And so Jane After Dark has come to the end of The Wire. I need to watch it again to catch more than the one-eighth I caught the first time around. But after watching all five seasons, spanned over most of this year, the thing that keeps popping into my head is that the bureaucratic end of things is really no better than the drug dealer end of things.

In some ways, the drug dealers have more ethics than the suits. At least when a druggie does something that wrongs others in the system, there's no messing around. They're shot. They know they have it coming, and they step up and take it, just like Snoop did, asking if her hair looked ok before being gunned down. Just like Proposition Joe did when he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable bullet to the head.

Ah, how good it is to get back to The Wire. I've been steered off track by other DVDs landing on my doorstep for Jane After Dark, so season five of The Wire has been a while coming. One again, the show blows me away with the writing, characters, cinematography and realism. I'm just part-way into season one, but I love all of the references to everything that's happened thus far in the series, and the crew's continued attempts to bring down Marlo's organization. And, apparently, Omar is still in the game ...

Well, well, well. How interesting to see the purchase of the nail gun we saw in the first episode of season four of The Wire come back around to bring everything together. "It's a tomb," says Freamon in "A New Day," and it all makes sense to me. Well, some of it makes sense anyway.

And then there's the teetering decision of whether Freamon will keep getting crap from the higher-ups about going out and looking for Marlo's bodies, using up manpower, and upping the murder rate of the city, or whether they'll do the right thing and actually do their jobs. Oh, the bodies that rolled in.

I'm well into season four of The Wire (just finished "Margin of Error"; read my other Jane After Dark installments), and getting into the guts of the Baltimore political scene and how it's all interwoven with the cops and drug business.

Oh, those kids! It really makes you see how they've gotta be extremely driven to get out of that life, because a lot of the adults are just priming them to continue the drug business into the next generation. Not only their parents -- which is really sad -- but people like Marlo, who has his minions handing out back-to-school cash to build goodwill with the kids. At that rate, those kids don't have a shot of clawing their way out of a life of crime.

It will take me another run-through or two to really fit all the pieces together, but I'm digging how all of the characters have evolved ... or not ...

If any fans of the critically-acclaimed HBO drama The Wire would like to visit the set sometime in the future, you better bring a shopping list. It's being turned into a Wegman's Food Market.

Yup, The Wire is ending after this upcoming season. I have to admire the show for ending after five seasons even though it's a big hit with critics and loyal fans. I've often said that many shows should be like novels and have a definite end time (Lost, Alias, other shows) so they don't go out of control or overstay their welcome or come up with lame plots in later seasons, so it's good to actually hear that creator and executive producer David Simon feels the same way.

This final season will focus on the slimy tactics some people in the media use (that doesn't include bloggers, of course). The show returns in January.

[via TV Tattle]