Drunk: steady on 12, although everybody has a couple of drinks at the end. McNulty giving a fuck when it wasn't his turn: steady on 17. Murders: up one to 33, with the killing of Frank Sobotka. We are shown something similar at the end of each series of The Wire.įavourite quote: the Greek: And, of course, I'm not even Greek. "Every arrest and maxi-trial seems more like a way of replacing cops and breaking business cycles than something capable of destroying a system," Saviano writes. Napolitans involved with the mafia refer to it as "the system", which has obvious parallels with "the game", the name for the drug economy that might have been a more apposite title for David Simon's programme than The Wire. There are many differences between the Italian mafias and the Barksdale gang in The Wire – the mafias' widespread involvement in legitimate business, neutralisation of the police, international reach, enormous scale, and intricate political influence (Stringer should have marched the west side to the polls to vote for Clay Davis's opponent when the state senator double-crossed him).īut there are also similarities, not least in the contrasting attitudes to business we see above, which match Avon and Stringer's, but also in the way the gang/mafia is knitted into and drawn from the community, and replenishes itself periodically from that source, as well as the use of violence as punishment, intimidation and to resolve commercial problems. All there is, is a territory where you do business – with, through, or without the state. The state-antistate paradigm doesn't exist. According to Schiavone, the Mafia wanted to become a sort of antistate, but this was not a business issue. He talked about Cosa Nostra as if it were an organisation enslaved to politicians and, unlike the Caserta Camorristi, incapable of thinking in business terms. One of the declarations about the Sicilian Mafiosi that shocked me most was made by the Casalesi pentito Carmine Schiavone, in a 2005 interview. I recently read Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, in which the author contrasts the Cosa Nostra of Sicily and 'Ndrangheta of Calabria with the Camorra of Naples: It's that other thing.Īs we have discussed, with hindsight, Avon now seems the more clear-headed in these discussions. String, this ain't about your motherfucking business class. And we see a bad-tempered prison meeting between Stringer and Avon that ends with a somewhat reluctant fist bump that suggests that the old partnership – "us, man" – is entering rocky waters.Īvon concedes that Stringer can temporarily run the business as he sees fit – "at least until I get home you do" – but when Stringer tries to tell him that "every market-based business moves in cycles", he cuts in: Omar promises "I'm going hard after Stringer". Heroin addict Bubbles reveals to detectives Kima and McNulty that supposed rivals Stringer and Proposition Joe are now sharing territory – "cats and dogs, sleeping together," as Kima puts it. The programme gradually resumes its focus on the black housing estates and sets the scene for the next series – although I think it's a shame for the show's overall feel that none of the dock characters are ever knitted back into its fabric (Greeks aside), reinforcing the perception of this series as the odd one out. And we see a new batch of foreign prostitutes unloaded from a shipping container to replace the ones who were killed at the start of the series. ![]() Where last time drug lord Avon Barksdale was jailed but his lieutenant Stringer Bell went free, with their operation basically left intact, here the two most senior narcotics traffickers – the Greek and Vondas – both escape to sell drugs another day. We see the same shot of the Key Bridge that we saw last week as Frank Sobotka walked towards the Greeks, and we know that the union boss is dead.Īt the end of the last series, we discussed the cyclical nature of the programme, and the montage that ends this season establishes that theme once again. ![]() ![]() But it's all suffused with a sense of dread. It opens almost bucolically, with the radio chirping that "it's gonna be partly cloudy, breezy and warm today with highs around 80", and the sun going up over the cranes and the weeds. This final episode, directed by Robert F Colesberry, is full of opposing images: beautiful wide shots of the colourful shipping containers and the dock machinery towering over them, glorious depictions of industrial decay. Series two ends with dockworker and minor criminal Nicky Sobotka crying in the rain for his lost relatives and his lost industry, over the grimly ironic sounds of I Feel Alright by Steve Earle.
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