I’m not sure I totally agree. I think part of the message is that the system will always be there, and there will always be players in the same places, but that doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes. Being a low level cog in the Baltimore street drug industry is never going to be a great life, but would you rather that Prop Joe or Marlo Stanfield was running the show? Similarly, neither Royce nor Carcetti was an angel, but that doesn’t mean there was zero difference between them. Compromising your principles doesn’t mean you’ve abandoned them entirely.
But yeah, he was definitely a big disappointment. (Insert your own Barack Obama comparison here.)
Seems to me that Marlo was shown heading back for life on the street (and probably jail) as compared to trying to become another Stringer. I think he found himself in a too foreign setting that was seemingly out of his league.
They’ve been together since the end of season one, when he offered to let her stay with him since they obviously didn’t have the resources to put her in protective custody or anything like that. She had moved out of D’Angelo’s place and had nowhere else to stay.
Shardeen showed up again in season 2, during the Port investigation - Kima met with her to find out how to get more information on the Russian dancers/prostitutes. Shardeen mentioned that Lester was the reason she was in nursing school and it was pretty clear they were a couple.
She never WAS a prostitute, she was a stripper. They never showed her turning tricks, or even implied it. Even when Lester & Kima were choosing her as an informant, one of the reasons was because the picture they had of her wasn’t a mug shot, it was her DMV photo. They recognized her as a “citizen,” not someone in the game.
-30- is what newspaper people type or write at the end of the story, to denote that it’s the end.
The funny thing about Carcetti is that he still seems to believe that he’s good for Baltimore and for Maryland. His wife gave him a half-disgusted look when he was watching himself on TV, his homeless speech, I think it was, and I wondered if she might say something to him about how manipulative he’d become.
David Simon and Ed Burns are coming up on NPR TOTN in a few minutes.
In the article Gozu linked to, the interviewer told David Simon that “people were saying” the last scene with Marlo tasting his own blood was supposed to symbolize something about Marlo’s soul. I didn’t get that at all.
But, I wonder if that scene was supposed to represent how now that he was on the corner he literally and figuratively cannot go back to the businessman’s world. Figuratively, because it’s just not in him and literally because now he has a bloody hole in his suit and he can’t go back to the party from whence he came.
I also think that Michael is going to be the next Omar. I think they’re right in the same place - they both are “from” the game, they both have mixed feelings about the game, and they both think (thought) that they can change the game. The Survivor parody AuntiePam linked to made me chuckle because it showed “Team Omar” as being Omar, Omar, Omar and Omar
I think Carcetti believed what he was saying when he ran for mayor in that he wanted to make Baltimore a better place. But he was just too influenced by the people around him and the actualities of Baltimore. Now he has his eyes on the prize of making Baltimore a better place from Annapolis by being the governor. But we all know that he will end up just getting wrapped up in the actuality of Maryland and not advancing Baltimore at all. I think Simon is trying to show that you can either be a politician or a humanitarian, and the system does not allow you to be both.
Is Sydnor supposed to be the new McNulty? I can see how we were to think Kima was, but the last Sydnor shot had him talking to the same judge we say McNulty talking to in the very first episode.
I am also glad Cheese got capped…I’ve always “liked” Slim Charles. I too also wish we saw what became of Avon.
Who was that old guy with the New Day Co-Op? He looked like the Deacon with glasses - but my copy of the episode was totally stretched out so no one looked like themselves. All my research points to “just some other uncredited old guy”… tell me I was seeing things.
Rubystreak - “-30-” is what a journalist writes at the end of his copy to indicate “the story has ended.” It’s a short(??) form of -XXX-.
Agree to disagree, then, because I didn’t see any meaningful changes. If you can point some out to me (note: they need to be MEANINGFUL changes, not just, “Omar dead, Mike the stick-up boy now,” or “Royce out, Carcetti juking the stats now”), and explain why you think this is a significant change for Baltimore, I’d love to see your side of it.
Someone just like them is running the very same show, now playing on a corner near you (somewhere in urban America). Just because it’s not Joe or Marlo doesn’t mean Fat Face Ricky and Slim Charles are anything but more of the same. The Greeks are the same, so the nature of doing business has not been substantially altered. Meet the new boss… same as the old boss (that goes double for the BPD and triple for the City government). All the idealists, reformers, and dreamers are ridden out on a rail or in a body bag. It’s the realists, those who play the game, who succeed and retain power. That message is delivered over and over across 5 seasons.
I think Carcetti has abandoned them entirely. He took Rawls with him to Annapolis, for god’s sake. You could argue that’s just the reality of doing business, but I don’t think that harms my point. That final montage was showing that, while individual people’s lives move on, the totality of the situation remains pretty much the same. While the personal tragedies and triumphs of our heroes and villains are interesting stories, the story of the City of Baltimore is going to roll along, largely unchanged by the individual stories that unfold inside it.
I was more than a little disappointed that the last line was as cliche as you can be. I knew the moment McNulty got out of the car and was looking at the city what the line would be.
I’d rather he had just said “Fuck it.” and shrugged.
Maybe someone can help me with this: was the undercover bum that talked to McNulty after Templeton’s bogus report from a previous season? He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place him.
Other observations:
Totally forgot about the stripper that helped Freamon in Season 1. Glad to see them still together.
In my mind, the last line should’ve been “Fits like a glove!” I was cracking up at Valchek in that scene.
And of course I loved McNulty dressing down Templeton - that scene will resonate for me for a while. Then the shoutout of the door to the homicide division from Season 1.
This just in: Randy Wagstaff is Cheese Wagstaff’s son. So says David Simon, anyway, to a lecture hall at USC. He said he left it out because there were only 10 eps in the season. That’s too bad, because it’s a story line I’d have been interested in seeing.
