The Wire - All Prologue: The Green Lights of Baltimore

The Wire – All Prologue

Season 2, Episode 6

Directed By: Steve Shill

Written By: David Simon, from a story by Ed Burns and Simon

Read out “The Wire” Project here. Read about the previous episode here, or click here to see the total coverage. Assume spoilers for the episode

            Why does David Simon identify with D’Angelo Barksdale more than any other character? Of all the members The Wire's sprawling cast, it is often D'Angelo who becomes a microphone for Mr. Simon’s themes. Mr. Simon never sold drugs or had a childhood that led him to prison. Sure, he spent a lot of time around drug culture (see: The Corner), but there is something truly unique about why he chooses D’Angelo; the man continues to hold onto the fact that he can escape. McNulty and the cops see that their efforts will have little effort. Stringer and the higher up drug family know they are tied to a certain life and cannot rise above it. And the port men see their livelihoods slowly fading out of existence. But D’Angelo still believes in the possibility of escape.

            But it is an impossibility, nonetheless. The highlight of “All Prologue” is a speech where D’Angelo explains The Great Gatsby to the prison book club. “There are no second acts in America,” someone quotes Fitzgerald, which inspires D’Angelo to explain that as much as we want to escape our past—our crimes, our passions, our family—we are inextricably linked to them. And many characters slowly realize in this episode that they are, in fact, tied to their past.

The Wire - Undertow: Back In the Game

The Wire – Undertow

Season 2, Episode 5

Directed By: Steve Shill

Written By: Ed Burns, from a story by David Simon and Burns

Read out “The Wire” Project here. Read about the previous episode here, or click here to see the total coverage. Assume spoilers for the episode

            After a long break from The Wire (non-cinema issues: moving apartments, overload of work, some other stuff) I was afraid if I could jump back into the show without it losing its magic. It had been over a month, and while I had not forgotten about lonely fighter McNulty, the cautious and adaptive Stringer Bell, and the moral conundrums of Frank Sobotka, I wondered if the show would start to show fatigue, just from being more of the same. But The Wire always finds new ways to not just put its characters in new places, but make us see these characters differently. Not a complete 180 or anything, but to really understand their true convictions.

            But  “Undertow” is one of the most plot heavy episodes of The Wire. Ed Burns and director Steve Shill have no rush of plot, and nothing revelatory or shocking happens. But small nudges reveal these characters as the police attempt to break into the port culture, a self-contained world where everyone protects themselves. When Freamon, Bunk, and Russell present Grand Jury summons to a number of workers, Frank laughs in their face almost manically. He knows these guys are loyal to the end, as long as he’s loyal to them.

The Wire - Hot Shots: An Unfamiliar Land

The Wire: Hot Shots

Season 2, Episode 3

Written By: David Simon, from a story by Simon and Ed Burns

Directed By: Elodie Keene

            One of the most difficult adjustments that David Simon had to make when writing and producing the second season of The Wire was to let go of almost every one of his original locations. In many great television series, there are locations and sets that become a character themselves—the main deck of the Battlestar Galatica, the Bluth model home, or Counter Terrorist Offices of Jack Bauer. But in this second season, we’ve abandoned almost every location save for the homicide offices. Gone is the low rises and Orlando’s strip club and instead we get the shipping docks and the church. It’s a bold move that changes a lot of the ways we view how location creates character, though the cinematography of Uta Briesweitz (who I still argue is the visual auteur of the show) keeps us in the same leveled realism with a shade of dark gray morality.

            As you might tell, there’s not so much heavy in theme for this episode, entitled “Hot Shots,” or at least the narratives being spun together have little in common with each other. Each is great in its own right, though not as much stands out visually. We've also got the return of Omar, which will be fun to watch.