"The Wire" Year Two

Spoilers ahead for the first and second seasons of "The Wire."

Watching the series is going faster than I expected, probably because I'm enjoying it so much. Season Two is an easier watch than Season One, even though in many ways it has to start over from the beginning, introducing us to a new set of characters involved in crime and corruption, and the unseen social forces behind them that contribute to this. It also continues to follow most of the characters from the police and the Barksdale organization from Season One, and sets up future conflicts in subsequent seasons.

Season Two is about the Baltimore docks, home to the International Brotherhood of Stevedores union. Work is scarce and growing scarcer, so union treasurer Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) has been working with a group of Greek smugglers to move drugs and contraband, and spreading the money around for political leverage. His nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber) and son Ziggy (James Ransone) are major POV characters, who start to do extra jobs on the side for warehouse owner Spiros Vondopoulos (Paul Ben-Victor) and his mysterious boss, known only as "The Greek" (Bill Raymond). The big case of the season is the discovery of thirteen dead Jane Does suffocated to death in one of the shipping containers by Port Authority officer Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan). A separate Jane Doe is discovered by McNulty who appears to be connected to the others. Finally, police Major Valcheck (Al Brown) gets into a petty feud with Frank Sobotka and puts together a detail to investigate him. All three investigations eventually become a single, complicated case.

As a kid I was always frustrated by television shows that insisted on returning everything to an established status quo at the end of every episode, so it was hard to ignore the way that the second season of "The Wire" spends so much time reuniting all the major members of the team that brought down Avon Barksdale in Season One, even though several of those members, including Daniels and McNulty, are on the verge of quitting the police entirely. Moreover, the establishment of the major crimes unit headed by Lt. Daniels seems to be an awfully big contrivance to keep them all together. It really undermines the sense of uncertainty and institutional dysfunction of Season One. However, I do appreciate that Daniels and McNulty get ahead by using the flaws of the system to their own advantage, and their motives are less than pure. McNulty gets Homicide on the hook for the Jane Does as revenge for his demotion by Rawls (John Doman). Prez is Valcheck's son-in-law, and it's ultimately nepotism and Valcheck's outsized sense of entitlement that gets Daniels involved and the ball rolling. Still, it all seems a little too convenient and expected.

And then they kill off D'Angelo Barksdale. This was a major shock, as D'Angelo was one of my favorite characters from Season One, and I expected that "The Wire" would continue to chart his growth and disillusionment through the rest of its run. Now it's Omar and Stringer Bell who are being maneuvered into the lead positions of the local drug trade storyline, which stays firmly in the background for most of the year, but is quietly building up to something bigger to come. Rival kingpin Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) and Bodie Broadus (J.D. Williams) become more prominent, along with a new character, assassin Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts), who may be the most caricatured, almost cartoonish figure in the show so far. I haven't decided one way or the other about him yet, but seeing him clash with Omar is a lot of fun. Otherwise, Stringer and Avon's troubles trying to run the operation with Avon in prison are rarely very compelling. I expect all the slow character-building will pay off next season though.

I didn't find the characters from the docks nearly as interesting as the Barksdale gang members. The trouble is that none of them are particularly smart and you don't get the sense that they're trapped in their lives the way that the drug dealers in the courtyard were. Frank Sabotka, who has such altruistic intentions, is awfully sympathetic though. Chris Bauer's performance is fantastic, embodying a working class man with very deep loyalties and convictions, grappling with the unintended consequences of dealing with the wrong people. He's a perfect tragic figure, whose fairly mild aspirations end up costing him everything. Unfortunately, nobody else around him operates at the same level. Ziggy and Nick are a pretty dull set of lunkheads, even if Ziggy is occasionally a very creative and whimsical lunkhead. The Greeks don't make much of an impression.

All in all, Season Two feels slighter than Season One. Sabotka and The Greek aren't nearly as formidable as Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell. The fight to get the case solved doesn't seem nearly as arduous. It's easy to tell who the good guys and the bad guys are. Still, the season definitely has its moments. The "the dead girls in a can" crime is shocking, not so much for the crime itself, but for the way all the different agencies keep trying to pass responsibility off on one another, and how the girls are ultimately used as political and bureaucratic leverage by various characters. It becomes clearer than ever that McNulty is not necessarily a good guy, displaying self-destructive tendencies that are probably going to get him killed. And Omar's appearance in court, tying up loose ends from one of last year's murders, is one for the ages.

Onward to Season Three.
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