Recapping 'The Wire': Episode 2

So in episode two of The Wire, our heroes in the police department-and the non-heroes among the bunch, because some of these cops really are the bottom of the barrel!-get their very own office space, in the basement of the police department. Which is “dank,” at best. We learn very quickly about the loser cops, because the kind of hot white one with the bad attitude and his dumb friends go into the projects at 2 a.m. all drunk and start shaking people down, and then the awesomeness happens, which is that the people in the projects start pelting them from above with bottles and old TVs and stuff. That is excellent and reminds me of various trips to the projects from my youth! And then the really terrible thing happens.

In the aftermath of this ridiculously ill-advised incident-which ends in some kid from the projects losing an eye and which was entirely motivated by an unearned, macho sense of self-worth (“Who does that dyke think she is, bossing us around?” is basically what the dumb hot white one, named Herc, says of his coworker, who is actually busy doing policework while he picks his fat nose)-the leader of the squad, Lieutenant Daniels, who is black, has to come in and tell them how to lie about what happened so they get off. This is a truly horrible moment!

And the show spends some time examining how he made this decision, with his awesome wife Marla, who is the perfect, perfect, perfect character: this African-American woman of a certain age and education, who is a realist and yet still an idealist, who understands things in a very clear, very 1970s-black-liberation way; she has everything figured out as a system, with an endgame, as a historical process, as an interaction with the artifacts of a superstructure. I have met this woman (of various ethnicities, but nearly always of the same age) in real life repeatedly, and she is always completely right and clear-eyed. But it seems near-impossible to put her counsel into practice in the complicated day-to-day, as I think Lieutenant Daniels agrees.

And this incident is where you first get a sense of the great, sucking-in force that is so famous about The Wire. I started to understand, a bit, the insane devotion that verges on addiction among people who’ve written about watching the show. Like, a week went by between watching episodes one and two because I was like, “Oh I don’t know, I bet this gets pretty good, but the first episode seemed so long….” And now I am like “Oh hey, this show is in it to win it.”

Though you know, we’ll see. Life is busy, due to the artifacts of The Man’s capitalist superstructures, and there’s only so much time to watch TV.

Previously: Episode 1.