The Wire comes full circle in its gripping finale says the Chicago Tribune's Mo Ryan. The following piece discusses the series finale of The Wire (which aired Sunday on HBO). If you're a fan of the show, I recommend watching the finale before reading what's below...
An image has been in my mind since I watched the series finale of The Wire. It’s a scene of a character named Dukie preparing to shoot up drugs. It’s only a brief glimpse at Dukie’s fate, but it’s heartbreaking. We met Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) and three other eighth-grade boys two years ago, in Season 4 of The Wire. He was a shy, smart, gawky youth who didn’t quite fit in on the tough streets of West Baltimore. He blossomed when his teacher, a former cop, started giving Dukie clean clothes and soap and showing him how to use a computer. As he gained confidence and shed some of his reticence, it was impossible not to care about Dukie, whose rare smiles were heart piercing.
Dukie’s home was shared with drug addicts who resided in a nightmarish row house with no running water. He moved in with Michael (Tristan Wilds), a classmate whose boss was the ruthless drug lord Marlo (Jamie Hector). As The Wire’s fifth and final season progressed, I naively hoped that Dukie, who’d dropped out of high school to look after Michael’s brother, would make his way out of that grim world. I hoped someone would help him, or that this bright, kind young man would find a way to overcome his severely limited options. But it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps Dukie never had a choice. And over the series’ five unforgettable seasons, The Wire has made us look hard at the lives of people who have few choices.
Eventually Dukie was cast out by Michael, who had to cut all ties with friends and family to survive. Dukie wasn’t good at selling drugs, so he scratched out a living by scavenging metal and junk from the crumbling buildings of Baltimore. And as The Wire’s resident addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo) did back in the day, Dukie started using drugs to numb the pain. In Dukie’s last scene, the camera remained distant. The viewer didn’t see the needle piercing Dukie’s skin — the wordless scene ended just before that moment. It’s almost as if the filmmakers couldn’t bring themselves to show the full extent of Dukie’s downfall. We only see him preparing the syringe and bringing it up to his arm, but through The Wire’s unsparing depiction of Bubbles’ life, we have a pretty good idea of what Dukie’s existence will be from now on: misery.
Dukie may not be real, Bubbles may not be real, but thanks to the show’s masterful writing and acting, I won’t soon forget them. The Wire illuminated ways of life I’ve never experienced, and though I wept for Dukie, I thank the show for creating him and dozens of other memorable characters. We also won’t forget Randy (Maestro Harrell), Dukie’s classmate, who lived with a foster mom in Season 4 and who demonstrated an entrepreneurial flair (he made pocket money selling snacks to classmates). As we saw earlier on The Wire, a terrible chain of events left him an angry, perhaps even vicious young man. By Season 5, the sweet, enterprising eighth-grader had been replaced by a menacing thug. And thanks to The Wire’s meticulous storytelling, we know exactly why.
We won’t forget Michael, who supplied the most memorable line of The Wire’s second-to-last episode. As he was being cast aside by Michael, Dukie tried to get him to recall some silly caper that they’d both been part of only a year or two ago. Didn’t he remember? Dukie asked. “I don’t,” Michael almost whispered. Was his meagre childhood so far away that he truly couldn’t remember anything enjoyable? Or was he making himself forget those rare instances of happiness, as a way of armoring himself? Just as Dukie’s only choice was to numb the pain, Michael had only one option: To shed any sentiment and become tougher than those who would kill him. To survive, these young men had to lose what made them human.
And that’s what was heartbreaking. Thanks to the show’s incisive writing and the brilliant work of the young actors who played Dukie, Randy and Michael, we knew what they were like when they were human, when they were just kids. We knew their quirks and flaws and slender dreams. To see each of them crushed by circumstances outside their control was terrible, but I couldn’t look away. This is the stuff that wrenching drama is made of.
Over five seasons, The Wire has expanded the possibilities of what television drama can achieve. The finale was as good as the show gets: Tightly plotted and masterfully directed, it was viscerally affecting on a number of levels. And as we saw the fates of various characters unfold in Sunday’s 90-minute closer, I kept thinking of a line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
That’s what Dukie, Randy, Michael and Bubbles were to the gods of Baltimore: Nobodies. Drop-outs with only no realistic chances of betterment. All along the way, individuals in positions of power had chances to make altruistic choices that would help people like them, just the powerful had opportunities to improve the police department, make the schools better, govern wisely, etc. The show doesn’t preach or grandstand, but over five seasons, anger at the fate of the Dukies of the world has been the driving force of The Wire. It has used a meticulously created, fascinating universe to hammer home this point: The powerful, even those who start out with ideals, end up leaving the powerless to their narrow, almost unavoidable fates. Those in power try hard to ignore that fact (if their culpability occurs to them at all) and continue to choose the short-term, selfish path.
