The Wire catches its last murder. / HBO photo: Nicole Rivelli
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this, crack open a tub of cottage cheese for lunch and watch the last episode ever of The Wire.
What is closure, anyway? People complained that The Sopranos didn’t give it, but its abrupt ending gave closure better than it could have by telling us whether Tony lived or died. Its closure came from ending the series the same spirit that it aired.
That’s what The Wire did too. You could say that The Wire’s conclusion was the opposite of The Sopranos’ in that it showed us what happened to pretty much every major, and most of the minor, characters on the show (and it wasn’t nearly as artful, iconic or surprising). But on the other hand, it ended nothing–again, entirely in character with the show.
The last episode of The Wire didn’t have the stunning impact of Omar’s death two episodes ago, or the sheer poetry of the penultimate episode last week, which was probably the series’ true emotional coda. There was a lot crammed into its ninety minues, as is often the case with finales. But the moving last few minutes, beyond sending off a raft of characters, said goodbye to the show’s greatest character, the city of Baltimore, as the pile-up of images–people on corners, a kid riding in a shopping cart–showed that life goes on, for better and very often worse, whether we get our closure or not.
So: McNulty leaves the force but avoids jail, his lie proving too big to be exposed. Lester retires. Bubbs makes it out of the basement. Templeton gets his Pulitzer. Haynes gets the copy desk. Carcetti makes governor, Rawls state police chief, and Valchek commissioner. (The last seemed far-fetched under Mayor Norese, but I’ll admit it was funny.) Daniels becomes a lawyer. Marlo gives up the crown but can’t get the blood off his cuffs. Michael becomes Omar. Slim et al. get the connect. Kenard gets busted. Cheese gets got. (Funniest line of the night: “This sentimental m_____f______ just cost us money.”)
There are things I could quibble about in this last episode. The Sun story, which I’d often defended this season, just petered out. The Sun’s winning the Pulitzer made sense in the context of the show’s broad cynicism, but I’m not sure I believe that Gus couldn’t have brought Scott down with the dirt he had (remember, as Gus said, the Sun story is set in a world in which Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley have already happened, and newspapers are if anything paranoid to a fault about fraud cases). But this being The Wire, what’s more important is what the story says about the larger media system, and I didn’t feel Simon ever did enough with his premise of showing how slavery to the corporate bottom line has affected journalism (though Gus very briefly tried to tie it in with that “little pond” speech). The ending of the Marlo case was more satisfying, but rushed. And overall, there may have been a little too much closure–too many endings spelled out where they would have been more powerful had Simon left us to infer them (Dukie tying off with the junkman, for instance).
But endings are almost always impossible; there’s too much business, too many compulsories, and you can’t begrudge the occasional hat-tip (like David Simon sitting at a desk filing copy in the Sun newsroom). And because The Wire hardly operates on a per-episode basis, you really have to look at the last several episodes, or the last season, as the finale. If anybody wants to get really plotty about this last episode, we can discuss in the comments, but for me it was all about the grace notes.
The most notable, of course, was the rushing, time-lapse panorama of Baltimore in the final seconds, black faces, white faces, hanging out, working, banging, playing, getting by–life, going on–and McNulty’s closing words, “Let’s go home.” That final epitaph was important, because as gloomy and pessimistic as The Wire can be, it is–was–never nihilistic, and never defeatist. It was about struggle—struggle as opposed to prosperity, yes, but also struggle as opposed to giving up. It was about making it up from the basement, a more ennobling achievement than making it to the governor’s mansion. It was about going on because life is better than the alternative, being good police because it was its own reward and going home–instead of turning that car around on the Interstate and driving off–because for all its troubles in the end, it is home. The Wire has been searing in its condemnation of the flaws of Baltimore and America, but I have never believed a second that it did not passionately love both.
The other ending to the episode came about half an hour before the actual one: the fake wake for McNulty. Not because McNulty was necessarily the most interesting character on the show, though he was often the focus, and Landsman gave him a surprisingly tender, if ball-busting, sendoff. (“If I was laying there dead on a Baltimore street corner, I’d want it to be you there standing over me, catching the case.”) No, it was that the scene caught the essence of The Wire–the dark comedy, the hilarity and pain and camaraderie, and the incongruous rightness of a room of white and black cops hoisting whiskey to a Pogues song about getting drunk at a wake, ending in a farewell “to big Jim Dwyer / The man of wire / Who was often heard to say / I’m a free born man of the USA.”
To natural po-lice, to gallows humor, to rebelling and failing and surviving to get drunk at your own funeral—to this sprawling, brawling angry love letter to America’s cities, raise a glass.