The Wire - S2- Episode 1: Ebb Tide

[shadowkat]

[I've decided to review and watch this differently than I did Farscape, reviewing each episode or pair of episodes, detailing my first unspoiled impressions to see how my opinion of the show changes as it plays out, along with my opinions of the characters. Example of changes?
I started out hating Stringer Bell and Rawls - and now find both rather entertaining and amusing. Very odd.]

The fucking Wire, man, I'm addicted. (Also clearly been watching it just now, since I'm thinking in the slang.) Just finished watching the first episode of S2, and it blew me away - kept rewinding. This is rewind tv at its best. Also, if you've been following along on my reviews and never heard of this show or just seen various people on lj or elsewhere rave about how brilliant it is - and are thinking, it's a cop show - WTF? Why I'd be interested in a show about the drug culture of Baltimore? Trust me - there's more going on. Also unlike a lot of these types of shows, it has a sly wit.

The Wire is an integrally woven character piece - plot and character seamlessly flow into each other. And it requires work to follow. You can't do something else during it. This is lean forward on your coach and play close attention television. Or rewind tv. And the characters play with your head long afterwards...I think I'm developing a crush on Omar, Daniels, Greggs, and McNulty. Because it is so detailed. Little details...like the temperature outside, Bunk's dislike of water, the confined spaces, a dove stained glass window...

While on the surface it appears to just be a cop show or a show about the drug culture, it's really a character piece about people solving work place oriented problems, and struggling in their lives, struggling to make a difference or just to survive in a difficult world - and it discusses directly and indirectly the abuses and uses of power within that world. Not everyone wants power, those who do don't understand those who don't. And not everyone can achieve it. In some respects it addresses power better than the sci-fantasy/urban gothic series that I've been addicted to have, or at least far more realistically and in a far more subtle manner. This world feels familiar to me. I feel the grit of it between my fingertips. I can hear the voices in my head. Painful, but gripping, and oddly comforting - it also acts as others have said as a deft social criticism of our societal structure and the power plays within it.

"It's all about self-preservation, that something you never learned, McNulty," Jaye Landsman.


1.McNulty continues to be the catalyst or the character that brings in new cases and new characters. Last season - it's through McNulty the Wire gets started, this season, it's through McNulty's switch in positions - being farmed out to Harbor Patrol, the place he'd least like to be that brings in the waterfront element.

Rather adore McNulty - he reminds me of that gruff Irish cop, who is always on everyone's bad side, while skirting close to cliche, he never quite is the cliche and he's real. I wonder at times how closely he is based on Ed Burns. Probably not at all - since he does not feel like a Marty Sue character - he feels real, warts and all.

Farmed out to harbor patrol - which we learn he didn't tell Rawls that he wanted or didn't want. He said nothing. He followed Lester's advice. But his Sgt - Jaye Landsman told Rawls that was the place McNulty didn't want to go. Jaye: I didn't realize how pissed off Rawls was...(sure you didn't Jaye.)
But McNulty gets both Rawls and Jaye back in spades when they attempt to farm out a murder that McNulty brings in from harbor patrol to another district. It's a hilarious bit - McNulty goes back and measures the distance - then types it up. We aren't told what he is doing we are shown.
See - what David Simon and Ed Burns excel at here - and is a definite flaw in other similar series - is exposition. They trust their audience to figure it out for themselves, they don't lead us by the hand. We don't have a lengthy monologue with McNulty explaining to us what he's about to do or ranting at the guys who farmed it out. The dialogue is simple.

After telling Landsman and the other guy (whose name I can't remember - he's tall, gray headed, and looks like well how I'd describe the man in the gray flannel suit - like death warmed over? Drab), about the defense wounds on the gal, and how she was missing shoes and a coat. McNulty states somewhat wryly, and somewhat enviously: "Have fun with it."

Landsman: We already had our fun. We phoned it out to (another division). The body was found in their waters, it's their murder.
McNulty: How? They just accepted that on your phone call?
Landsman: Not my phone call, Rawls called them and told them it was their murder (he says it better than I do, I can't remember the exact words)
McNulty grimaces.
Landsman: It's all about self-preservation, McNulty, something you never learned.

Later - after scenes with various other characters. We come back and see McNulty measuring out
the distance in the water from where the body was found to where he towed it. And sends a fax.

Rawls knocks on Sgt Landsman's door: Your floater has come back to you, Landsman.
Landsman: WTF?
Rawls: Some low level scum marine on harbor patrol faxed in the coordinates and we have to do the case.
Landsman: Fucking McNulty.
Rawls agrees, laughing: Much as I hate that ....., got to give him credit for getting us on this one.
He did a great job of it.

LOL!