Not everyone in The Wire was without options. The finale showed various characters taking stands, drawing lines in the sand and refusing to cross them. Yet most of them paid for their stands. Rebels may evade their ultimate fate for a time, and they’re celebrated within the mythology of the show. (Didn’t the solo gangster Omar start to seem like a superhero this season? And the show has always had a soft spot for the renegade cop Jimmy McNulty.) But in The Wire’s Baltimore, nobody escapes the consequences of rebelling. It’s only a matter of time before the gods get around to killing the peskiest flies.
Thank goodness the show allowed Bubbles to get clean. I don’t know if I could have dealt with him falling “down in the hole” again. He was able to change himself, even if nothing about the streets ever really changes. But he survived, and he’s even found a sliver of peace, and that’s more than I thought he’d get as the series came to a close. Bubbles’ speech before other recovering addicts in the March 2 episode was one of the most emotionally intense moments The Wire has ever created (Royo is only one of many amazing actors in this enormously talented cast).
Surprisingly, Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) didn’t appear to pay a price for exercising her free will and speaking out. She told her bosses that Jimmy McNulty’s serial killer was an invention, but by the end of the episode, she was still a “murder police,” or a homicide detective. Then again, maybe she is being punished – she’s stuck in the Baltimore version of Groundhog Day. On The Wire, it’s a place where senseless murders and revenge killings are almost unbearably repetitive. Kima may not have paid a price for telling the bosses about McNulty’s illegal scheme, but will her competence at her job change anything in Baltimore? Not likely.
Most everyone else who made a stand was crushed or exiled, as is usually the case on The Wire. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) finally got the top job at the Baltimore police department, but he refused to prettify the crime statistics for the city’s ambitious mayor, Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen). By the end of the final episode, Daniels was gone from the department. Of course, Bill Rawls (John Doman) landed on his feet. Despite the scandal over McNulty’s scheme, Rawls, Daniels’ eternal enemy within the police department, was promised a promotion by a mayoral aide if he “did what he was told.” He had no problems with that. Daniels, on the other hand, was told that his problem was that he failed to do what was told, the same assessment that Michael received from his fellow enforcer, Snoop, in the March 2 episode. Thinking for oneself is frequently punished on The Wire: Those in power are shown to consistently frown on it.
Michael was always “asking why when you should be doing what you’re told,” Snoop said – just before Michael shot her. In the end, Michael’s need to think for himself meant that he had to go solo – unless he was willing to fall in line, he’d be the enemy of Marlo’s organization. Just as Daniels had become an irritant that the police bureaucracy had to eventually expel. The fact that brave choices are usually punished within the world of The Wire fits with creator David Simon’s world-view, which holds that individuals are capable of change, but institutions are not. On The Wire, the powerful institutions and the individuals who hold the levers of power crush those who don’t toe the line.
According to the show, change from within isn’t possible — for gangsters, teachers, politicians or anyone else inside a big organization. When it comes to the Baltimore police, the eventual ascension of the political hack Stan Valcheck as commissioner, which was shown in the finale’s closing minutes, surely undid anything good that Daniels or his protégés ever accomplished. In some cases, I disagreed with the withering finality of that assessment — that institutions aren’t ever capable of change — but I must credit the show with never wavering from its central assumption: Whatever their original intentions, all power structures or bureaucracies morph into entities that exist to reward the powerful and punish the independent.
Though the series as a whole is a towering achievement, I wasn’t a fan of this season’s newspaper story line, which wasn’t executed with The Wire’s typical subtlety and understated realism. The show has done a brilliant job of depicting, with savage honesty, what makes big institutions dysfunctional, and nobody can argue with the idea that newspapers are in crisis. But the main cause of that crisis is not reporters who make things up, as Scott Templeton did at the fictional Baltimore Sun. Still, there’s been so much media coverage of The Wire’s journalism angle that it would feel like overkill to dwell on it here.
I wouldn’t blame the newspaper story line, however, for the show’s low Nielsen ratings this season. If online forums are anything to go by, many hard-core “Wire” fans have been gobbling up the final episodes as they appeared one week early via HBO on Demand. And besides, the show’s ratings have always been on the low side. TV viewers are used to happy endings, or at least progress of some kind as a program moves to its end point. But what's the old saying? "The more things change, the more they remain the same." That was certainly The Wire's opinion.
