final grades

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.

(S04E13) An opening scene of Sgt. Landsman comically griping through his morning almost turns tragic, but Bubbles will survive to struggle through another day. A little of the "new day" thinking rubs off on Sgt Landsman, who stops putting the stats first. This whole extended opening was one of the most powerful and moving segments of the year, which is saying a lot. Landsman's very thick veneer of self-protection, his sarcasm, his cynicism is melted away by compassion for Bubbles.

One of the beauties of premium cable, besides lack of commercial interruption and minimal censorship, is the ability to make an episode the length it needs to be. Still, even at 79 minutes the finale leaves me hungry more. There are some good series on television these days, some very good ones even. However, nothing approaches The Wire. Well, I'm preaching to the choir here, I know. Now I'll have to content myself with a paperback of David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a non-fiction account of Simon's year covering Baltimore's homicide department, and the basis for the classic network television series Homicide.