Letters to the Editor
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Barriers to Entry
"Hepola" -- Come on! Can't we have the people talking about the show for our benefit at least having done their homework? It was clearly Nikky Sobotka, surrounded perhaps still by his witness protection muscle (along with fell dockworker Nat) yelling at the demolition of the much needed (for the docks at least) grain pier. And your "fabulist" character is Templeton. At least learn the names, makes it look professional. Deputy loves names.
Is McNulty's use of Donald more reprehensible then Carcetti's use of the homeless as political talking point? It's easy to be viscerally opposed to the immediate callousness of kidnapping a homeless man and using him for an ends to a mean -- but isn't this the same thing Carcetti is doing -- albeit on a much more abstract level.
As for "bleakness", I think it's hard to to say that this season has given us anything worse than last season, or any season for that matter. Running through the show's core is a fear and loathing of contemporary control structures, in whatever form: the corner and the ghetto, the tentative middle class of the Police uniform and the union, the upper crust of the DA, Police command and City Hall -- no matter what strata of society individuals are still tragically beholden to the institutions they serve: is Burrell still not a pawn? Is Gus still not emasculated and humiliated every day from behind his editor's desk?
The Wire has always argued that what you're born into means far more then personal "virtue", I don't see this season departing from that them, instead it continues to reinforce it. There is no individual morality on the Wire, only a collective and thoroughly modern acquiescence to the diaphanous puppeteer.