The Wire - Season Two

It took me a while to get around to the second season because I had other things to watch - and, admittedly, I was procrastinating slightly because while I like The Wire, it is a dense show that requires concentration - but I finally finished it.


Because the previous season's case was such a headache for the department, everyone involved was split up and moved around, and because Rawls hates McNulty, he sent him to harbour patrol as punishment.  This leads to some fun scenes where McNulty gets revenge by proving some found sea corpses to be in his former department's jurisdiction, meaning Rawls' underlings now have to work those cases.  It also leads, later in the season, to a satisfying episode where season one's team inevitably reunites to work a shipping yard case that surfaced in the premiere when a myriad of dead women were found in a shipping container.


I'm not sure I enjoyed this season's case as much as last season - although Barksdale's drug ring was still a presence in spite of the police not really following them, and this seems like the greater arc that may last the entire series - but it did bring some interesting characters.  Ziggy Sobotka, who reminds me of a scrawny, dweeby Christian Bale, was a colourful character because he has a certain brashness and obnoxiousness that is surprising because he's also a screw-up, and I tend to think of screw-ups as being meek.  It was also cool to see Amy Ryan join the cast for the season; she seems to be one of those actresses who never gives a bad performance.  And I liked seeing Freamon - my favourite character from last season - get out of the basement and pound the pavement after finally escaping the pawn shop unit.  It was certainly a much busier season than the last due to a larger number of subplots simultaneously going on, which should have made it more fun, but I think I just wasn't totally into the shipping dock setting or something.  I loved the musical montage with which they closed out the season, though.  Overall I still liked the season, but from what I hear, seasons three and four are the best, so I'm very much looking forward to those.


Best Episode: "Backwash" had some amusing scenes with Herc and Carver involving a surveillance mic inside a tennis ball, and "Storm Warnings" gave Ziggy some powerful dramatic scenes, but I liked "Duck and Cover", in which McNulty gets back on the team and almost hooks up with Beadie, Herc and Carver invent a fake informant, Frank gets paranoid and catches on to the police surveillance, and Ziggy brings a duck into a bar (which sounds like the set-up to a joke).