Though the change felt somewhat abrupt, but it was clear The Wire was turning Michael into Baltimore’s new Omar. The legendary Omar (Michael K. Williams) was a street legend in West Baltimore; he robbed drug dealers but was smart enough not to get caught or killed. In the end, though, he was just as powerless as Dukie. In the show’s most shocking moment, he was killed a couple of episodes ago by a corner kid who’d grown up in Marlo’s cold, unforgiving world. Omar’s budding superhero status obviously couldn’t last. That his life ended so senselessly made sense within the world of The Wire. As Snoop (Felicia Pearson) said in the March 2 episode, “Deserve got nothing to do with it.”
Did Namond (Julito McCullum), another eighth-grader in Season 4, “deserve” to end up in a stable, loving home, after being removed from the drug world and adopted by a former top cop, Bunny Colvin? No more than Randy deserved to end up in a brutal group home; no more than Dukie deserved live on the streets. Perhaps Namond will be the next Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), a smart, eloquent reformer (though Colvin was spit out by the system when his unorthodox views proved troublesome). Dukie sure seems like the next Bubbles. Perhaps the recently promoted Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) is the next Cedric Daniels – a smart, honorable man constrained by a system that rewards unquestioning loyalty. And though Marlo’s out of the drug game, for now, the mysterious Greek and his minions are still putting heroin and crack on the streets of Baltimore.
ln its closing montage, The Wire seemed to say that nothing changes. Those who leave the streets, for whatever reasons, will be replaced by a new generation of dealers, users and cops. But that grim conclusion doesn’t begin to convey the depth and compassion of The Wire. The show never held back from bearing witness to “the suffering of the world,” as the finale’s quote from Kafka put it. The Wire found humane and empathic and funny ways to tell interesting stories about life, and its creators loved Baltimore, as the finale’s many montages made clear.
The dry humour of the people who inhabited that world never failed to make me laugh out loud. I can’t quite believe I’ll never see my favourite character, Bunk (Wendell Pierce), deliver some hilariously cynical comeback. I’ll never see Daniels’ glare or Omar’s swagger. From the mayor’s office to the police department to the grungiest back alley, The Wire showed us people so richly nuanced and detailed and real we wouldn’t be surprised to meet them in the street. After five seasons, it’s exceedingly hard to let them go. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave the eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended up leaving the police force. But Landsman could have been talking about the show itself. “He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes … [but] brother, when you were good, you were the best of us.”
Further reading: An LA Times round-table discussion with several cast members. A lengthy David Simon interview on the Alan Sepinwall blog.
An image has been in my mind since I watched the series finale of The Wire. It’s a scene of a character named Dukie preparing to shoot up drugs. It’s only a brief glimpse at Dukie’s fate, but it’s heartbreaking. We met Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) and three other eighth-grade boys two years ago, in Season 4 of The Wire. He was a shy, smart, gawky youth who didn’t quite fit in on the tough streets of West Baltimore. He blossomed when his teacher, a former cop, started giving Dukie clean clothes and soap and showing him how to use a computer. As he gained confidence and shed some of his reticence, it was impossible not to care about Dukie, whose rare smiles were heart piercing.
Dukie’s home was shared with drug addicts who resided in a nightmarish row house with no running water. He moved in with Michael (Tristan Wilds), a classmate whose boss was the ruthless drug lord Marlo (Jamie Hector). As The Wire’s fifth and final season progressed, I naively hoped that Dukie, who’d dropped out of high school to look after Michael’s brother, would make his way out of that grim world. I hoped someone would help him, or that this bright, kind young man would find a way to overcome his severely limited options. But it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps Dukie never had a choice. And over the series’ five unforgettable seasons, The Wire has made us look hard at the lives of people who have few choices.
Eventually Dukie was cast out by Michael, who had to cut all ties with friends and family to survive. Dukie wasn’t good at selling drugs, so he scratched out a living by scavenging metal and junk from the crumbling buildings of Baltimore. And as The Wire’s resident addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo) did back in the day, Dukie started using drugs to numb the pain. In Dukie’s last scene, the camera remained distant. The viewer didn’t see the needle piercing Dukie’s skin — the wordless scene ended just before that moment. It’s almost as if the filmmakers couldn’t bring themselves to show the full extent of Dukie’s downfall. We only see him preparing the syringe and bringing it up to his arm, but through The Wire’s unsparing depiction of Bubbles’ life, we have a pretty good idea of what Dukie’s existence will be from now on: misery.