2. Daniels - has also been farmed out to the place he least wants to be - except it is another dank dungeon - this round, he's in the Lt in charge of the Evidence Room. When Bunk goes looking for evidence that they'd found last season - and conviscated last season, which suddenly turns up missing - Daniels, annoyed, has his new team turn the evidence room inside out hunting it. This bit is neatly juxtaposed with Brodie who is also turning a car inside out hunting for something. In Brodie's case he was set up by Stringer Bell - a sort of test. Followed by Stringer's spies to see if he did his job right. It's a tense moment between them and this being The Wire - I worried about Brodie for a bit there.

By the way, a shout out to liz_marcs here? You were right - I changed my mind about Stringer Bell. The man is growing on me. Maybe because worse characters have popped up.
Also Stringer is clever. He's working out of the funeral home. Another shout out to candelfeather for pointing out how the show consistently depicts the characters in confined settings. Stringer is in a windowless room in a funeral parlor, before it was an windowless room in club. Daniels is in the windowless Evidence rooms (before the windowless basement of a building doing the Wire). McNulty is always out in the open - on a boat, outside. As is Bunk. Shakima (it is Shakima not Nekome (finally got the right spelling thank you show),) Greggs is in another windowless office, dark, no light, doing paper work - and comes home to a brightly light but few windows apartment with her girlfriend.

Windows another theme - the stained glass window war at the church. The Major - the father of Prez, wants to install a stained glass window in honor of firemen and police in his church, but he's outbid by Frank Sobotke - on the warf - who installs a huge German stained glass window in honor of warf workers on the waterfront. The police Major is wondering how in the hell, Sobotke afforded it. Good question. The windows are stained glass - you can't see out of them. The church is dark, confined.
And the scene in which the the minister and Frank Sobotke talk - they are dark, the window highlighted. Great camera work in that scene.

McNulty in direct contrast is outside - freezing, looking through windows. He's the only one.

The Daniels scenes are rather funny - Lance Reddick is an amazing actor. He plays it so well. His subordinate wants to know how they are going to finish all of this in time? It's going to take all night. Daniel's says that's okay, they'll keep looking til they find it. Evidence is floating down on top of them, thrown every which way. Daniels hunting himself. I love Daniels.

3. Herc tells Shakima Greggs that she should help him knock in a few doors for old times sake. He misses Carver and her. She says he has to step up, find a way to do it without relying on them.
He says she's pussywhipped, that if she were a guy, and she's a heck of a lot better than most guy cops he knows, he'd take her out with a bunch of guys, have a few beers and tell her to face it - you are whipped. Shakima had made a promise to her partner, that she would be be in house now. She's doing paper work - writing affadavits and discovery requests. It's boring. But safe. Meanwhile at home her partner is trying to get pregnant and it costs lots of money. It's not quite the cliche that I worried about...although it is close...the sidelined cop hating the desk work but loving their partner more. Shows the problems of being a cop - the stresses. You have a dangerous line of work.
The part that excites you - the reason you became a cop - you are constantly stopped from doing, or if you do it - you risk getting killed or fucking someone else up.

McNulty, Greggs, Daniels, and Perez - all fall into this category. They loved doing the Wire - that was the best case ever. That's why they became cops. But their organization, their friends, etc - don't want them to do it - the price is too high.

4. The Waterfront - a whole new kind of evil pops up. Making the drug dealers of last year look sort of tame in comparison. There's also once again through Ziggy and his cousin (Nick?) - a scene that demonstrates alcohol the legal drug is just as bad as the illegal variety. We see bits of this in the first season - with both Bunk and McNulty's drinking. Here it is a bar scene gone wild, and the drinking. It's almost a double-standard - we can do this highly addictive and dangerous drug, but not the other? (I say this as someone who enjoys having a drink every now and then and likes alcohol.)

On the Waterfront - we meet - Ziggy and his cousin Nick, who is the son of Frank Sobotke. They live in confined spaces as well. Sort of a downtrodden white man's version of the projects except along the waterfront. We also meet The Greek ( the same actor who plays Stan on In Plain Sight - it's fun seeing younger versions of all of these actors. The guy who played Wallace in S1 and got killed, that little kid? As an adult - plays Vince Howard on Friday Night Lights - since I watched the shows almost back to back - I noticed it, sort of jarring.) And Boris (or Sergie).

