From Whence Omar Came: The Wire’s Minisodes
First, a shout-out: the doctor is in. Elana Levine has started a blog, Dr. Television (no, that’s not the doctor above!), and already I’m really liking it. Dr. T has some neat posts on soaps and the writers’ strike in particular, but also in her first post insists that she wants her blog not to be so serious all the time. Thus, a brief post of hers about catching up on The Wire that I really relate to reads:
I’m having dreams about Frank Sobotka and cans missing from the stacks. I can’t fall back asleep at 2 AM after replacing the blanket of an almost-4-year-old because I’m too busy thinking about Stringer Bell. Am I really supposed to be able to work with these characters marching through my brain all day and night?
Which struck home today, as I spent a lot of time on the subway, without a book, and thus spent most of it thinking about The Wire’s minisodes released prior to Season 5. No real spoilers below, for those who worry.
Releasing the minisodes was a neat idea, and the concept behind each is kind of cool too. One takes us back to Baltimore in 1962 to see a young Proposition Joe, another to 1985 to see a young Omar (below), and the third to 2000 to see how Bunk and McNulty met. The best sequels nearly always involve prequel (think Godfather II to Godfather, or even the info gleaned about Luke in The Empire Strikes Back), so I like this idea more than the 24 direct-to-phone clips that create a different agent with a different case. If 24 had given us mobisodes that examined how Jack joined CTU, say, then I’d actually be interested. And the long-promised Lost mobisodes focusing on the other Lostaways pique my interest because they could perhaps tell me more about how everyone got to the island (symbolically speaking). So The Wire’s attempt to take us back in time is interesting.
But in thinking about them all day, I must object to the Omar minisode in particular (see below, and I promise this spoils nothing about the show). Clip and objection after the fold.
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