I will hate you forever, Kenard.

The Wire, Season 5, Episode 8

"Clarifications"

When I watch The Wire, I take notes for the blog post I'll eventually do. For this episode, here's exactly what I wrote from the beginning of the episode:

"Comstat meeting-McNulty briefs the brass...Poot works at Foot Locker!...I really like Michael's t-shirts this season, first the black one with the crown, now a blue one with swirls...it's really hard to see Omar hobbled...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! KENARD EFF [not really what I wrote] YOU"

And that's where it ends. For me, The Wire ends here. Honestly, short of Dukie killing Michael (and I guess we shouldn't rule that out), I have emotionally detached from the story. I was crying so loudly that my brother heard me from the other side of the house and climbed out of the shower to make sure I wasn't being attacked or anything. Nope, just my favorite character being murdered.

Other people have written that we should have seen this coming, that it was foreshadowed, etc. One even goes so far to say, "Anybody who really understood 'The Wire' knew it would end like this." Well, a) that's unbelievably smug and b) I must be blind, deaf, and dumb, because I didn't see it. I foolishly believed that the legend of Omar would continue on, and the drug dealers of Baltimore would keep on looking over their shoulders for that shotgun. And if he had to go, I wanted the blaze of glory, dammit! I wanted him to take Marlo with him!

But no, all he got was a shot to the back of the head from a kid who couldn't even look him in the eye when he killed him, his body stripped for souvenirs, no mention in the Sun, and a near mix-up in the morgue.

It's probably stupid to feel so much about the death of a fictional character, but...I watched the episode OnDemand a week ago, and I still can't talk rationally about this. I know he was probably doomed the second he came back from Puerto Rico, once he hurt his leg, once Kenard wasn't afraid of him, once Omar seemed too hell-bent on revenge, once his one-man crusade for justice finally ran up against an entity too big for one individual...I don't want to hear it. I just want to be angry at David Simon for awhile, and I want that to be Omar's twin brother that was killed.

Oh, yeah, other things happened in this episode. I don't care. Instead, here's a great interview with Michael K. Williams, talking about the groundbreaking nature of the character of Omar.