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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Wire Season 3: War and Peace

  
 
sleazenation
20:09 / 07.10.07
Due to popular demand, here is the thread for discussion of season 3 of The Wire.

Avon's still in the slammer, but getting closer to doing his 'second day' His man Cutty is already there. And out on the street, Stringer Bell is finding difficult to compete in multiple aggressive market places.

And then there's Hamsterdam, Bunny Colville's attempt to think his department out of an unwinable war on drugs.

So, highlights, lowlights let us know what you think....
 
 
Mug Chum
20:28 / 07.10.07
I have trouble remembering these episodes good enough to not be afraid to get spoilery, but Bunny's speech in the police department is something unbelievable (I actually think "There's never been a paper bag for drugs" should be in the thread description too) -- as well as the beer cans imagery on the roof (the tiniest thing mentioned here and there along the season then BAM! it hits you like a hammer with the context and the image).
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
20:36 / 07.10.07
You know what I love about the Hamsterdam speech?

Not the speech itself. The scene directly afterwards with Herc and Carver in the patrol car. Herc, with his usual finesse, says: 'What the fuck was all that about?' Carver doesn't say anything at all, but you know, from the look in his eyes, that he's going to do whatever he can to support Colvin's plan. Never mind McNulty, Freamon, Kima or Daniels, Carver is my favourite police character in this whole bloody show.
 
 
Mug Chum
20:45 / 07.10.07
Carver won my endless simpathies with aligning himself with Bunny (without mentioning anything else). But Freamon and Daniels are just too cool.

Curious thing, it seems that real life policemen were picking up dealers on the wire discussing Omar, Brother (?) and String on the last episodes.
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
21:49 / 07.10.07
Season 3 really felt a lot like season 1 to me. It wasn't the return to the same locations and characters as much as it was the way things were getting done. The detail in the first season had to do a fair amount of shady deals to get what they needed, in season 2 (with the feds help especially) it seemed like their job was really easy.

In season 3, though, we had a return to the slightly shady police work. The scam they ran with the burners, pre tapping phones and selling them to the dealers themselves was one of my favorite bits of TV police work. Bunny setting up a free trade drug marketplace to keep the crime away from the 'citizens' and his subsequent dealings with Stringer are another major example.

I think what I liked the most though was the way this season wrapped up. Without spoilers, does anyone know if they knew there would be more to come when this was made, or did they think they were done? Everything works out in the perfect way. McNulty finally realizing that he needs more then the next big case and deciding to make a go for it with the 'Right Woman' and walk a neighborhood as well as String and Avon both having their schemes backfire in a (to them at least) totally unexpected way worked really well.

The only storyline I didn't find all that interesting was the mayoral race. Knowing that the timeline for the election was longer then the likely length of the season made me not really care about it.
 
 
Spaniel
08:33 / 08.10.07
Can't join in with this yet as I'm only half-way through my second viewing of Season 3, and don't want to be reminded of all the little details.
 
 
nedrichards is confused
20:51 / 08.10.07
The thing I love most about this season is the Cutty/Dennis arc. Almost as much as Prez I was really, really rooting for him throughout and the fact that he gets a happy ending just choked me up. Correct me if I'm wrong but in seasons 1-3 is he the only person to get out of the game without dying? (I haven't seen 4 and I respect the no spoilers, I'm not suggesting something bad happens to him in season 4). His slow, almost cut off reactions when he gets out, unused to the pace of life outside and the way that over the season he slowly sharpens up without losing his essential laconic pace. Lovely, and reason alone (if you needed one) for the long form storytelling.

An aside, I'm sure someone will be better at this than me but I love the semiotics of the usage of suits in the characters. Everyone, no matter how broken down, always seems to have a suit available for those critical moments when you need to smarten up. It's most obvious in Bubs and Cutty/Dennis but I seem to remember that pretty much everyone has one.
 
 
Mug Chum
21:26 / 08.10.07
Not only suits, but I think the show has a nice quality in terms of knowing how to use good art direction to portray everything as a social sign. Clothes, cars, cellphones, houses, locations... You can sort of always tell what their position are in "the game" through them, almost as -- sometimes even being wrong pre-conceived inertia -- shorthand connections without drawing too much attention to it.

Omar (and Brother Mouzone as well) has a nice quality in that in how he was a disrupting figure of those rules, almost fantastical western-ish (his shotgun dangles at his side in broad daylight barely hidden by his reaper-matrix black overcoat).
 
