To end “The Wire,” the searching, searing portrait of Baltimore that has held us transfixed for five seasons, creator David Simon looked into his soul for an ending. What he chose is less important than what motivated him to choose it. In interviews, he is fond of talking about the Greek tragedies, with their lessons of hubris, of talking back to the gods. But while hubris is definitely one of his faults, he has instead found himself, in this fifth and final season of this show, in a fix caused by a different character flaw.

Like James Stewart’s Scottie in that most modern of tragedies, “Vertigo,” he is caught up in an obsession. Scottie, having once had a glimpse of a dream of reality in the form of a woman named Madeleine, tries, when given the chance, when meeting her again, to turn his reality back into that dream.

As I recall, this plan does not end well for Scottie, and worse for Madeleine.

In this metaphor, David Simon is Scottie, and “The Wire” is Madeleine. We, the viewers, are Midge, fetchingly played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who I feel does us justice.

And it is unfortunately “The Wire” that ends up falling off the mission bell tower.

. . .

And so this entrancing series ends tonight, after three amazing seasons (one, three and, particularly, four); one quite good one (two); and, finally, one (five) that will forever be given an asterisk, which will lead readers down to this kindly, explanatory notation: “Mr. Simon took leave of his senses during the final season, making comparisons difficult.”

Indeed, after eight puzzling and frequently preposterous episodes, and one compelling one (the ninth, last week, which caught us off guard) we now have a tenth and final one, which reminded us a lot of episode five, about which we wrote: “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.”

In point of fact, the scenes tonight involving the street, for the most part, remain reverberating and shocking. We see Michael reborn, the re-invented existential child of Marlo Stansfield and Omar Little. And as for Marlo himself, our last sight of him—alone on a corner, escaped from a civilized party, bleeding, grinning with some odd triumph—is a truly postmodern image, a man outside of our society, yet suddenly detached from his own as well, and suddenly exhilarated, recklessly, by the alienation. For caring enough about his personality to conceive of this portrait, Simon (and his amazing collaborators) must be given credit for a perverse humanism and a willingness to follow their creations to uncomfortable, challenging places.

And yet, from this abstract, shuddering tableau we are jerked back by Simon’s infantile obsessions with his old employer, the Baltimore Sun. While we were pleased, last week, to see some of those obsessions held back, if only for 58 minutes or so, they are arisen again this week through much of the 93 minutes HBO allowed him to close out his series.

His fabricator, Scott “Smeagol” Templeton, claims to have seen the imaginary serial killer of homeless men in the very act of abducting a new victim, into an unmarked van right outside the Baltimore Sun offices. (While the front of the Sun faces busy Calvert Street, the rear seems to open back into a Boschian scene of homelessness and depravity. Sort of like the wardrobe in “The Chronicles of Narnia.”)

Now, our man McNutty in the police department invented one serial killer; Templeton, not to be outdone, invented his own as well. It’s not clear from his story which of these two imaginary characters is the one committing this particular imaginary crime. Anyway, Templeton’s nemesis, intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, is believing none of this, as would any other sentient being. Since Simon has populated the upper Sun management of his show with fancypants effetes who, being cartoons, are not sentient, they eat up everything Smeagol says with a spoon.

Having to watch these scenes next to those of Stanfield and the rest of the drug-gang developments is disconcerting, like flipping between “The Godfather” on one HBO channel and, oh, I don’t know, “Beethoven’s Third” on another. (Or “The Godfather III.”)

Talk on the internets is that Simon had to crunch a normal 13-week season down into ten, and that’s why so much of the plot developments this seasons have been so rushed. Many threads are being wound up tonight, with complex emotional and political responses being limned almost too quickly to grasp or challenge. It kinda went like this:

Gregs tells Daniels and Perlman about McNutty’s fake serial killer; they tell the mayor, who tells Rawls and Daniels they must cover it all up or they will be forced to take the fall; Daniels is willing to do so, but Perlman, his lover, reminds him it will cost her career, and his ex wife, also, says –

Wait a minute. Why would Rawls and Daniels have to take the fall? They say, “Hey we caught a cop falsifying evidence. Indeed, he even abused the bodies of dead people to do so. (Ew!) Lock him up and throw away the key!” Why would they be implicated? And Perlman? She is in the city attorney’s office. What did she do wrong? It’s not her fault the cops misused a wiretap.

