observations: Price and Simon throw a huge spanner into the works as far as continuity geeks like me are concerned by giving a cameo to none other than Richard Belzer, Detective Munch of Homicide: Life on the Street and Law & Order: SVU fame. Although Belzer identifies himself as a former bar owner—and Munch co-owned a tavern on Homicide—I’m inclined to think he’s not reprising the role. For one thing, he shares the frame with Clark Johnson, who of course played one of Munch’s co-workers, Meldrick Lewis, on Homicide.


For another, if he playing Munch, he’d theoretically be connecting The Wire to the same continuity as a vast array of other series, few of which seem like they take place in the same world: In addition to Homicide and SVU, Munch has appeared on the original L&O, The X-Files, The Beat (UPN’s short-lived 2000 series about uniformed NYPD patrolmen, starring Mark Ruffalo), L&O Trial by Jury, Paris enquetes criminells (the French remake of L&O Criminal Intent, starring Vincent Perez as a Gallic version of Vincent D’Onofrio’s character) and even Arrested Development and Sesame Street! Through various other crossovers, these series can be linked to The Simpsons, Chicago Hope and the ultimate crossover magnet, St. Elsewhere, which, via the notorious Tommy Westphall Hypothesis, theoretically takes place in the same universe as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seinfeld, Walker Texas Ranger, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, I Love Lucy and Mayberry RFD. Given some contradictions between Homicide and SVU where Munch’s biography is concerned, it’s possible to argue that the Homicide Munch and the L&O Munch are different characters in different universes (even though the Homicide Munch has appeared on the L&O shows, one of whom grew up in Pikesville, MD, the other in New York. Yes, it’s enough to make your head spin, but such is the nature of obsessive TV fandom. In any event, my position is that The Wire takes place in its own universe, with no ties to Homicide or any other series.

The lawyer representing Clay Davis, Billy Murphy, is a real-life defense attorney, one of the city’s finest, as well as a member of the city’s black aristocracy (his great-grandfather founded the Baltimore Afro-American, a legendary black newspaper that’s popped up in the background on The Wire once or twice). In the biography on his website, Murphy describes a philosophy that leaves no doubt as to why he was Clay Davis’ first choice: “I look at it this way—a trial lawyer who isn’t able to use the full spectrum of techniques has arbitrarily limited himself. If a trial judge pushes you, you’ve got to push back. I used to say that my client is a child of God and everybody else is a son of a bitch.”


For more recaps of The Wire, click here.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

The Umbrella Academy S1 Ep4: Man On The Moon

from Vulture.com

https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/the-umbrella-academy-recap-season-1-episode-4.html

The Umbrella Academy Recap: Tick, Tock
By Scott Meslow

Photo: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix

There’s a lot of weirdness baked into The Umbrella Academy. (This is, after all, a series that includes a chimpanzee butler.) The premise is wild and elastic enough that you could introduce pretty much anything without stretching plausibility too far.

So why is the show spending so much time on the hoariest of ’90s action tropes: a pair of quippy, quirky, sadistic assassins in matching black suits? I like both Mary J. Blige and Cameron Britton, who are doing their best with this material — but in 2019, I’m not sure there’s a fresh way to do Tarantino–lite. And if there is a fresh way, The Umbrella Academy certainly hasn’t found it yet.


So it’s not exactly a good thing that “Man on the Moon” spends so much time with Hazel and Cha-Cha as they try to get Klaus to crack. There’s some decent dark humor to be mined from the situation, as Hazel and Cha-Cha torture, strangle, and waterboard Klaus to his evident kinky delight. But it eventually turns out the real torture is the baggage from Klaus’s various addictions as he sobers up. Withdrawal would be bad enough — but for Klaus, being sober also means all the ghosts come out.

So the episode is a race against time: Can Klaus escape before his sobriety swallows him up? In the end, the solution comes from his superpowers: By interrogating the ghosts that appear — who turn out to be the victims from Hazel and Cha-Cha’s previous missions — Klaus is able to pass along accurate details about past murders to his torturers, freaking them out and sowing discord about old conflicts.

But unbeknownst to everyone in the motel room, there’s another ticking clock at play: Detective Patch, who follows a string of clues to Hazel and Cha-Cha’s room. It’s painfully obvious that this will end in Patch’s death — and sure enough, it does — but the interruption gives Klaus enough time to sneak away, grabbing the secret briefcase Hazel stashed in the vents on his way out the door.

So Klaus the cockroach lives another day — but at what cost? Patch’s death will be felt most deeply by Diego; between Patch and his mother, Diego has endured a lot of loss lately. But Patch’s death, and Diego’s subsequent discovery of her body, feels like it should land with more impact than it does. The Diego-Patch relationship was never The Umbrella Academy’s strongest. Basically everything we knew about Patch was tied to her relationship with Diego — and for all the superhero cliches this show has sidestepped, I’m not thrilled to see yet another story about a vigilante motivated by the murder of a woman he loved.

But there’s also a second wrinkle to this twist that could, at least theoretically, lead to some interesting new complications. When he found Patch’s body, Diego wasn’t particularly careful about whether he was leaving fingerprints behind. Patch’s fellow officers know that Diego is a violent vigilante, and that he and Patch dated until she dumped him. Until now, Diego has been able to do all his crime-fighting with the tacit approval (or at least the blind eye) of the police force. But there’s a very real chance they’re about to hunt him down.

And Diego isn’t the only Hargreeves kid facing an unexpected threat. While Klaus is getting tortured, Vanya is embarking on her sweetly awkward romance with Leonard. It’s been obvious from the moment Leonard was introduced that he had some kind of ulterior motive, so I’m relieved that, by the end of episode four, The Umbrella Academy has finally dropped the pretense and revealed him to be a bad guy. The warning signs start with Leonard going into Vanya’s apartment — ostensibly to leave her a bouquet — and acting kind of sketchy and aggro when Allison catches him and asks what he’s doing. If that didn’t make things clear enough, the episode ends with Leonard doing something unequivocally bad: dumping Vanya’s pills down the drain.

