The Wire: Difference between revisions

* [[Insistent Terminology]]: Lester Freamon, a highly capable detective, was forced into pawn shop unit for thirteen years "and four months".

* [[Instant Death Bullet]]: Quite frequently for a show renowned for its realism, though [[Justified Trope|justified]] at times.

* [[Ironic Echo]]: Many. Prominent examples include:

{{quote|"I'll take anybody's money if he's giving it away." Senator Davis, Namond Brice

* [[Mood Dissonance]]: Omar's sort-of [[Leitmotif]] is... [[Dissonant Serenity|The Farmer In The Dell]]. On the other hand, Omar whistles it so that in resembles a marching music. Since he only whistled it, the tune resembles that of the very relevant 'A-Hunting We Will Go'.

* [[Mother Russia Makes You Strong]]: 'Boris' points out that American prisons are not real prisons as he has been a 'guest' to the actually harsh Ukranian ones.

* [[Never Heard That One Before]]:

{{quote|'''Bunk:''' Not gonna give us your name? How 'bout we just call you Boris, then.

'''Sergei:''' ''[sighs]'' Boris. Why is it ''always'' Boris? }}

* [[No Good Deed Goes Unpunished]]:

** Before season 1 started, Lester Freamon had been forced to work in the pawn shop unit for, well, doing his job investigating a homicide.

** Haynes and Gutierrez also find this out the hard way in Season 5.

** Bunny Colvin's reward for cutting the felony crime rate in his district by 14% and improving the general quality of life for its citizens is {{spoiler|to be busted down to lieutenant, fired in disgrace, and vilified to the media as an "amoral" and "incompetent" man who "buckled under the pressure" of his command}}.

* [[Not So Different]]: During a trial {{spoiler|Omar}} destroys {{spoiler|Levy's}} attempt to discredit him as a witness by pointing out that his description could [[Insult Backfire|very easily]] be about himself.

{{quote|I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. ''[[Nothing Personal|It's all in the game right?]]''}}

* [[Number Two]]: Various characters in the drug trade, including Stringer Bell in the first season, Spiros Vondapolous, Chris Partlow and Slim Charles.

* [[Office Golf]]: Burrell does a lot of this.

* [[Punch Clock Villain]]: Various individuals of the Barksdale organization would qualify; D'Angelo pretty much treats his criminal actions as a profession.

* [[Putting the Band Back Together]]: What Lt. Daniels spends most of Season 2 doing. The hardest one to get back is, of course, McNulty.

* [[Rabid Cop]]:

** Detective Collichio in the fourth and fifth seasons; he becomes so exasperated by the actions of the street dealers in Baltimore that he takes out his frustrations on a middle-school teacher driving to work.

** Officer Walker decides that the most reasonable response to Donut's constant car thievery is to break his fingers. {{spoiler|The boys get their revenge on him for this.}}

* [[Reality Ensues]]: Happens quite a bit. Most notably in season 5 with {{spoiler|Omar's death}}.

* [[Real Men Wear Pink]]: Omar is so tough that he can walk down to the corner grocery store in a turquoise silk bathrobe and drug dealers will still toss their stashes to him out of fear.

* [[Real Song Theme Tune]]: Tom Waits's "Way Down In The Hole", performed by a different artist each season (including Waits himself in Season 2).

* [[Reasonable Authority Figure]]: Quite a lot of them considering the cynical nature of the series, though none are without flaws. Cedric Daniels is shown to be a good cop at heart, but he's very ambitious. Howard Colvin is a father to his men, but he risks everything on a poorly conceived gambit that inspires some [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|angry tirades]] from cops. Frank Sobotka does everything he can to save the docks, but essentially sells his soul to do so. Carcetti seems to be one during his early career and political campaign, but his ambition causes him to go down the same roads as everyone else. Prez turns into one over the course of season 4, though he'd already shown himself to be a truley incompetent and even violent cop.

* [[Reassigned to Antarctica]]:

** McNulty, at the end of the first and third seasons (the latter being used to allow Dominic West to be [[Written-In Absence]] while filming several feature film roles).

* [[Spell My Name with a "The"]]: The Bunk.

* [[Spoiler Opening]]: Every opening contains clips from episodes later on in the season, but they don't make much sense until you see them in context.