Then finally the jaw-dropping cargo. White slavery - or rather female white slavery. The female waterfront cop stumbles on the bin that the Russian Boris unloaded on the dock and had the Greek pay Nick and Sobotke to let them unload. Frank asked Boris to seal it up or remove it - that out in the open, unlocked, it was begging for attention. Sure enough - the beat cop stumbles upon it and
discovers 8 maybe ten young girls dead inside. Horrible site. Didn't upset me - because I've seen it before on other shows - this is a popular trope in crime dramas and a bit overdone, but it is realistic and fits in with the general theme of the Wire - where women are considered yet another disposable commodity. You see it in S1 - Greggs is shot and disposable when she dresses like a woman.
The whores are disposable. But - not everyone treats women as disposable - Lester Freeman doesn't,
nor for that matter does Rawls or Daniels. McNulty has his own issues, but he doesn't either. Nor does D'Angelo entirely. It's complicated. While it bugs me and I don't like it - it would be disingenious of me not to admit that it is realistic and that they should address it. There's no reason you would know this - but white slavery is a big organized crime money maker in the States and abroad. There are several rings in Queens, the Russian mafia is quite notorious for it. A house just got broken up in Queens last year. Also, around the world? In Saudia Arabia - a woman traveling to Saudia Arabia must be met by a male chaperon on the other end, she must be escorted by a male, and covered. She can't drive and has no rights. Women are the disenfranchised minority around the world, more so than persons of color. Sexism and misogyny and gender bias is worse than racism, far worse and far more insidious, The Wire gets that much across and does it well - far better actually than gothic horror and fantasy shows that I've watched over the past twenty years have.

Also, again, a confined space. A locker. Items smuggled in and out. Women as drugs. OR another kind of drug. Another way for a "man" to escape himself. The women like the cocaine, the crack, the alcohol, etc are smuggled in enclosed containers. The drug culture instead of freeing people traps them. Pushes them inside the hole.

It's ironic - because the waterfront is open area, outside near the sea. Just as the pit at the projects and the orange sofa was open. Yet all roads from it - lead to being confined. People go from being free and out in the open, to being trapped and confined when they come into direct contact.
McNulty when he gets imbroiled in the case of the dead woman - goes into the dark, into the windowless confined space and types out his message to put the case back into his own department.
Further trapping himself. It's the right thing, but the least beneficial to McNulty. Daniels - gets interested in the evidence and ventures into the confined space of the cage to root it out, just as last season he left his bright office and descended into the dungeon to root out the drug dealers.
Shakima Greggs was out in the open, but she got involved in bringing down the drugs and tracing the money - and ended up shot and finally in a dark confined windowless space. Different prisons.

Fascinating series and intricately detailed. Every piece builds on the next.



Should I do a season review of Game of Thrones...or have enough been done already? On the fence.
Meant to...but no real time.

Comments

[shapinglight]

Glad you liked it. I think season 2 is brilliant, but it is a little jarring right at the start when suddenly all these new white characters are introduced. A big contrast to season 1.

Just one thing, Ziggy is Frank Sobotka's son, not Nick. Nick is his nephew. Also, nice to see the actor who plays Frank in such a serious role. Everything else I've seen him in (including True Blood) has had him as a sort of comic relief character.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks! I got them confused. There's so much detail in each episode and it moves so quickly, with so many new characters introduced, it's easy to get lost.

Agree on the actor who plays Frank - an excellent character actor, nice to see him get a serious role that he can sink his teeth into.
The Wire is a bit like Game of Thrones - in that it is casting a lot of character actors in lead roles - with great results.

The first episode of S2 is actually better than the first episode of S1, it's tighter and the pacing is better. S1 took a while to get moving.

It is jarring - with all the new white characters, who all sort of look alike. Will state - that it is a relief to see a show in which not everyone looks like they came out of a modeling agency.
Actually no one does in The Wire - which is highly reassuring.
It makes it more real and more gripping.

Out of curiousity - was the scene that caused you to cry - the scene with the dead girls? Because that is a powerful scene and quite shocking.

[shapinglight]

Out of curiousity - was the scene that caused you to cry - the scene with the dead girls? Because that is a powerful scene and quite shocking.

Yes, it was. I suppose I was seeing it through Beadie Russell's eyes.

[candleanfeather.livejournal.com]

"The fucking Wire, man, I'm addicted. " Whistles innocently.

I have a fierce love for season two, because it's there the series really gets to spread its wings. It's its first dive at examining closely the links between drug culture and the rest of society and it gets it right. It also develops a keen and sharp analysis of what's happening to people in the working class all over the world, because what's happening to these people on the dwarfs of Baltimore it has happened to the people in my country who worked in coal mines, in the steel industry and it's still happening to other workers. It's something that happens again in season four, the social processes they are examining there, they're at work in France too.

"While on the surface it appears to just be a cop show or a show about the drug culture," The way I understand the Wire now after having seen it whole, is that they choose police work and criminality as a place from where they would put the lights on society at large.It's something similar to the type of approach historians or sociologists have when they work on criminal sources. Two years ago, I visited the police museum in Paris, its archives gave you a multiplicity of study angles on society be it politics, cultural life, transports, economic activities... If you ever come to France again, have a look at it, it's a very interesting place and not overcrowded like le Louvre.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Hee. You should thank beer_good_foamy for my addiction. He showed me that clip of the chess discussion and I thought, damn, I have to watch that show.

