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Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?


This is a great listen. The story about the crew's reaction to Wallace's death was hilarious.

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Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


Jerusalem posted:

I will always love that he walks in the shuffling corpse of a dead man and walks out the greatest hero in American history :laugh:

I watched the O.J. made in America documentary and it was, let's say, relevant to that scene. Art imitates life, I guess

Rupert Buttermilk
Apr 15, 2007

🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...


Oh my god, Tom Fontana, too?

I'm a huge fan of Oz, so I'll definitely be checking this out (aside from the fact that it seemed neat already).

deoju
Jul 11, 2004

All the pieces matter.
Nap Ghost
From a thread in D&D
The Western District way...

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

"Sure I told him I was going to drown him in the harbor, let the crabs eat his body, then give the crabs to his family to eat..... but I did NOT tell him to put on a hoody and come to my neighborhood so I could shoot him!"

awesmoe
Nov 30, 2005

Pillbug

Jerusalem posted:

"Sure I told him I was going to drown him in the harbor, let the crabs eat his body, then give the crabs to his family to eat..... but I did NOT tell him to put on a hoody and come to my neighborhood so I could shoot him!"

I mean i might have told him to put on a hoodie and come to my neighbourhood so I could shoot him. I don't recall saying that. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what I say to who, you know?

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

awesmoe posted:

I mean i might have told him to put on a hoodie and come to my neighbourhood so I could shoot him. I don't recall saying that. Sometimes it's hard to keep track of what I say to who, you know?

"So.... you called him a friend of the family?"
"Yes."
"Well... no need to make a note of that!"

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy

Jerusalem posted:

"So.... you called him a friend of the family?"
"Yes."
"Well... no need to make a note of that!"

I mean, as long as the guy you called that was black, I don't see a problem. Spade a Spade and all that.

MrSlam
Apr 25, 2014

And there you sat, eating hamburgers while the world cried.
It's not a perfect game (some would argue it's not even a good game, but I like it) and it deals more with police cooperation with the mafia than the war on drugs, but you all might be interested in This Is The Police. I bring it up because it deals with hypocritical politicians, cops being used like soldiers, neverending crime, political scapegoats, and the pressures of an understaffed underpaid overworked police force being ordered to roll a boulder uphill day after day. So yeah, it reminded me of The Wire.

Here's the thread for it
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3785580

And the trailer for it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odv3y374-88

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


MrSlam posted:

It's not a perfect game (some would argue it's not even a good game, but I like it) and it deals more with police cooperation with the mafia than the war on drugs, but you all might be interested in This Is The Police. I bring it up because it deals with hypocritical politicians, cops being used like soldiers, neverending crime, political scapegoats, and the pressures of an understaffed underpaid overworked police force being ordered to roll a boulder uphill day after day. So yeah, it reminded me of The Wire.

Here's the thread for it
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3785580

And the trailer for it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odv3y374-88

Yeah I started playing that and had the same thought. Getting stupid counterproductive requests from city hall and thinking "is this how Burrell felt all the time?"

As you say it's not a perfect game and mostly not like the wire at all but I get what you're saying.

Alec Bald Snatch
Sep 12, 2012

by exmarx

deoju posted:

From a thread in D&D

The Western District way...

Funnily enough the depictions of casual police brutality and racism in the Wire turned out to be very tame compared to the real thing.

little munchkin
Aug 15, 2010

Dmitri-9 posted:

One thing bothered me about the Sobotka storyline. After they realize Frank is dead the FBI agent apologized to McNulty saying he thought Agent Koutris worked on customs cases but had been transfered to anti-terrorism implying that the FBI would protect the Greek because he could give good intel. Surely the mole would get in trouble for conspiring to kill a state's witness and the Greek was just as bad as a terrorist because his organization had already racked up two dozen bodies, imported tons of heroin, corrupted a port etc. The FBI might tolerate a criminal act to catch a bigger fish but there are limits, seemed kind of unrealistic in a show that was almost journalistic in tone.

Like a lot of the other unrealistic things in The Wire, it actually happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_Bulger

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy
If you thought that Frank went to the big Union in the sky at the end of Season 2, well it's great to see him as a American Pilot's Association representative in Sully. :v:

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

LordPants posted:

If you thought that Frank went to the big Union in the sky at the end of Season 2, well it's great to see him as a American Pilot's Association representative in Sully. :v:

They should get along great! They both ended up in the water

kippa
Aug 10, 2005

Fry, it's been three days. You can't keep boogie-ing like this. You'll come down with a fever of some sort.

