Well, it was the good and right thing to have Omar reappear last night broken and crying in a janitor's closet. After his leap into thin air, away from Chris and Snoop's terrible clutches, we Omar fans cheered his escape. But he's not a superhero, and a slick black trench coat isn't enough to break a fall like that. After they searched what looked like the entire complex, plus the neighborhood Dumpsters and sewers and hospitals, how Marlo's crew didn't find Omar is going to have to remain a mystery. But at least we were reminded, through his tears and shattered leg, and his dismal moaning when he knotted that flimsy wash rag around his busted ankle, that the man is still earth-bound to The Wire's rules.
It looked to me like Omar stuck a broom under one arm and limped away from the scene of the crime in the bright light of day. I'd quibble that Marlo is fastidious enough to have left at least the kid on the bike to stand watch, but I wanted to see Omar live to bust around the corner with his shotgun as much as anyone else. We haven't seen him in a rage like this since his boyfriend was killed all those seasons ago. Chris knows his days are numbered, and Snoop's suggestion that they head to Toys ''R'' Us wasn't helping his mood. Omar, whose shadow is always the first thing we see, set a car on fire, shot one of Marlo's cronies in the knee, and told him to tell the boss that a real man would meet him in the streets.
Marlo, though, follows a different code, and I can't see him ever showing up for a ghetto duel. He lied to the council that Omar was to blame for Prop Joe and Hungry Man's murders (not that any of those savvy men were buying his lies), called off future meetings, and told everyone the price of a brick was going up. Meanwhile, Lester finally figured out that Marlo was back on cell phones not for conversing, and certainly not to text-message his associates (''Need I remind you that these fine men are products of Baltimore public schools?''), but to send pictures back and forth. So Lester needed more money, and the tools to intercept photo images, and his growing list of demands frayed McNulty's last nerve. ''You are a supervisor's nightmare!'' shouted McNulty, who had been so sure more money and resources would come rolling in after the serial killer made front-page news and the mayor gave an impassioned speech about it being his job to protect the city's most vulnerable citizens. Alas, this is Baltimore, and McNulty got the news that he was screwed while Patsy Cline weeped in the background on the boss' radio about going ''walking after midnight, searching for you.'' Those are night shifts without overtime, mind you.
Finding himself stuck, McNulty somehow saw fit to kidnap an old homeless man, scratch out his identity card, stuff him far away in a distant shelter, and send an anonymous photo of the poor sap as a warning from the feared Cellphone Photo Pervert. When McNulty was driving his capture out of Baltimore, the drooling man's head bobbing and weaving, it's not hard to picture the rapidly unraveling detective in a similar bad way in the future. The detective looked like he had a crisis of conscience, aware for the first time of the moral swamp he was drowning in, but he left Larry-now-Donald to rot in another city anyway.
So now Scott's juked serial-killer beat will get further play on the front page of The Baltimore Sun. The worm has what's coming to him, but something about seeing him in his earnest man-of-the-streets Kansas City Star T-shirt, getting chased off the tracks by a German shepherd but sticking it out anyway to hear a ruined ex-marine's story, was endearing. He'll cook up anything in a jam, and get called the Jimmy Breslin of Baltimore by Nancy Grace because of it, but this sudden burst of real work seemed to both calm and inspire him. Even Gus was proud of the copy he turned in (''Read it and weep...literally''), but he also wanted Scott to make a couple calls about a woman complaining that he'd gotten a past story all wrong. Gus still smells something sour in his newsroom, but the higher-ups, chinless Yick and syrup-tongued Yack, want Scott to keep cranking out more Dickensian features on the plight of the homeless. When they praised the eager reporter for his story, they also quickly reminded him that it was yesterday's news. They need copy for tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.
NEXT: Bunk works a real crime
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