Dukie may not be real, Bubbles may not be real, but thanks to the show’s masterful writing and acting, I won’t soon forget them. The Wire illuminated ways of life I’ve never experienced, and though I wept for Dukie, I thank the show for creating him and dozens of other memorable characters. We also won’t forget Randy (Maestro Harrell), Dukie’s classmate, who lived with a foster mom in Season 4 and who demonstrated an entrepreneurial flair (he made pocket money selling snacks to classmates). As we saw earlier on The Wire, a terrible chain of events left him an angry, perhaps even vicious young man. By Season 5, the sweet, enterprising eighth-grader had been replaced by a menacing thug. And thanks to The Wire’s meticulous storytelling, we know exactly why.
We won’t forget Michael, who supplied the most memorable line of The Wire’s second-to-last episode. As he was being cast aside by Michael, Dukie tried to get him to recall some silly caper that they’d both been part of only a year or two ago. Didn’t he remember? Dukie asked. “I don’t,” Michael almost whispered. Was his meagre childhood so far away that he truly couldn’t remember anything enjoyable? Or was he making himself forget those rare instances of happiness, as a way of armoring himself? Just as Dukie’s only choice was to numb the pain, Michael had only one option: To shed any sentiment and become tougher than those who would kill him. To survive, these young men had to lose what made them human.
And that’s what was heartbreaking. Thanks to the show’s incisive writing and the brilliant work of the young actors who played Dukie, Randy and Michael, we knew what they were like when they were human, when they were just kids. We knew their quirks and flaws and slender dreams. To see each of them crushed by circumstances outside their control was terrible, but I couldn’t look away. This is the stuff that wrenching drama is made of.
Over five seasons, The Wire has expanded the possibilities of what television drama can achieve. The finale was as good as the show gets: Tightly plotted and masterfully directed, it was viscerally affecting on a number of levels. And as we saw the fates of various characters unfold in Sunday’s 90-minute closer, I kept thinking of a line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
That’s what Dukie, Randy, Michael and Bubbles were to the gods of Baltimore: Nobodies. Drop-outs with only no realistic chances of betterment. All along the way, individuals in positions of power had chances to make altruistic choices that would help people like them, just the powerful had opportunities to improve the police department, make the schools better, govern wisely, etc. The show doesn’t preach or grandstand, but over five seasons, anger at the fate of the Dukies of the world has been the driving force of The Wire. It has used a meticulously created, fascinating universe to hammer home this point: The powerful, even those who start out with ideals, end up leaving the powerless to their narrow, almost unavoidable fates. Those in power try hard to ignore that fact (if their culpability occurs to them at all) and continue to choose the short-term, selfish path.
Not everyone in The Wire was without options. The finale showed various characters taking stands, drawing lines in the sand and refusing to cross them. Yet most of them paid for their stands. Rebels may evade their ultimate fate for a time, and they’re celebrated within the mythology of the show. (Didn’t the solo gangster Omar start to seem like a superhero this season? And the show has always had a soft spot for the renegade cop Jimmy McNulty.) But in The Wire’s Baltimore, nobody escapes the consequences of rebelling. It’s only a matter of time before the gods get around to killing the peskiest flies.
Thank goodness the show allowed Bubbles to get clean. I don’t know if I could have dealt with him falling “down in the hole” again. He was able to change himself, even if nothing about the streets ever really changes. But he survived, and he’s even found a sliver of peace, and that’s more than I thought he’d get as the series came to a close. Bubbles’ speech before other recovering addicts in the March 2 episode was one of the most emotionally intense moments The Wire has ever created (Royo is only one of many amazing actors in this enormously talented cast).
Surprisingly, Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) didn’t appear to pay a price for exercising her free will and speaking out. She told her bosses that Jimmy McNulty’s serial killer was an invention, but by the end of the episode, she was still a “murder police,” or a homicide detective. Then again, maybe she is being punished – she’s stuck in the Baltimore version of Groundhog Day. On The Wire, it’s a place where senseless murders and revenge killings are almost unbearably repetitive. Kima may not have paid a price for telling the bosses about McNulty’s illegal scheme, but will her competence at her job change anything in Baltimore? Not likely.
Most everyone else who made a stand was crushed or exiled, as is usually the case on The Wire. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) finally got the top job at the Baltimore police department, but he refused to prettify the crime statistics for the city’s ambitious mayor, Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen). By the end of the final episode, Daniels was gone from the department. Of course, Bill Rawls (John Doman) landed on his feet. Despite the scandal over McNulty’s scheme, Rawls, Daniels’ eternal enemy within the police department, was promised a promotion by a mayoral aide if he “did what he was told.” He had no problems with that. Daniels, on the other hand, was told that his problem was that he failed to do what was told, the same assessment that Michael received from his fellow enforcer, Snoop, in the March 2 episode. Thinking for oneself is frequently punished on The Wire: Those in power are shown to consistently frown on it.
