Omar back.
Being as I was born in that hospital, no, I wasn’t even momentarily confused. 
But I can excuse an Iowan for not getting it instantly.
However, you may recall that in Season 2 someone mentioned (and Simon has said this in interviews, too) that since Bethlehem Steel closed its big plant at Sparrows Point, Johns Hopkins has become the city’s biggest employer. But a large portion of those jobs are low-skilled bedpan-changing positions, not the high-paying union steel mill jobs that once supported a large chunk of the city’s population.
Someone once paraphrased G.B. Shaw to the effect that “every professional language is a conspiracy against the laity.”
I have a suspicion that the secrets of Rawls and Daniels will be intertwined, since Rawls knows that there are skeletons in Daniels’ closet. (But does he know exactly what they are? Does Valchek?)
So far, only we viewers (and the bathroom scrawler) know that Rawls has his own closet, but if Daniels were to find out somehow (via Landsman or Valchek perhaps, although I don’t know how), an all-out battle between the two might be stalemated by mutual threats of blackmail.
But I hope not. I’m no homophobe (Some of my best friends are gay! Really!), but I really want to see what happens when Rawls is outed.
I can hardly wait for the rest of the season!
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Seeing Bubbles again made me think of how sad the episode was when the spiked dope ended up killing hid friend.
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McNulty, yo’re screwing up again…
I probably don’t have to say this to Wire regulars, but I think it would be a good practice in our future threads not to discuss episodes before their first Sunday night air date, even though they are available on demand before then. Or, at the very least, to spoiler-box any details about a “future” episode before the air date.
I assume (although I could be wrong) that there are at least some HBO subscribers who don’t have access to On Demand. And as I’ve said previously, although I have On Demand, I prefer to wait until Sunday night.
Is this okay with everyone?
Deal.
I spent last season (my first watching) figuring out who the hell everybody was, but now that I know I’m enjoying it greatly. It’s like a terrific play, and I rejoice to see the great Clark Johnson back on my TV, the coolest Afro-Canadian EVER!!
However, some of the gushing in the media about the show bugs me. Greatest show in the history of filmed entertainment–I dunno, you’ll still have to pry my ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT DVDs from my cold, dead hands.
As for Omar, didn’t he take off after ripping off Prop Joe? I suppose he’ll be back.
I was spoiled for major events in S3 and S4 – my own fault, but I’ve learned my lesson.
If On Demand viewers can wait for Sunday night, that’d be awesome.
And if there are any first-time watchers in the thread, please speak up and let us know how you liked it.
For sure. He doesn’t always show up in the first one or two episodes, does he?
Did you notice McNulty when he was calling home? He rummages through his pockets at the pay phone, then comes up with a cell phone. Like “Who put that there?”
What do you want to bet Beadie gave him that phone, after a few too many late nights when he didn’t bother to call.
I figured he didn’t use the pay phone because he knew she’d recognise the number on caller ID and know he was at the bar (as if the background noise wouldn’t give it away :rolleyes: ). But your explanation makes more sense, with him being as drunk as he was.
Yeah, it could have been either way.
When next we saw Jimmy, after the reassignment to Homicide, we see him abusing the furniture. He’s never slammed anything before, never lashed out physically. (Except for when he re-enacted hitting that pole with his car, of course.) But him kicking the desk – it could have been Jimmy mad at the reassignment, or Jimmy disappointed in himself. Or both. We didn’t see what happened with Beadie when he went home the night before.
Are you really watching a year old show, or was the “1/6/07” in the title a mistake?
This is 08, you know.
DAR
:smack:
Leave it to a nurse to pay attention to details. 
Speaking of nurses, I wonder if Cutty and his nurse are still together. There might not be a place for him this season, since all the kids are back on the corners.
Hey! Maybe Dukie will go to the gym!
I wasn’t confused, because it is actively going on.
Hopkins Medical Campus has historically been surrounded by really bad neighborhoods. And, I mean “surrounded”, like on all 4 sides. Two blocks north or east would put you right into block after block of boarded up row houses, and presumably, some of the open air drug market.
But, they’ve been putting a lot of money into that part of town, and expanding the campus. According to Prop Joe, this is forcing the drug trade into new territory. Actually, the “main” campus (not the medical campus) is sort of doing some eastward expansion, too.
