The Wire, season 2
..
Season 2 expands the story to include Baltimore’s shipyards, where union boss Frank Sobotka is struggling to keep the dockworkers’ jobs alive in a dying industry. Automation has decimated the stevedores’ world, where now one man does what twenty used to do. Worse, their harbor is silting up, which makes it impossible for larger container ships to get up river to this port. Meanwhile, as depressed dockworkers barely scrape by, valuable waterfront property is being converted from derelict shipyards to chi-chi fern bars and high-rent townhouses. The dockworkers are a dying breed, but Frankie Sobotka isn’t going down without a fight.

Frankie is father to big family: his union members, all the dock workers, his useless son Ziggy, his nephew Nick, even the port authority cop Beatrice, called Beadie. He keeps an eye on everything, large and small. Like Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale, he is a man of vision heading up a struggling family. Frankie knows there’s one sure way to save his family. The city has to cough up the money get the harbor dredged. Those few extra inches will bring enough new business into the port to keep their world alive, at least for a while. And the only way to do that is to buy influence, which is extraordinarily costly. The only way to do that is to turn a blind eye to containers that wouldn’t ordinarily get past customs.

Frankie has connected with a man known only as “the Greek.” Frankie’s nephew Nick gets the word from the Greek’s sidekick Stavros, and on cue the dockworkers deliberately lose track of a container, which mysteriously disappears after they unload it. What’s inside? They don’t know and they don’t really care. Containers go missing all the time. The ship owners make an insurance claim and nobody’s the wiser. It seems like an ideal situation, until something goes terribly wrong one day and a container full of dead girls is found in the stacks. When Beadie investigates, she discovers the dead girls, suffocated. The air vent was deliberately damaged. They were murdered.

##

The seemingly trivial incident that acts as the catalyst for the second season involves Major Valchek, head of the Southeast District police. Valchek’s got a new stained glass window honoring Baltimore’s police for St. Casimir’s Catholic Church, but is infuriated when he discovers the spot is already occupied by a window honoring the church’s dockworkers. Frankie Sobotka beat him to it. The priest offers Valchek a different and far less visible location for his window. Valchek is beyond furious and vows revenge.

Valchek happens to be father-in-law to “Prez”, the useless doofus who turned out to be so good with numbers, patterns, codes and figures in Season One. In the post-Barksdale landscape, Prez is disgruntled with the meaningless work assignments he is getting. His father-in-law is telling him to relax, take the easy jobs, and keep his mouth shut. Prez gripes that he really enjoyed the work he did with Daniels, that it really felt good to do good work. Valchek can’t stop thinking about Sobotka. The penny drops, and suddenly he knows how to get his revenge. Valchek calls in a few favors and gets Daniels assigned to head up an investigation into Sobotka’s union, Frankie in particular, under suspicion of… something. Drugs. Smuggling. Whatever.

Daniels has literally been in the toilet since the Barksdale case, assigned to the evidence room. That’s about as low as you can get. That’s his thanks for rocking the boat. He’s decided to hang up this spurs and go into law, but the chance to redeem himself, to head up a solid case again, is too tempting. To his wife's great dismay, he agrees to take it on.

##

As thanks for his part in Season 1, McNulty's been assigned to his worst nightmare: the marine unit. He buzzes sullenly around the frigid port in his speedboat, bored and depressed. He's making some headway in getting his wife to forgive his past sins. Then one day they pull a body out of the water. It's a beautiful young woman, murdered, with no identification. McNulty can't stop thinking about her. He's determined to find out who she was and how she got there.

Meanwhile his old partner, Bunk, is assigned the case of dead girls in the can back in Homocide. Nobody wants this statistical hot potato. Homocide and the Port Authority keep trying to pass it off to the FBI, who hands it back to them. A dozen nobodies to screw up their success rate.

Lt. Daniels has been told to investigate the dockworkers union, but he's not even sure about what. He has no clue this is simply Valchek's revenge over the stained glass window flap. But he's a good cop and so he reassembles the team that worked so well in Season 1, adding Beadie the port cop, who blossoms when given the chance to do some real police work. But try as he might, Daniels is unable to break down Rawl's animosity for McNulty. Jimmy's ex-boss wants him to remain exiled to the marine unit. However as the investigation unravels the complicated story at the port, Daniels finds a way to bring McNulty back into the fold. Jimmy is like a man come back from the dead. He's given a chance to do the right thing for the dead girl whose picture he carries around with him.