* [[String Theory]]: The Major Crimes Unit's pegboards are a fairly low-key example.

* [[Stylistic Suck]]: McNulty's intentionally horrible British accent--Dominic West is British himself.

* [[Ted Baxter]]: Cheese is the game's version of this. There is not a single season that he appears in where he doesn't get completely punked out at least once, and if he weren't Prop Joe's nephew he probably wouldn't have gotten anywhere near where he got. {{spoiler|And then when he finally ''was'' on top of the drug game, it lasted all of one scene before Slim Charles put a bullet in his brain.}}

* [[Terrible Interviewees Montage]]: In the second season, with people who all claim not to speak English. Later in season 3 The Bunk, when trying to recover a police gun, interviews several convicts who can't help him, including some who try to sell him other guns.

* [[Theme Music Power-Up]]: Omar whistling "[[Ironic Nursery Tune|The Farmer in the Dell]]".

* [[Thieves' Guild]]: Stringer trying to run syndicate meetings according to Roberts' Rules of Order.

* [[Trauma Conga Line]]: Season 4 subjects Randy and Bubbles to this, ''especially'' in the [[Wham! Episode]].

* [[True Companions]]: A lot of the cops might hate each other. In fact, a lot of them do. But when {{spoiler|a cop gets shot,}} the ''all'' forget their differences and ''all'' work together.

* [[Two-Teacher School]]: Averted in the fourth season. Multiple scenes show teachers at an inner-city Baltimore school debating issues such as curriculums, test preparations, and overall teaching structures; we also see shots of teachers giving lectures to their classes. Played straight when it comes to actual class focus, however.

* [[Ubermensch]]: Omar Little, personal-code warrior

* [[Utopia Justifies the Means]]: Bunny Colvin's Hamsterdam project can be considered a mild example. It greatly improved public safety and quality of life for Baltimore citizens, but it involved allowing criminals to peddle drugs unhindered, and ''brutally'' [[Disproportionate Retribution|punishing the dealers who refused to move to the free zone]].

** For the most part, however, this is averted: most applications seen on the show are plain Win32 GDI apps running on Windows XP. The animations on the dock monitoring software are a little unbelievable (a little truck drives away with the container?), and once a search for "suspects" was done using what appeared to be the Windows Explorer File Search (with a call to the contact done through the Windows Telephony dialog), but jaggy, aliased 2D polygons and unframed text boxes in clunky custom programs are far more believable on a city police computer than full-3D operating systems that [[Magical Computer|can enhance a 4 pixel area]].

* [[Viewers Are Geniuses]]: You're expected to keep up with multiple plot lines, a dozen-plus characters and their sub-stories, and all their field terminology with no [[Expospeak]] provided.

* [[Villainous Breakdown]]:

** Omar shows signs toward the end of season 5 as his physical condition deteriorates and his [[Roaring Rampage of Revenge]] becomes more and more disasterous.

** Stringer has one in "Middle Ground", unfortunately for him it gets cut short by {{spoiler|Brother Mouzone and Omar showing up.}}

* [[Villains Out Shopping]]: Several times. In the Third Season, Herc and Carver run into Poot and Bodie while all four of them are on dates. The fourth season opens with a hilarious scene of Snoop buying a nailgun at Home Depot. In Season 1 McNulty catches Stringer Bell out grocery shopping and has his children tail him, a fact that doesn't impress his estranged wife.

* [[Vomiting Cop]]:

** McNulty in season one, when he listens to {{spoiler|the tape of Kima getting shot}}. Slightly different from most examples in that he's not even at the scene, and when it actually happened he kept his cool. It's only in reliving the experience when he loses it.

* [[We Will Not Use Photoshop in the Future]]: Averted: On the eve of the election, Mayor Royce distributes flyers near polling places that show Carcetti with a notorious slumlord. Even though they immediately determine them to be fake, Carcetti doesn't have the time to properly debunk them.

* [[Wham! Episode]]: Usually the second-to-last episode of each season; most memorably, the eleventh episode of the third season.

* [[What Have I Done]]: One of the intonations of McNulty's catchphrase, "The fuck did I do?".

* [[What the Hell, Hero?]]: Bunk on the night after Jimmy's [[Jumping Off the Slippery Slope]].

* [[Where Are They Now? Epilogue]]: seen at the end of each season, with an extra-length one at the end of season five.