It’s somewhat funny that Joe calls it “John Hopkins”. The proper name of the schools is the odd “Johns Hopkins”, but a lot of people (but no one who went there, so it’s sort of a class thing) make that mistake. It’s definitely intentional on the part of the writers.
It never ceases to amaze me how drunk McNulty and Bunk can get, and still maintain more or less conscious. The sheer mass of Bunk weaving gracefully around the bar is a sight to behold.
Hey! Has anyone else scene the extra little back stories that OnDemand is featuring? Perhaps they’ve appeared, or will appear, on DVD collections, but I don’t own those yet.
Anyhow, there are three mini scenes - about a minute or two a piece - featuring three characters’ pasts. One is Prop Joe as a young hustlin’-minded kid in the 60s, another features Omar the Invincible gettting his start in the 80s, and finally McNulty and Bunk in the 90s. They’re hardly necessary viewing, but they’re fun.
I noticed a discrepancy between one of the prequels and the actual show. We were rewatching S3 just last week… remember when Stringer is looking up Omar’s past in an attempt to find Omar’s family as a way to get at him? There’s a picture of Omar in the social services file (a real picture of Michael K. Williams as a kid, so cute!) at about 8 or 10. No scar. Then, in the prequel, he has a very well-healed scar across his face. He’s supposed to be about 30 in the show, and the prequel takes place in 1986? So there’s no way he had that scar in 1986. If he did, it would not have looked like that, or it wouldn’t look as it does now.
Nitpicky, maybe… I only noticed because I saw the S3 ep and the prequel within a couple of weeks of each other. I wish they’d left the scar out of the prequel. It harmed my willing suspension of disbelief.
Does it help if Omar is older than 30? I’m not a good judge of age, but I’ve thought of him as late 30’s, maybe even early 40’s.
I think IRL he’s over 40, but when he’s testifying at Bird’s trial, Ilene Nathan asks his age, and he says “29, or thereabouts.” That’s in 2003. So I think it’s established in the show that he’s about 30. The boy who plays Omar in the prequels looks like he’s middle school aged to me, so 12, 13? The picture of MKW in the photo is late elementary school, like 10? Timeline doesn’t work for me on that scar, though I liked the 1986 story because I love Omar as a character. The Wire misses on the details so rarely, too.
BTW, Omar testifying against Bird is my favorite scene in the whole series. “I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase… but it’s all in the game, right?”
I just looked at it again. The Omar prequel takes place in 1985, not 1986… and that boy in the prequel looks little to me. No more than 12. The makeup job on the scar is bad, too. I don’t know much about this stuff, but the scar on MKW looks much more recent than 20 years old in my not so educated opinion. Am I wrong about that? Eh. Sorry about the anal-retentive nitpicking.
Omar’s just a few years younger than Bunk. How old do you think Bunk is? I can’t quite tell.
From his Wikipedia entry, and this interview I’d tend to think MKW got his scar in his late teens. But, that doesn’t really have any bearing on when Omar might have gotten his scar.
Those “prequels” are on YouTube, for anyone interested. They’re pretty neat.
I had this theory about McNulty and the phone…has he not been drunk in a bar since before he got his cell phone? His “old ways” was getting pissed and calling his wife on the payphone. Then he gave all that nonsense up, went “straight” and during that period got a cell phone. Since he found himself suddenly in the midst of his “old ways” he was going straight to the payphone, which is why he was surprised to find his cell.
To me that bit of that scene said “it’s been a heck of a long time since I was in that rut. It’s been so long that no one needs a payphone anymore. And here I am again.”
Pre-airs are being leaked all over the place, so I gotta be careful what I post…the kids have already put out Episode 7!
Yeah, that’s true… Bunk seem a lot older than Omar, but they have to be only a couple of years apart. IRL, Wendell Pierce is 45, so 5 years ago he’d have been 40, but characters are often younger than the actors who play them.
Just going by how old the kid in the prequels looked, and how old Omar said he was (which could have been a lie), I’d say the scar was acquired in his pre-teens. I don’t know how it would look if it were only a couple of years old v. 20 years old.
I wonder how lil Omar got that scar…
This article says he was 25 when it happened. FWIW.