Deserve Ain't Got Nothing To Do With It

The Re-Up Gang on The Wire season 5, through the penultimate episode. We'll have one more dialog after the final ep, though I'll be in Texas at that time and I'm not sure what my Wire-watching status will be.

UPDATE: One aspect of the show that should be dealt with in greater detail than an email forum encourages is the question it has raised about realism and verisimilitude in literature and where The Wire falls on both accounts. It seems to me (based in part on comments to previous episodes of our WireTAP dialog) is that complaints that this season has not been realistic have been taken to mean that the show is not Realist in a formalist sense. It isn't and clearly never was.

Snoop's death is a good example of the fantasy that informs the show. "Deserve ain't got nothing to do with it" is borrowed from the final showdown scene in Unforgiven between Gene Hackman and Clint Eastwood. Hackman protests that he doesn't deserve to die, that he was building a house—an appeal to humanity and the potential within even monsters. The final confrontation between Michael and Snoop is an inversion of those values: Michael was never one of them, humanity has nothing to do with the work that they do.

Certainly, it was one of the finest interactions in the season if not the whole show. It wasn't Realist by any stretch but it was realistic based on what we know about the characters. Too much of this season, though, has traded faithfulness to the characters for the fantastical and (as Kay protests in the latest WireTAP) the transactional. It's when basic verisimilitude breaks down that the fantasy stuff, like Omar's suspenseful, death-defying cliffhanger, takes on a special and unfortunate significance. Whereas in the context of a show whose characters' motives are grounded and readable, the departures and genre play that characters like Omar represents are satisfying, they seem gratuitous and overblown when the rest of the show isn't working.