So what’s Leonard’s deal, anyway? Is he just using Vanya to get to her superpowered siblings, or does he actually want something from her specifically? How much does he know about Vanya’s past? (After all, she wrote a whole book about it.) Is Leonard working for himself, or is he operating at the behest of a different villain? And either way, what’s his endgame here?

The superhero genre has long been propped up on a rich bed of crazy fan theories, so it’s probably past time for me to toss one out. After four episodes, here’s where I suspect The Umbrella Academy is going: Vanya has been on drugs since childhood because her superpowers are out of control, and the drugs can suppress them. Hargreeves only told her she didn’t have powers because he was afraid of what she could do if she discovered them. And once the pills wear off and the superpowers return — in, I don’t know, about six days — Vanya will have exactly the kind of raw strength that could destroy the whole world.

Raindrops

• On a break from all the torturing, Cha-Cha and Hazel take some of Klaus’s drugs and burn down the Meritech building. Unfortunately, this also derails Five’s most promising lead about what causes the apocalypse; in despair, Five storms off and gets rip-roaring drunk.

• In a pair of flashbacks, we get more evidence about how Dr. Hargreeves treated his children. Luther ended up with the gorilla body after his father sent him on a dangerous mission alone; he came back so badly wounded that an experimental serum was the only thing that saved his life (causing his physical transformation as a side effect). The other flashback shows Dr. Hargreeves locking the adolescent Klaus in a crypt, refusing to let him out until he stops being afraid of the ghosts that appear to him.

• Five alludes to killing untold numbers of people, even referring to himself as “the Four Horsemen” — but as far as we’ve seen, he ran straight from the Umbrella Academy dinner table into a future where every other person on Earth was dead. What part of his story are we missing here?

• The Umbrella Academy soundtrack has largely stuck to older songs, but episode four opens with Morcheeba’s “Blood Like Lemonade,” from the 2010 album of the same name.

• Diego discovers Patch’s body to the tune of David Gray’s “This Year’s Love.” Kind of a weird choice — but it does have a lyric about cutting like a knife, so hey, maybe it’s perfect for Diego.

• A celebrity tabloid that reveals Allison’s estranged family is doing “just fine” also teases an article titled “How I Became a Star: Ahn Mur Tells All.” That’s a direct reference to assistant art director Ahn Mur (and a perk of working in the art department)!

• Another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it magazine on the rack: Whippet Snippets, which seems to be devoted solely to the dogs of the same name.

Want to know what’s new on Netflix? Check out Vulture’s streaming guide.

The Wire S5 Ep 6: The Dickensian Aspect

from Slant Magazine

https://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/the-wire-mondays-season-5-ep-6-the-dickensian-aspect/

The Wire Recap: Season 5, Episode 6, “The Dickensian Aspect”

With each successive episode of The Wire’s final season, it seems, fans have become more firmly split into two camps.

on February 11, 2008

By Andrew Johnston
Photo: HBO



“If you have a problem with this, I understand completely.”—Lester Freamon

With each successive episode of The Wire’s final season, it seems, fans have become more firmly split into two camps: Those who think the show is as fine as ever, and those who are frustrated by what they perceive as a mounting lack of realism. Beginning with “The Dickensian Aspect”, I expect that schism to start growing even wider. For my part, I’m with the “same as it ever was” gang and am caught up in the story David Simon is telling, which—if the sixth and seventh episodes of the season are any guide of what to expect from the last three—will grow increasingly satirical by the week.

For a couple of seconds, Simon fucks with our heads by teasingly suggesting that Omar’s body is being dragged away from the apartment building from which he leapt in “React Quotes”. When we see Marlo’s footsoldiers pounding the pavement and canvassing E.R.s, however, it’s soon apparent that Omar indeed made his escape. “That’s some Spider-Man shit there,” Marlo says to Chris as he looks up at the balcony. “We missed our shot. Now he’s gonna be at us.”


Marlo doesn’t seem especially pissed at Chris, which is perfectly logical—nobody can deny that Chris, Snoop and Michael did everything they could have. Exactly how Omar survived his leap is not made clear, but his broken leg suggests he hit the ground rather than grabbing onto another balcony or windowsill and pulling himself inside the building. Unless he was able to lock that storage room from the inside, though, it seems like a big stretch for Marlo’s lackeys to have skipped it in their search (he’s also in there an awful long time before he bandages his leg and hobbles off on his ertzatz crutch).


Down at Homicide, Bunk is more livid than ever about McNulty’s scam after his trip to the Sun in the previous episode. “That asshole’s making up his own shit,” a smiling McNulty says of Templeton. But while McNulty is pleased as can be at how successful his big lie has become, he gets the first inkling that things have gone too far when he decides to put more pressure on the top brass by staging another “killing” and learns that because of the hype around the serial killer, any DOA call to Homicide (who, as we’ve seen, check out DOAs that are obvious non-murders, in order to eliminate the possibility) results in an instant media circus. In response, he comes up with a way to stage a killing without a dead body.


Seeing a drooling, spastic homeless man by the side of the road, McNulty pulls him off the street and slips $100 in his jacket (on the basis that it can’t be a kidnapping if the “victim” gets paid) and takes him off to see Lester, with whom he arranges the next stage of the con: Shooting footage of the bum with the camera on a clean cellphone, then dragging the guy down I-95 to Richmond and parking him in a shelter there along with an ID card saying he’s from Cleveland rather than Baltimore. It’s crazy, sure, but not any less crazy than anything else McNulty has done (still, I wish they’d come up with a more subtle way to let us know McNulty was in Richmond rather than slapping the city’s name all over the door of the shelter). At the Sun, Whiting and Klebanow are predictably as pleased as can be with Templeton’s latest article about the serial killer, and Templeton is so busy eating it up that he’s caught off guard when Whiting asks him what’s next. He comes up with the idea of spending a night with the homeless, a gimmick he hopes will fulfill Whiting’s wish for coverage that reflects “the Dickensian aspect of the homeless”.