Did he ever find that pig he was looking for in Louisiana?

Mokelumne Trekka
Nov 22, 2015

Soon.

I love everything about season 5 and I think the dislike by others is exaggerated

(coming from someone who likes S2 best)

LloydDobler
Oct 15, 2005

You shared it with a dick.

After my last re-watch I have to say this is a strong loving show all the way through, and while I like season 4 best, it's just because I like it, not because it's actually better than any other. All 5 seasons of this show hold up on their own, it's just that you have to get used to the show veering in different directions each season. Once you get over that, every season is fantastic. And as has been said over and over in this thread, even if there is a worst season or episode of the wire, it's still head and shoulders better than 99% of the rest of TV, past or present. Period.

Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Dec 22, 2005

GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS
It's exciting that it's now commonplace for television to focus on a long-running plot arc instead of just hinting at one. I think that means that it's possible for the wire to be surpassed, even if it hasn't yet.

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

As has been mentioned a lot, even those who say season 5 is the "worst" season of The Wire acknowledge it's still really, really, really, really, really loving good television and still better than almost all other television. My biggest complaint has always been that the newspaper storyline feels rushed and lacking in comparison to other examinations of institutions. The worst part is in how one-dimensional the newspaper "bosses" are, whereas in politics/school/police/the FBI and even the drug organizations themselves we got to see what made the higher-ups tick and why they did the things they did (usually because they were under pressure to deliver "results" as opposed to just doing their goddamn job).

A couple more episodes and the newspaper storyline might have worked out, but I also think David Simon needed somebody to lend a critical eye to his writing about something he was so personally close to (the same way he did for Ed Burns in season 4 and the school storyline). I gotta respect the subtlety with which he created a character like Gus who was so up his own rear end about the importance of the newspaper industry that he failed to notice the big stories that were going on all around him, but even then the show almost seems to go out of its way to make him a hero in a way it successfully avoided with McNulty and his relationship to the police.

algebra testes
Mar 5, 2011


Lipstick Apathy
Yeah and Scott always felt way too ridiculously villainous and irredeemable to me also.

zenguitarman
Apr 6, 2009

Come on, lemme see ya shake your tail feather


That sound Herc makes when he's moving the desk makes me laugh every single time.

Rupert Buttermilk
Apr 15, 2007

🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

For anyone who saw Masters of Sex (season 4), a certain Andre Royo plays Sammy Davis Jr :toot:

Cage
Jul 17, 2003
www.revivethedrive.org

zenguitarman posted:

That sound Herc makes when he's moving the desk makes me laugh every single time.

I love that I can just right click "sound Herc makes when hes moving the desk" and search google for it and usually it works.

This one?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhkndQ3LML8&t=76s

Stare-Out
Mar 11, 2010

On my 5th rewatch and noticed something. In Season 4 episode 4, "Refugees" when Chris and Snoop put the security guard in the vacant after he dissed Marlo, Snoop takes his badge as a "souvenir", then Chris snags it and throws it away. There's a shot of it landing in the weeds next to the vacant. I wonder why they didn't follow up on that as the shot of the badge landing felt really deliberate as both Chris and Snoop touched it with their bare hands. Maybe they had something planned so the cops would find it and they'd pull prints off of it or something?

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

Stare-Out posted:

On my 5th rewatch and noticed something. In Season 4 episode 4, "Refugees" when Chris and Snoop put the security guard in the vacant after he dissed Marlo, Snoop takes his badge as a "souvenir", then Chris snags it and throws it away. There's a shot of it landing in the weeds next to the vacant. I wonder why they didn't follow up on that as the shot of the badge landing felt really deliberate as both Chris and Snoop touched it with their bare hands. Maybe they had something planned so the cops would find it and they'd pull prints off of it or something?

I don't know if they intended to do anything with it, though you could easily argue that the significance of a symbol of authority ("fake" cop or not) being tossed carelessly into the weeds near a row of vacant houses suffering from abandonment/urban decay is rather telling.

I also think it's worth considering that the police were looking for nails in boarded-up doors and then going into the buildings and searching those, and I doubt that anybody even thought to look among the weeds OUTSIDE the buildings. They're so focused on looking in one place that they don't see evidence lying around exposed outside of it. Then the abundance of evidence they found gets completely negated in any case due to budget cuts and inexperienced incompetence within the forensic lab.

Stare-Out
Mar 11, 2010

True, but the shot itself is weirdly on the nose and upon several rewatches of the show I've noticed more and more specific close-up shots in the vein of "remember this because it matters" on whatever item or person it was so it caught my attention this time around. I guess it could be just to show that Chris and Snoop actually killed the grocery store security guard since the actual murder isn't shown but it feels too on the nose for the show, honestly.

