Watching “The Wire” these last few weeks is like dealing with a bad case of mental tinnitus. Try as you might, you can’t get that racket out of your head.

The racket is your brain saying, “… but, that just makes no sense!”

Since David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” went down this crazy trail, he’s left so many open questions that it’s hard to focus on what’s happening on screen. Each week, the insane stuff that had left you quizzical last week gets trumped by whole new implausibilities. For example: As we have seen, Detective Jimmy “McNutty” McNulty has invented a serial killer of homeless men. He’s done this because the city is not giving the department enough resources to continue to pursue Marlo the supervillan and his two horrifying familiars, Chris and Snoop. McNutty’s logic has been unclear from the start; if the powers that be didn’t care about all those bodies in the buildings, why would they care about a few homeless guys?

That was the annoying buzz in your head from last week’s episode. This week, there’s a new one. McNutty’s serial killer has (fictitiously) killed five homeless guys thus far. But during the same period, Snoop and Chris have dispatched six! (The three in the home invasion, Prop Joe, Hungry Man and Omar’s backup.) Why does McNutty have to invent a serial killer when there are already two running around?

“The Wire” still has a lot going for it. The screen shudders whenever Marlo or his gang are present. And Omar is back, too.

But is it just me or are the episodes increasingly becoming dominated by the parts of the show that are implausible? And is the inferior stuff beginning to seep into the good parts? Tonight, for example, we see several characters come to hear that Prop Joe was killed. Everyone just takes the news in stride. But wouldn’t the death of one of the city’s major drug lords be of some interest to, you know, the police who are pursuing the drug dealers? Bunk is chasing a drug dealer, Marlo. He hears that one of the other city kingpins, Prop Joe, has been killed. Does he then think, Hmmm, maybe there’s a connection? No!

Isn’t this, you know, odd?

McNutty’s new gambit is so complicated it beggars description. His original plan was to invent a serial homeless killer and then get to apportion out the new detecting resources that came his way to the Marlo investigation. (The show doesn’t explain how he would be able to do this, but whatever.) The mayor holds a press conference declaring that the city would make the homeless-killer investigation his top priority, but McNutty discovers to his chagrin that the new resources don’t magically appear. (In what has become another mark of the weaknesses of “The Wire” this year, no one at the press conference asks the mayor the obvious question, namely whether the city would actually devote more resources to the investigation.)

Due to some other developments that are too dreary to relate, McNutty takes his scheme to a whole new level, to somehow invent new homicide victims without actually having to produce human carcasses. Here again, things in “The Wire” just get preposterouser. In the new logic of David Simon’s fifth season, folks will somehow care more about dead people who don’t actually exist, again as opposed to the real dead bodies Snoop and Chris are leaving all over town.

There are other weaknesses, too; Simon’s lancing way with a plot development and the arc of a given episode are weak tonight. Last week, Omar leaped out a fifth-story window when Chris and Snoop ambushed him. We learn what happened to him a few minutes in tonight—he apparently hid in janitor’s closet of the apartment building. Since Chris and Snoop have been combing the neighborhood and the city’s hospitals looking for Omar, it’s kind of strange they didn’t just think of looking in the nearest place a guy who’d hurt himself jumping out a five-story window might have crawled to.

Doh!

Then Omar limps out—in full daylight, plainly wounded and vulnerable. Wouldn’t he wait until night? The episode ends tonight on McNutty’s dreary homeless scheme; wouldn’t it have been a lot more dramatic to have Omar AWOL the whole episode, only to come crawling malevolently back to life at the end instead?

One other odd thing: As we saw last week, fabricating reporter Scott “Smeagol” Templeton claimed to have been called by McNutty’s serial killer. (The one who doesn’t exist.) McNutty doesn’t even find it odd that the reporter has done this. Anyway, David Simon has been desperately trying to come up with a way to make McNutty’s fake killer plausibly help out the department’s Marlo investigation. This being “The Wire,” they want to tap someone’s phone. I’m no detecting expert, but are wiretaps really an effective tool against a serial killer? Did they catch Jeffery Dahmer or the BTK killer that way? If you know who the killer is, you can just follow him, right? What’s he going to say on the phone, “No, I can’t go bowling tonight, Bert—I, uh, have to go look for a drifter to kill.”

Anyway, McNutty and the ADA go to talk to their old friend Judge Phelan about trying to tap the phone of the serial killer. They actually spend a few minutes discussing tapping the phone of Smeagol. Phelan pooh-poohs the idea, framing the issue of being one of getting into a pissing match with the paper. (“You don’t want to pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel,” he says, har de har har.) Still, he makes it seem as if tapping the phone of a reporter gathering news might somehow be an option. Has that ever happened?

But, leaving all that aside, why was McNutty trying to get a tap on the phone of a reporter he knew was making the whole story up? Presumably he just wants the tap for permission to go after Marlo’s phone. But wouldn’t the tap expose Smeagol’s deception if he said he’d been called a particular time but the tap revealed no conversation took place?

That voice again! “But, that just makes no sense….”

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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: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!

… 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.