'The Wire' finale: Same as it ever was

When I was in college, Kurt Vonnegut came to my campus for a speaking engagement and explained why Hamlet is the greatest piece of literature in the English language. (Hang with me here for a minute, because it'll come back around to the brilliant finale of The Wire, I promise.)

He took out a blackboard and explained that most works of fiction have a series of highs and lows, drawing a couple of chalk lines that looked like EKGs, and that the hackiest stories have the biggest peaks and valleys. In Hamlet, though, every good thing that happens is offset by some unfortunate event, so the line ends up being pretty much straight -- just like life, Vonnegut explained.

Which brings us to Sunday's finale of The Wire, my pick for the finest television series of my lifetime (at least). The episode delivered bucketloads of resolution, but even in the midst of all that, nothing much changed. The bosses at the police department are still juking the stats, so the real police can't do their jobs. The politicians still don't see as far as the next office. The business on the corners continues unabated.

Given what The Wire has been saying about Baltimore (and, by extension, any and every other city in America) for five seasons, I don't know that any other ending would have sufficed. People will take their small victories where they can -- and there are some to be had, without a doubt -- but they'll get them in spite of the institutions that are supposed to serve them.

Creator David Simon, who wrote the finale, covered a tremendous amount of ground Sunday. I'm inevitably going to leave a few things out, so please take any and every aspect of the show up in the comments. But the best way I can see to do it is to take it one institution at a time.

Let's start with The Sun, which came under the show's lens this season and has come under fairly strong criticism from a lot of quarters (we scribes can be a sensitive lot) for its emphasis on the fairly insider-y stuff about how the pursuit of awards can drive coverage and on Templeton's string of lies.

Simon argues in this exhaustive interview (all of which is really interesting, but the relevant section is near the top) that the big thing about the Sun story is what's not happening -- i.e., the paper's not covering the fact that the cops are cooking the crime stats to boost the mayor's campaign for governor, that drug money is funding campaigns and redevelopment projects and that the staff has been so gutted of institutional memory that it doesn't recognize the significance of Prop Joe or Omar's death.

That's no small thing. What was most interesting to me, though, was how it worked as a parallel to McNulty's story. As Jimmy tells Templeton in the homicide squad room -- and watching McNulty call out the lying reporter was one of the finale's better moments -- at least he knew why he was lying; he doesn't get what the hell Templeton's going to accomplish with his fakery.

What it gets him, of course, is a Pulitzer (along with his enablers Whiting and Klebanow), while Gus and Alma, who tried to blow the whistle on Templeton's lies, are banished to the copy desk and a suburban bureau, respectively. I don't know whether the knowledge that other people know he's a liar will end up having much effect; though he's clearly shaken by McNulty calling him on the carpet, he sure as heck looks like he recovered in time to accept his award.

The police. How great was that final scene with Sydnor railing about the bosses to Judge Phelan, mirroring the conversation McNulty had with Phelan in the very first episode of the series? I buy completely that Sydnor is disillusioned with the higher-ups -- he's seen plenty of nonsense in the past two seasons working with Lester -- but let's hope he's also learned Freamon's more measured approach to police work. He's never been depicted as the kind of hothead that McNulty is, so maybe he can evolve into a Freamon or a Bunk and do some real, honest police work in spite of the bosses.

Following Kima's revelation to Daniels that the homeless case is a fake, it of course falls apart -- but not in the way you might expect. Both the department and City Hall are desperate to keep the screw-up quiet, usher Jimmy and Lester out (and bury them "in a hole so deep no one ever gets close to digging them up," as Carcetti's detestable chief of staff Steintorf puts it) and keep both the department and Carcetti's administration -- and by extension, his campaign for governor -- from imploding.

The game of CYA proceeds apace -- getting over a minor hurdle when Templeton (seriously, how pathological is this guy?) tries to fake a new murder attempt to keep the serial killer in the news -- until another body turns up, this time with a white ribbon around his wrist. The victim also has a couple business cards on him, which leads McNulty to the card-collecting homeless man we met early in the season. Though he's deeply disturbed, the cops have a fairly easy case on Card Man for the latest killing and from rookie detective Christenson's last case, where the vic also had business cards on him. Rawls is then able to spin the story so that they can say Card Man is a "suspect" in the fake killings, putting the matter to face-saving rest for the public.

That's of no use to Jimmy and Lester, though -- and really, there's no coming back from such a massive fraud, which Rawls correctly (if short-sightedly) notes also put a good amount of extra cash in the wallets of McNulty and several other cops, thanks to the overtime tap being turned back on.

And so we come to one of the most sustained hilarious scenes in Wire history -- the mock wake for Jimmy, led by the redoubtable Jay Landsman. When I said in my blog post earlier in the week that I loved Landsman despite his overwhelming lack of redeeming qualities, this was what I was talking about: The eulogy he gave Jimmy ("He was natural police. ... I don't give that up unless it happens to be true. Natural po-lice. But Christ, what an a**hole.") was just about perfect. And the scene with Jimmy, Lester and Kima outside the bar, with her acknowledging she told Daniels about their bogus case, struck just the right note for me as well. Like McNulty, Kima may be too dedicated to the job for her own good, but she's never not worked a case honestly, and that's something both Jimmy and Lester have to respect.