Ainsley McTree
Feb 19, 2004


All the pieces matter, unless they're purely symbolic

Stare-Out
Mar 11, 2010

Also I have to say as much as I already love season 4, I'm warming up to Prez more than I did before watching him establish himself as a teacher in the class. Whenever I thought back to S4 I always remembered him being completely taken by and overpowered by the kids but he's doing pretty drat well pretty drat quick. :3:

Jerusalem
May 20, 2004

Would you be my new best friends?

I love when he talks to the kids about intimacy and building a life together. It's simultaneously incredibly sweet and also pretty depressing, because it seems like such an alien concept to so many of the students.

Stare-Out
Mar 11, 2010

Jerusalem posted:

I love when he talks to the kids about intimacy and building a life together. It's simultaneously incredibly sweet and also pretty depressing, because it seems like such an alien concept to so many of the students.

It's all somewhat heartwarming and sweet until later when you think back on it and realize that all the progress being made is what most expect kids to know and have already. Then it's just depressing.

Kevyn
Mar 5, 2003

I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.

Jerusalem posted:

I love when he talks to the kids about intimacy and building a life together. It's simultaneously incredibly sweet and also pretty depressing, because it seems like such an alien concept to so many of the students.

"Yo, tickle my nuts!"

Boywhiz88
Sep 11, 2005

floating 26" off da ground. BURR!

Kevyn posted:

"Yo, tickle my nuts!"

That smirk he gives at the chalkboard before turning around and being a teacher is the best.

wormil
Sep 12, 2002

Hulk will smoke you!

Stare-Out posted:

... as both Chris and Snoop touched it with their bare hands. Maybe they had something planned so the cops would find it and they'd pull prints off of it or something?

I remember thinking that on my 2nd watch but some amount of time passes before they even look around the vacants, prints would have been gone but I kept expecting Bunk to find it in the weeds. Maybe they were afraid it would detract from Lester's discovery about the nails.

banned from Starbucks
Jul 18, 2004




Even with the prints it wouldn't mean poo poo. ("We found the badge in the grass then we threw it back in the grass")

wormil
Sep 12, 2002

Hulk will smoke you!

banned from Starbucks posted:

Even with the prints it wouldn't mean poo poo. ("We found the badge in the grass then we threw it back in the grass")

It would place them at the scene (at some point). It's weak, but combined with motive it could help make a case. People have gone to prison with less evidence.

bucketybuck
Apr 8, 2012
Finding the badge would have been a negative in my eyes, The Wire isn't about finding the obvious clue in the bushes.

More than that, the murder of the security guard is all the more horrifying because of how callous and meaningless it is, having the badge be some super clue that eventually brings down the killers takes away from that.

the pole or the dole
May 21, 2009
Did they ever use fingerprints to catch anyone in The Wire? I feel like the whole fingerprint thing was a joke, remember when Bubbles gave the burner phone to Kima wrapped in paper to preserve the prints? Kima just rolled her eyes and laughed if I remember correctly.

ShaneMacGowansTeeth
May 22, 2007



I think this is it... I think this is how it ends
David Simon was at pains to point out in the homicide book that witnesses make cases and convictions, hence why D'Angelo's trial goes to poo poo and Bird's goes down. Get some witnesses, then stack up some physical evidence, but if you have a flimsy piece of evidence it's going to take one hell of a prosecutor to make any sort of case if it gets to trial. Hell, I was a jury on two cases in the summer and we convicted the first case based solely on witnesses because there was no physical evidence, while the second we convicted because there was a slew of evidence and the sole witness (in this case the defendant) was terrible on the stand.

Kevyn
Mar 5, 2003

I just want to smile. Just once. I'd like to just, one time, go to Disney World and smile like the other boys and girls.

the pole or the dole posted:

Did they ever use fingerprints to catch anyone in The Wire? I feel like the whole fingerprint thing was a joke, remember when Bubbles gave the burner phone to Kima wrapped in paper to preserve the prints? Kima just rolled her eyes and laughed if I remember correctly.

There was also the scene where the homicide detectives lied to Bodie about having his prints on one of the guns he threw off the bridge.

And Valchek lifting prints off the photos of the van he was being sent.

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Stare-Out
Mar 11, 2010

And Bunk & co. trying to lift prints off of the payphone that was used after Greggs was shot. And the phone at the Greek's when Brandon was picked up by Wee Bey and the Barksdale crew.

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