Roger Catlin | TV Eye

End of 'The Wire'

"The Wire" wound up its marvelous run on HBO Sunday by returning to its original theme song.

The Blind Boys of Alabama version of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole" that had started the first season shows in 2002 came playing again in the final moments, as McNulty parks his beat up car, looks over the city he's worked for 13 years and various flashes appear of what's to happen wrap the story.

It’s been a shorter than normal season, with just 10 episodes, but there's still a lot to cover. Most of the taut final episode was given to how exactly everything was going to play out following the botched legal road to what would seem to be the goal of all -- the bust finally of a major drug operation. It's clear from Mayor Carcetti's first slack-jawed scene, that he has no idea how to spin the thing except that it's never to come out at all.

Some fall, some rise. There's a terrific scene when McNulty faces the lying, opportunistic reporter Scott Templeton and tells him he knows he's in on the fib. The truth about makes him sick. A deal with the drug lawyer seems to fall too neatly on the heels of a source within the grand jury, but hey, there is a lot to tie up quickly here.

That's never been a main goal in a series that's been allowed to unfold more naturally and realistically season to season. But like the clocks on Marlo Stansfield's cell phones, it's time to move things ahead. And before we do there are a number of moments -- another police wake for the dead career of McNulty; a Hitchcockian cameo of creator David Simon back at a desk in the Baltimore Sun where he began his career; a quote to start the show that comes from a quote that's later seen on the wall of the newspaper hallway from H.L. Mencken:

As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.

Mencken's the most famous guy you could have in an episode of "The Wire." Except Poe. And he'd say "nevermore."

But if it wasn't the Mencken, the quote would have been the one McNulty says about a "lie being so big people don't notice it," a pretty good metaphor for our time.

But as they played "Way Down in the Hole" at the end of the episode, what do we (and McNulty?) see as a future for these people?

• At the Sun, the reporter who made up stuff, Scott Templeton, won the Pulitzer; the City Editor Gus Haynes was busted down to the copy desk; reporter Alma Guitirrez shipped out to the county bureau. In one happy development, Mike Fletcher, who finally finished his story about Bubbles, got the City Editor job.
• Carcetti gets the governor’s job; Rawls takes the state police job as planned. Daniels takes the fall and becomes a lawyer. Council president Nerese Campbell becomes mayor and who gets the city police commissioner job but Valchek? 
• Assistant state’s attorney Rhonda Perlman is made a judge (payback for making Marlo problems go away).
• Lester Freamon is happily retired.
• Young un Michael Lee is stepping into an Omar role, stealing from drug dealers.
• Marlo walks, wants to become a businessman, but shoots up a corner just so he can finally say he stepped to the street (he gets cut in the process).
• Slim Charles and surviving members of the consortium meet up with the Greeks to continue the connection.
• Kennard, Omar's killer, is picked up by the police, charges unknown.
• Dukie, poor kid, becomes a junkie.
• Bubbles keeps sober, is eventually invited upstairs to eat dinner with his sister.
• Drugs are still sold on the streets of Baltimore.
• Life goes on.  Way down in the hole.

From 'The Wire' to War

"The Wire" ends tonight on HBO, but not with a blackout and no glimpse to the future, as "The Sopranos" did. (And no, despite a story we ran in the paper today, there’s no truth to plans for a "Sopranos" movie).

Storylines will play out, glimpses of the future will be seen, and best of all there will be the first look at the next project from executive producers David Simon and Ed Burns.

"Generation Kill" is a miniseries due later this year on HBO chronicling the first wave of the U.S. war in Baghdad that began five years ago this month.

Baghdad is a far cry from Baltimore, but the large cast for the miniseries has at least one holdover from “The Wire” – actor James Ransone, who played Ziggy Sobotka in the shipyard season (and who appeared very briefly this season to razz the mayor and be hauled away by cops).

Connecticut native Lee Tergesen (Toby from “Oz,” Sully in “Rescue Me”) stars in the series as the soldier who chronicles the invasion. It’s all based on the book of the same name by Evan Wright about the Marines 1st Reconnaissance battalion in March 2003 from a series of articles he originally wrote for Rolling Stone.

The cast will include Alexander Skarsgard, Stark Sands, Jon Huertas and Rudy Reyes, a former Marine and Iraq veteran who will play himself.

The series has been shot in Mozambique and South Africa and is currently being edited.

'The Wire's Leap of Faith

What’s made "The Wire" one of the most acclaimed series in TV history is how its interlocking stories of urban failure are largely based in truths.

The police department is so dysfunctional cops have to break out on their own to get things done; there are no less organizational difficulties among the drug syndicates they’re trying to bust. Favors and petty corruptions in city hall, deep lapses of the school systems and the dismantling of the newspaper are things its writers can trace.

So when drug dealer Omar took a multi-story swan dive and survived in the middle of the current season, some viewers also thought he might have been jumping the shark.

But George Pelecanos, one of the writers of the series, says it was based on the experience of an ex-con on the set. "He was once in a shootout in a high rise and jumped six stories," he said. "He broke his legs, but crawled to a car and got away."

It seemed like something they could try with Omar, Pelecanos said. "But hwn we got to the location we looked up and thought: He'd never make it. Nobody will ever believe this. So we lowered it a couple of floors."

It isn't until the following episode that the audience finds that Omar has survived after all, dragging his way to a janitor’s closet where he fashioned a crutch from a mop and hobbled eventually away. And still viewers thought it was too much a leap of faith.

For many others it was just one element of a remarkable run, involving some of the best crime writers ever enlisted to write for TV, including Dennis Lehane, Richard Price and Pelecanos.

Dukie Watches 'Dexter'

It all came down Sunday on “The Wire,” in an episode where every major drug dealer was finally rounded up, Carcetti could finally hold a positive press conference, Lester could get drunk and celebrate.

At the same time, McNulty is feeling worse and worse about what’s happened. Gregg’s spilling to  Daniels; and Snoop is trying to set up Michael – who turns the tables in the episode’s darkest moment.

But when Michael rushes home to pick up Dukie, what is he watching but "Dexter."

"It’s about a serial killer who only kills serial killers," he tries to explain.

The Showtime series is currently playing Sunday nights on CBS, but there was no way they’d know that when they were making the episode.

It is the smallest part of what would normally be considered the climactic episode of the stellar series. But there’s a whole lot of things to tie up in next week’s series finale, requiring 90 minutes.

The Final Season Begins

McNulty’s drinking and womanizing. The police department is in disarray and Bubbles is trying to stay on the straight and narrow staying hin his sisters place (she makes him leave during the day after he fenced a lot of her stuff in a past relapse).

As "The Wire" began its final season Sunday with more praise and hype than ever before (raising the possibility that people other than critics may actually tune it in), it was clear once more that this wasn’t your normal cop show.

Cases wouldn’t get resolved within an episode; hell, they were still trying to crack the case of Marlo Stanfield more than a year after more than 20 bodies were found rotting in a vacant tentament serving as body stash.

There seems even less chance for it to be solved, with the budgets slashed to the bone.

McNulty wonders what it would be like to work “in a real police department.” Reporters at the Sun, which is part of an ongoing storyline this year, wonder what it would be like working in a real newspaper.

Although it seems like the focus on the paper – and the new cast it requires – seems to have little to do with the other threads, but initially we see Bub sell papers by the highway, and soon there will be interactions between the police department and the press as well, as they try to figure out ways to use one another.