''The Wire'': The Man Who Fell to Earth

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The press and politicians can salivate all they want over what working the homeless angle can do for their careers. Bunk, though, is going to work actual murders. What a treat to see him back in someone's home (this time, Michael's mother), giving a possible witness the stuff. There's something off in the file on Michael's stepfather's murder; it was a crime of passion where all Marlo's other murders were smooth and methodical. The scent led Bunk to juvie, where Randy walked into the room, and I bet all of you at home did a spit take like me. Randy, our once round apple in the baggy T-shirt, was dangerously grown up. Ripped in a wife beater, his cheekbones jutting out angrily, he lit into a pressing Bunk. ''Why don't you promise to get me outta here?'' he snarled at the detective. ''That's what you all do, isn't it?'' On his way up the stairs, Randy slammed a smaller kid into the wall and disappeared, the same way the boy we knew just last season has vanished as well.

Randy wasn't the only ghost from the past wafting through this episode. Through Randy's rap sheet, we even heard a shout-out to Prez, who Bunk casually dismissed as that ''goofy motherf---er.'' At the mayor's sparsely attended ceremony to announce a supposed revitalization of the waterfront, chisel-cheekboned Nick Sobotka let loose a surge of obscenities from the back of the crowd, bemoaning his lost port of Baltimore.

If I had any complaint about this season, besides my constant waffling over whether I'm sold or not on this serial-killer plot, it's that there aren't as many new characters whose lives we can sneak inside. Apart from my beloved Gus, there's no one else who's going to make me start chewing my knuckles, knowing that these tough-minded TV writers might rip them from me. In season 1, I figured if I could just keep Wallace and D'Angelo, I'd survive. (Ack.) In the following seasons, I worried over the Sobotkas, Omar, Cutty, Bodie, and even Stringer Bell. Then there was that gut-wrencher fourth season with the boys, and I'm still not sure I've recovered from Dukie handing over a Christmas present to Prez or Randy yelling at Carver down the hospital corridor. And then there's Bubbles, each season, giving me hope and setting me on edge. I understand that this is The Wire's final season and that those involved have brought us so many rich and rewarding characters that to introduce too many more would take valuable screen time from the ones we're already invested in. But Scott and Alma aren't cutting it. So it's up to Gus to give us a new character to root for, and represent what's good and under siege in the paper biz.

Oh, and for lines of the night, I'll have to tip my hat to both Marlo (''That some Spider-Man shit there'') and Bunk (''My heart beats purple piss for you''). I'm not sure what it means for a heart to beat purple piss, but I'm going to try it out on the next overly aggressive telemarketer who calls. And if, by the way, they get the reference, then I'll buy whatever they're selling.

So, if you had to bet money, who in this snow globe is going to make it out alive when the final credits roll? Is McNulty doomed to end up as lost and loony as his poor passenger Larry? Is his saner, saltier partner Lester going to go down in a blaze of glory? Is there a smoother actor than Jamie Hector, with his languid moves and deadened purr, on TV today? Did Carcetti's speech give you a shiver? And if that didn't set your heart to pumping, how about when Daniels called his gal ''darling''? Attention, sir!