Very little of what Templeton experiences can be described as “Dickensian”, but the adjective certainly fits the episode as a whole as connections are drawn between scattered plotlines in ways that some may find credibility-stretching, but which are appropriate if you’re one of those (like me) who has always seen the series in literary terms and believes a certain amount of license comes with the territory. One might argue that the most Dickensian moment in the entire series comes when Bunk, in his back-to-square-one investigation of the rowhouse bodies, is led to the grim institution that is now home to Randy Wagstaff, who he pledges not to arrest out of respect for “that crazy motherfucker Pryzbelewski.” Last season, Randy was the most playful and charming of the four boys we spent the year with, and the one who best fit the profile of a lovable street kid out of Oliver Twist. A year later, he’s grown far more than Michael or Dukie, and his spirit has been broken by his time in the foster home, perhaps because he feels abandoned by Carver. “Why don’t you promise to get me out of here?,” he asks Bunk. “That’s what y’all do, ain’t it—lie to dumb-ass niggas?” As Randy barges out of the room, he ferociously body-checks another kid on the stairs, giving us a grim example of the behavior he’s had to adopt in order to survive.



Bunk’s investigation next leads him to Michael’s mother, who at last clues him in to the connection between her son and Marlo and Chris, giving Bunk the first real lead on the rowhouse bodies in ages. Now that he’s starting to get enough evidence to make the case, a new question comes to the forefront: Can he do so before McNulty’s scam is exposed?

Lester’s willingness to go along with McNulty has been criticized by some viewers, and the scene in which he tells Sydnor about the wire tap on Marlo kinda-sorta plays like an attempt at preemptively addressing some of that criticism with the line about how he’s run “out of time and patience”. McNulty is pleased to have Sydnor in the loop on the Marlo front, but he’s not quite ready to trust him with the truth about the serial killer, though Sydnor’s query about ties between Marlo and the homeless killer means McNulty may soon have no choice.


A lot of people expected the New Day Co-Op to bite the dust last week, but Joe’s organization managed to get a brief reprieve. As the members convene, we learn that Marlo, somewhat surprisingly, isn’t yet their number one suspect in Joe’s death. Whoever has the hook-up, they agree, will be the one who offed Joe. When Marlo takes charge of the meeting, he shocks everyone by claiming responsibility for the deaths of Joe and Hungry Man. It’s soon clear he’s being entirely disengenuous, as he goes on to explain that he’s responsible because he inadvertently led Omar to them. He then puts a stiff bounty on Omar’s head: $100,000 if he’s captured alive, $250K if he’s dead. Usually, of course, it’s a live capture that yields a bigger reward, but Marlo is no fool—he’s a lot, lot safer having someone else kill Omar,he’s a lot, lot safer having someone else kill Omar for him if at all possible. However, right after Marlo dangles the prize money in front of Baltimore’s assembled dealers, he foolishly alienates them by announcing a spike in the cost of his package. Marlo may have youth and power on his side, but the other dealers have numbers and experience on theirs, and Marlo’s completely out to lunch if he’s not taking the possibility of mutiny into account.


Omar reveals something of a new side of himself as he makes his next moves: He’s never seemed to show much awareness of his status as a street legend, but here, he shrewdly takes advantage of his rep to start boxing Marlo in. By chipping away at Marlo with small raids, he ensures that as many people as possible hear his message—“Omar thinks Marlo is too much of a pussy to face him in the street”—thereby giving Marlo no choice but to personally participate in a standoff. If Marlo doesn’t, he’ll have no credibility left and will surely be pushed aside by his rivals, resulting in him going down in history as the William Henry Harrison (or Pope John Paul I) of Baltimore crimelords. Even before Omar blows up the SUV, Marlo’s crew are quaking in their boots—Chris is terrified of Omar going after his family, completely forgetting about Omar’s well-known policy of sparing civilians at all times.


I look forward to reading reactions to “The Dickensian Aspect” from commentators who’ve been dogpiling on the Sun storyline, since the newspaper action has never been as even-handed as it is this week. Yes, Gus is given more reason than ever to suspect that Templeton is up to no good as another lie is revealed: When reporting the story about the woman who died of the seafood allergy a few episodes back, Templeton allowed himself to be duped by her sister, issuing an appeal for scholarship dotations for the dead woman’s kids, all of which went straight into the dead woman’s pocket. On the other hand, despite all the reasons we’re given to hate Templeton this week (including his self-congratulatory appearance on Nancy Grace’s show), his encounter with the homeless veteran allows us to see that he’s actually capable of being an excellent writer and reporter when he actually does his job and refrains from just making shit up.

The biggest surprise—and the biggest mystery—is the issue of Prop Joe’s leak within the State’s Attorney’s office. Joe had made cryptic hints in the past which suggested that he had an inside source; now that he’s dead and the leak is confirmed, it’ll be interesting to see where the plot goes given the near-complete lack of suspects—before this season, Rhonda Pearlman is pretty much the only character we’ve met from the SA’s office, and chances are good it isn’t her. Rupert Bond expresses dismay at the leak and seems initially confused when Pearlman shows him the evidence, but given the shortage of viable candidates for the mole, he can’t be ruled out. I don’t think it’s inconceivable that the leak is someone we haven’t met yet—some people might think that was “cheating”, but I don’t.

However, it’s worth noting that at some point in the last couple of days, HBO added a character from the SA’s office to the roster of “The Law” characters on the network’s website: Grad Jury Prosecutor Gary DiPasquale, played by Gary D’Addario. As an older white guy (he’s at least 55), D’Addario isn’t Suspect #1, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned from The Wire it’s that no one is beyond corruption. (Also added to “The Law” roster: Detective Vernon Holley, played by Brian Anthony Wilson, and Officer Michael Santangelo, played by Michael Salconi. Added to “The Paper” over the weekend was Sun Regional Affairs editor Rebecca Corbett, played by Kara Quick.)

