Things are starting to line up in the multiple plotlines.
Episode #41: “Refugees”
“No one wins. One side just loses more slowly.” – Prez
As the homicide unit’s newest detective Greggs is assigned to the high-profile witness case in an attempt to stall the investigation until after the election. Freamon joins Bunk on finding his missing suspect and realizes the connection to the lack of violence from the Stanfield Organization. Freamon suggests the suspect has been killed and his body hidden. Marlo loses big in a poker game and decides to take over Bodie’s corner. Chris and Snoop assess Michael as a potential recruit. Proposition Joe manipulates Omar into robbing Marlo’s next card game. Watkins becomes more angry with Royce when he sees he has reneged on a promise to back his protege Marla Daniels for a council seat. Randy is caught truanting and becomes a reluctant informant for the teachers.
New Characters:
Bug (Michael’s little brother)
O-Dog (Marlo dealer)
Episode #42: “Alliances”
“If you with us, you with us.” – Chris Partlow
Carcetti learns that Greggs has been assigned the witness case and uses the information against Royce. Watkins forms an alliance with Carcetti. Now a sergeant in the major case unit, Herc takes part in a series of ill-advised raids that fail to render any signifigant arrests. Herc takes a video camera without permission to surveil Stanfield. Marlo tries to enlist Michael but he rejects the offer. Marlo arranges to have Omar framed for murder. Dukie debunks Randy’s theory that the Chris and Snoop’s victims are undead and shows him the bodies. Prez struggles to control his student’s behaviour. Bubbles is beaten by another drug addict and throws Sherrod out for truanting.
New Character:
Zenobia Dawson
I’m a little confused as to why Prop Joe seems to be playing Omar and Marlo against each other. Ostensibly, Prop Joe had been concerned with Marlo to provide unified muscle when confronting the New Yorkers. I suppose he might simply like Omar removed from the equation altogether, but Omar hasn’t really been presented as an issue post-Stringer. Mostly, it seems like this conflict came out of nowhere, and Joe (I think) stands to lose a whole lot more than he gains. It just doesn’t sit right — Prop Joe is (should be?) smarter than that.
Can anyone offer an explanation/did I miss something?
I feel nervous for Prop Joe. I feel like he is as good as dead, what is he crazy trying to pit Marlo against Omar? When anyone tries to play Omar they die, I mean even someone as clever as Stringer Bell got got. I am really interested to see how Prop Joe’s whole attempted set up plays out because we know it is going to be bloody. I would say my money is on Omar. He is so reckless and careful that I doubt even Marlo will be able to kill him. I mean we see him wear his bullet proof vest, he scopes out every situation prior to putting himself in it and he even takes such precautions as putting gum in the crack of the door to see if the seal is broken to know if someone is waiting inside his home to try and kill him. He is also ruthless and I think merely knowing that he has robbed someone like Marlo he will sense that he needs to cover his bases and go after him since Marlo isn’t likely to be taking getting played sitting down. Although my one worry is that instead of Marlo’s crew making it known that they want to kill Omar they are keeping it on the down low so maybe he won’t suspect it and they will come at him out of nowhere. But I am still hoping and putting my faith in Omar, probably also because I don’t think I could handle his death. I love him too much, especially after the whole incident with his Grandma and her crown.
A noteworthy and tender moment in one of these episodes was when Prez gave his food to Dukie, again maybe I am super sensitive but this had be on the verge of tears. Finally we are starting to see what living in extreme poverty is like. And you can’t help but root for Dukie’s that he gets out of his horrible situation because despite not having enough to eat, being filthy and being taken advantage of by the family or people he lives with (they steal the care packages teachers give him to sell for drug money) he still makes it to school. If that isn’t impressive I don’t know what is. I still don’t feel like we have enough back story about him and I am left wanting more. I also want to learn more about what it is like to live in a group home since that has been referenced a lot in these past two episodes. It is especially intriguing since the tidbits of information we get about the group home is that they are awful and so it’d be useful to see what the inside of those homes are really like.
And just to put some facts behind why I got so teary eyed about Prez giving Dukie his food is because hunger is so prevalent in our world but not just in developing countries (worldwide around 30,000 children die a day of hunger) but in our own country. Something information to think about and food insecure/insecurity basically means not enough food to survive on, so these households are left hungry:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that in 2007:
36.2 million people lived in households considered to be food insecure.
Of these 36.2 million, 23.8 million are adults (10.6 percent of all adults) and 12.4 million are children (16.9 percent of all children).
The number of people in the worst-off households increased to 11.9 from 10.8 in 2005. This increase in the number of people in the worst-off category is consistent with other studies and the Census Bureau poverty data, which show worsening conditions for the poorest Americans.
Black (22.2 percent) and Hispanic (20.1 percent) households experienced food insecurity at far higher rates than the national average.
