Wire Thread

The best-laid plans of mice and men seem to be going to shit this week, most notably as a disgruntled Haulk's phone call to a Sun reporter leads to the inevitable exposure of the Hamsterdam gambit. Frankly, I'm glad, because the Western District's ability to keep this quiet struck me as inordinately implausible. On the one hand, Major Colvin's efforts at innovation are clearly meant to be cast in a positive light and we know that David Simon is no fan of the status quo. On the other hand, the exposure and rather swift unraveling of this venture seem like a wholly foreseeable consequence of what he did, which calls into question the thinking behind the whole thing. Over on the street side of things, Stringer's drug co-op is now set to turn against him due to his failure to control Avon's war on Marlowe. The war, in turn, is cutting into the Barksdale crew's profit margins and may have left the leadership over-exposed to a vengeance-seeking Omar. Even McNulty is beginning to feel the sting of the exploitative relationship he initiated, while Councilman Carcetti is having some second thoughts about the wisdom and ethics of the train of events that he's set in motion.

With only two episodes left in the season, it's clear that an awful lot of these plot arcs are going to be left unresolved. The Major Case Unit's decision to enter the mobile phone business seems to me to leave a lot of room for the sort of blowback that's affected innovators on other fronts this season. Flashing a little leg at the judge may have gotten State's Attorney Pearlman her warrant, but that argument won't necessarily hold up on appeal, and poisoned fruit considerations could wreck the whole case. What's more, the way this was done strikes me as exposing Bubbles to an inordinately high risk of death, since the Barksdales have historically caught on to surveillance plots in the past. Last but by no means least, was that Deputy Commission Rawls we saw in the background of one of those gay bars?