Finally, I was disappointed to find Simon & Co. screwing up series continuity—and demanding a lot of fanwanking from viewers who want everything to make sense—by providing a chronology of recent Baltimore mayors that leaves no room for Clarence Royce. When Carcetti is dedicating the construction project, he mentions a chain of predecessors that includes Thomas L. J. D’Alesandro III (mayor from 1967-71 and the older brother of current Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi; he’s appeared as himself in a cameo in—I believe—Season 4), William Donald Schaefer (1971-87), Kurt L. Schmoke (1987-1999; he’s also been on The Wire) and Martin J. O’Malley (1999-2007). The problem, of course, is that O’Malley is the real-life model for Carcetti (much as Nerese Campbell is an apparent counterpart to present real-life mayor Sheila Dixon), and The Wire’s fictional timeline, including several years with Royce as Mayor, began in 2002.


Fanwanking this one isn’t actually that hard—if the IMDB is correct that Royce made his first appearance in the first episode of Season 3, it’s possible that on Earth-Wire, O’Malley was mayor from 1999-2003 and ran for governor four years earlier than he did in reality. However, the very existence of O’Malley in the world of The Wire is problematic since during seasons three and four we’re repeatedly told what a big deal it is for a white guy to become mayor at this point in time. It’s stuff like this that make one realize how smart Aaron Sorkin was when he initiated a policy on The West Wing (a policy scuttled scuttled by his successors) of never mentioning a real-life president after Dwight Eisenhower.


For more recaps of The Wire, click here.


This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

The Wire S5 Ep 5: React Quotes

from Slant Magazine

https://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/the-wire-mondays-season-5-ep-5-react-quotes/

The Wire Recap: Season 5, Episode 5, “React Quotes”

I doubt many folks would disagree if I described the narrative momentum of The Wire’s fifth season as freight train-esque.

on February 4, 2008


By Andrew Johnston
Photo: HBO



“Just ’cause they’re in the street doesn’t mean they lack opinions”—Haynes

At this point, I doubt many folks would disagree if I described the narrative momentum of The Wire’s fifth season as freight train-esque. “React Quotes” is jam-packed with incident, and while (as the title suggests) much of the action is in response to things that have gone down before, there are just as many new developments which propel us into the second half of the season on a mighty head of steam.

We begin in the park, where Marlo has taken to meeting Vondas at the bench where he and Joe held their conferences in years past. Vondas, ever the pramgatist, says a few words to mourn Joe’s passing before initiating Marlo into his world by giving him a cellphone he can use for an apparently secure means of communication. (Surveillance ops long since stopped being the central theme, or even the central organizing device, of The Wire, but it’s still odd to have a show with that name where there isn’t some wire-tapping going on, and a good bit of what follows is devoted to once again turning Lester Freamon into someone who spends way too many hours in a dank storage room filled with electronic equipment.) Taking over that spot on the bench next to Vondas is almost enough to cement Marlo’s status as top dog, but his ascent won’t be complete until Omar has been dispensed with. Last season, Marlo’s rise through the ranks was in many ways invisible, as those who stood in his way vanished without a trace, their bodies only turning up months later in the rowhouses. This year, Chris and Snoop have been leaving their victims where they fall, as a means of setting an example of what those who cross Marlo can expect. Kima found all of the corpses at Junebug’s house in situ, and as Alma tells Gus Haynes at the Sun, one Joe Stewart was found dead in his living room, while the body of one Nathaniel Mantz was found in a back alley garage (some of the folks discussing the episode in Alan Sepinwall’s On Demand thread speculated that the third victim, the domestic homicide, was Bodie’s grandmother, but I heard the last name as “Bogusz,” not “Broadus”, and apparently the HBO closed-captioner went with “Boguss”). Are Chris and Snoop certain their guns are untraceable, or are they getting sloppy? I’d say the answer lies somewhere in the middle.


This week’s episode was written by David Mills, who adapted David Simon’s The Corner for HBO and who has also written memorable episodes of Homicide and NYPD Blue. This is only his second Wire (following on “Soft Eyes”, Season Four’s second episode), and he has a grand old time playing in Simon and Burns’ sandbox, tossing out line after line of dialogue that is intensely colorful yet always true to character for whomever is saying it. Case in point: Tommy Carcetti. “How does it feel, Clay? Not much fun on the ass end, is it?,” the boy-faced mayor crows as he sees a TV report on the indictment of everyone’s favorite state senator. Norman Wilson, canny as ever, is quick to advise him that “you don’t dance on Clay’s grave until you’re sure the motherfucker’s dead.” A lot could yet go wrong for Rupert Bond and his risky plan to prosecute Davis at the local level, but his show for the cameras is enough to persuade Carcetti that Bond is worth cultivating as a potential heir—because no matter what, he certainly wouldn’t make a worse mayor than Nerese Campbell would.


Earlier, when Chris and Marlo left the park to prepare to hunt Omar, Chris said he needed to go home to say he might not be back for awhile. I expected we were going to see that Chris lives with his mom, but in retrospect I realize that might have been too much of a reprise of the situation with Omar and his grandmother. Instead, it seems, Chris is shacked up with a girlfriend with whom he has two kids. It’s a humanizing touch, to an extent, but it also makes him seem like even more of a monster for being able to come home and be an affectionate dad after a long day of shooting people in the head and covering their corpses in lime.


Chris and Snoop’s next stop is the offices of Maury Levy, where Chris’s behavior suggests that they’ve been committing their crimes while using a car registered in his girlfriend’s names. Levy counsels them to use a car registered to some random schmuck, in addition to providing counsel vis-a-vis Chris’ gun arrest last season. On the way out the door, Marlo gives Levy his cellphone number. Not knowing of the trick Vondas showed Marlo, Levy says that if Marlo is talking on a cell, “Joe gave him to us just in time,” causing him to cackle at the prospect of the massive billings that would result from Marlo’s arrest.

