So as I mentioned in my review of the previous season, I was a of fan of the first series of
The Wire. This police crime drama, novel for the way it depicts drug gangs and the cops out to get
them simultaneously, was gritty, felt realistic, and had great entertaining characters. I had heard
quite a few things about the second season, namely that it is a bit of an oddball in the run of the
show for being drastically different from the first. I do wonder if that reputation has come
about because during the initial run of the show, I can see how the second season seems like you’re
watching a completely different show, but in retrospect, looking back at the entire show,
each season focuses on a different aspect of the city of Baltimore, so I wonder if it’s
a case of the second season did the same thing that the rest of them did, only it did it first,
so people were more shocked. I still haven’t seen the rest of The Wire, so what do I know?
In any case, season 2 IS a big shock, because there seems to have been a huge shift in
characters and plots. The Barksdale crew, the primary targets of the cops in season 1,
are relegated to being one of the season’s B plots, they’re almost completely side-lined,
though there is clear promise that these guys are gonna return in big fashion in future seasons.
It’s so different from season 1 that Michael K Williams, who played Omar – who, again, is hardly
in this season – said that he was angry and went to the show’s creator David Simon, accusing him
of essentially giving a show made great by black storylines to white guys. I have to say though,
as someone who preferred the gangs and raids of season 1 to the storyline of season 2,
it does give the show a more realistic feel to have prominent characters drop in
and out of importance during the course of the show’s run. For the same bunch of characters
to always be front and centre would make The Wire start to feel like a lesser show.
Our boy Jimmy McNulty is reassigned by his hateful boss Rawls to the marine unit,
as Rawls knew this was the one unit McNulty would most hate working in, and as you watched this
depressed and dejected alcoholic bob up and down a police boat, fishing rod in one hand and the
onset of frostbite approaching in the other, it’s bizarre knowing this is the same fiery frenzied
maverick from the first season who was the heart and soul of the Barksdale operation.
Though I suppose we’d all be similarly moody if we were in his position, and it was hilarious seeing
McNulty painstakingly do more work than he’s ever done in his life making a case to pin a body of
a dead woman in Rawl’s jurisdiction, and he later does something similar when a set of 13 dead women
are found in a shipping container on the Baltimore docks. Rawl’s is naturally furious as 14 murders
with practically 0 chance of the murders being solved will ruin Homicide’s clearance rate.
And it was interesting seeing the dynamic and politics with regards to ownership of
cases – there was a scene, for example, where the heads of different departments, Rawls included,
are in a meeting furiously playing oral badminton trying to land the murder cases on each other,
and as a laymen with practically no experience with the law, it’s both sad and hilarious to see
these guys giving so much attention to trying to avoid the murder cases, much like how you
and I would try and get out of our managers trying to dump more work on our desk. But
that’s what The Wire is all about isn’t it, the systems, policing ones included, warts and all.
The main shift in storyline in season 2 is that the focus of the season is on the Baltimore docks,
not drug dealers and gangsters in the projects. And in doing so, the show introduces a whole
new bunch of characters, all shoved in your face before you can tell who’s who, aside from one guy
Ziggy, a guy with a big ego and an even bigger dick – literally – who’s the kind of guy that
wouldn’t be able to poor water out of a shoe if the instructions were written on the heel, and
he fancies himself something of a gangster. He’s the son of Frank Sobotka, the union treasurer,
a highly complex and well developed character who does what needs to be done for his union
and takes care of his crowd, but he is involved with, shall we say, skimming off the top, when
it comes to the contents of shipping containers coming into the docks, and a deal he is in with
an elusive figure known as the Greek threatens to burst into something huge and dangerous for
all. Sobotka’s idiot son has a cousin Nick, a much more level headed guy but one as equally, if not
more involved with the enigmatic European gangsters than his uncle. Unlike Ziggy,
who’s intentions are related to ostentation, Nick needs money to build a life for himself, to find
a house for his woman and himself, as he isn’t getting the money he needs on the docks because
working hours always goes to seniority. And Frank is fighting a losing battle to keep his world
alive – increased automation and other issues are cropping up, and he needs to raise funds
to lobby a congressman to fund a new canal, which ultimately means more jobs for the union men.
In fact, the entire main storyline of season 2 comes from Frank Sobotka donating an expensive
stan glass window to a church, which pisses off Major Valchek because he wanted the spot
that Sobotka got. Feeling slighted, Valchek heals his wounded ego by literally creating
an entire cop detail just to go after Sobotka, who he’s convinced is dirty because he thinks
he has too much money. At first the detail is run by a munch of nobodies, but then
an initially reluctant Lt Daniels, who almost retired from the force completely and went into
law, is bought in to run he detail. And he in turn picks his crew, which just happens to be
more or less all of our favourite characters from the first season that were in his detail,
people like McNulty, Herc and Kima, and so our heroes reunite Avengers style to take down a
union treasurer all because of a Major’s bruised ego. But, in typical Wire fashion,
the dead woman found in the water, the 13 girls, the docks, the Greek, the union,
it all is connected, it all comes together, even the streets from the first season, as it’s more or
less revealed that some of the best drugs that Proposition Jo, a competitor of the Barksdale
crew, gets his good stuff from the Greek. So in a way, it’s like season one is about drugs on a
street level, and season 2 is about where those drugs come from, with us peeking momentarily at
gangsters who operate on an international level, with people as far up as the FBI in their pockets.
The on-goings with the Barksdale crew were interesting, even though they didn’t feature much.
