O what tangled webs we weave, when we wuin “The Wire” with wacky wengeance, as Scott would have said, had he spoken like Elmer Fudd and been a “Wire” fan. Tonight was the fifth episode of the fifth season of “The Wire,” the amazing TV show David Simon has driven off the deep end in its final season, driven by a mad obsession with his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. Just as with last week’s episode, Simon has presented us with a show divided neatly in two, leaving half the show to two ruinously silly plotlines and the other to ramped-up action and mordant plot twists as good as anything the show has yet offered.

Let’s take the bad first. The mien of David Simon’s alter ego, Jimmy McNulty, or McNutty, as we fondly call him, has turned wholly cartoonish; he’s feverish, sweaty and distracted on a good day; on a bad night, as we have seen, he can be found in a roadhouse parking lot, giving it to a bar chica over the hood of his patrol car. Bunk won’t talk to him, Beadie is about to dump his sorry ass, and his kids barely acknowledge his presence.

McNutty, however, is our hero; like David Simon, he’s been pushed to the edge by a bureaucracy that doesn’t care, a society that devalues street deaths, and hair products that are at a loss to contain his ever-more-disheveled locks. So McNutty is embarked right now on a tangled, over-elaborate plan to create a fiendish serial killer of homeless men. We are supposed to excuse his actions because they will supposedly get more money for the police department to capture the evil Marlo; the show is trying to make the logistics of this clear, but of course this is impossible, because it makes no sense in conception or execution.

It would be nice to say things are better over at the Sun, but they’re not. McNutty’s counterpart at the paper is named Scott Templeton, a Jayson Blair-type fabricator working on the paper’s metro desk. His crimes are being committed to advance his career, and are being abetted by some fancypants top editors, who lay off David Simon’s hardworking reporter buddies but make the way easy for young frauds like Templeton.

These two utterly implausible plot points come together this evening delectably. The plot is quickening! Templeton, who is not getting any support from intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, goes out and falsifies a call to himself from the serial killer. That will give him a big scoop in the paper. McNutty goes to the Sun to meet with the reporter and his editors, and lets them know that the killer has called the police department as well.

As the two fabricators faced each other across the table it reminded me of the Woody Allen movie—I think it was a Woody Allen movie—where he’s masterminding a bank robbery, only to find another robbery team there at the same time.

”The Wire” from the start has been predicated on meticulous, accreted bits of reality that catch you up in them and then sweep you along in their humanity and pain.

These utterly preposterous plot developments, culminating in this scene, are a good example of how off the rails the show has gone:

a) It’s hard to see how Templeton could hope to get away with his fake phone call. If the police find the killer, he might well be exposed as a fabricator. At best, he would be called out later at the paper for having been duped by a prankster.
b) For both the police and for Templeton’s editors, the key question would have been this: Did the caller say something that only the killer could have known? The answer to that question would dictate whether the story would get into the paper and whether the police would take it seriously. Note how the show took care not to have either party ask that obvious question.
c) Since McNutty knows the serial killer doesn’t exist, he also knows that the real killer didn’t call Templeton. So he knows either that the call is by a prankster or that Templeton is a big fat liar. In either case, why did he take the chance of telling the paper his own lie that the serial killer had called the cops, and buttress Templeton’s invented target of twelve bodies to boot? Doesn’t that just tell Templeton that McNutty was making things up as well?

A few other observations:

• The newsroom scenes were less unrealistic of any episode yet, Simon’s having by now run out of clichés. Well, almost run out of clichés. Haynes at one point utters the hoary maxim, “If it bleeds, it ledes.” If you recall, a couple of episodes ago, the original story about the homeless murders was relegated to an inside page, bumped by an l-i-t-e front-page features story on skydiving or somesuch. It’s another example of Simon’s wholly inconsistent portrayal of the newspaper. He’s ready to demonize it one way one week, and then romanticize it another way a week later.

• Apropos of nothing, can I say that “The Wire” is not the best TV show of all time, as so many commentators have opined? (Before this season started, of course.) The best show ever on TV would be “Seinfeld,” for its meticulous and devoted portrayal of a species destroying itself, all done without a hint of sentimentality. (The show gets extra points for doing it on broadcast TV, in the form of a 22-minute sitcom.) The second-best show ever on TV was “The Larry Sanders Show,” which besides great scripts and great acting found the depths of human degradation and the pits of human loneliness on … the set of a TV show, with millions of people watching. The third best TV show was “Absolutely Fabulous,” a tour de force of acting, directing and writing by Jennifer Saunders; the fourth and fifth best TV shows ever were “Deadwood” and “The Office” UK. “The Wire” may be the sixth, depending on how I’m feeling about “The Sopranos” on any particular day.

(Digression: There is, for example, about “The Sopranos” one weakness in its foundation that for me always made it thematically shaky. When all is said and done, the show was about a guy—a fat sociopath—beset by a whole lot of female problems: His wife, his mother, his sister, his daughter, his shrink, his girlfriend… This “Honeymooners” underpinning, which goes back to the very first scene of the series*, inevitably left a faint air of the cheesy undergirding the structure. What David Chase did with this template was something to behold, of course; over the years his production team mastered the technical possibilities of the medium. But thematically it never transcended these origins.**)

• People seem to like the Steve Earle version of the title song. They are nuts; you can hear him trying too hard. Earle’s one-note acting performance in the show (he’s the 12-step guy who’s always looking at Bubs with beseeching eyes), like his career these days, has turned him tiresome. Earle was once a great American songwriter with a great American mess of a personal life. (You gotta love a guy who for a big part of his career had more wives than he’d had albums released.) Even at his most dissolute, in the late 1980s, he had a guitar army that took the “Copperhead Road” album on tour and made you believe it. And, on his return some years later, you could see him play live and shiver the rafters as his massive band slipped into “I Feel Alright.” (Simon used the song to great effect to close the second season of “The Wire.”) But he’s since become shrill and unconvincing, desperately trying to gin up some soul in his collaborations with Del McCoury, and turning his live appearances and his albums into ever-more-sanctimonious harangues. He has became, in a word, a bore.

* In the very first scene of the show, we see Tony in the waiting room of Melfi’s office … seen from between the legs of a nude female statue. Now, what could that mean?
** Cf. the first line of the “The Godfather” [dir. F.F. Coppola, 1972]: “I believe in America!”

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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
Episode four: “The Wire,” season five, episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”

… 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.