The Wire - Season Two (****)

Herc: Fuckin' white boys, I love 'em. I fucking love 'em!
Kima: Yeah?
Herc: Dumb as a box of rocks.
Kima: Who?
Herc: White boys. Talking about the brain-deads in my Kane Street case. I call him up, I tell him I wanna buy some drugs. You know what he says? He says "Okay, I'll sell you the drugs. How much drugs do you want?" I swear to God, Kima, they don't code it, they don't ask for a meet, nothing. And then when you make the deal, there's no runner, no bullshit. It's the guy himself walking up to you in the parking lot, saying "I brought the drugs, did you bring the money?" I'm not kidding. I have much respect for black people after working with these idiots for two weeks. Seriously, if white boys want to sell drugs in Baltimore, they have to make different laws for it, like, even it out for them.
Kima: Affirmative action.
Herc: Leave no white man behind.

If Season Two of The Wire proved anything, it proved that the show had no interest in kowtowing to the expectations of its viewers, its network, or anyone else. After Season One established it as a gritty police procedural, a "black show" dealing with the inner workings of inner city drug gangs and the cops that chase after them, albeit with some certain political (and harshly cynical) underpinnings, to open as Season Two opens, transferring the point of interest to the mostly white port of Baltimore is something of a shock. It doesn't feel like the same show. In a lot of ways, it's not.

And yet it is, in every way that matters. Season Two clarifies in many ways things people could only guess at in Season One: that the creators of The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns, were interested in far more than the drug trade of West Baltimore.

So we are introduced to the Port, its characters and its problems. Primarily white, Polack, and working class, mostly concerned with the jobs produced by the loading and unloading of ships that park themselves in the harbor, the Southeastern district is a very different animal from the Western we've become familiar with. It's the district Major Valchek (Al Brown), who we remember from Season 1 as Pryzbylewski's petty father-in-law, has command over. After an always-symbolic opening sequence ("We got a lot of party going on here"), it's him of all people that we open on, ignoring his son-in-law as he waxes reminiscent on the events of Season One, focusing instead on a stained glass window he plans to donate to his Catholic Church.

It's a church he shares with the head of the local Checker's union, Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), and much to Valchek's dismay Sobotka has beaten him to the punch, donating a window that dwarfs his own. It's the dumbest of reasons (by design, I imagine), but it will start a feud that provides one of two catalysts for the season's port plot. Sobotka is more concerned with other issues: the rebuilding of a grain pier, and more ambitiously, the dredging of the canal. Two more feet, and the port, which is dying slowly, could be prospering. The window donation was a primer to get an audience with a Senator.

Valchek surmises that the money Sobotka's throwing around is a lot more than the union can provide, meaning it seems likely that Sobotka's into some dirt. On that, and that alone, he's right. Sobotka, along with his nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), are being paid by a man named Spiros Vondopoulos (Paul Ben-Victor) to disappear cans off the docks. What's in the cans? They don't ask. They don't want to know.

Which leads to the second catalyst for the port plot, when the local port patrol cop, Beadie Russel (Amy Ryan) makes an ugly discovery: a container full of girls. Thirteen of them, foreign, young, and pretty, being smuggled into the country for clubbing and prostitution. All dead, suffocated, when the air pipe into the container was smashed in.

Jimmy McNulty, resigned after the events of Season One to the city's marine unit, makes a discovery of his own: a floater in the water that is quickly linked to the container (thirteen bodies; fourteen bedrolls). Able to convince the medical examiner that all fourteen were homicides (the air pipe was smashed in with multiple blows), and from the time of death that they suffocated while in the city's jurisdiction, he succeeds in a petty way in sticking Rawls, the major that fucked him over, with fourteen unsolvable homicides.

Meanwhile, Valchek is able to leverage his way into a detail targeting Sobotka, supposedly spearheaded by his nephew. As with last season, he's sent humps, but rather than making lemonade as Daniels was able to, he complains to Burrell, who is more concerned with gathering the votes to be named the next police commissioner. Burrell appeases him, drawing Daniels out of where he was stuck in Evidence Control. Daniels in turn was planning on retiring - to become a lawyer - but the appeal of the case and the promise of a promotion if it's seen through successfully draws him back in. He also insists on choosing his own people, and he's loyal. It's also because the show has a finite cast, although it doesn't always seem that way.

So, yeah, the case is more complex than the previous season's, and where Season One was more concerned with the intricacies of its primary investigation, Season Two puts the spotlight on the internal workings of the police department: how the homicide detectives are anxious to avoid having more murders to investigate, how the politics of the department dictate what kind of cases get made, how political "suction" trumps competence in all circumstances.

So now, I'm way the fuck into this review and I haven't gotten back to the street. The primary thread of Season One does continue: Avon Barksdale is behind bars, albeit with a light sentence, while Stringer Bell stays on the street, struggling to hold on to the towers with their connections dried up. Proposition Joe, seen briefly in Season One, offers a deal to cut Stringer in on his package ("straight off the boat" - tying directly back into the port) in return for a slice of the towers.

More to the point, the season's primary political issue shifts from the futility of the war on drugs to the struggles and ultimate suffocation of the working class. It's an interesting argument, and one I have to admit I'm less amenable to than that of the first season, yet it's presented compellingly enough. I buy them, I like them, I understand their struggles.

I also reserve some judgment, such as when Sobotka, late in the season, attends a presentation where a salesman touts the efficiency and safety of robots doing the majority of the cargo unloading, such as in Rotterdam. They view it as a horror movie. I'm reminded of the Darwinian maxim of those being least able to adapt being the first to die off. So while I reserve some affection for their lifestyle - one of non-stop alcohol consumption (in a hilarious moment, Valchek sets up a DUI checkpoint at 8 am to catch dockworkers on their way to work, straight from the bar).

I also sympathize with the dilemma of Nick Sobotka, who, desperate for hours in a union that values only seniority (and where he isn't senior), starts to see the allure of getting involved in drugs. And of Ziggy, Frank Sobotka's son, who lacks his cousin's competence but not the desire to get involved in dirt. His story ends tragically, and while justice is served, it doesn't seem that way.

Still, the season is as tight as they come, a seemingly strange adjective to apply to a plot that sprawls as The Wire's does. Like with the first season, and every season to come, it tells one cohesive story with no attempt to turn each episode into its own mini-arc.

And strangely, I sympathized with the plight of D'Angelo Barksdale, who ate the biggest charge in the fallout of Season One despite being a clear underling. He wanted out of the game, and his mother convinced him otherwise. He is and was not a brutal man. He deserved better.

But The Wire doesn't give him better, because that's not it's way. Sentimentality was never its concern. It's saying something more. Even when I don't agree with it, it's making an argument, which is something almost no shows do, and it's making it passionately, eloquently, and with verve and wit, which makes it stand alone.