Shortly thereafter, at the Sun, Alma tells Scott Templeton that she has a police source on the serial killer story, and the two go off to meet McNulty. Since the beginning of the season, fans have been predicting that Templeton’s story would converge with McNulty’s, but I expect few predicted exactly how it would happen. McNulty tells them the reporters that the killer is a sexual fetishist, but it’s instantly obvious that he hasn’t thought things through. Grasping at straws as he tries to come up with enough half-assed specifics to sell the story to Alma and Templeton, he basically accepts a how-to-manufacture-a-news-story lesson from Templeton in order to re-purpose the “facts” about the killer in a media-friendly package. The scene’s humor is underplayed to the point of near-invisibility, but it’s there, and it represents some of the first real evidence to back up David Simon’s claim that this will turn out to be The Wire’s most “Strangelove-ian” season.


Having played a role in convincing Burrell to go quietly last week, Nerese now turns her attention to Clay Davis, who comes into her office angrily insisting that he won’t go down alone. As proof that Davis isn’t fucking around, he unleashes something we’ve waited four and a half episodes for: His trademark Sheeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiit, probably the longest such exclamation he’s ever dropped. Davis must have dirt on Campbell, though, otherwise she wouldn’t take such pains to convince him to (if necessary) take a hit and accept a brief prison term so he might fight another day.

If patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel, I’ve always felt that ethnic pride can only be inches behind it. In the tradition of such scandal-plagued real-life politicians as former Newark mayor Sharpe James and former D.C. mayor Marion Berry, Davis teams up with Carcetti’s predecessor, Clarence Royce, to play the Afrocentrism card, arguing that he’s being set up by a white-dominated media that’s determined to keep blacks from attaining too much power. That said, Royce takes pains to tell Davis—through the clenched teeth of a Cheshire-cat smile—that if the state senator can’t retain some degree of plausible deniability regarding corruption charges, he’s well and truly fucked.


After sharing a byline on the first serial killer story, it seems Templeton is out to claim the follow-up for himself. Looking to interview the homeless, he visits the Catholic Workers soup kitchen where Bubbles volunteers, and is nonplussed to discover that most of the folks there aren’t actually homeless but rather “working poor”. This allows for a smooth segue to Bubbles, who we see in the kitchen washing dishes. The shelter supervisor wants Bubs to serve meals instead, and Bubbles declines. After he visits Walon at work, we realize why: Bubs is convinced he has HIV from years of sharing needles and exposing himself to risk god knows how many other ways. Walon takes Bubbles for a test, and the negative result knocks our old friend for a loop. He obviously wanted to be positive—or felt he deserved to be—as punishment for years of sinning in general, and particularly for leaving the hot shot where Sherrod could get it. Realizing he’s not facing a death sentence, I expect the stakes in Bubs’ battle to stay sober will rise as he flounders for something to hold onto, something to live for.



Back at Homicide, McNulty learns from Landsman that the bosses have approved unlimited OT on the homeless case for two detectives—McNulty and Kima. Horrified, Bunk drags McNulty into his “office”, the interrogation room, and says that if his scam is going to take a real detective off a real case (the massacre at Junebug’s house), then McNulty has truly taken his scheme way the fuck too far. McNulty clearly hoped that Freamon would be his partner in the investigation, and he quickly enters damage control mode, telling Kima to use the OT to work the Junebug case while he handles the serial killer on his own for a spell.


You’d think this would be enough to scare McNulty into caution; instead, it just makes him more rash. By this point, Herc has used his access to Levy’s office to obtain Marlo’s cell number, which he passed to Carver who in turn gave it to Freamon. The two detectives come up with their ballsiest scheme yet: Stage a fake call from the killer on a pay phone, use that as an excuse to get a wiretap—and then put Marlo’s number and not the pay phone number on the request form. McNulty goes to the Sun after learning from Landsman that the paper has apparently received a call from the killer. Templeton has just served up a bogus story about a homeless family living in fear of the killer, but that’s not enough for him. His decision to manufacture the call plays out on his face as he’s approached by the tweedy reporter with whom he’s supposed to tag team an education piece, something he clearly anticipates about as much as a colonoscopy. After he says the killer told him to expect a total of 12 victims—and provides a lame response to McNulty’s query about how and why the killer reached him on his cellphone—McNulty picks up the ball and runs with it, saying he was called from the same area as Templeton and that the killer also mentioned the number 12.

Now that Templeton and McNulty are locked into a spiral of codependence that’s more elaborate and intense than either man can imagine, McNulty and Lester proceed with the wiretap, and the episode ends with Lester intercepting a cryptic signal off of Marlo’s phone. In various On Demand threads, I’ve seen a lot of guesses as to the nature of the signal, few of them right—which surprises me, since the trick that Vondas showed Marlo is both incredibly simple and, when you think about it, incredibly obvious. If people are going nuts trying to figure it out, though, who am I to spoil the fun?

You know it’s a good episode when I’m this far into the recap and haven’t even gotten to the stuff sure to spark the most conversation. In scenes sprinkled throughout the episode, Omar mounts a long and meticulous stake out at the apartment of Monk, an underling of Marlo’s who has been set up as a sacrificial pawn. Omar’s long, patient wait parallels Lester’s stake outs, while Marlo’s manipulation of Monk has very strong echoes of the way Nerese wraps Burrell and Clay Davis around her finger. The episode comes to an intense climax—one of the most intense the series has ever given us—when Omar’s plot collides with the one major story line I haven’t yet discussed.