The bosses. But man, oh man, did the police get screwed on the political side. After swallowing hard and keeping his mouth shut on the homeless case, Daniels draws the line when Steintorf asks him to juke the stats to bolster Carcetti's campaign. Lance Reddick does slow burn exceptionally well, and his bitter recounting to his ex-wife Marla about how stat games have killed the department was absolutely riveting.

Daniels' refusal to play ball, though, means that the file about his old assets investigation -- last seen being passed from Burrell to Nerese early in the season -- comes back into play, hanging over his head like a guillotine. Saving both his ex-wife's and his current girlfriend Ronnie's career, he falls on his sword and resigns. Here's what really stings, though: The new commissioner is none other than Stan Valchek, who has made a career out of politicking and, as Sydnor puts it to Judge Phelan, "wouldn't know police work if it took down his front door on a warrant."

Meanwhile, does Tommy Carcetti have any bit of his soul left? From day one of his administration in Baltimore, he has tacked to whichever way the political wind was blowing, playing budgetary shell games to fit the needs of his stepping-stone office on the way to the governor's mansion. He didn't inherit anything resembling a rosy situation when he took office, and he's leaving the city in just about the same situation as he found it.

The street. The Wire doesn't get much more heartbreaking than the scene last week where Dukie walked down the long alleyway to his new "home" with the junk man. After that, it's no big surprise to see him slip into a life of addiction, going so far as to scam Prez (who, to his credit, knew he was probably getting took) out of a couple hundred dollars. That doesn't make it any less brutal to watch him shooting up.

Contrast that with Bubbles, who finally agrees to let Fletcher run his story in the Sun, even if he's a little embarrassed by it: "Plenty motherf**kers wake up every day and don't get high. My man's makin' me sound special for doing what the f**k I need to be doing." But if you didn't choke up a little at the scene in the epilogue where Bubbs goes upstairs to have dinner with his sister, then there's something wrong. (And though I said it last week, it bears repeating: Andre Royo delivered an absolute knockout performance this season, and really for the show's entire run.)

The game, meanwhile, is always the game, even if Marlo is no longer in it. One of the more fascinating scenes in the finale settled on the newly freed Marlo -- who walked but had to pledge to give up the life, lest the case against him get revived -- chafing at his role of legitimate businessman (the very role Stringer Bell coveted) and walking back down to a corner to stir up some trouble. (Loved that the two guys hanging out there were continuing to exaggerate the legend of Omar.)

His scuffle with the corner boys results in a minor cut on his arm -- not bad considering he was outnumbered and the other guys had a gun and a knife. It leaves Marlo with a bemused look on his face (maybe because only a short time earlier, Levy warned him that the developers interested in his money will "bleed" him if he's not careful). I don't think we're meant to know which way Marlo goes from here, but the corner culture seems so integral to who he is that having to walk away from it seems almost worse than having to do time for it.

He does, however, have a fat roll to ease his transition, courtesy of his sale of the co-op to the other dealers, led by Fat Face Rick and Slim Charles (who's apparently gotten over the notion that he's not the "CEO type," as he put it a few episodes back). Charles also provides one of the episode's best visceral moments, popping Cheese as he delivers a monologue about how the game doesn't allow for nostalgia (Method Man was pretty great in that scene, was he not?).

As for the rest of Marlo's crew, Chris takes the fall for all 22 murders in the vacants, most if not all of which he was responsible for anyway, and gets a life sentence with no chance at parole (interesting to see him hanging with Wee-Bey, Avon's former enforcer, in the prison yard in the closing montage). Cheese, had Slim Charles not ended his time out on bail, and Monk were headed to prison on drug charges, and Levy, like Marlo, gets to skate on buying the grand jury documents in exchange for not taking Marlo's case to court, where it could get shot full of holes. He's now free to represent a new generation of dealers with help from Herc, who is possibly too dense to realize that he's screwing over every former friend he has in the police department.

Finally, Michael has become the new Omar, robbing Marlo's money man Vinson in almost the same fashion the late Mr. Little would have. Michael has always kind of stood apart, whether hanging with his friends last season or questioning some of Marlo's decisions in this one -- and it became clear last week that he was a pretty sharp tactician as well.

That brings us to the closing montage, with the season one version of the theme song playing over a series of quick scenes catching us up on the various players: Daniels is now a defense attorney, Pearlman a judge, Slim Charles and Fat Face Rick are meeting with Vondas, Rawls is accepting his promised job heading the state police, Kenard gets picked up for Omar's murder and the corners are still the corners.

Life goes on, and we do what we can. I couldn't think of any other way for The Wire to end.

What did you think of The Wire's finale? Satisfied? Bummed out? Will there ever be another show like it?

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