The ten states with the highest food insecurity rates in 2007 were Mississippi, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Maine, South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
So it isn’t just Dukie that suffers from hunger but a huge portion of our country. It is just so sad. Sorry to be a downer.
I guess one of the reasons I see that Prop Joe might want Omar dead is because Omar’s profession is robbing drug dealers which is bad for business. I remember a while back Omar robbed a couple stashes of someone in the co-op so that is money lost. I mean why would be want the best stick up boy around when we can have him dead and not risk losing money because their stashes get robbed? I am totally in agreement though Prop Joe is foolish because I don’t think it is as easy as he is playing it to get Marlo to go after Omar, something is bound to get messy.
Antoinette,
I really appreciated reading your post. It served as a bit of a wake-up call for me. I began “watching the wire” with every intent to try to view it more as an ethnography than a riveting narrative. Somewhere along the way I managed to trade my soc. hat in for that of a semiotician. Thanks for popping the bubble!
I really like the four children that we are introduced to in this season. I think they all represent a different aspect of the home lives that are prevalent in Baltimore and other urban areas. Michael is a very strong character who seems to have grown up quickly due to his mother who is a fiend and an absent father. He has to take care of his younger brother at the same time and seems the most responsible. Namond on the other hand is the son of Wee-Bey and has always been given everything through his life. Namond has been given all his clothes and housing situation as well as the being involved in the game with Bodie. Namond also has the biggest mouth out of all the children and this is understandable considering the parenting he receives on a daily basis from his mother. Randy has a foster mother but actually has the best home life out of the four children. His foster mother sets strict rules for Randy as well as strikes fear into him based on the fact that he told Miss Donnelly who was doing the tags around the school. Dukie is in the most difficult situation of all the children because the rest of his family are fiends. But beyond this point, the basic essentials are not even provided to Dukie like proper nutrition or hygiene. So it is interesting to see the progression of these characters so far and throughout the rest of the season. Each character will go through a progress of education considering the theme of this season is education.
I think Season 4, more so than any other season so far, goes some length to pull peripheral individual characters into the overriding storyline of main plot line, in this case, the education system. Characters that were left for dead by the plot’s conclusion (relatively speaking) at the end of Season 3 have been coincidentally integrated in the main plot line once again. So far, The Wire has been smart and smooth about the integration of multiple plot lines and has been fairly implicit in the intersecting relationships between characters. Season 4 employs more traditional television techniques in this manner by bringing in characters, pretty blatently, so as to keep them involved in the show. The three examples that come to mind are Cutty, Bunny Colvin, and Prez. All of these characters, for one reason or another, have all coincidentally happened upon work at the Middle School. These three characters were integral parts of Season 3, but had become basically obsolete to the Police and Criminal plot lines by the season’s conclusion. I don’t really know what I think about this particular strategy by The Wire’s writers this season. As a viewer, I really enjoy watching these characters, so I am happy with how things have turned out. However, although the circumstances of each of these three characters is very believable, the explicit involvement of all three at the Middle School is throwing me off.
What I like most about this new season is the fact that we get a chance to see the potential players of the game before they really enter into the machine. We saw how randy was mislead into leading fruit’s killer, who’s name I forget, to a trap where snoop and chris killed him and dumped him in a vacant house. We saw how micheal is now being approached for a ‘career’ as a Stanfield soldier, it seems as though he embodies what cutty or wee-bey might have been like as a kid, I almost wish we could see him grown up because he could some real damage as an adult. Namond is a tough character to side with. He is Wee-Bey’s son, which should make me like him in some way or another, but I feel like he fails in the hardness that his father carries, and he is way too flashy as a hopper. I have a feeling his ponytail is going to come back to haunt him at some point.
Overall this season has really cut to the point with how different these kids lives are from most of ours. We saw the lot of them chilling in a alley courtyard, and when shots are fired nearby, instead of hiding under the covers, they are guessing the caliber of the bullet. It wasn’t until they saw a shady character who may have done the shooting, that they made any moves. It is really interesting to see the boys cover for themselves and a couple of them, Michael and even Dukie really run their own lives where their parents are unable to as impoverished addicts.. Namonds’ upbringing is all but provided for, except he has no real motive but for his flash and reputation – I was expecting Wee-bey to do something about it but it doesn’t seem as though he wants anything particular from Namond, save for a few hard facts on the changing game. I don’t know exactly what I am expecting from these kids, and I’m really interested to see where Michael lands.