Early in the episode, Dukie gets his ass kicked after a (much younger) corner kid lobs a soda bottle at his head (when Dukie tries to defend himself, older boys are quick to intervene on his assailant’s behalf). This leads Michael to take Dukie to Cutty’s gym for a lesson in self-defense (strangely, it seems Dukie and Cutty somehow never met during season four or during the 15-month gap before season 5). In a hugely poignant scene, Cutty tells Dukie that “not everything come down to how you carry it in the street. I mean, it do come down to that if you’re gonna be in the street, but that’s not the only way to be.” When Dukie replies “out here it is”, Cutty retorts that “the world is bigger than that, at least that’s what they tell me.” So, Dukie asks, “How do you get from here to the rest of the world?” Cutty sighs and says “I wish I knew”.
Cutty tells Dukie that if he’s not suited for the corner or the ring, he has “other skills,” a point also made by Michael in the scene where Dukie asks him for a shooting lesson. The scene shows us just how far he’s traveled down the road to being a merciless motherfucker, nailing targets with impressive skill and telling Dukie, like a sage from a Samurai movie, that one should never draw one’s weapon unless you’re well and truly ready to use it.


Even though Michael, like Cutty, urges Dukie to concentrate on his intellectual abilities, I was terrified at first that Michael drags Dukie into the line of fire—during the epic shoot-out that goes down when Omar storms into Monk’s apartment, falling into the trap that Chris has carefully laid for him, you can briefly see someone taking one of Omar’s bullets in the kneecap. The scene is so shadowy that at first, I couldn’t be entirely sure it wasn’t Dukie. Subsequent inspection, much to my relief, proved otherwise.


Even without Dukie in danger, the shootout is pretty goddamned pulse-pounding. After subjecting us to the deaths of Butchie and Prop Joe these past two weeks, for Omar to fall next would be more than any fan could take. But Omar lives to fight another day, or so it appears—it’s not entirely realistic that he could survive a leap through a window at that height, but neither is such a thing unprecedented. Even if you consider it a stretch, don’t forget that we’re talking about the one character on the series to exude a sort of reality-distortion field that allows him to be more myth than man. Omar has been called the ghetto Batman before; a more accurate comparison might be to Marvel’s Punisher, given Batman’s code against killing and his rejection of firearms, but I wouldn’t want to insult Omar by comparing him to a mook like Frank Castle (in a fight between the two, my money would be on the man with the scar). No matter who Omar reminds you of , there’s no denying that his legend can only grow on the heels of what is surely the most daring escape in a long career filled with close calls.


A few miscellaneous notes: When Clay Davis makes his first radio appearance, he’s visiting an actual African-American talk station in Baltimore, WOLB 1010AM, “where information is power!” (per the slogan on the studio banner). The DJ interviewing Davis is Larry Young, the station’s morning drivetime host. The station on which Davis makes his second radio appearance is unspecified, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a real life station too.

To my relief, Amy Ryan was put to much better use this week in the scene where Beadie visits Bunk at Homicide to talk about McNulty’s travails. In a handful of scenes, we got to do some pretty serious catching up on McNulty’s personal life, via a return visit from his kids (holy cow have they grown!) and his ex wife Elena. Since she only made one appearance last season and it’s been so long since I watched any Wire episodes earlier than that, I’d completely forgotten the character was played by Callie Thorne. After four seasons of watching her torment Denis Leary as Sheila Keefe on Rescue Me, seeing her turn up here was almost as distracting as Dominic West showing up in a loincloth in 300. Almost.


For more recaps of The Wire, click here.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

The Wire S5 Ep 4: Transitions

from Slant Magazine
https://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/the-wire-mondays-season-5-ep-4-transitions/

The Wire Recap: Season 5, Episode 4, “Transitions”

From beginning to end, it’s jammed with scenes that exemplify everything people watch the show for.

January 28, 2008

By Andrew Johnston
Photo: HBO

“Transitions” is what I think of a true “fan’s episode” of The Wire: From beginning to end, it’s jammed with scenes that exemplify everything people watch the show for—rich character interaction, crisp dialogue, dry humor, righteously indignant muckraking and complex wheels-within-wheels plotting. It’s also the kind of episode that can only be done at this point in a season, when there’s still time for events to play out in all manner of ways before groundwork has to be laid for the finale. Such episodes often fall a little too early to feature seismic, game-changing events, but that’s definitely not the case here.

The title refers, of course, to the journalistic art of the seamless segue from one paragraph to another—and while, like most of the season’s titles, this one comes from the vocabulary of journalese, the episode itself somewhat ironically has less Sun action than the three that preceded it. At least it seems to—this week’s events on the streets, at city hall, in police HQ and at the Western District station house represent the culmination of so much long-term plot and character development spanning several seasons that the Sun scenes can’t help seeming like weak sauce by comparison.


The two principal transitions, of course, are Rawls’ temporary elevation to the commissioner’s office (with Daniels taking over as Deputy Commissioner for Operations for a few months of grooming before being handed the top job) and Marlo’s coup against Proposition Joe, which both makes Marlo the king of the East Side and leaves “the Greek” with no choice but to do business with him. I’m sure a substet of Wire fans will float the theory that it’s actually Marlo, and not Joe, who takes a bullet in the final scene, but that’s wishful thinking. I mean, come on—is David Simon that cheap? The second that next week’s “React Quotes” hits HBO On Demand (where it should do better than usual thanks to viewers who don’t want to be forced to choose between The Wire and next week’s Super Bowl), the theory will deservedly die quickly.


Spooked by his ex-wife’s concern about the dirt in Burrell’s possession, Daniels goes to the commissioner to swear that he had nothing to do with the effort to oust him. Before Burrell has the chance to use the incriminating evidence—which apparently proves that Daniels was part of a corrupt Eastern District drug squad during his early days on the force—he’s persuaded by council president Nerese Campbell to go quietly and accept a cushy private sector job that will pay him just as much, if not more than he was making as Baltimore’s top cop. It’s a blatant bribe, one that is somehow bizarrely legal, much as the loan that allows Rhonda Pearlman to nail Clay Davis with the “head shot”—something “every kid with a starter home” does, as Lester Freamon points out—is bizarrely illegal.


