''The Wire'': From the Jaws of Victory

Dukie, the night's terrible heartbreak, also got to daydreaming. After Michael dropped Bug off at an aunt's house deep in the quiet, mystifying suburbs, telling his little brother not to cry as he tied the boy's shoe, Michael and Dukie idled outside the junkman's den. Dukie, whose pocked and discolored face suggests he's already dipping into drugs, no longer has Bug to care for, and now he's losing Michael, who must shed his friend to protect him from Marlo's wrath. Dukie, loath to leave his last tether to childhood, started reminiscing about a summer afternoon of piss balloons and ice cream off a truck. ''Do you remember that day, Michael?'' The harder boy finally got out a somber ''I don't." These two do not yet know, or have reason to believe, that life can hold more than loss and more loss. Earlier in the season, when Dukie asked Cutty how one made his way out into the wider world, the boxer couldn't give him an answer. He's trapped here, as if behind a barbed-wire fence, without anyone to help him pull himself out.

So, after the credits rolled, I stomped around the house in a fit of rage and tears, the way I always do following the penultimate episode in every season of The Wire when I realize just what losses we'll have to endure this go-round. I was supposed to go to bed now, knowing that Dukie had wandered into that mad carnivalesque shadow world, clutching his backpack straps for protection? Damn, I hate this motherjacking show. (To comfort myself, I looked up the terrific actor who plays Dukie on the HBO website and was happy to read that in real life 16-year-old Jermaine Crawford likes to sing and dance and eat crab legs. Yay, youth!)

How about the rest of you? Whatever nagging misgivings you've had about the season so far, can we agree that all is forgiven after this mighty episode? Did Kima do the right thing by turning McNulty in? Will the wiretap hold? If Marlo and Omar had met mano a mano in the streets, who would've prevailed? Is a drunk Lester — ''Shardene better be awake too because I doooo believe Lester Freamon's in the mood for love!'' — still a sexy Lester? (Yes, that Shardene from back in the day!) Dukie's tentative stumble to the dark side ripped my heart up; which tragedy on The Wire cut you the deepest?

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