#5 Lake Trout Special: Price is going up edition

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Rules. Follow them.

Friday open thread. Yammering and mouthing off encouraged, likely even rewarded.

Omar and Marlo: Two men enter …

Pick the correct two outcomes below:

A. Omar (himself) kills Marlo

B. Marlo (himself) kills Omar

C. Someone else kills Marlo

D. Someone else kills Omar

E. Marlo survives

F. Omar survives

Political crack/Wire mashup: Pick a Wire character that best corresponds to a political player. Extra points for creative use of photos and/or quotes

Scenarios

Yeah, there’s a lot of them, but I’m interested in how the downfall of Marlo plays out.

1) They turn up enough stuff on the wire and such to make a big ass case against Marlo, and the “homeless” serial killer goes away

2) They can’t do diddley against Marlo, and the serial killer case bites them all on the ass

3) Omar gets to Marlo first.

I really want to see what happens if Omar gets to Marlo first. What the hell does Lester do then?

[WARNING:  Possible spoilers in comments below]

#4 Lake Trout Special, Carry Out edition: Open Thread

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You guys got this down by now.

Friday open thread. Yammering and mouthing off encouraged, likely even rewarded.

Here’s a thought. We talked about dead vs. surviving already, but tell us what would surprise you most if it happened.

McNulty climbing back onboard the wagon, Marlo going legit, Omar going back to Puerto Rico, taking Rawls with him…

Simon, New Orleans, and the Davis Rogan connection

First, to set the stage, the standard NuPac head shot. Davis Rogan, Ben Franklin High School yearbook, 1982:

Dead pool

We are all doing it in our heads, so let us get it on paper. Who do you think is least likely to make it out of Season Five alive? And if you choose to share, why not?

Remember, this is Wire logic, not “regular” teebee logic.

Also, no spoiler-informed choices. Wild-ass guesses only.

Time has come today

“Tomorrow ain’t promised to no one…meanwhile, we go on.”

It makes some sense that, in a 10 episode season, the episode at the halfway mark, the bottom of hour, would be all about time.

And I do mean all about, from the dialog to the songs chosen for the episode. Almost every scene mentions or is concerned with time, be it specific or in abstract: the nature of time, its passing, age, deadlines, waiting for things to happen, wishing they hadn’t happened, the changes people go through, or don’t, or can’t yet.

Everything is connected: the other stuff

There’s no doubt what Ep 54 will be remembered for, and it is hard to get past what Marlo did to Prop Joe, but we need to look at all the other switches that flipped as well.

It’s at these moments I hate On Demand, or at least not having On Demand, but I’ll stick my speculative neck out anyway, knowing that half of you already know whether it’s valid speculation or just mistaken crap.

So, let’s chew on some of the bigger chunks:

Herc: Stupid, corrupt, or truly evil?

In the first episode of the season, we got the beginnings of a plot development with Herc and Levy, and (speaking as a social Sunday-night watcher, not some On Demand dope fiend) thus far we haven’t seen anything further on it. VirgoTex and I chatted about it in email a little a few weeks back, then events got in the way and I never blogged about it, but let me think out loud about it and see what you think.

It’s become clear to me so far this season that the Barksdale crime family is alive and well. Even with most of their soldiers dead or in jail, the family is still in The Game. Avon (and presumably Wee-Bey and others) are tight with the Russians in prison. On the outside, they’ve got Slim Charles temporarily affiliated with Prop Joe. And most importantly, they have Levy.

Uncivilized thuggery

Marlo.

Motherfucker is evil.

Man not only has an old blind man tortured and killed but calls in not one, but two, favors from a man he’s in the process of fucking over, one of those favors actually facilitating the act of betrayal. Not that Prop Joe’s fancy footwork during last season’s heist, to say nothing of the ten thousand propositions leading up to that, hasn’t earned him some bad karma, but damn! Marlo is stone cold.

However, 53 bent over backwards to show us that Marlo is pushing the edge of his envelope. We’ve never before seen him overreaching this far, so much out of his own element that we see he’s still just a punkass chump to the guys on the next rung up. It’s too early to tell if Vondas is going to “rainmake” Marlo, but we know for sure he’s got him licking his boots.

And that’s a lovely shade of bitch to see Mr. Marlo Stanfield wearing.

In the lions’ den

Given that the linear thought plugin for the virgobrain appears to be on the fritz this week, I’m surrendering to some shorter impressionistic posts. Please jump on in with your own riffs if any of my jumble resonates.

During Marlo and Prop Joe’s visit to Our Lady of Laundered Money, the painting Daniel’s Answer to the King by Briton Rivière dominates the initial shots. The painting depicts the morning after Daniel’s dark night, as he answers those who have come expecting to see him devoured and instead find him delivered by his righteousness:

“My God has sent His angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before Him innocency was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.”

While pure innocence is not a widely held commodity in The Wire, we are seeing many of our characters (most of them believing their own actions justified, righteous) facing the test of their lives, thrown to the lions either by circumstances beyond their control or as a direct result of their own actions. That, I think, brings us back to the difference between believing, the act of choosing to have faith in one’s subjective interpretation of events (which may or may not have been manipulated by others), and the objective involuntary act of knowing something concrete, that others agree is also true.

Some of our characters believe that in the fullness of time, they will be vindicated. Clay Davis, for example. Others know better, know they’ve reached the end of the line, their faith in what brought them here now lost. Remember the image of Burrell, who lived by the stats, now likely dead by them as well, staring out the window, the paper on his desk by the ringing phone.

Conversely, there’s Lester, as noted yesterday in Racy’s post:

Now we have Lester acting somewhat out of character, going along with Jimmy and the fake serial killer scam. Why? His people are broke, alone and abandoned in the face of a tragedy. They are on the verge of not being players anymore. They think surely we will be rescued. Surely the Government wouldn’t do nothing in the face of 22 murders? This is America, we shouldn’t be abandoned!

Well, give it up Lester. No one is coming to help you!

What about Butchie? There was a discussion in the comments here yesterday in response to Ashley’s original statement that Butchie was not in the game, and therefore, shouldn’t have been a target. I’m not going to say Butchie was an innocent but I think his refusal to talk wasn’t just him being a good soldier. Butchie was never Omar’s soldier. His exact relation is unclear, but what we do know is that they were family, bound by mutual devotion above and beyond the game, and Butchie kept the faith to the end. We see that borne out by the expression on Omar’s face when he gets the news about Butchie.

Which brings us to Marlo, Omar’s opposite god of war in the impending battle. Who among his crew has that kind of devotion to him, has faith in him, affection for him transcending the game? Likewise, is there a soul on earth that Marlo would shed a tear for, anyone or any ideal he wouldn’t give up if the price was right?