“The Wire” in its fifth season has settled down into an unsettling dichotomous duality, as A.J. Liebling might have said. I can’t think of any television show ever that was so perfectly half-extraordinary and so perfectly half-preposterous.

In the former half, we have the Marlo-Omar-Prop Joe thread, finely wound and elaborately pulled tight. Tonight’s denouement had an emotional punch I don’t think I will forget soon, based as it was first on events in episodes one, two, and three seasons past and thus almost dreamily ungraspable, and second on a grace note or two early on in tonight’s episode (in a lawyer’s office, and then at one of those unfailingly hilarious drug overlord meetings in that sterile hotel conference room) and because of that sharply and wholly poignant.

It may be one of the more memorable episode endings in TV history. Most particularly, we can see in Marlo a figure who can transcend the show’s bleak streets and bleaker bureaucracies: a perfect and efficient god-dispensing beast, a Superman in the most alarming Nietzschean sense. David Simon, the brilliant, flawed creator of “The Wire,” has a crank’s view of what’s wrong with the world; in Marlo, a creation of his most malevolent impulses, he makes, paradoxically, his most elegant argument. Like a strain of bacteria that staves off each flawed insufficient vaccine—growing wiser and stronger in the process—Marlo prevails. If we don’t get it together, Simon seems to be saying, this is who we’re all going to be working for.

And then there is, sigh, the other half of “The Wire,” the one with McNulty (and now, even more preposterously, Freamon) embarked on a gambit that is, in both its conception and execution, something out of another, much dumber, show. (“The Wire: SUV,” with the Who singing “Down in the Hole” over the opening credits.) Paired with the Sun stuff, on which more in a minute, it’s enough to make you scream.

From here on in, I’m going with Bubbles’ pronunciation of his name: McNutty is on the trail of a guy, Marlo, who dumped 22 bodies in boarded-up housing. For reasons that have not yet been made clear, he thinks he can get some more attention for the department if there’s an imaginary serial killer around who kills homeless guys, as opposed to a real one who kills people who aren’t homeless and presumably have family.

As is stultifying clear, McNutty is going to hook up with the two young semantically and ethically challenged young’uns from the Sun, who are going to buy his outlandish story because they want to get ahead, and the Sun, led as it is by strutting brace of credulous popinjay editors, is just the place to do it. Bunk is very displeased with McNutty; I’m displeased with his creator, David Simon. It reminds me of something Bertie Wooster once said in an old Wodehouse book, which I just found on Wikisource:

”To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?”

“I could not say, sir.”

“Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.”

“Elaborate, sir?”

“That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves—that is what you are frequently prone to become. Your methods are not simple, not straightforward. You cloud the issue with a lot of fancy stuff that is not of the essence.”

Exactly. Couldn’t McNutty could get the same effect by calling up the Sun and telling someone that the police department was disbanding the group that was solving 22 murders?

But no. Meanwhile over at the Sun, our hero, manly and intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, was being the life of the party, delivering some knee-slapping comments while watching a mayoral press conference at the news desk. But then Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor comes over to tell him that swearing is a no-no in the newsroom. In the David Simon universe, manly men should be able to swear at a newspaper. (They should also be able to publicly correct the word usage of young female Hispanic reporters, even when they don’t know what they are talking about, and possibly have a nip now and then and pinch a few bottoms as well, but Mr. Fancypants would probably rain on those parades, too.)

Also meanwhile, angry young reporter Scott Templeton, whom we know is a Jayson Blair-style maker-upper, husbands his resentments, piece by piece, like Smeagol. His precious is a job at the Washington Post, but the Posties, when he goes to visit, aren’t buying what he’s selling.

(When I saw Templeton approach the Post building, I was waiting for Simon, as a Sun loyalist, to throw a few barbs the Post’s way, but if they were there I didn’t catch them. I think he, too, is in awe of the paper.)

Finally, Simon continues to bang on the tedious drum that buyouts at a paper like the Sun would target a hardworking veteran police reporter like Twig, who has the department wired. As I wrote last week, I’m sure that some valuable reporters have been let go in the downsizing that has wrenched the newspaper industry over the last four or five years; but in the vast majority or cases, the whole point of the buyouts is to target the unproductive folks as a workaround of last-hired first-hired union rules.

Simon’s drumbeat on this issue doesn’t even make internal sense; the editors keep saying (with heavy-handed irony), “We’ll just have to do more with less.” Why would they let go the guys who are actually doing more? What’s that word for someone who’s being a jolly sight too clever….?

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.