S2 appears to be discussing unions and smuggling to get additional money or the black market - which is prevalent in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe right now. The Working Man can't make enough to get ahead, so much like Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale, et al - he starts slowly doing things on the side, justifying them, until he gets deeper and deeper. There's another show that you should try that delves into this issue - Justified, it discusses the working poor in the hills of Kentucky, the coal mines. It's not quite as well written as The Wire, but it does deal with similar issues but in a rural setting. Another one - is The Good Wife - which deals with it from the female perspective - in yet another way.

Have you read any Richard Price? Or seen the films Traffic, Clockers, Freedomland, and I think there's a couple documentaries out there. These delve into it as well - not as well as the Wire appears to. But they are similar.

Two years ago, I visited the police museum in Paris, its archives gave you a multiplicity of study angles on society be it politics, cultural life, transports, economic activities... If you ever come to France again, have a look at it, it's a very interesting place and not overcrowded like le Louvre.

Thanks for the Rec. I really do need to visit Paris again. The last time I was there, I was 14, I think. I vividly remember it. But it was 1981. I'm guessing it has changed since then. ;-) I loved the city - it's why I took six years of French (I can barely read it, can't write in it and I can't speak it - can understand a little. My difficulty with it was that I can't hear the soft sounds.) Used to correspond with a girl who wanted to become a judge - Natalie Regis was her name. We lost touch way back in the 1980s. But my love affair with France started in 1981 and has never really ended. Just no time and no money to visit. But someday. Also want to see Italy and Spain.

But the museum you mention sounds fascinating. Far more interesting than the Louvre. I can do art museums here - we have 20 of them.

The way I understand the Wire now after having seen it whole, is that they choose police work and criminality as a place from where they would put the lights on society at large.It's something similar to the type of approach historians or sociologists have when they work on criminal sources.

Having studied Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and worked in the field, also in legal aid with the housing authority and domestic violence coalition - I agree. You can see the effects of gentrification and poverty through police and criminal culture best. You also can see the power structure.

Economics...is behind a lot of it. As historians know - most revolutions and wars are the result of economic downturn or economic problems. Crime is often a direct result of an inability to get ahead by other means. I remember having a lengthy discussion with a reformed bank robbery and crack cocaine addict in a federal penitentiary on this issue. He was a black man from Ohio, with a family, who had turned to crime because he could not find a way to pay for his family, and his addiction. He also had troubles finding work. He wanted to know if I thought he could find a job once he got out of prison. But he was so trapped. He got a sentence for five-ten, ended up serving 15 years, long-overdue for parole. And he had a detainer - which meant even if he got paroled from the Federal Penitentiary, he still had to get released from the State. I remember bursting into tears in my supervisor's office - because I could not get him released from the detainer (I wasn't a licensed attorney in Kansas, just an intern working under a licensed attorney, and therefor had no jurisdiction in Ohio.). My hands were effectively tied.

The system beats everyone down, not just those who get caught up in it - the criminals, but also those who choose to work in it - who want to make a difference. You see it clearly in the Wire - all those guys started out like Perez, wanting to make a difference. It can become demoralizing if you let it.

[candleanfeather.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all the recs.The best chance I've to catch one of these is the books. Seing original US series is a problem in France: you have too wait for a long time, be prepared to not be able to watch the integrality of the seasons, to pay close attention to the most obscure channels of the TNT... meanwhile the big channels will be clustered with CSI, Bones and so on for years.I saw a few episodes of the Good Wife and enjoyed it but they already stopped to broadcast it, same with the Wire (I bought the DVDs),Oz, Trueblood, Skin (a gritty British series). The only original series I could see was Btvs. I wonder if it would be possible nowadays.

Dear, that experience in Ohio was terrible. I could never have worked for penal justice either. I don't doubt that for some criminals their place is in prison, but for others I really wish there were other solutions, giving them a real chance to construct a new life and be a part of society again.

[candleanfeather.livejournal.com]

A few more things:

"and it discusses directly and indirectly the abuses and uses of power within that world." and what's more rarely done the illusions of power. It'll become more appearent in season 3,4 and 5.

About the dank basements where these cops work, they're a direct counterpoint to the shiny over equiped labs one can see in so many cop shows (CSI, Bones) where money is never a problem. Baltimore is a broke city and it shows. Reality and not American dream.

"but white slavery is a big organized crime money maker in the States and abroad. There are several rings in Queens, the Russian mafia is quite notorious for it." It's a plague in Europe too. And there's also a trafic concerning African women.