The Wire 3/9 (Minor Spoilers)

N

Not Shinola

250+ Posts
Just watched the final episode. No major spoilers below, but I will hint at some of the stuff that happens, and give my opinion of the episode.










































About an hour and a half ( last few minutes is a montage)
Pretty Much every loose end is tied up.
This season ends pretty much like every The Wire Season ends (some good, some bad)
We get another wake for a cop at the irish pub.
Prez has a beard.
Some vengeance is served.
Chardine from Season 1 makes an appearance.

Overall, last episode was OK. Like most seasons the 2nd to last episode is better than the finale. This finale was more cynical than most. And the end of the newspaper angle was kinda lame. Great series, but time for it to die. As far as HBO series endings, better than Deadwood or Sopranos, but nowhere close to Rome.
 
It was decent. Not sure how that show could have ended with a Bang and it didn't.

It was a little too much "TV" insofar as how it ends but the show still ******* rocks.

Question - what exactly was the final scene with Marlo about? That he was going to go legit but the streets keep calling him back?

The scene with Slim and The Greek was cool. The Greek runs that ******* town.
 
Liked it as a series finale.
(spoilers)


Glad to see Cheese go, always disliked him. His last sentences about the game pretty much sums up the series as a whole. Michael robs the rim shop and becomes the new Omar, sans sexual leanings. Dukie, the kid destined the escape the streets, turns to drugs. Namond (wee-bay's kid), the kid stuck in the game, manages to escape. Life goes on, the game continues.

Only thing I wish we could have seen was Avon, the kingpin of the first season to round everything out. Maybe he was there and I missed it.
 
first, you probably should have given the title of "Wire Series Finale" since this isn't some random rerun of Lost.... the is the end to one of the top 10 shows to ever air.

spoilers here so stop reading if you haven't seen it.

didn't end like i thought for mcnulty. he really came out of this one better, at least as a person, than i expected.

awesome to see slim take cheese out. cheese has been a prick since he stole old dude's firebird and burned it.

marlo will be just like barksdale. he can't take it. he only knows the street. sad thing is, that is real for a lot of inner city youth.

sucks to see little man shooting heroin. who knows how many guys there are like that. guys ,that given a chance, would probably be successful responsible members of society. but with the cards he was dealt... guess those are the breaks.

sorry to see it go, but HBO does a good job of not letting these shows go downhill (as best they can). it is better to keep it how it is, a great ******* show, with 5 good seasons.
 
I like the fact that in 4 or 5 years they could be A Wire movie or a 6th season.

I was listening to the Sportsguy podcast with Jason Whitlock, and one of thei things they speculated on is the character arcs for some of the kids.

At this point Michael is the new Omar, but they stated that if you did this show in 5 years that Michael and Randy could be the new Avon and Stringer.

Dukie is the new Bubbles
 
Marlo:The truth is, I'm down with this gangsta ****. I've been there, done that.
Co-Op dude: You're something other than a gangsta?
Marlo: A business man...yea tall man, I can't get my head wrapped around that **** neither.

So there he is, so uncomfortable in a suit in a room full of suits so he has to bail. He goes, chases off some corner boys and gets cut, that getting cut is real to him, it sort of re-energizes him and it draws back a quote from season 3.

"I ain't no suit wearing business man...I'm just a gangsta I suppose." - Avon Barksdale
 
In five years, is Bubbles the only guy who really improved his life?

I'm so sad to see this show end. Glad Simon and crew is putting a mini-series together for HBO.
 
i wonder if kinard got pinched for omar's murder?

kima showing up to "the wake" and being embraced by lester and mcnulty was great.

...and dukie manipulating prez and shooting junk was the way this was supposed to end. the street just traded bubbles for dukie and the stats don't change. it's just one group of teens-twenties for another......
 
No more Wire, Rome, or Sopranos. Damn, this is depressing.
frown.gif
 
the dookie/bubbles tie in was amazing and sad. this season we got to see some of bubbles charisma coming back as he got his life together. we saw a flash of dook's charm when he was scamming prez. overall i really enjoyed the way it ended. the only thing is i wish that journalist ******* got his in the end.
 