D’Angelo took a 20 something year sentence at the end of the first season,
and though he and Avon are behind bars together, D’Angelo is not seemingly with it. He’s cold,
distant, doesn’t talk much with his mother, with Avon, and just seems to want out, to be away from
it all and be away from everyone. In spite of Avon and his crew concocting a quite frankly
criminal-mastermind worthy plan to get D’Angelo a reduced sentence, he’s as indifferent as ever,
and his behaviour leads the likes of Stringer Bell to question his loyalty,
thinking he may flip as he was going to at the end of the last season. This leads to – spoiler
alert - Stringer, unbeknownst to anyone, even Avon, sanctioning D’Angelo’s death in prison,
with another inmate doing the deed and making it look like a suicide. That was a very sad part
of the season – one of two really sad deaths – and what with D’Angelo’s development, I really
thought that this was a character who was going to last many seasons, possibly even the whole show,
with a long, great arc, so you can imagine my shock when be basically got Michael B Jordan’ed.
Over the course of the season, especially during Stringer’s visits to Avon in prison, you can kinda
see that he’s manoeuvring all the chess pieces required in order to assert more power for himself
and move himself into a position where he is making decisions behind Avon’s back. It’s going
to be interesting seeing where all this is going, and to be honest I actually saw it coming even
in seasonone, but not because of anything that happens in the show itself – it was really
because whenever you se promos and adverts of The Wire they always showcase Idris Elba
and not the guy who played Avon, so I figured that either Avon gets put away for a long
time or he gets violently bumped off and the number two Stringer eventually takes his place.
One thing that really needs to be commented on is the nuance of The Wire. So many things are
so subtle, so blink-and-you’ll-miss it, that you sometimes wonder if they’re even there at all,
and half wish The Wire would cater to you and make things a little more obvious, linger on
shots a little longer just to emphases a point so you can be sure it was actually being made.
Let me give you an example, the legal system liaison of the detail,
Rhonda Perlmann, who McNulty has an on-off fuckbuddy relationship with,
is standing next to McNulty as he types in a report of a raid of an illegal brothel,
a raid in which he made the sacrifice of getting a bit of hanky-panky with two of the hookers.
The whole thing is kinda played for laughs, but if you look at Rhonda’s face as she reds the report,
she looks absolutely horrified and distraught, and she walks away without
a word. Easy to miss if you were still focusing on “tee-hee-hee, Jimmy slept with the hookers.”
Another great example of the show’s subtlety is Daniel’s wife. She makes her feelings clear
that Daniels, after being given a shit post after the events of season one,
should retire and go into law. When he is seduced by the detail, she is obviously angry,
as shown by one scene where her and Daniels eat their supper and se’s got her grumpy face on.
But she kinda disappears from the show after that, but makes a brief appearance later on when
a call comes for Daniels late in the night – she passes the phone to him and without waiting to see
who would be calling at this hour or what it must be about – surely it’s urgent - walks back to her
room, closes the door and turns her light off. That, and the fact that the duo were clearly
sleeping in different rooms, tells you everything you need to know about what has happened to their
relationship since Daniels agreed to lead the detail. Fantastic visual storytelling.
Season 2 takes an interesting look at the working man’s life on the ports of Baltimore,
and the struggles they face and the decisions they make to get into bed with criminals. Unlike
the thugs from season 1, crime, guys like Frank Sobotka, isn’t a desired way of life, but it’s
a necessary means to an end because that’s how the game is played. Heck, this guy has an entire
detail on his *** simply because he got on the wrong side of a guy high up in the police force.
There’s a whiff of Greek tragedy in season 2, you see individuals go through a lot,
who are in deep with sunk cost fallacy in full swing, and if these characters expect
their hard work to yield results…well, maybe they didn’t catch the first season of The Wire.
Guys like Ziggy are annoying, but intentionally so. In fact, his story
does go somewhere interesting. The only real disappointment of a character is Brother Mouzone,
a supposedly incredibly deadly hitter who is hired by Avon to stop encroachment of rivals
on his turf. Mouzone talks and looks like a school prefect, and he has quirky lines like
“The most dangerous thing in America is a nigga with a library card”, but he feels like a bit of
a contrived character, a cartoon that has stumbled onto the set of a gritty urban crime show.
I did find him amusing, like how calm and diplomatic he was after he got shot,
but he felt like the showrunners wanted to insert a colourful, wildcard character into the season
as they did Omar in the first, but it didn’t quite work. Also, while we’re talking about negatives,
it did feel a little contrived how the gang from season 1, who were all realistically assigned to
different departments and cases, were all bought back together for a new detail, and
it des kinda make you think, what was the point in separating them in the first place, and talking
about 3 or 4 episodes to bring them together? One of the more bleaker and darkly comic
elements of season 2, and this does feel like a far more bleaker season than the previous,
is that after the case is done, and some people have died, others have gone to prison and some
have escaped the long arm of the law, after all the issues with the dead girls in the container,
we see a shot of more women being unloaded out of a container. The case was solved, but the problem,
and system, continues. In fact there is a montage towards the end, quite a goosebump inducing scene,
highlighting the state of each character’s life, with one shot of a central character
clinging to a fence, starring out at the dying docks, clinging as if he is in a prison cage,
stuck in a never ending limo. In general, season 2 of The Wire is at a
similar level as season 1, in terms of the quality of the writing and acting, but for me personally,
the first season is superior simply because the characters it dealt with were
just more interesting for me. I did enjoy the Sobotka storyline,
very much so even if it did have a slow start, but there is an element of me where I’m thinking – OK,
you’ve scratched that itch now, so can we now go back to the gangs and the streets?
And so, let’s see what season 3 has in story. Thanks for watching.