The Wire / Tropes A to B

Tropes A-B | Tropes C-D | Tropes E-L | Tropes M-R | Tropes S-Z | Main Page

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A

• A-Team Firing: Most of the gangsters rarely hit each other when not firing at point-blank range ... Truth in Television as their real-life counterparts rarely put a priority on marksmanship, and unlike Marlo's gang don't go out to the woods to practice their shooting. Lampshaded by one of the cops observing that the kids are more likely to hit a bystander than their putative targets; deconstructed when this actually happens in season 2, killing a nine-year-old boy.
• Abandoned Playground: Several, considering that Baltimore is a shooting gallery. After Ziggy confesses to murder, his cousin Nick gets drunk in the old playground where they used to play and reminisces about it. In Season 3, drug kingpin Marlo holds court in an abandoned park/playground because it's difficult to bug.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Bill Rawls being seen in a gay bar. The actor apparently told the showrunners to not pull any punches, but aside from some graffiti in season 5, a stray phone call that Daniels fields when he moves into Rawls' office and a couple of remarks that take on a different light, it's never brought up again.
  • Greggs's night law classes in Season 1. She remarks later that because of the Barksdale investigation she's had to miss a lot of them, and while it's possible that her long recuperation from being shot and ensuing difficulties with Cheryl lead her to drop them entirely, their disappearance from the show is never explained onscreen.
  • When he's first introduced, Tommy Carcetti is shown cheating on his wife, and later as he contemplates running for mayor, his friends say that he has a reputation for womanizing (they actually refer to him as a "gash-hound"). This is never brought up again, not even during his bitter campaign for mayor, and he is shown as a devoted family man for the rest of the show's run.
• Abusive Parents: Unfortunately numerous:
  • Namond Brice and D'Angelo Barksdale have some of the worst mothers around. Both continually press their sons into the drug game (read: mortal danger) to maintain their own lifestyles. Both are eventually called out on it, in a brutal manner. Wee-Bey allows Namond to live with Bunny Colvin, for a chance at a real future (delivering a subtle but scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech to De'Londa in the process). When D'Angelo is assassinated on Stringer's orders, McNulty goes to his girlfriend Donette with his suspicions instead of his mother. When Brianna asks McNulty why, he says "Honestly? I was looking for somebody who cared about the kid." The ironic and sad thing though, is that his girlfriend didn't really care about him either.
  • Wallace, Michael and Dukie's mothers were even worse, since they were all junkies who couldn't care less about their sons' well being. Wallace ran away from home and lived in the low rise projects with other (presumably) runaway kids for this reason. Dukie's parents and Michael's mom all figured out ways to use anything coming into their respective homes—including welfare—to feed their habits (usually by selling stuff provided to their children or purchased with food stamps or other welfare and buying drugs with the proceeds), to the point where Dukie had to rely on things provided by his teachers (and eventually staying in Michael's place, which Michael acquired after getting involved in the drug game), and Michael had to take control of the family's welfare card personally to ensure it went to buying food and clothing for himself and for his younger half-brother Bug. If Michael didn't step up to the task, he and his little brother would have starved. Michael's stepfather is strongly implied to have sexually abused Michael.
  • It's implied (and confirmed by Word of God) that Chris Partlow had a stepfather similar to Michael's, given that he chooses to beat the guy to death rather than shoot him like everyone else he's killed.
  • Added to that, the fathers of all these people are not even around at all, and (with the exception of Namond's father Wee-Bey, who seems to have been a good father to Namond while he was free despite being an enforcer for the Barksdale Organization) seem to have been completely out of the picture for most of their children's lives. The only one who could have been a father figure (with the exception, again, of Wee-Bey) was Michael's stepfather and he was worst of all. (Actually, Wee-Bey being as decent a dad as he could have been under the circumstances is probably the biggest factor in Namond being the only one of these men and boys who was well-adjusted enough to successfully exit the game.)
• Accidental Murder: Reckless Gun Usage in a dense city has its consequences.
  • in season 2, Bodie and his crew are fighting over turf with an another crew, which escalates into a shootout. However, due to both side's incompetence with guns, neither side gets hit, but one stray bullet hits a small child in the head, killing him.
  • in season 4, a man about to testify in a drug case is found shot dead, and Carcetti uses the case to hammer Mayor Royce for not providing funding for witness protection. For the inconvenient politics, the case gets kicked around and buried until the mayoral primaries are over, after which Kima Greggs is allowed to properly investigate the case, and it turns out the guy actually got struck by a stray bullet from someone shooting at empty containers in an alley.
• Actor Allusion: Mixed with Real-Person Cameo: (Examples)
  • Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich playing a security guard at the governor's office.
  • Donnie Andrews, the real-life inspiration for Omar Little, who appears as his sidekick a few times and is ultimately killed when Omar makes his Super Window Jump. That scene was based on an incident in Andrews' real life.
  • Guess which character is played by notorious former crimelord "Little" Melvin Williams, the inspiration for Avon Barksdale? Give up? The Deacon.
  • Felicia Pearson basically plays a fictionalized version of herself. Somewhat.