The intensity of the case drives Daniels' marriage on the rocks. It makes Gregg's pregnant girlfriend furious. After nearly getting killed in Season 1, Kima had promised to stay on a desk job. But she can't resist the lure of this mysterious case. And McNulty quickly abandons his attentions to his ex-wife once he's back on a real case.

Little by little, the strings of the story come together: the dead girl in the drink, the dead girls in the can, the hostile, mostly Polish union boys, and the drug dealers. Bunk's homocide case partners up with Daniels' union investigation, and soon they bring in the Feds too. They discover the girls were from eastern Europe, brought in for prostitution purposes. The Greek's got his fingers in the drug pie as well, and one of his partners is none other than Proposition Joe, who is Stringer Bell's main competition.

Frankie Sobotka knows nothing about the Greek's drugs and prostitution ring, so he stares down the police with solid brass balls, but his conscience bothers him -- a lot. When his deadbeat son and naive nephew unknowingly lead the cops back to the Greek, Frankie has to pay the price. The penance for this sin is deadly.

##

Meanwhile life goes on in the projects. The good-hearted junkie Bubbles still skitters in and out of the action. He’s the resident informant, invisible on the street as one of many, but he watches too, he sees and notices. When his friend Johnny was beaten nearly to death by the Barksdale people in Season 1, he decided to work with the police and help bring them down. He felt so good about it, for a little while he tried to pull himself out of the cesspool of his life and clean up, but he couldn’t make it and slid back into addiction and degradation.

The outlaw Omar Little shows up to testify against Barksdale and muddy the waters around the projects. There he plays both sides against the middle every step of the way, but he's proving to be as good as his word when it comes to the cops. He will have his revenge for the brutal torture and murder of his lover Brandon, whatever the cost.

##

Drug Kingpin Avon Barksdale continues to reign over the Westside from inside prison; second-in-command Stringer Bell oversees the day-to-day operations. But Bell is having trouble finding decent product to sell; the word is out that Barksdale copped a plea and none of the suppliers trust him anymore. It's impossible to hang onto prime real estate without decent product, and so Bell makes a deal with Prop Joe to split the Towers -- they allow their competitor into their prime territory in exchange for providing them with quality product. But he makes this highly controversial and risky move without telling Avon. Little by little, we see Stringer Bell moving towards overt conflict with Barksdale. Whatever it is, it'll be bad.

Avon’s nephew D’Angelo is also in prison, struggling to come to terms with the shape his life has taken. He’s seen enough to know the moral rationalizations for the violence in this life don’t add up. He has never been the same since the death of little Wallace, the young mother hen who was murdered for having doubts in Season 1. In a poignant scene set in a prison reading group, D’Angelo talks bitterly about Jay Gatsby and how your past can never leave you, no matter how you try to reinvent yourself. He knew he had no future.

D’Angelo’s doubts condemn him to the same fate as Wallace. Stringer believes Avon is blinded by familial love and doesn’t see the risk Dee poses. Unknown to Avon, Stringer Bell orchestrates Dee's murder inside the prison, made to look like suicide. We see it coming a mile away, but even so, D'Angelo's death is stunning, tragic.

##

So many murders. So many dead, faceless and nameless. But once in a while someone takes notice. D’Angelo took notice of William Gant’s death, the "citizen" who paid with his life for having testified against him in Season 1. And he can't forget his young friend Wallace’s death, just as Omar Little cannot forget Brandon’s murder. We know, too, that one day Avon Barksdale will find out that Stringer Bell engineered his nephew's murder-- and you know that won’t be forgotten.

McNulty can’t forget either, the mysterious woman they pulled out of the bay, the murdered beauty who would disappear into obscurity, nameless, unmourned.

Port Cop Beadie Russell can’t forget the pile of lifeless bodies she found when she pulled down the false wall in the container. Frankie Sobotka can’t either. He suspects their blood is on his hands, one way or another, and it worries him. But he can't afford to take his eye off the ball. He's got to dodge the bullet on their customs irregularities, and he's got to look like a bystander in the murder investigation -- while somehow continuing to pour cash into the endless bribes needed to get that port dredged. In the end, his need for that money is not much different from the junkies addicted to Barksdale's heroin.

Two men, working with their families, doing what they see as the best they can. Two men with promising nephews they're trying to mentor. While the union boys proudly proclaim their Polish heritage quaffing raw eggs in whiskey for breakfast, today's eastern European immigrants decompose in a container outside on the dock. It doesn't matter whether they're cops, junkies, drug dealers, stevedores or union bosses. They all see themselves as having no choice, doing the best they can with the cards they were dealt.

xx