There’s a great shot toward the end of the episode of Daniels smiling with satisfaction as he visits his new office, but his happiness would naturally be short lived if he knew that Campbell now has the dossier, which he presumably believes to be out of circulation as a result of Burrell’s failure to use it. It’s a pretty safe bet that we haven’t seen the last of the folder—but with no other viable African-American candidates for the commissioner’s office in sight, expect Campbell to use it as a means of keeping Daniels in line rather than getting him out of the way.

In the wake of Butchie’s death last week, we learn a little more about his background—apparently he wasn’t born blind but rather lost his sight to a bullet shortly after he took to playing the game. Joe, who knows everyone remotely connected to the drug trade—he really is a classic center-of-the-web intelligence broker, like Conan Doyle’s Mycroft Holmes or George R. R. Martin’s Littlefinger—appears to be the only one of the current players (apart from Omar, of course), visits the gangsta florist we’ve seen before and purchases a flower arrangement accompanied by a message that could double as a dying curse hurled toward Marlo: “Woe to them that call evil good and good evil” (that’s Isaiah 5:20, in case you were wondering). Joe, as we learn in his ensuing conversation with Slim Charles, is well aware that Cheese is in business with Marlo behind his back, but he claims to be wary about taking premature action against members of his own family. Instead of moving directly, Joe tells Slim he’s going to take a few steps back until the Omar-Marlo feud settles down, allowing Cheese to run his business in the meantime—implicitly putting Cheese in Omar’s line of fire. When Omar later demands that Slim take him to Joe, Slim swears up and down that Joe had no complicity in Butchie’s death. Cheese’s name is not mentioned (Slim may not know that Cheese steered Snoop and Chris toward Butchie), but Joe’s unfaithful nephew is nonetheless now at least #4 on Omar’s revenge list, and ought to be looking over his shoulder at all times—at least unless, God forbid, Marlo & Co. somehow manage to take care of Omar first.



Joe doesn’t really sign his own death warrant until the next co-op meeting, at which he rules against Cheese and in favor of Hungry Man in a territorial dispute (in a great continuity touch, the strip-club owner who cut the shady deal with Nerese Campbell in “More With Less” identifies himself and tells some of his side of the story at the co-op meeting). The scenes that follow are among the most powerful depictions of treachery and gangland justice in the annals of filmed crime drama, up there with Fredo Corleone’s inadvertent betrayal of his brother (and Michael’s subsequent revenge) in The Godfather Part II and the execution of Tommy DeVito in GoodFellas when he thinks he’s about to be made. As the meeting breaks up, there’s a great shot of Joe and Marlo facing each other in profile, with Joe’s massive gut symbolizing the distance between them. “You need to focus a bit more on working with people,” Joe tells Marlo, before the younger dealer walks away with a sneer on his face.

Even so, Joe continues his mentorship of Marlo by setting him up as Maury Levy’s newest client—and, in a great display of what makes Joe Joe, we see him bond with Herc over their mutual contempt for Earvin Burrell, who was a year ahead of Joe in high school. Even as Joe continues his efforts to reshape Marlo in his own image, Marlo continues to move against him by having Chris and Snoop offer Hungry Man as a gift to Cheese, one that more or less literally comes tied with a bow (for his part, Hungry Man reacts the way any of us would to getting shanghaied by Chris and Snoop: “Man already shit himself, and we ain’t even get started yet,” Snoop marvels with a laugh. “Get a gift, give a gift,” Chris counsels Cheese, essentially sealing Joe’s fate.


When Marlo and his lieutenants visit Joe at home in the final scene, Marlo delivers a line that’s both a withering dismissal of Joe’s patronage and a clear-eyed assessment of his own character: “I wasn’t made to play the son.” Indeed, when Marlo arrived on The Wire, he was already a fully-formed evil, and his ability to hold sway over volatile personalities such as Snoop and Chris stands as ultimate proof that he’s a natural-born leader. Up to his literal dying breath, Joe attempts to bargain his way out of trouble; in response, Marlo offers perhaps the most chilling display of his charisma yet as he coaxes Joe into accepting death without resistance.


Another arguable transition—a much more subtle one—is the continued growth of Ellis Carver into a stand-up officer and, more than likely, Daniels’ spiritual successor. At the top of the episode, the man with the worst haircut on television, Western District patrolman Anthony Colicchio, attempts to bust Michael and his corner boys, only to walk into a trap: The bag in which he expects to find Michael’s package turns out to be full of dog pooh. Michael (wearing an all-too-apt “Ghetto University” T-shirt) and his pals may not be holding, but they still succeed in pissing off Colicchio enough to haul them down to the station house under arrest for harassment.


Carver (who you’ll recall made a futile attempt to take Randy Wagstaff under his wing last season and spare the lad from foster care) sides with Michael and will have nothing of it. “I’ve seen some stupid shit in my day, but even by Western standards this rates a whole new category!”, Carver barks, before announcing his intent to bring charges against Colicchio over the incident. Carver’s decision displeases his old pal Herc, but he sticks to his guns. In addition to showing his continued evolution as a man and a police officer, the incident could also be construed as marking another stage in the transition of the Baltimore Police into being an African-American-controlled institution (a transition that, in the Wire universe at least, has been taking place from the top down). To Colicchio, Michael & Co. are “fucking yos”, but a black cop like Carver is able to see their behavior for what it is, which is just boys being boys (though Michael proves he’s further along the road to manhood than his baby face suggests when his crackhead mom asks for help finding work and he tells her he’s not going to pay her to be his mother).