 
Janean Patience
10:33 / 08.11.07
Well, that was way better than the second season, wasn't it? Which in retrospect was the middle book or film of a trilogy and had the onerous task of getting everyone in place for the big finale while pretending it was telling a separate story altogether. The Greek was Christopher Lee in Attack Of The Clones or Christopher Lee in Lord Of The Rings: a placeholder villain, a paper tiger for our police to fight while the show geared up for the return of Avon and the downfall of Stringer. Why they didn't make it explicit by hiring Christopher Lee for the role I don't know.

What do you do when you get what you want? was the theme of this series. You can be at the top of the game making a million a month, you can cut street crime by unheard-of percentages, you can get the target you've been chasing for years, you can get the anonymous hotel sex you spend half your life pursuing and then you have to figure out what to do with it. Success has consequences and they're not always welcome or expected. I wanted Hamsterdam to work. I didn't want it to be discovered, I didn't want it to be closed down, when the Mayor was desperately searching for a way to keep it I was with him all the way... and then when it's on TV, an open-air drug market, and the Mayor says "What the fuck was I thinking?" it was as clear to me as it was to him. You can't do that shit. No matter what. Politics runs higher and further than anyone knows.

The Stringer/Avon relationship, while feeling slightly tweaked for effect at times, could only lead to tragedy because two men can't be one boss. Same as Daniels and McNulty. Someone's got to be in charge. Cutty's difficult path never went where you expected it to. Hopefully he's in season four. Omar was great as usual, a folk hero larger than life who's nevertheless just one man living, and though I never liked Brother as a character - he seemed to have been cut from a 90s gangster movie and wandered into a show that didn't really match his tone - the scenes with him and Omar were great, two operators who work in and out of the game recognising that they could work together.

The best bits: the Major's paper bag speech, the corner boys collected in the school gym and it's only then you realise their ages and that this is where they should be if everything worked, Omar's present of the gun to Bunk, Prez's final moment with the machines and his final moment as a police, Herc and Carver's double act, Bubs walking through the Free Zone at night and how powerfully that darkness conveys the danger of what's been created, Stringer's failure to comprehend the straight world's hustle, McNulty's bad date, Freamon hustling the cell phones. And more I'm sure I've forgotten. Not quite at the heights of season one but way, way better than the confused season two. Which makes it one of the best TV dramas I've ever seen.
 
 
Spaniel
11:11 / 08.11.07
Of course, the other big theme is REFORM.
 
 
Janean Patience
14:08 / 08.11.07
I see that with Cutty and Stringer, but who else?
 
 
Spaniel
14:24 / 08.11.07
Colvin. Even the mayor with his detonating of the towers.

TBH, I didn't think about it too much when I was watching the season, but the David Simon talks about it in the commentary. It was front and centre in his mind, apparently
 
 
Janean Patience
14:52 / 08.11.07
Can't honestly say I saw that. I guess you could count Bunny's move as a reform of the drug laws, but it's a stretch. And Stringer isn't strictly reforming as trying to break out of the game into a bigger game, one where he's no more than an asshole with a package to be taken from him. I guess McNulty has his moment of realisation but reform doesn't seem to fit it. Simon's plain wrong.
 
 
Janean Patience
15:10 / 08.11.07
Forgot one of the best bits: McNulty and D'Angelo's mom. Horrible because he was saying the worst, most upsetting things possible to her, perhaps with the intention of getting to Stringer, and horrible because every one of them was true. Nobody gave a fuck about her boy. He had to be killed by somebody important, but it wasn't worth anyone investigating. An investigation was actively discouraged by the authorities and Stringer alike. And that final line, McNulty looking for someone who cared, is a crippling blow to her because it's true. She was responsible for his fate. Her son died and was thrown away and she was in the chain of command that allowed it to happen. A brutal, brilliant scene and I only wish it was that part of Stringer's scheming that came back to kill him rather than the comparatively weak stuff with Brother.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
16:27 / 08.11.07
WTF, how are Colvin's (in fact the whole of Hamsterdam's!) and McNulty's stories NOT about reform?

There's also that moment when Brother Mouzone looks right at the camera and says "Reform, Lemar. Reform!", but y'know, maybe he's plain wrong too. Maybe the guy just doesn't have the inside scoop the way JP does.

Reform isn't the only theme of the season, but it's a big one. It's not always about reform being genuine or good: Carcetti makes a big speech about the need to reform the system that made Hamsterdam possible, and that's mostly just electioneering... but it is a big theme.
 
