Uh-oh

So today I'm already hit by a conversation I can no longer have with my lifelong friend who died on Friday. Mo went to Princeton with now disgraced New York Governor Elliot Spitzer (it seems they may have been in the same "eating club"), and now I can't call him to exchange extreme snark.

As everyone surely knows by now, Spitzer just got busted for his involvement with a prostitution ring, a federal crime (client money facilitating women crossing state lines to break the law) that could lead to a conviction, and likely resignation this week.

About a month ago I had a conversation with Mo about the New Yorker profile on Spitzer's slamming drop from earning 70% of the vote in 2006 to a 36% approval rating, George W. Bush territory. When I asked if Spitzer, in college, was as repulsively, explosively arrogant as he appeared to be in the article, Mo simply replied, "No comment."

Damn his discretion!

Soon after the story broke, another friend sent me an email that asked, simply:

Spitzer = Carcetti

Ah, at least! Back on solid ground with an analogy drawn straight from The Wire, which ended its scorching, epic 5-season, 60-episode run last night. That's approximately thirty feature films worth of entertainment, the lion's share of what I see in a theater in a year.

On the show, Thomas Carcetti starts out as adulterous city councilman, runs for Mayor, wins and (SPOILERS AHEAD),
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caps last night's series closer in montage as Governor. He successfully navigated the waters of McNulty's serial killer fraud, and everyone ends up better for it in the end.

What I found in the close to The Wire was a sense of surprise and surely relief that it wasn't as tragic as expected. The writers had called this the Dr. Strangelove season, and the ending had more comedy than pathos, save for the final scenes with Duquand, condemned to a soulless hell of addiction and poverty, just like the "family" we first saw hints of, the fate he momentarily escaped thanks to his drug-dealing buddy, Michael.

McNulty is arguably better off having left the force even if sans pension, Lester is pensioned off at 30 years with the devoted Shardene coming onto him while he's making the doll house furniture that earns him a pretty penny. Daniels sticks to his conscience and ends up free of the institution. Perlman is a judge. Rawls is promoted to state police by a grateful Carcetti. Narese becomes Mayor of Baltimore and -- the most hilarious moment in the montage -- promotes Valcek to Police Commissioner.

Best of all, Cheese gets it right in the head from Slim Charles after threatening an upstanding drug co-op member with his pistol and talking about how he's going to be the Marlo now. Boom! Payback for Tall Man and, most of all, Prop Joe. And in some ways seeming like justice for Omar.

This is now brilliant the storytelling is. I'm cheering for gangster Slim Charles (who takes over the drug trade with Fat Faced Rick). Nice.

While maybe the story didn't end with some maybe adolescent idea of tragic gotterdammerung, and maybe in a weird masochistic way it feels like a gyp, the actual choice made by creator David Simon (nice cameo in that newsroom pan) and crew is perhaps more humanistic, while still provide the closure release you maybe didn't feel at the end of The Sopranos.

The show began with McNulty, and among a cast of equals Dominic West is the only cast lead to receive first billing, not alphabetical. His intellectual vanity kicked off the very first wiretap unit in the very first season. It took a few episodes for him to get it, but he's the catalyst for everything that unfolds on the law enforcement side. The thorn in Rawls' side. The ringleader.

Famously, The Wire took a perpendicular turn with its fourth season, when evidently Dominic West wanted more family time and McNulty, having completed the Avon Barksdale arc over the course of the first three seasons, took a backseat to the four new schoolkids who broke our hearts over thirteen episodes. That was arguably the finest season, brazen it its risks, devastating in its rewards.

With its mere ten episodes (the final being 1 1/2 hours) after the usual twelve, and sudden introduction of the newsprint institution, this fifth and final season seemed at times almost coda on the rest of the series. The cameos by characters past combined with the jarring choice made by McNulty to mess with homeless corpses and create an impossible-to-sustain fiction, in order to fund the actual druglord sting, felt forced, not exactly the show we knew, almost like comment on the preceding body of the series.

Bottom line: who cares. Simon and company again took a perpendicular turn, only this time centered on the character we knew and loved for three straight seasons, keeping the series fresh (it may have felt weird but it didn't feel like retread) and still, in one of those famous second-to-last episodes, pulling all the threads until the tension was eye-poppingly maximus.

I resisted writing about the series closer last night because I wanted a day to reflect on it, see if I had anything to add to Andrew Johnson and Alan Sepinwall (both linked about, along with Sepinwall's lengthy, Wire-literate interview with David Simon), anything original to say, preferably momentous.

Well, I'm short on the momentous, but from a pure narrative point of view, the fact that the series ended with McNulty getting out of his car, carrying in his passenger's seat the last neat little piece of the closure puzzle, staring off at downtown Baltimore while having his first-time version of the usual season-ending musical montage; the fact that the montage was to the original Blind Boys of Alabama opening credits version of Tom Waits' "Down in the Hole" (each season, of course, the opening theme was performed by a different artist or ensemble); the fact that McNulty's last line is, "Let's go home," just points to the simple fact that they knew what they were doing.

This is McNulty's story. Sure, it's Stringer's and Carcetti's and Daniels' and Greggs' and Bunk's -- the list goes on over scores of speaking parts. But at the core was Jimmy, and since we suffered with him, caroused with him, fornicated and investigated with him, we needed to close him out.

While we don't know what job he'll be doing next (Private detective? Series sequel?) we do know that he's completed his arc. The serial killer scam storyline, climaxing with Marlo Stanfield and associates getting arrested (even if Marlo walked away, into his own private purgatory), allowed the writers to take McNulty to the farthest extreme, actual rogue policework, not just bending the rules and skirting the bosses.

Jimmy needed a win to leave, that or die trying (my prediction throughout the season, gladly wrong). He ended up getting one. He's sated; there's nowhere further to go with undercover wiretap investigation. The game goes on and now it's Syndor and Slim on the gerbil wheel, but McNulty has scratched that itch and escaped by the skin of his teeth. There's no going back but no need to.

The remarkable narrative trick was how the powers moved the human pieces to get a desired media and hence new reality result. Everybody ultimately plays their part, disregarding any "truth", and everybody gets paid. The lucky implausibles included the conveniently timed copycat killer at the nick of time and Lester's speedy identification of the courthouse leak, and maybe Elliot Spitzer will hand onto his job thanks to such a twist in real life.

If nothing else, after watching the full breadth of The Wire, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Now, if Mo were here I'd hit him with the same note I sent back to my buddy who equated Spitzer with Carcetti. It seems that the Lt. Governor, who may step into Spitzer's shoes by the middle of this week, would not only be New York's first African-American Governor, he would be the state's first blind Governor as well.

Not unlike Butchie, the beloved safe haven for the late Omar Little.

So if Spitzer = Carcetti...

Does Paterson = Butchie?