The Wire “The Buys”

This episode opens with D’Angelo suggesting to his crew at the low rises that maybe, just maybe, they don’t have to be so physical with their junky clients.  He suggests that maybe, just maybe, if there were less bodies around the projects, the cops wouldn’t be all that interested in them.

At that moment, Bubbles walks up to perform his hat trick for Greggs and McNulty on a nearby rooftop.

The Wire isn’t a show for slowing down and doing nothing, so what we have here is forward momentum on a lot of fronts.  Daniels agrees not to get Prez in trouble further for blinding a kid in one eye, but he sticks the guy on desk duty at the detail.  Then he learns he needs to make some busts.  Those won’t help and he knows it, but his superiors think it’ll get the judge and the press of their collective backs, so they might as well.

McNulty is his usual asshole self, though the number of people who like him triples from the pilot since both Greggs and Bubbles seem to think he’s OK.  He won’t go on the raids, mostly because he knows it’s a waste and he has a better idea.  When he and Bunk took D’Angelo in for questioning, he found D’Angelo carrying a beeper, not a cell phone.  Can the cops copy the beeper?  One trip to the prosecutor helping out, good ol’ Rhonda Pearlman…apparently the reason McNulty is divorced…and yes, he can copy the beeper if his superior is willing to do it.  Even if Daniels is mad at him.  Oh, and the FBI says Daniels may be dirty.

Who else is dirty?  The two overweight slugs the detail got saddled with.  One takes a header in the raid when a dealer smacks him one.  Well, maybe not dirty, but definitely useless.  Who isn’t useless?  Lester Freemon.  The guy who makes doll house furniture.  He overhears a conversation about Avon’s past and manages to find a photo of the guy off a boxing poster.  Avon finally has a face for the cops.  Lester also finds a phone number written on a wall during the raid.

D’Angelo, meanwhile, explains how chess works to his underlings, and then gets praise from Stringer for record profits from the low rises.

And then…HOLY CRAP!  IT’S OMAR!

OMAR’S HERE!

OMAR ROBBED THE LOW RISES!

Omar was supposed to be a bit part of a few episodes.  Instead, Michael K. Williams so impressed the producers, he got to stick around for a while.  Omar is almost like a character out of a different show.  But he’s charismatic and compelling and I don’t care.  It’s OMAR!

Granted, he doesn’t do much in this episode, but there he is.