nancynall.com » The finale.
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The finale.

The thing about “The Wire” is, you can never say you didn’t see it com­ing. Dis­as­ter lurks around every cor­ner, and is usu­ally stand­ing smack in front of you when you get there. But because this is TV, the land of 12-minute DNA tests and pros­e­cu­tors who never lose, you keep hop­ing for a mir­a­cle. TV is sup­posed to make us feel good. “The Wire” never does that. And yet, we don’t feel bad. We — I, any­way — feel some­thing else.

The season’s cen­ter­piece was four middle-school boys tee­ter­ing on the precipice; they could go either way. Of course the odds were over­whelm­ingly against them, and that’s how it went. One is now a cold­blooded killer. Another is liv­ing with the first boy, earn­ing his keep deal­ing drugs. A third has been thrown back into the orga­ni­za­tion we laugh­ingly call child pro­tec­tive ser­vices, and the fourth is kinda-sorta safe, but prob­a­bly not. Which is pretty much the way these things go. You can do every­thing right, and yet, when you’re this kind of kid, it’s still not enough to save you.

It’s not just the kids who are unsaved. The police, the teach­ers, the politi­cians — all bang their heads against some­thing big­ger, and all get bloody fore­heads, while the immov­able object remains unmoved. The over­ar­ch­ing les­son is that it’s best not to try, except that the best char­ac­ters, and the redeem­ing moments, come from the peo­ple who do try, and fail to move the object, but some­how find a lit­tle bit of hope. Remem­ber McNulty last sea­son, his career in tat­ters, going back to uni­formed foot patrol, swing­ing his baton mer­rily and look­ing gen­uinely happy for once. Colvin tried to solve the drug prob­lem in his own way last sea­son, failed, but came back this year and suc­ceeded (we hope) on a far smaller scale, by sav­ing Namond from the cor­ner. And Bodie, who shot Wal­lace in sea­son one, found a shred of decency and tried to do the right thing, only to pay for it. He redeemed him­self, how­ever, in find­ing the shred. A small miracle.

So what is it we feel, then, if not good? Here’s my guess: Con­nec­tion. In a TV show, con­nec­tion is to feel­ing good what real inti­macy is to just hav­ing sex. (Remem­ber Prez’ remarks on this topic to his class?) More sat­is­fy­ing, deeper, some­times painful but always worth the effort.

There is no jus­tice in the world, so this episode, this sea­son, will of course be ignored by the peo­ple who give the awards that make more work like this pos­si­ble. That’s no rea­son to stop try­ing. I can’t wait for next season.

Dis­cuss.

Posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 11:24 am
in Television.

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5 responses to
“The finale.”

  1. Mary O said on December 11th, 2006 at 12:49 pm

    This sea­son seems to have flown by.

    I found illu­mi­nat­ing the bar dis­cus­sion between Carcetti’s guy Nor­man and Royce’s for­mer chief of staff: They always let you down. It’s some­thing you kind of know instinc­tively, but you get caught up in the emo­tion of the movement-for-change, and you some­times tend to for­get that the sys­tem is built on a lot of com­pro­mises. “Kids don’t vote.” Harsh, but so very true.

    And though this is not exactly an orig­i­nal thought, what also is so fas­ci­nat­ing about this show is that it por­trays the drug cul­ture as bureau­cratic and soul-crushing as any gov­ern­ment or busi­ness job. Bodie’s lunch-hour com­plaint to McNulty that he has worked hard and been loyal since he was 13, and he’s got noth­ing to show for it, was noth­ing short of genius in show­ing that. It’s been done before on this show, but for a sol­dier like Bodie to cop to it was amaz­ing. And then he went down in a cor­ner stand­off, killed by his own for­mer guy after fac­ing the fake-hit by Chris and Snoop.

    Won­der if McNulty will be going back to his old ways now that he’s back on the team and out of uni­form. My bet is yes.

    And my bet is that Namond gets sucked back into it too. That was so depress­ing. But I’m going to tune in next sea­son to see if they resolve that at all. I just want Bunny back, I guess. He seems to be the moral cen­ter to a lot of the story.

    There’s a great arti­cle in today’s Wash­ing­ton Post about the view of the show from kids who’ve lived this type of life.

  2. Dorothy said on December 12th, 2006 at 10:08 am

    I feel so badly that no one else has com­mented I thought I’d pop in this morn­ing with a few words. I have not seen the show til the end yet. I have seen only about the first half hour. I thank you, MaryO, for rec­om­mend­ing that Wash Post arti­cle. I printed it out and took it with me to Mike’s doc­tor appoint­ment yes­ter­day to read.

    There was also an inter­est­ing arti­cle about the late Vince Guaraldi in the same issue. I’ve always loved the music from A Char­lie Brown Christ­mas, so it was good to get some back­ground on the guy who com­posed it.

  3. Dorothy said on December 12th, 2006 at 2:45 pm

    Good arti­cle on Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles:

    http://​observer​-reporter​.com/​m​a​i​n​.​a​s​p​?​S​e​c​t​i​o​n​I​D​=​2​8​&​a​m​p​;​S​u​b​S​e​c​t​i​o​n​I​D​=​9​5​&​a​m​p​;​A​r​t​i​c​l​e​I​D​=​3​4​7​5​3​&​a​m​p​;​T​M​=​4​9​055.59

  4. Kim said on December 12th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

    Wow. What a great sea­son. I love how it shows some of the folks deep in the trenches — Don­nelly, Colvin, Carver, McNulty, you know the rest if you watched — as true believ­ers. Even portly Jay has a smidge of it. They live/work among what the worst pro­duces: the worst par­ents, the worst sys­tems (school, law-n-order, gov’t.), the worst cap­i­tal­ists. Yet it hasn’t killed their hope for change.

    I think that’s the thing that keeps us going: hope. It’s cer­tainly the thing that, with a lit­tle serendip­ity like Colvin com­ing to the res­cue some­how when Carver can­not, will blast one kid out of cir­cum­stances like those four comer cor­ner boys — the thing that no soci­ol­o­gist or reporter or mayor ever puts a fin­ger on. That cute lit­tle raw sewage-mouth Kenard (God, thought I was going to die when I heard them say his name, “canard”!)? Already gone. No hope. Maybe. I hope not. Bug? How the hell could he sur­vive this? Michael just swapped bad outcomes.

    But, yeah. How can you even hope for hope when a young adult has been so cul­tur­ally shel­tered in his own freak­ing city that he doesn’t know what/where the idyl­lic arbore­tum is? That’s where Colvin should have taken the kids instead of Ruth’s Chris.

    Redemp­tion comes in sliv­ers for these peo­ple, even the kids. And it’s usu­ally never enough. I wish I could be more coherent.

    I guess redemp­tion for the show means one more sea­son. I’ll set­tle for that. It’s time peo­ple found out Lou Grant has left the building.

  5. First day: everybody all friendly an’ shit « Got that New Package! said on December 28th, 2007 at 12:16 am

    […] in front of the rest of us. Her posts on the show, along with com­men­tary by Ash­ley and oth­ers, make great read­ing: It’s not just the kids who are unsaved. The police, the teach­ers, the politi­cians — all bang […]

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