Organ GrinderThe Wire

The Wire re-up: Season two, episode nine - whose war is it anyway?

SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have already seen The Wire in its entirety. This week: lessons in the art of negotiation

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It's all about the deals. Parlays between dealers, agreements between police officers, quid pro quo with international entrepreneurs and pacts with the devil himself.

This week, Baltimore's finest, shrewdest, dumbest, most powerful and most petty make deals in a series of moments that act as touchstones for several storylines that will come to reshape the city and its inhabitants over the next few episodes.

The laws of causality state that for every action there must be a reaction, but the distance between the two is not usually so compact. Call it what you will – kismet, karma, destiny or fate – but the very deliberate, very pronounced movements by several players and institutions lead them on very different paths.

Valcheck accuses Burrell of reneging on their deal to somehow implicate Frank Sobotka in some – any – form of crime. Stringer makes a deal with Proposition Joe to take his product after a shootout on a corner leads to a nine-year-old boy being killed, and the BPD shutting down the drug trade for a few days. Ziggy makes a deal with Gleckas to offload some cars he's looking to steal. Nick Sobotka makes a deal with Vondas and White Mike to start peddling g-pacs. The Greek exploits the war on terror to exchange tip-offs for information on drugs bound for Colombian 'narco-terrorists' with his FBI handler. And finally, Avon makes a deal to bring some extra muscle to his organisation's ranks – the bow-tied, Atlantic Monthly-reading, Walther PPK-carrying, bad motherfucker, Brother Mouzone.

The issue of predetermined fate and the 'gods' of Baltimore frequently crop up in discussion of the show, but what if the writers fell down on the side of chaos theory rather than causality? What if it's all coincidence? Do all the pieces really matter? I think we can assume that they do, especially as this episode was written by David Simon himself.

Valcheck's petty one-upmanship leads directly to the detail discovering the Greek. The call placed by McNulty's Fed buddy, Fitz, to Agent Ernesto Koutris leads directly to a road that has Frank's murder at the end of it. And Ziggy's attempt to lift himself into higher criminal circles leads ultimately to his own tragic climax.

So while we can be rationally sceptical over whether the players' fates are predestined, we can certainly see that many of them are the victims of their own hubris, parochialism or plain stupidity.

And the results are not necessarily bad for the characters in question. The Greek, as you would expect, uses a piece of bad luck to his advantage. Despite Gleckas popping up on the detail's radar through surveillance of the docks, a deal that has gone awry with the Colombians allows him to horsetrade with Agent Koutris, thereby gaining his favour and favours.

"The world is smaller now" he says, "and the FBI are very interested in this", as the war on terror encroaches on the war on drugs, not for the first time. The deal between the FBI and the Greek takes wider interests of national security as its mantra, with collateral damage, such as local police investigations, perfectly acceptable. Koutris gets info on drug smuggling and volatile chemicals transported through international shipping channels, while the Greek gets info on people snooping into his affairs. A simple illustration of how the abstract impacts on the specific.

The drugs brought in and sold on by the Greek, repackaged by Bodie and his crew as 'Bin Ladens' and 'WMDs' ("this shit will mass-destruct your ass"), leading to shootouts on the corner that kill a child getting ready for school. For that boy's mother, and this corner of the Western, the war on terror and the war on drugs are indistinguishable.

Quote of the week: "Calm the fuck down! It ain't like they're going to flush a half dozen whores down the toilet!" – Bunk chastises an overzealous officer during the brothel raid.

Running totals

Murders: Up one to 31, the poor kid shot through his window during the gun battle on the corner – leading Bunny Colvin, on his first appearance, to question "just what the hell is it that we're doing?" in the ensuing scramble to solve the murder.
McNulty giving a fuck when it wasn't his turn: To echo Mark Smith's comment last week, while in a literal sense Jimmy does this with the two prostitutes while going undercover with a hilariously bad English accent at the brothel (ooh the layers of irony), it doesn't really count. Drunk: No sauce this week so steady on 12.
Dubious parenting: No change from three.
Bunk drunk: Static on five.
Herc fuck-ups: Still on six and a half, though he does show some self-awareness this week, as he hilariously says to Carver: "I'm starting to think that as criminal investigators, we're not really respected."
Omar stick-ups: No sign of the man. Still on five
Bubbles attempts to get clean: Ditto. Two.

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