McNutty and Smeagol are on the ropes. In McNutty’s case, the imaginary serial killer is now the worst-kept secret in the department. The pressure is building!

And over at the Baltimore Sun, Smeagol, the obsessive fabricator who wants fame and fortune and a job at the Washington Post, is now being hotly pursued by his own personal orc: crusading and intrepid city editor Gus Haynes.

More on them in a second: The big loser tonight is McNutty’s love interest, Amy Ryan, who doesn’t get her much deserved Oscar (for “Gone Baby Gone”) over on ABC and here, on HBO, is stuck in a dead-end relationship with the skankiest police detective in Baltimore, which is saying something. Ryan has a great speech tonight (one of two nice moments in the show), confronting McNutty about his unmoored emotional life. Right after that, McNutty gets his plaintive moment as well. He is possessed by something; the writers of “The Wire” want it to be something tempestuous and noble, but we know it’s just David Simon’s demons:

“I don’t know where the anger comes from,” he moans to Ryan. “I don’t know where to make it stop.”

David Simon’s crazy anger—his obsessions with some journalistic disagreements he had with his former bosses at the Baltimore Sun—has ruined the fifth and final season of ”The Wire.” Those of us who are soldiering on have the sinking feeling now that things will never be made right. With but two episodes to go, we are resigned and sad. The balance of the show will never come back. The crayon-scrawled plot will glop and smudge its way to a conclusion. The cartoony villains with twirl their mustaches and giggle maniacally a few more times before sweeping their capes behind them and heading for the exits. Common sense, subtlety and artistry will remain tied to the railroad tracks, and Dudley Do Right will not arrive before the 11:15 Acela to Union Station.

All we can do to make sense of this is chart, in a Beckettian slough of despond, the things that don’t make sense:

* Freamon now is revealed as a supercop. He spends a few hours a day helping McNutty orchestrate the fake serial killer. He also runs the wires on Marlo Stansfield’s crew. In his spare time, he puts together a corruption case again Clay Davis, the state senator.

* When a serial killer of the homeless threatens Baltimore, the city turns to … McNutty. Daniels and Rawls are now the top commissioners; both of them hate McNutty with a passion. But somehow this born troublemaker and perennial fuckup is allowed free reign to investigate an ultra high-profile case and dispense departmental resources without oversight.

* No one’s double-checked his evidence or raised any of the, oh, several dozen questions that would quickly expose his silly plot, either. Of that tide of reporters from the Sun, none are re-examining McNutty’s investigation. Even the FBI is credulous.

* We see another detective blackmail McNutty into coughing up some of his excess manpower. If a dimwitted fellow investigator can figure out McNutty’s scam, couldn’t someone else?

* Smeagol/Templeton, the wayward Sun reporter, has Haynes, the city editor, watching him carefully. How does he respond? He steps up his inventions! He embellishes the already compelling story of a homeless Iraq vet … and again adds an untraceable anonymous quote to a routine story. His character was driven by ambition; now he’s a crazed, compulsive maker-upper, even when it plainly risks his career.

* An FBI deputy director’s brief cameo is, if you can imagine it, the worst cartoon yet. If he really was a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN, why would he care about impressing a couple of mopes from the Baltimore Police department?

* Huge plot points continue to go unremarked. We saw recently how the assassination of Prop Joe, one of the city’s major drug kingpins, doesn’t get discussed in the department. Tonight, Omar is killed, which is the show’s other classically shocking moment tonight, by what seemed to be a 10-year old. There is a witness, and a cop on the scene specifically tells Bunk the kid was only a few feet tall. Wouldn’t that be worth some attention? In the dog-bites-man world of cops ‘n’ robbers ‘n’ newspaperin’, wouldn’t an execution-style killing by a 10-year-old be notable?

* And what Mayor Carcetti hopes to gain politically from the homeless killings doesn’t track either. It’s another one of the headache-inducing “Wire” plot threads this season that this issue is somehow going to help the mayor make the governorship. In a state that already has a Republican governor, is a crusade against a serial killer of vagrants going to help a Democrat get elected? To folks in the rest of Maryland, does presiding over a city with a sex-crazed killer running around help a candidate?

It’s hard to see how Simon can wrap any of this up satisfactorily. If McNutty gets caught, it will only be through means that have been artificially delayed. (And ditto for Smeagol.) If he doesn’t it will seem a cheap and cynical resolution to a preposterous concoction. (And ditto for Smeagol.) It’s hard to see how Marlo gets caught legally in the next two hours, because all Freamon and Syndor have done is establish how he holds his meetings. If Michael turns in Chris and Snoop (and this seems to be where the show is headed), it’ll be via a too-abrupt change of personality. With Omar gone, the only presence in the show with a menace equal to the Stansfield clan’s is gone; if Chris or Snoop get killed it will be via a fluke. At this point, we just want everyone to be put our of their misery, but mostly us.

————

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!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”
Episode seven: Preposterouser and preposterouser!

… 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.