  • The woman playing the principal of the local school? Actually the principal of the real high school. No wonder you sat up straight when she yelled.
  • Lt. Dennis Mello is played by the actual Jay Landsman, a long-time homicide detective in the Baltimore Police Department. Not to be confused with the fictional homicide detective Jay Landsman named in his honor.
  • Det. Ed Norris is played by Edward Norris, former Baltimore Police Commissioner who had a somewhat controversial career that ended in indictment. His lack of respect for the current Commissioner is a running gag and some of his dialogue in season 1 is self-deprecatory as it was filmed while he was still commissioner.
  • When he goes undercover in the Greek's brothel, McNulty's alias is "James Cromwell", in reference to "the English fuck who stole my ancestors' land". Dominic West played Oliver Cromwell in the Channel 4 miniseries The Devil's Whore.
  • Lester accuses the boys of being "A bunch of draft-dodgin' peace-freaks". Clarke Peters was arrested in an anti-Vietnam war demonstration and later accused of draft-evasion when he was working in Europe.
• Actually Pretty Funny
  • Rawls sometimes gives credit to his antagonist and is amused by his actions or remarks. Most notably, he laughs when one of the floaters comes back to his jurisdiction thanks to McNulty's calculations.
    Rawls: Fuckin' Jimmy. Fuckin' with us for the fun of it. I gotta give the son of a bitch some credit for wit on this one. Cocksucker.
  • Nicky breaks out a smile when he realizes the "Love Child" affair is just a prank.
  • Valchek finds some amusement in the stolen van being toured around the world due to the feud with the stevedores. Sadly, he only starts to find the humor in it after Frank Sobotka is found dead at the end of season 2.
  • McNulty usually takes with a smile many of the numerous jabs he receives. When Lester chews McNulty out with a remarkable "get a life" speech, Jimmy finds some of the quips very funny.
  • When the MCU comes up with a plan to bust a careful and disciplined drug lieutenant in the hopes that Drac, a moronic nephew to Proposition Joe who doesn't even speak in code, will take his place, Burrell asks why do they think that Joe will promote the wrong man. Daniels answers that the police do it all the time. After a brief pause, Burrell laughs.
  • Butchie tells Omar to sell back to the Co-Op the shipment he stole for 20c on the dollar and that Prop. Joe would find some humor in the audacity. Joe isn't amused, but Marlo and Chris do find it funny when they learn about it.
  • invoked Norman Wilson laughs his ass off when the serial killer scheme -used as a political platform- is exposed as a fraud, despite Carcetti calling up Dude, Not Funny!.
  • Maurice Levy just laughs when Stringer tells him that Clay Davis just walked away with thousands of dollars out of his pocket to "bribe" the City Planning Commission, when just about anyone with ties to City Hall could have warned him about the infamous Senator.
  • After Cutty leaves Barksdale in the lurch by quitting suddenly, he starts up a boxing gym for local kids. Needing proper equipment, he eventually goes back to Avon to ask for money for the gym. When pressed for an amount, he admits he needs $10,000. Avon and Slim Charles give him a deadpan stare before busting out laughing and cutting a check for $15,000.
    Avon: Go through all that for $10,000?
• Adopting the Abused: In season 4, Bunny Colvin is introduced to Namond Brice, the son of incarcerated gang enforcer Wee-Bay and very emotionally abusive mother De'Londa. As it slowly becomes apparent that Namond does not have his father's applitude for the street life, while his mother expects him to be the breadwinner by dealing drugs, he ends up relying on Colvin for help, and at the end of the season, with his father's blessing, Colvin and his wife adopt Naymond, who is later shown to thrive and grow into a talented public speaker. The same season also sees Carver trying to adopt Randy Wagstaff, whose home was just firebombed leaving him homeless and with his foster mother in a coma, but Carver's lack of resources get in the way and Randy ends up in a dangerous group home. Similarly, Pryzbylewski helps out with the severly neglected Duquan, taking his laundry and packing extra lunch to give him, but is limited in how much he can help, and the last he sees of him is when he comes to him to very obviously scam him for money, which Prez does give him, but tells him he doesn't expect to see him again.
• Advertised Extra:
  • Really, did Neal Huff deserve a spot in the opening credits of season 5? Did Michelle Paress?
  • Dominic West still gets top billing in Season 4 despite there being many episodes where McNulty doesn't appear at all.
• Aesop Amnesia: At the end of Season 1, Herc is seen giving a couple of rookie Narcotics detectives a speech about the importance of being a Guile Hero in their work. He immediately forgets all about that lesson in subsequent seasons. A scene early in season 2 implies that the rigors of paperwork for property seizures was too much for him.
• Affably Evil:
  • Proposition Joe. Drug kingpin who runs the East Side of Baltimore. Doesn't especially like the bloody side of the drug business, but has no qualms about ordering murders when he has to. Unfailingly polite and reasonable to everyone he meets. Everybody likes him.
  • Senator Clay Davis is a blatantly corrupt, money-grubbing politician who will take anyone he can for as much money as he can. He's also friendly, charismatic, and cheerfully open about what he is:
  "I'll take any motherfucker's money if he givin' it away!"
