The Wire “Moral Midgetry”

Tommy Carcetti is getting tips on how to be a bigger politician than a city councilman and Cutty is looking to open a gym and teach boxing to keep kids off the streets and off drugs.

Those being the smallest plot lines this time around, we got them done and over with and move on.

At the heart of the Barksdale Organization, the thing that kept it running as well as it did, was the partnership between Avon and Stringer.  Avon had the street smarts, the hustle, while Stringer was the money man with the ambition.  They’ve been lifelong friends, and given how much Stringer was floundering while Avon was in jail and how much the two haven’t quite been seeing eye to eye lately, it’s easy to see why they need each other.

That may have been changed forever by the end of the episode.

So sure, while Colvin’s Hamsterdam project seems to be doing something right, where the crime rate in his district has dropped so much his superiors are doubting whether or not he’s been padding his results, and while McNulty and Greggs are tracking Stringer’s efforts to buy disposable phones from distant locations going comically bad when McNulty incorrectly assumes a white suburban cop is racist (the guy is married to a black woman), the thing that would come between Avon and Stringer is the elephant in the room Avon isn’t even aware of:  that Stringer ordered the murder of Avon’s nephew D’Angelo.

Yeah, there are problems. Stringer is actually getting somewhere in the legitimate (or at least legal) business world, while Avon is plotting war against both Marlo and Omar.  It doesn’t work since Omar is still more or less lying low and Marlo recognizes an ambush first and hits Avon’s car before Avon can hit him.  Avon is wounded but lives.

But McNulty had long ago figured out that D’Angelo was no suicide.  First he tells D’s mother.  Then she goes to Stringer.  Then he goes to Avon.  And while Stringer is trying to get Avon is stop being a gangsta, Stringer finds himself in a position that he probably shouldn’t have been and outright tells Avon that yes, D was murdered.  And Avon isn’t dumb enough to not realize how Stringer knows this.

The season has a few more episodes left, but I can’t see how this doesn’t create a more permanent rift between Stringer and Avon.

I also can’t see Daniels not figuring out exactly why he got assigned to Stringer after McNulty and Greggs dug up stuff he didn’t want to pursue.

But on a final note, Omar comes back from the East Side to see Hamsterdam up and running.  He wouldn’t be the first thief to rob the dealers there.  Heck, Colvin’s people were taking reports from the robbed dealers.  Omar, though, doesn’t like what he sees.  What does he see?  A trap.  He’ll pass.