This week’s PostBourgie recap of HBO’s incomparably dope drama ‘The Wire’ is being handled by Gene Demby, who works for a newspaper in New York City. SPOILERS! 

Of our little troika here at PB, two of us are unabashed, hardcore Wire zealots.

But Stacia, a TV junkie and Baltimore native, remains a holdout. Recently, she started watching The Wire in the worst way: in out-of-sequence clips on YouTube. It was there that she peeped the famous scene that opened Season 4, where Snoop and the salesman at the hardware show have a disturbing conversation about a nail gun, and the quietly tragic scene where Bodie and McNulty converse at the arboretum. “I’ve decided this show would devastate me in its entirety,” she said.

And she’s probably right. After watching this week’s episode — easily the best episode of the season and which boasted arguably the best scene in the show’s run — I felt deflated in a way I’d never felt watching a TV show before. Yeah, even The Wire.

Which begs the question: are we, devotees of this singularly depressing show, just a bunch of masochists? Sadists? Is this, like, fun?

Whatever a happy ending is supposed to look like, this week’s installment boasted one that was the absolute antithesis of that. The quiet exchange between Michael and Dukie was, for my money, the most heartbreaking exchange on a series that trades in heartbreaking exchanges. Dukie’s walk down into that yard at the end of the episode mirrored Frank Sobotka’s walk down to the river to meet with The Greek in Season Two, unwittingly trudging toward his death. I needed to take a walk myself when it was over.

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