The Wire “Reformation”

And now the metaphorical cat is out of the bag.  The season is coming to a close.  The war between Barksdale and Stanfield claims a few more bodies, and the chickens are coming home to roost.

And amidst it all, Brother Mouzone is back.

What does Mouzone want?  He’s looking for Omar.

Omar, meanwhile, is looking for revenge against Avon and Stringer.

Stringer is trying to get Avon to cooperate with the narcotics Co-Op Proposition Joe is a major player in.

Avon wants his corners back.  He can’t adapt.

And then the other shoe drops for Major Colvin.  Yeah, that reporter Herc called last week is nosing around Hamsterdam.  Colvin can put the guy off with some convincing lies, then does what he really didn’t want to do but has no choice to do now.  He tells Burrell and the other high ranking officers at the ComStat meeting.  Burrell is furious.  All Colvin has to defend himself is the 14% drop in crime in his district and a thick stack of letters from grateful citizens.  Rawls is actually impressed Colvin had balls that big.  Colvin agrees to take the fall for the whole thing since he’s retiring soon anyway, though he will lie to protect the cops under him.

Burrell takes the same letter and stats to the mayor later.  The mayor isn’t happy about that.

We get a lot on Colvin this episode.  He has a talk with Carver about what it means to be a cop.  Colvin hates the drug war because it creates an “us vs. them” and the real job of a cop is to protect the neighborhood while getting to know the people there.  Carver needs to develop some Confidential Informants.  Carver seems to take that to heart and seems to buddy up a bit with Cutty.  Cutty’s trying to get his new boxing gym off the ground, but his equipment is old and the kids disrespectful.  Cutty has to learn to be a bit more patient first, but he’s getting there.

As for CIs, the Detail had identified the guy who buys the disposable phones, and since it takes too long to get a wire tap on one of those, they decide to try a new angle.  Bubbles, it seems, knows the phone-buyer’s loud, obnoxious girlfriend.  And she’s greedy.  It doesn’t take much to get her to convince her boyfriend to buy cheaper phones and pocket the change.  The problem for buyer-guy?  Well, Lester is selling these “hot” phones, and they come pre-wire tapped.  See, Bubbles is a useful CI.

McNulty seems to be becoming more introspective when Daniels calls McNulty out on his assessment of other people.

And Carcetti is having a crisis of conscience himself.  He wants to be mayor, but to do that in Baltimore, he has to let his best friend on the City Council (another black man) split the black vote in the primaries.  Politics is rough.

And between everybody hunting everybody else, it’s probably about to get rougher.