OK, anyway, Daniels’ ex wife, too, says if he makes a stink the city council president will bring up that slip from his early career and it will sink him and her career on the council. Meanwhile, Levy, Marlo’s lawyer, smells something wrong in the prosecution case, and forces Perlman to offer a deal, so Marlo gets off. So McNutty and Freamon go have a drink, and –

Wait a minute; why would Daniels’s ex wife be compromised? How come Clay Davis can get away with wholesale corruption and remain a viable political figure, but not the ex Mrs. Daniels, for some unspecified crime twice removed from her? And how does Marlo get off scott-free? Why is public or political pressure a factor in an imaginary homeless killer (as if folks cared what happened to homeless folks) but not when the mastermind of the city’s drug underworld and a mass murder of no small skills himself walk way from this lineup of heinous charges?

OK anyway, then-

Wait, we have more questions. Why aren’t McNutty and Freamon more incensed at Marlo’s getting off? Of all the bureaucratic foul-ups and absurdities over five seasons of “The Wire,” isn’t this by far, by far, the worst? And … why doesn’t Perlman just use her incriminating tape-recording to get Levy summarily arrested, removing him from Marlo’s case and leaving the gangster at the mercy of a less-sophisticated representation? And… why doesn’t the state use the threat of the death penalty to try to turn Chris Parlow against Marlo? And … to get back to McNutty’s fake serial killer, don’t so many folks know about it at this point that it would be impossible to keep it a secret? Would a meeting of fully half a dozen people, including the mayor and the two top police commissioners, convene to discuss an obstruction-of-justice conspiracy? And …

. . .

Unfortunately, the questions about the police department thread pale next to those in the newsroom. The silliest thing about the episode is a shot in the closing montage, as Smeagol accepts his Pulitzer, while the Fancypants Duo look on proudly. It’s telling that, over ten episodes, Simon never got around to telling us what Templeton would get his Pulitzer for.

After the homeless serial killer becomes big news, we are told that Templeton is out covering the homeless, focusing on “the Dickensian aspect.” But we never hear what stories, exactly, he’s working on, or how the paper expects to win a Pulitzer behind it, besides a reference that in some way the governor (!) has taken action because of something the Sun wrote. (Homeless is such an over-covered story that it’s hard to imagine why a big-city paper would take it on as a Pulitzer project. The idea that a paper can win a Pulitzer for merely writing about quote-unquote the homeless is another example of the crayons Simon is using in his portrayal of the newsroom.)

The intrepid Haynes collects a file on Templeton’s offenses, but we never see him present the evidence, and we never hear how the editors respond. Instead, various Sun staffers are disappeared, like the bodies in the vacants. (You can see Simon in the corner of one shot in the newsroom, seemingly unconcerned about his inadequate plotting.) The problem, here again, are the crayons Simon is coloring with. The mini-scandal at the Sun that he got his panties in an uproar about involved a few small but disturbing stories by a reporter named Jim Haner; in “The Wire,” Templeton is making up quotes, characters, whole stories; he invents calls to himself from a serial killer, embellishes war stories from a homeless vet and even puts himself at the scene of an attempted kidnapping! And then Simon sets all of that against a pair of mincing top editors who beam with pride at everything Smeagol does.

. . .

In the end, Simon let his didacticism, and his knuckleheaded leftism, get in the way of his show. Besides our last glimpse of Marlo, there was the clever scene of Syndor chatting up Judge Phelan, an homage to the conversation McNulty had with the judge in the very first episode, so many years ago. Those few seconds made us happy; but that just makes us think about how Simon pulled his punches with the fate of McNulty, his grimy alter ego. (Why is Simon still out for Haner’s head, so many years on, but Greggs so quick to forgive McNulty’s crimes?)

We’re sorry to say we’re glad ”The Wire” is over, and we hope Simon will chill for a bit on the subject of the Baltimore Sun. That’s to much to hope for, however, based on this just-posted interview with Simon on Salon. Here’s a key passage:

The issue that’s being debated here is whether or not a second-tier regional paper—that once covered its city, that was trying to get better at explaining the nuances and the particular details of life in the streets of its city and in its boardrooms and its council chambers and in city hall—is becoming thinner and thinner. And what they’re able to capture of the city is thinner and thinner. That’s what we depicted. And incredibly, the entire onanistic, self-absorbed, psychically wounded, worried-about-tomorrow world of journalism had nothing to say about that.

But of course, Hitsville and many other places explained that Simon’s vision of journalism was narcissistic and blindered. Simon wants the Sun to have foreign bureaus and not care about the Internet. In this regard, his vision coincided perfectly with the Sun’s management and that of its corporate owners for many years. It was only after that became financially untenable that the cuts came. Simon attributes the drop-off in younger readers to the Internet, when of course that has been a steady trend in newspaper for decades.

Simon also tries to portray those who criticize his show as journalists touchy about criticism of the industry. That, too, isn’t true: actually, his critics have said, almost uniformly, only this: That his obsessions have created bad art.

————

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!
Episode eight: Whenever I call you friendo!
Episode nine: The Passion of the 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.