I’m not sure if I agree with Pete that bringing the more peripheral characters from season 3 into season 4 is blatant. I think that the fact that Prez, Colvin, and Cutty all end up somewhat involved at the same middle school (and don’t forget Bubbles and Sharod) is definitely convenient and certainly necessary for the structure of the season but I think that it still makes sense within the framework of what has already been established throughout the history of the show. We know from last season that the deacon has worked with both Colvin and Cutty in the past and he is the one that sets them both up at the middle school, so as far as those two characters being involved at the same middle school the deacon’s involvement helps it make sense to me. I maybe wouldn’t by Prez working there while the other two were if they had not established him there first – but as it stands Prez is the first of the three characters that we see in the school. Also the way that the creators introduce each character into the school helps as well. Bunny starts out with a different job that he hates and then moves to the school – and Cutty only does it for a little extra cash- its not like season 4 started out with all three characters just happening to work at the same place and I will admit that would have felt forced. I also think that the pace at which we are watching the show in class probably makes the fact that these characters are working in the same place at the same time a little more obvious – i think it would have seemed a little natural to viewers watching the show a week at a time.
As absurd as the notion of zombies seems in the context of everything else we have seen in The Wire, the fact that this is a legitimate debate among the eighth graders is really appropriate. It not only brings them further into the world of Marlow’s crime and drug ring but is also necessary to remind us that these are still just kids. Despite their ‘hard’ place on the street, in school and at home, these kids are still just kids. Even though they may have already seen more guns, drugs and violence than most adults, the fact remains that they are still just 14 years old and it took something as bizarre as zombies to remind us of that.
This is fits with Bunny Colvin’s grant experiment and I’m convinced these themes of age and maturity will continue. The scene in the interrogation room with the 18-21 year old criminal was completely absurd and I can only imagine how fun it was to write. With the objective of scaring off the academic and convincing him that the proposed age-group was a bit too aggressive I can only imagine that writing the scene required Simon and Burns to just get as vulgar and rowdy as possible…which is amusing to think about and amusing to watch.
I think we can agree that we are all interested to see what happens with Michael’s future, Dukie’s living situation, and the other kid’s place in Colvin’s experiment.
After writing some of my other posts that exemplify the negatives of the game, a specific scene from episode 41 popped into my head. We often talk that one of the most intriguing aspects of the game, that lures many into it, is the fast ascent one can experience. One moment he can be a regular soldier and the next he can take on a managerial role. Well in the case of Body, this backfired on him. I know his decline took place a while ago, however, in this episode, it was blatantly and harshly drawn out.
Chris and Snoop head over to Bodies corner to talk to Bodie and further impose their power over him. When they roll up, they begin asking him questions about Micheal. After Bodie responds with an answer, he than asks why. Chris looks at him and states that he is no longer able to ask why. Once a respected and somewhat influential member of an organization, Bodie is now back to where he started.
What I thought was interesting about this scene is that we often only associate the descent of ones status in the game with death. Its either they live and rise fast in the ranks or they die and obviously loose all status (unless, of course, you are at the top and your family will be compensated). We never really looked at Bodies situation where although he is still alive, which is an accomplishment in itself, he has been demoted to where he started years back. I felt like bringing this up as another way, opposed to death, to look at how easy it is for one to loose their rank in the game and to further the idea of how horrible the game truly is.
There’s an Arthur Penn film called “Night Moves”, it’s a fantastic movie, came out in 1975 after Watergate, Vietnam, and all the turbulence of the 60s. It’s Gene Hackman playing a PI who is hired to find a missing girl (a young Melanie Griffith). If you haven’t seen it and plan to watch it and don’t want to know the end then don’t read the rest of this post.
What happens is, Hackman finds the girl but gets caught up in the case. The case keeps expanding and getting messier and messier, eventually Hackman discovers that everyone has been lying to him from the start and on top of that his wife’s having an affair. The film ends with Hackman on a boat in the Florida Keys but unlike in Bogart in “Key Largo”, Hackman is unable to play the hero and he ends up bleeding to death as the boat circles endlessly in the water.
Anyway the reason for mentioning this is “Refugees” makes a very interesting reference to “Night Moves”. The film’s opening quote; “No one wins. One side just loses more slowly”, is almost a direct lift from “Night Moves”, and it’s not just the quote, it’s how it’s played out. In “Night Moves” Hackman sits watching a baseball game, his wife comes in and asks him who’s winning. Same thing with Prez. On one hand it makes perfect sense, “Night Moves” has the same dismal ‘we’re all doomed and America sucks’ thing plus the whole dissent and greek tragedy pessimism “The Wire” revels in. But the scene in “The Wire” ends with Prez’s wife saying, “See, someone’s winning.” Which I’m almost certain doesn’t happen in “Night Moves”, and this seems so odd. Perhaps it’s meant to be ironic, perhaps it’s not a reference at all, perhaps it’s just to show Prez’s wife as oblivious to the seriousness of the problems of the education system. But perhaps, just perhaps, this is a sliver of optimism. Perhaps Prez won’t end up trapped in a endless loop, perhaps Prez will play out the end of “Key Largo” instead of “Night Moves”.