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I just watched through the whole show for the first time over the last couple of weeks. That was an interesting ride. A lot of my friends thought it was the best show ever made and after watching it, I can agree that it's certainly in the top ten, but I'm not so sure about best ever. The flaws are pretty big and season 5 especially had me getting pretty frustrated with the writing. It's definitely the best police drama I've ever seen, but I guess that just means I need to watch The Shield to actually have something worthy of comparison. I would say the high point for me was season 2. It did such a good job of showing how out of their depth the police department was even when they were being pushed into an investigation and told to find anything they could. For me, that is the only season where the city itself felt like a character. I kind of wish that Carcetti had shown up a bit earlier just because it would have made season 2 really about Baltimore more than anything else. Season 5 was a terrible slog. I really disliked how off the rails McNulty went and felt his character development was more or less a retread of what we've already been through with him. I'm pretty sure you can cut out everything involving the journalists and you're at no loss. You just have to tweak a couple of things like the phone call, but you don't actually need the journalists as characters to pull it off. Really though, the biggest issue is that I don't sympathize with their plight at all. They're all college educated, upper-middle class who have options outside of journalism if they're willing to send out their resumes. The teachers, union workers, students, and corner boys are all way more sympathetic and their plights feel so much realer. I know one of the themes of the show is how the gangster and political worlds are cyclical, but that kind of made the show repetitive to watch. The characters are missing a key piece of information, five episodes go by, they suddenly have that information and can crack the case. In between, some people get betrayed and the balance of power shifts. And by season 5 the show had run out of steam pursuing those things. It tried to tell the same story again with new constraints and it suffered greatly for it. The constraints felt really arbitrary and the outcome inevitable to wrap up the show. It was neat seeing the "origins" of Omar and Bubbles and the new batch of disaffected cops, but we had already seen analogs of those and other characters at other points in the series. I didn't really need to see more "literal" origins. Just my two cents on it. It's great television when it's good, but season 5 overall left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 05:59
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Sneaky Fast posted:^^^^^^^^ Edit: It's not really important what shows I liked more. Some shows I feel are better overall. Just check out Archer, Babylon 5, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. Those are all excellent at what they set out to do. Thaddius the Large posted:I absolutely agree with you on season 5, but I had no issues feeling it was repetitive prior to that. I think a big part was that they tried to sell the idea of progress, especially thanks to Carcetti, Colvin, and the Coop, and I really did hope along with the characters for a new day; sure it all goes to poo poo, but up through season 4 I think I avoided complete and utter cynicism and hopelessness. I started feeling it was repetitive in season 3. They're not covering new ground with the wire taps. Really, it's all the same thing. Somehow, MCU ends up with the number and they work a tap from it. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Dec 5, 2013 |
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Dec 5, 2013 19:40
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No disagreement that the show isn't really about the wiretaps, but it's hard not to be annoyed at the literal plot even when the themes are interesting. Just because I'm not watching a show that's "about" wiretaps doesn't mean they don't feature prominently and repetitively into the plot.
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Dec 6, 2013 04:28
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Clay Davis was amazing. He was so slimy he shined. Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet. And even as awful as Herc was, he was still responsible for bringing Marlo down.
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Dec 6, 2013 08:53
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One of my favorite scenes is when Levy pinches Herc's cheek and invites him over for dinner. Those two make such a great power duo.
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Dec 6, 2013 10:59
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It just annoys me that McNulty basically went through the same arc twice with the only difference being that he can't even be a beat cop after what he pulled in season 5.
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Dec 6, 2013 17:12
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EvilTobaccoExec posted:You would really hate The Sopranos. I actually was thinking of the addiction angle when I made the post. The thing of it for me is that ultimately I want a good story and those don't always have to be true to life. This isn't Don Draper's continuous spiral, it's a relapse which by definition is the same thing again. It's certainly realistic behavior for an addict and it fits the theme, but it wasn't interesting to watch a second time especially since the outcome wasn't all that different.
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Dec 6, 2013 19:07
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While the actual homeless serial killer plot never got quite as stupid as it could have until the very last episode of the show (there really was a serial killer all along!), I was so totally disappointed in it compared to other season's plots that I at several points thought for sure McNulty was actually going to kill a homeless person. I'm not sure if the writers were trying to make me think that that was a real possibility to get across just how desperate McNulty was, in which case I guess they succeeded, or if the plot was just so ridiculous and unbelievable that anything seemed possible, even McNulty becoming the serial killer he so desperately needed. I should say that in a lot of ways, season 5 of The Wire reminds me of season 5 of Babylon 5. Where it's good, with Marlo and Omar for example, it's just as good as the show has ever been. And when it's bad it's the worst as well.
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Dec 16, 2013 06:09
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Well, the way I read it was that the guy had been killing people, definitely two, but possibly others. No one ever would have noticed, cared, or linked them together, but it was entirely possible he actually was a serial killer. He wasn't responsible at all for McNulty's fake murders, but he had killed at least two other people. It just felt like a totally unnecessary crisis that was resolved basically immediately. It let them tie everything up into a neat little package rather than forcing Carcetti or Rawls to continue paying lip service to something that was fictional but the city suddenly cared about.
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Dec 16, 2013 10:48
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Konstantin posted:I have to say, as a cryptography nerd, Marlo's code is a lot better than the code used by the Barksdale organization in Season 1. I don't know if the police would have broken it in any reasonable amount of time without the incredibly lucky coincidence that ended up happening. The idea of using a widely available and inconspicuous document as a key is a good one, especially in a situation where the people using the code can be caught and searched at any time. The misdirection caused by using photographs of clocks as ciphertext is an additional nice touch. Of course, anyone with any knowledge of cryptography could come up with a much better code that couldn't be broken by luck, even given the constraints Marlo had to work with. Still, Marlo is extremely smart to come up with a decent system without any knowledge of cryptography at all. I think it's implied that the system was given to Marlo by the Greeks.
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Dec 22, 2013 17:10
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What I mean to say is that we see Vondas showing Marlo a phone. I suppose it's possible, though absurdly unlikely, all Vondas did was say, "Use pictures, but you're on your own for what the code is going to be," since there's no scene where we see him actually explaining how it works. I guess that's my definition of "implied", as in, strongly suggested or hinted at but not actually spelled out.
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Dec 23, 2013 06:30
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I immediately liked season 2 after being sort of underwhelmed by season 1. The other seasons were fine television, but 2 was where the show peaked for me. I feel like Baltimore itself became a character in that season and it made the whole thing feel a lot more epic and visceral, which is impressive given that we were dealing with working class Joe's.
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Nov 24, 2014 03:46
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