Star Trek: The Cage

"A curious species. They have fantasies they hide even from themselves."

"The Cage" is the 1965 pilot of the original Star Trek, our very first glimpse of Gene Roddenberry's now culturally ubiquitous vision of the future. This pilot starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, Majel Barrett as second-in-command Number One, and Leonard Nimoy as alien officer Mr. Spock.

The Wire: Mission Accomplished

"If we don't have the courage and the conviction to fight this war the way it should be fought, the way it needs to be fought, using every weapon that we can possibly muster, if that doesn't happen well, then we're staring at defeat. And that defeat should not and cannot and will not be forgiven." –Councilman Carcetti

This episode was an hour long coda to the season that effectively ended with the shooting of Stringer Bell in the preceding episode.

The Wire: Middle Ground

"Now there's got to be a middle ground here that we have yet to find. There's got to be some way to accomplish this without turning everything upside down." –Mayor Clarence Royce

Or not.

Regarded by many as perhaps the best episode of the entire run of stellar episodes in a stellar series, it asks and in some ways answers the question as to whether a middle ground can be found.

The Wire: Reformation

"Slow train comin'. Reform, Lamar, reform." –Brother Mouzone

Murder in the background, drugs still on the street, the towers are down but the game goes on. Will things change, can they be changed, or are all the promises fundamentally empty for the dark corner of the American experience portrayed on The Wire?

The Wire: Slapstick

"A new friend makes himself known." –Fortune cookie

And a tragic comedy it is, and tragic in an almost classical way as the fundamental flaws of many people and things (even the city itself) conspire to bring many people low. At the same time the errors are often so obvious that it's hard to believe anyone would make the mistakes, except for the characters who do.

The Wire: Moral Midgetry

"You know what this is? It's moral midgetry. Turn the fuckin' world upside down." –Colicchio

Is it "moral midgetry" to turn the world on its head and do something different, maybe something that seems to violate the bedrock beliefs of the person taking the action?

The Wire: Back Burners

McNulty: "The bosses don't know, huh?"
Colvin: "Fuck the bosses."

An episode with a doubly clever title, it refers at an obvious level to the "burner" phones being used by the Barksdales to elude eavesdropping, but simultaneously all the things that have been pushed from sight. These are things either too unimportant for anyone important to care about or too difficult to solve (or a bit of both). But for an episode that’s about things ignored or out of sight, a lot does happen.

The Wire: Homecoming

"And now all we got is bodies, and predatory motherfuckers like you." –Bunk

This is an episode about what it means to home in several senses. It can be coming home to the game, coming home to a purpose, or literally about home in the form of a row-house in Hamsterdam. It’s also about the disruption created when someone comes home and it upsets the balance that those left behind have established. Avon certainly manages this with Stringer and the Hamsterdam homeowner isn’t making Bunny Colvin’s life any easier.

The Wire: Straight and True

"I'm not around the way no more." –Stringer Bell

The Wire: Hamsterdam

"This is the world we've got, people and it's about time all of us had the good sense to at least admit that much." –Colvin

Do you ever have one of those days where you feel like a rat in a maze, or maybe more appropriately here, a hamster on the wheel? Because this episode is full of folks on that wheel, running hard and getting nowhere; only the thing is that some of them are aware of it and some, not so much. The title of the episode captures this perfectly: "Hamsterdam."

The Wire: Dead Soldiers

"...all of us in Baltimore, working, sharing a dark corner of the American experiment." –Jay Landsman

Back and forth we go from the theme of change to that of stasis, from business as usual to something new. We also get the sense more than in perhaps any episode that time passes and the characters are mortal, and that the time to do something is now.

The Wire: All Due Respect

"It's not personal, I swear to God, it's never personal with me." –Carcetti

All due respect, when it's your ass, its always personal. This phrase defines the episode and might itself be defined as "what one says immediately before disrespecting someone who it would be foolish to disrespect."

The Wire: Time After Time

"You don't look at what you did before, you do the same shit all over." –McNulty

And so here we are back from the docks and on the streets of West Baltimore. Things have changed, but have they improved? Urban renewal is going forward and the crime plagued battlegrounds that were high-rise housing projects have come down. The police are bringing data and information technology into play to fight crime. There is a new major crimes unit that is all over the Barksdales. So things are better, right?

The Wire: Port in a Storm

”This is a great day for Baltimore.” – Baltimore developer

And so it goes, the results are a muddle. The execution of Frank seems to essentially end the case, but then Nick’s sudden cooperation revives it, but not quickly enough to nab the leadership. A common theme for the first two seasons, success (clearing the 14 murders, busting a lot of bad people) changes very little (generating at best a brief pause in the flow of drugs) as the fight goes on for both sides.

The Wire: Bad Dreams

"Showtime, Frankie." –Major Valchek

This is the episode where we see the difference between Frank Sobotka and the other criminal leaders of The Wire drawn into sharp relief. The title refers to the bad ending to all the dreams that the union leader had for him and his. Frank wasn’t doing it all for himself, he was doing it for his people, his union and his family. All the talk of such things among the Barksdales have been shown to be empty rhetoric to justify unremitting violence and excuse their role in the ongoing destruction of their community. Frank had turned a blind eye to such things but here he discovers that he was deluding himself all along.

The Wire: Storm Warnings

"You need to think for just a moment and ask yourself, 'What do I have to do before this man raise up his gun again?' Good day to you, sir." –Brother Mouzone

Many warnings of serious trouble off shore, things are all unstable and the seas are choppy and a storm is already starting… okay, enough with the ocean-going references, let’s talk violence. This is an episode dominated by it.

The Wire: Stray Rounds

"This here game is more than the rep you carry, the corner you hold. You gotta be fierce, I know that, but more than that, you gotta show some flex, give and take on both sides." –Stringer

Sorry, Stringer, not many people seem to be listening to your advice in this episode. The title of this episode was a little like the episode "Collateral Damage," the arrests and crimes seem to fit no pattern but all sorts of people seem to be taking random hits. The most obvious meaning refers to the stray bullet that kills the boy in his house in West Baltimore, but it's "rounds" with an "s" and there are a number of additional hits seemingly coming out of nowhere.

The Wire: Duck and Cover

"You can get anything you want." –Diner Waitress

Only you really you can't, sure you can have her or another drink or an order of scrapple, but not what you really want and need. The episode starts with Jimmy McNulty indulging in two of the three vices that he had so recently promised his wife he no longer needed. The third, I hope you will recall, was police work.

The Wire: Backwash

"I'm also white. Not 'hang-on-the-corner, don't-give-a-fuck white,' but 'Locust Point I.B.S. Local 47 white.' I don't work without no fuckin' contract..." –Nick

As a kid growing up quite a long way from the ocean, backwash had one meaning. It was that nasty mixture of spit at the bottom of a Coke. It was viewed as essentially the unavoidable result of drinking from a can. At the ocean, it’s the outward flow of the water from the coast revealing the flotsam and jetsam left behind. I have also found that it is sometimes used as a synonym for an aftermath generally. I think all three definitions have relevance here, as we see the results of so many of the actions that have gone before and the inevitable consequences of the actions the characters are currently taking.

The Wire: All Prologue

"He was who he was and he did what he did and 'cause he wasn't ready to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him." –D’Angelo Barksdale

Lots and lots of scene cuts made this episode seem a little choppy, and yet it came together brilliantly. There were many plot lines and stories running simultaneously, and in some key ways this episode was the actual conclusion of season one. In a number of other ways, it is a signal that everything we have seen thus far in season two has been the prologue to what will come next. So exactly as we saw in season one, the pieces are all in place and now for the race to the end.