Michael was always “asking why when you should be doing what you’re told,” Snoop said – just before Michael shot her. In the end, Michael’s need to think for himself meant that he had to go solo – unless he was willing to fall in line, he’d be the enemy of Marlo’s organization. Just as Daniels had become an irritant that the police bureaucracy had to eventually expel. The fact that brave choices are usually punished within the world of The Wire fits with creator David Simon’s world-view, which holds that individuals are capable of change, but institutions are not. On The Wire, the powerful institutions and the individuals who hold the levers of power crush those who don’t toe the line.
According to the show, change from within isn’t possible — for gangsters, teachers, politicians or anyone else inside a big organization. When it comes to the Baltimore police, the eventual ascension of the political hack Stan Valcheck as commissioner, which was shown in the finale’s closing minutes, surely undid anything good that Daniels or his protégés ever accomplished. In some cases, I disagreed with the withering finality of that assessment — that institutions aren’t ever capable of change — but I must credit the show with never wavering from its central assumption: Whatever their original intentions, all power structures or bureaucracies morph into entities that exist to reward the powerful and punish the independent.
Though the series as a whole is a towering achievement, I wasn’t a fan of this season’s newspaper story line, which wasn’t executed with The Wire’s typical subtlety and understated realism. The show has done a brilliant job of depicting, with savage honesty, what makes big institutions dysfunctional, and nobody can argue with the idea that newspapers are in crisis. But the main cause of that crisis is not reporters who make things up, as Scott Templeton did at the fictional Baltimore Sun. Still, there’s been so much media coverage of The Wire’s journalism angle that it would feel like overkill to dwell on it here.
I wouldn’t blame the newspaper story line, however, for the show’s low Nielsen ratings this season. If online forums are anything to go by, many hard-core “Wire” fans have been gobbling up the final episodes as they appeared one week early via HBO on Demand. And besides, the show’s ratings have always been on the low side. TV viewers are used to happy endings, or at least progress of some kind as a program moves to its end point. But what's the old saying? "The more things change, the more they remain the same." That was certainly The Wire's opinion.
Though the change felt somewhat abrupt, but it was clear The Wire was turning Michael into Baltimore’s new Omar. The legendary Omar (Michael K. Williams) was a street legend in West Baltimore; he robbed drug dealers but was smart enough not to get caught or killed. In the end, though, he was just as powerless as Dukie. In the show’s most shocking moment, he was killed a couple of episodes ago by a corner kid who’d grown up in Marlo’s cold, unforgiving world. Omar’s budding superhero status obviously couldn’t last. That his life ended so senselessly made sense within the world of The Wire. As Snoop (Felicia Pearson) said in the March 2 episode, “Deserve got nothing to do with it.”
Did Namond (Julito McCullum), another eighth-grader in Season 4, “deserve” to end up in a stable, loving home, after being removed from the drug world and adopted by a former top cop, Bunny Colvin? No more than Randy deserved to end up in a brutal group home; no more than Dukie deserved live on the streets. Perhaps Namond will be the next Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), a smart, eloquent reformer (though Colvin was spit out by the system when his unorthodox views proved troublesome). Dukie sure seems like the next Bubbles. Perhaps the recently promoted Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) is the next Cedric Daniels – a smart, honorable man constrained by a system that rewards unquestioning loyalty. And though Marlo’s out of the drug game, for now, the mysterious Greek and his minions are still putting heroin and crack on the streets of Baltimore.
ln its closing montage, The Wire seemed to say that nothing changes. Those who leave the streets, for whatever reasons, will be replaced by a new generation of dealers, users and cops. But that grim conclusion doesn’t begin to convey the depth and compassion of The Wire. The show never held back from bearing witness to “the suffering of the world,” as the finale’s quote from Kafka put it. The Wire found humane and empathic and funny ways to tell interesting stories about life, and its creators loved Baltimore, as the finale’s many montages made clear.
The dry humour of the people who inhabited that world never failed to make me laugh out loud. I can’t quite believe I’ll never see my favourite character, Bunk (Wendell Pierce), deliver some hilariously cynical comeback. I’ll never see Daniels’ glare or Omar’s swagger. From the mayor’s office to the police department to the grungiest back alley, The Wire showed us people so richly nuanced and detailed and real we wouldn’t be surprised to meet them in the street. After five seasons, it’s exceedingly hard to let them go. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave the eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended up leaving the police force. But Landsman could have been talking about the show itself. “He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes … [but] brother, when you were good, you were the best of us.”
Further reading: An LA Times round-table discussion with several cast members. A lengthy David Simon interview on the Alan Sepinwall blog.