At the Sun, Scott Templeton displays his work ethic (or lack thereof) by going to interview for a Metro job at the Washington Post while Alma Gutierrez busts her ass doing real reporting to help the Sun get the scoop on Burrell’s ouster. The Sun gets that story, but budget cuts on the courtroom front result in them losing out on the perp walk that Rhonda Pearlman sets up for Clay Davis. All of Davis’s scenes are fantastic and a testament to Isaiah Whitlock Jr.’s brilliance as an actor. The Davis who shows up to testify, deeply humbled, is a man we’ve never seen before, and it’s breathtaking to watch Whitlock as Davis first takes the stand, inspecting the evidence against him as if the paper was contaminated with Ebola, and then turning on the Clay Davis persona we all know the second he steps in front of the cameras that are waiting for him outside the courthouse. The Wire’s criminal failure to receive any Emmy nominations for season four makes it extremely unlikely that the television academy will recognize Whitlock, but I’d argue that few actors on The Wire are more deserving (though of course there are strong cases to be made for André Royo, Michael Kenneth Williams, Robert F. Chew and Wendell Pierce—hell, you could fill the all the Supporting Actor slots twice over with Wire regulars and still leave out a ton of amazing actors).


This week’s opening quote is attributed to Scott Templeton, in reference to his failure to get hired at the Post, but it could just as easily apply to how it’s a buyer’s market out there for Templeton’s bullshit, as well as for the lie McNulty is peddling. The “buyer’s market” line is also delivered by Lester’s old partner (still stuck on patrol as a result of getting screwed over by Rawls, we’re told), who Lester has surprisingly little difficulty persuading to provide him and McNulty with access to a fresh corpse. The bogus serial killer may be McNulty’s baby, but Lester takes point on the matter this week, persuading McNulty to visit a homeless camp in search of potential “witnesses” in the hope of creating an alibi that will keep anyone from suspecting that the killer is a fake. McNulty’s enthusiasm for the scam remains undiminished, as we see when he carves defensive wounds into the fingertips of the “victim”. Indeed, the glee with which he tells Beadie about the case almost makes it seem as if McNulty is starting to believe his own lies. Rather than the hoax, I’d say the definitive proof of how unhinged McNulty has become is his increasingly voluntary estrangement of Beadie, a woman who is clearly one of the best things to ever happen to him. Beadie’s speech about how she never believed the “McNutty” stories until he fell off the wagon is, however, unfortunately tin-eared and well below The Wire’s usual standards (as well as unworthy of Amy Ryan’s formidable talent). Given the amount of awesomeness that David Simon and Edward Burns cram into this incredibly dense episode, though, I’ll gladly forgive them for whiffing one measly scene.

With so much of the blog punditry about this season centering on the Sun storyline and the debate over whether David Simon’s treatment of the paper comes down to sour grapes (you know it’s getting out of hand when the Brits start chiming in), it’s refreshing to have come across a source of discussion that’s 100% free of Sun-related content: Sudhir Venkatesh’s weekly accounts for The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog of watching the show with a group of fellows who have actually played the game. Venkatesh has assembled a gallery of real characters alright, but half the fun comes from the censorship the transcript goes through to meet the Times’s standards . “But white folks [who write the series] always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive,” says Orlando, a retired Brooklyn gang member, speaking of Prop Joe during the roundtable on “More With Less”. Some of Venkatesh’s reportage is so colorful (“I knew that f——t would come back,” Flavor rejoiced, beer spilling down his arm. “Get his a—, Omar. Get Marlo, that little b—ch.”) that at least one commenter over there has accused him of pulling a Stephen Glass/Jayson Blair (or Scott Templeton, if you will) maneuver. To my mind, that’s high praise—because as I see it, a reporter can’t be charged with making shit up unless he’s doing a really good job.


In the latest of the many essays that he’s been publishing in lieu of interviews, David Simon describes a season two dust-up with then-Mayor Martin O’Malley, who was threatening to rescind the series’s permits to film in the city after he was displeased (as the Sun’s Jay Spry would diplomatically cast it) with the first season. The timing is interesting insofar as the encounter may have influenced the creation or characterization of Carcetti, a transparent O’Malley analogue who made his first appearance during the third season. In the piece, Simon mentions the real people behind a number of other characters, but in this case he leaves it to his readers to make the connection themselves.


For more recaps of The Wire, click here.


This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Amazing Spider-Man #30-31: Absolute Carnage

ABSOLUTE CARNAGE

Written by Nick Spencer
Penciled by Ryan Ottley
Published Sept-Oct 2019

   In a prelude of sorts, Kindred breaks into Norman Osborn's psychiatric hospital and spawns one of his creepy centipedes to take over the madman. Fooling him into thinking he's famed serial killer Cletus Cassidy, Spidey thinks back to how it's his fault the original symbiote made it back to earth in the first place. But for now he has bigger fish to fry. Carnage Norman wants the codices of his grandson Normie and Dylan Brock, son of Venom Eddie Brock.

   The fight is a brutal one, with Pete replaying memories in his head of simpler times. But with everything he lost, for all the lives he's destroyed, how much of it was actually his own fault? Trying to snap out of it, Norman is clearly conflicted. Talking to himself all the while, the Kindred parasite is taking a toll on the former Green Goblin. But it's the resolve of a greater strength in Peter Parker that keeps him from giving up. He fights back and in the end is able to beat the symbiote clone down. Spider-Man stands victorious over the Carnage controlled Norman but the fight is far from over. Although this small two shot tie-in is finished, the battle continues in Absolute Carnage. 

   So as I said in my previous blog, the Absolute Carnage reading order meanders over an absurd number of books. How much these two issues contributed is obviously minimal, but is still short enough to tell a complete story. Nick Spencer keeps up the good work and is able to shine a little more light on what happened when Spidey wore the black suit. Was it worth it? Maybe not for him, but for us, it made for some stellar reading material. I give these two a 9/10.

If you like this review, check out my video of it HERE.

You can also buy my physical copy of this book below:

Amazing Spider-Man #30 (Already Sold)
Amazing Spider-Man #31 (Already Sold)


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