The genius and beauty of "The Wire" is not that it's all a game, a tragic game its characters are for the most part trapped in. Yes, these dealers, cops, politicians etc. do treat life as if it had a series of win conditions, rules, as if nothing mattered but how well you used the latter to achieve the former. And yes, every time the characters step outside the game they are crushed by those who continue to play. But if this were all "The Wire" was, it would be a fairly mundane show. Well-written, perhaps. Entertaining, sure. But really just another "Law & Order" spinoff.

Instead, the beauty of "The Wire" is when it reveals to its audience--and less often, its characters--that the game is false, a shield behind which we hide in order to avoid the terrible truth that life is about real people, real tragedies. The genius is that "The Wire" lets us to participate in these games--the procedural, the tactics of drug traffickers, the ploys of small-time dealers, Union bosses, politicians. We watch wanting to see how the game plays out--for exactly the same reason we watch "Law & Order"--to see who wins, loses. And then the show sucker punches us. It brings it all back to the human level--the death of D'Angelo Barksdale, Frank Sabatka, the shooting of Detective Greggs, or maybe something more subtle like Tommy Carcetti receiving the trump card from those who play even better than he, anytime Bubbles is on-screen during the first two seasons--and then moves along, back to the game, back to what we would prefer to watch. It is jarring but it is seldom melodramatic.

"The Wire" has problems, namely the fast-forward "wrap ups" we inevitably get at the end of the seasons. These are annoying, obnoxious, and a betrayal of everything the beginning of the season has worked toward. But this can be forgiven because the show does what few others have--it shows us that life is *not* a game, and then it moves on, back to the game, because even the creators of television shows have to play.

It seems to me that there is an important difference between the almost Pavlovian response to hearing your name called at a party and actually imagining yourself playing tennis upon request. The second, on face value, seems significantly active and even deliberate--not so different from being able to blink your eyes in answer to a series of questions. I certainly do not imagine myself playing tennis just because someone asked me to. I would have to choose to do so, even if five minutes down the line I continue the activity habitually. Perhaps the fMRI's are not full proof that the woman is conscious in a meaningful way but they do seem proof enough to activate the physician's Hippocratic Oath: above all, do no harm.

And yet Mr. Burton quotes the oath as part of his conclusion that evidence of the woman's consciousness is trivial. In which case, to whom does Doctor Burton intend to do no harm? Is it the family he wants to protect? Surely being weighted down with a "brain in a box" might cause them some emotional hardship. Or perhaps it is the medical and insurance industries he means to do no harm? As he stated, the costs of keeping the patients alive runs into the billions.

I don't know how we should take the results of these test. But it does seem that the author is coming at them from a strange direction for a doctor. Maybe we should take clues from our other major Profession, and *not* put the burden of proof on a woman who is, after all, on trial for her life.