The Wire “The Wire”

Yes, the episode title is the same as the series.  I did not repeat myself.

Episode six opens with the body of Omar’s boyfriend stretched out on the hood of a car in a terrible neighborhood.  A long extension cord stretches into a window where an alarm goes off and wakes up really young Michael B. Jordan.  His character’s name is Wallace, so I’ll switch to that now.  Wallace walks around in a single tracking shot, waking a large brood of kids sleeping everywhere, tosses most of them juice boxes and bags of chips before sending them off to school while reminding them that if they don’t go to school they will go to foster care.  Wallace comes across the corpse in what is pretty much his back yard and he, well, doesn’t take it very well.  We’ve seen D’Angelo have problems with a conscience and disliking the violence, but Wallace isn’t much different.  If anything, he takes it worse.  Apparently, when he called in a sighting of Brandon, he never stopped to consider that Brandon would be tortured and then brutally killed.

By the by, as a contrast, we also see D’Angelo’s place.  Wallace and the lower-level guys live in squalor.  D’Angelo has a nice spread with a huge wardrobe and at least a dozen different pairs of shoes to choose from.

Thing is, killing Brandon sets certain things in motion.  Yeah, we get a rare appearance by Avon and Stringer in the low rises, but the real effect comes when Omar finds out.  And Omar, well, he may be against swearing, but he also has no fear.  Now he has a reason to go to the police, and he not only offers to fill in information on Avon’s different players, he even agrees to testify in court.

That’s probably good, since the detail’s other CI, Bubbles, seems to have fallen off the wagon with his buddy Jimmy, Jimmy being the guy who got Bubbles started in all this to begin with.

So, Omar is onboard, and the pay phones at the low rises are all tapped.  Lester is teaching an eager Prez to be a good cop, they’re getting pager numbers for folks like Stringer, so what can go wrong?

Oh yeah, McNulty’s boss, Major Rawls of Homicide, wants to use some of their evidence to get his stats up.  Such a move wouldn’t lead to convictions and would actually hurt the detail’s entire case.  McNulty goes from zero to asshole in less time than it takes to read this sentence, and about all anyone can do is get Daniels to try and get Rawls to back off…good luck with that.  Daniels uses whatever political capital he has to go to the deputy chief for another month.

I forget, did anything come of that “Daniels might be crooked” thing?  Well, at the very least, Omar gave the detail a name.  Bird.  Bird is the guy who probably has the gun used in various homicides, and if they get him, they get a lot.