Regarding the newspaper angle...realize this is David Simon's background. He wanted to publicize at least two significant things facing the industry. First, the dramatic decline in subscriptions. Internet and alternative media sources have killed subscription rates. Second, and it's related to the first, is the desire to make up ****. Does no one remember the NYTs scandal just a few years ago? This from the most well respected newspaper in America?

Sorry some of y'all didn't get it, but it was one of the most integral and important points made by Simon in the five seasons.
 
Alt,

I think you nailed it. Look at all the great characters - Prez, Colvin, Avon, Poot, Vondas etc. who were reduced to cameos this final season at the expense of the newspaper scenes.
 
I saw two problems with this season of "The Wire":

1). Simon and HBO agreed to do this fifth season in 10 episodes instead of the usual 12 or 13.

This forced them to cram too much into those first, important episodes, and they still didn't have enough time to tell all the stories to a natural completion. At this point, The Wire's loyal viewers are used to and expect the show to have a slow, deliberate pace. Their patience has always been rewarded with good storytelling and great acting.

2). This year's seasonal theme--The Media--wasn't nearly as well incorporated into the overall story of the entire show as the previous ones: Drugs, Dockworkers/Union, Politics, & Education.

Each year, we were introduced to a new aspect of Baltimore life. New characters were brought in and their stories related to the ones that had been told before.

The best example was last year's theme of Education. They took four new characters (The Corner Boys) and made them the focus of the season. This worked because A). those child actors were damn good, and B). the audience got to see those new characters interact with ones that they were already familiar with: Prez was their new teacher; Bunny Colvin, was an academic researcher for the UM public school, study program; Mrs. Sampson, Cutty's ex-girlfriend, was another teacher; Cutty, himself, was the school's temporary truant officer (and the boys went to his boxing gym). We also got to see Bubbles at Tilgham Middle School as he tried to enroll Sharrod, and Bunk and Carver dealing with Namond and Randy.

This season, the audience didn't connect with anyone at the Baltimore Sun. We were supposed to sympathize with Gus and some of the people that got laid off, but those characters weren't fully developed. We did see some of the journalists interact with the established characters--McNulty helping Templeton create the news & Fletch writing Bubbles' story--but for the most part their interaction with the established characters was brief--Zorsi complains to Pearlman about the paper getting treated equally with the tv stations or Alma showing up at press conferences to ask Carcetti or Daniels a question.

The Wire is still a great show. The fifth and final season was better than anything else on television this spring (tied with "Lost"). It just didn't live up to the standard set by the previous four seasons.
 
I guess I can see how the internet generation and 20-somethings didn't feel the newspaper storyline was compelling. But for those of us who grew up pre-internet and pre-cable TV, newspapers were an integral part of our lives. The days of Houston, Dallas and even Austin (who remembers the Austin Citizen which competed with the American Statesman?) having two newspapers are long gone. Heck, we even had morning and afternoon delivery. People relied on newspapers and the six o'clock news to see what's happening locally, nationally and globally.

That this industry is a shadow of its former self is a major story, and I'm glad Simon decided to tell it.
 
The media storyline should have been interweaving throughout the series. The whole point of the media storyline, as I mentioned, was to show what the paper is missing, well they miss a lot in all fields. I don't think they should have been a major factor until this season, but Gus and Twiggs should have been introduced and developed a little bit earlier in the series so we get the emotional gravitas of a senior reporter being bought out.

As far as it relegating other characters to cameo status, Simon wouldn't have had those characters as major storylines this season because they had nowhere to go with it. Take Randy for example. He knew in one scene he could wrap Randy's storyline and tell it more effectively that way rather than drag it out over a season.
 
I really liked how they brought back characters (even if just for cameos) to make brief appearances throughout the season.

The first poster mentioned Chardine re-appearing in the finale. When was that? I swear I don't remember seeing that. Was I drunk? Oh wait, I know, it must have happened when my wife asked me one of her 20 billion questions during the show. Nothing like missing 5 seasons of The Wire, then trying to catch up during the Series freakin' finale. arrrrrrggggh!!!
 
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