 
The Natural Way
17:09 / 08.11.07
And, I should add, the theme that the writers go on about when asked to describe what 3's about.
 
 
Janean Patience
17:20 / 08.11.07
Yeah, I figured that when Boboss said David Simon talks about it in the commentary about five posts up. And didn't entirely mean it when I replied Simon's plain wrong about the creator and writer of the show. That wasn't serious. Sorry if this wasn't immediately apparent.

I'd be interested in hearing how the theme of season three was reform if anyone wants to discuss it at greater length. With reference to McNulty, say. If it's all too obvious and painful to go over then don't.
 
 
PatrickMM
03:44 / 23.11.07
I just finished the season tonight and wow, was it great, certainly deserving of more than 16 posts. If season one was police procedural, two was tragedy, this one seems to go more for operatic melodrama. That's not a knock, it's more that this season featured such large scale character and thematic arcs, it was almost overwhelming at times. The thing I love about the show is the way it can turn someone doing nothing into an incredibly powerful emotional moment, notably Carver's silent sadness as he watches Hamsterdam torn apart.

Hamsterdam was the real hook for me this season, fascinating and multi-layered as both a plot point and social problem critique. It's amazing to watch Colvin build an entire society from nothing, and bring it to the point where it seems to be functioning. I like that the show gives us a multi-layered depiction of the project, from the bucolic empty corners to Bubs' truly terrifying journey through Hamsterdam at night. Watching the church guy setting up social programs was really interesting, and there are fewer images sadder than the broken down HIV testing sign lying in the wreckage at the end of the season.

There's a wonderful symmetry as we move from the destruction of the towers at the beginning to the destruction of Hamsterdam at the end, an experiment that worked, but just wasn't socially acceptable. That's what makes Carcetti's speech at the end so effective, if I heard that on TV, I'd commend the guy for standing up to crime, but we know that he has actually doomed the only thing that was working by speaking to the press. It's a devestating irony, and probably the moment where Tommy sells his soul.

And the amazing thing is, that's just one of three or four absolutely killer plotlines. Stringer's arc, his ascension to legitimate businessman, and disappointment at finding out it's just another game when he gets played by Clay Davis. It bothers me that he got killed, I think it would have been interesting to explore his futher ascent through social power structures, but his death was suitably dramatic.

There's a lot more to say, this was easily the best season of the show yet, continuing the broadening of focus that started in season two, but this time doing so in a much more unified and thematically coherent manner. I'm glad it's only a week until season four drops on DVD. Oh, and anybody got that WMD?
 
 
The Natural Way
07:16 / 23.11.07
Only it's not a week here.

Boo.
 
 
Spaniel
08:03 / 23.11.07
There's always dvd player hackery, which may well be a possibility. Get its product details and give me a ring - I might well be able to sort something out.
 
 
PatrickMM
04:04 / 25.12.07
Where's the season four thread at? With only a couple of weeks ago before season five starts, there's plenty to discuss. I just wrapped the season a couple of days ago and, without getting into spoilers, it's just as powerful and ambitious as season three.
 
 
Spaniel
10:17 / 25.12.07
Indeed it is, if not more so, but I won't be participating until after I've given it another run through. Originally saw it at the beginning of the year, but guess what Santa dun brung?
 
 
Axolotl
11:21 / 08.01.08
Nearly finished this series. Damn it's good. Some real genius bits of TV. Prez's downfall was touching, really got to me. The way it seemed to come out of no where was excellent. Cutty's path to redemption: I've not seen the last two episodes but I can't help feeling it will go horribly wrong - no one gets out of the game, I hope I'm wrong though.
 
 
Spaniel
12:19 / 08.01.08
no one gets out of the game

As I've said elsewhere, I think that's entirely the wrong way to view the show. Character's relationships to the Game aren't governed by cheap genre rules - nothing is inevitable in that way - rather they're governed by the reality of the situation. It's very hard to get out of the Game because it almost certainly is very hard to get out of the Game.
 
 
Thorn Davis
07:29 / 25.03.08
I was sure there was one of these threads for the fourth season, but I can't find it. What happened to that? I just finished watching it and I was looking forward to reading people's thoughts today :sadface:
 
 
sleazenation
08:10 / 25.03.08
Well, You can always start one...
 
 
Thorn Davis
08:34 / 25.03.08
Yes, but Barbelith comes down quite heavily on people who start threads if there's already one available - I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
 
 
The Natural Way
13:47 / 25.03.08
Weirdly, I think there's one for 3 and 4, but not for 4 in isolation.
 
  
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