  • Wee-Bey Brice, The Brute of the Barksdale organization. The best muscle the West Side of Baltimore has ever seen, and a trusted confidant for the Barksdale leadership. He's also a really nice and genuinely funny guy when he's not killing people, has a soft spot for his aquariums full of exotic fish, and truly loves and cares about his son Namond—to the point that Wee-Bey threatens his wife when she stands in the way of Bunny Colvin taking custody of Namond after it becomes clear that Namond is not built for the street.
  • Brother Mouzone. You know, the man with the thick glasses, the dorky bowtie, the exceedingly polite speech, a love of intellectual magazines like Harpers and The Atlantic, and who has no problem shooting hoppers with hollow-point bullets or gunning down Stringer Bell!
  • Even though Chris Partlow is willing to murder anyone without question, he usually acts calm and friendly towards his victims. The way you'd soothe an animal before you euthanize it.
• Affluent Ascetic: Drug dealers, out of necessity, tend to hide their wealth from the public. Marlo is a particularly sober example, but Proposition Joe (who runs his empire out of a dingy repair shop and seems to live in an ordinary, if well-maintained, house in East Baltimore) also qualifies. Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale are interesting borderline examples; they start quite understated, but start showing a little more flash—most particularly acquiring nice cars and large and well-appointed apartments in the Inner Harbor—once Stringer's legitimate business empire starts making them enough money to explain how they can afford such luxuries.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Stringer Bell's downward spiral and death is seen as this by many fans. Despite him being a murderous drug dealer who setup D'Angelo Barksdale's death and then had an affair with his woman afterwards, Stringer Bell was also shown as a thoughtful man who wanted to leave the life of crime and become a legal business man. He ends up getting screwed over by Senator Clay Davis when he tries to go legit, and his scheming finally catches up with him, to the point he can no longer talk is way out it. Finally, he decides to Face Death with Dignity.
• The Alcoholic:
  • It has been observed that McNulty is one of the most realistic portrayals of a high-functioning alcoholic on television. His job is so important to him that he manages to be a Functional Addict outside of his private life. In his private life however, he's a complete wreck. When we see him regularly drinking on the job in season 5, it's a good sign of just how low he's sinking and how many of his own lines he's crossing.
  • Augie Polk is a less functional example. After he turns up drunk to work one morning, Daniels orders him to take medical leave to treat his alcoholism. His partner Mahon isn't much better.
    Cedric Daniels: Between the two of them, I don't have a designated driver.
  • The dockworkers are all heavy drinkers. In spite of rarely getting work, they spend their days at a local bar. Their typical breakfast is a raw egg cracked into a beer. Johnny "Fifty" Spamanto gained his nickname after drinking over fifty cans of beer on his 25th birthday.
• Alcoholic Parent: Wallace's mother is an alcoholic who only cares that he took some money from her when he ran away from home at a young age. Duquan's parents are both drug addicts who will sell anything they can get their hands on to earn money for their fix, and Michael's mother is a heroin addict. Jimmy McNulty is the Alcoholic Parent to his kids, most notably in the fifth season when he has really fallen off the wagon, and his now teenage sons are starting to see him for what he really is.
• Alliterative Name: Brianna Barksdale, "Bodie" Broadus.
• All for Nothing: McNuly's fake serial killer scheme finally wrecks his police career. It did get Marlo Stanfield off the streets but it's implied it's temporary and in the greater scheme of things, it didn't make Baltimore a better place.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Played With: while her partner Cheryl avidly wanted a baby, Kima was initially unenthusiastic, and the baby is one of the many things that ends up coming between the two. The idea of being a mother eventually grows on her, and she ends up getting more involved in their son's life in season five.
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Lester Freamon is a very lowly-regarded detective who is given so little to do that he spends his days crafting dollhouse furniture rather than work cases. However, his low status is due to his insubordination rather than lack of ability. When given the opportunity, he's one of the best detectives in the city.
  • As Jimmy McNulty explains, patrol officers have much more power and freedom than one would guess from their rank, calling a patrol officer on his beat "the one true dictatorship in America." Patrol officers can choose to let criminals go, write them up for minor crimes or accuse them of major crimes, and their fellow officers will back them up. They also have more freedom, since the brass can't look over every patrolman's shoulder all day. The show explores both the good side of this (e.g. McNulty skipping out on writing pointless tickets to investigate a robbing spree) and the bad side (Rabid Cop Colicchio brutalizing and robbing the people on his beat).
• Alternate Catchphrase Inflection: Jimmy McNulty tends to say, "What the fuck did I do?" when reprimanded in a way that denies responsibility for whatever they're talking about. Sometimes, however, the ramifications of what he's done get through to him and he says it in a guilty tone.
• Ambition Is Evil: One of the recurring motifs of the series, many of the city officials and public servants engage in shady activities and schemes to advance their own careers and the drug lords who lust after power, money and/or respect casually rely on violence to attain their goals. Examples include:
  • Stringer Bell is sometimes an inversion, as his ambition to rise above the gangster life implies a pragmatic approach to crime and a reduction of violence.
  • One prominent unionist insists the stevedores should settle for the more modest goal of the grain pier, but Frank Sobotka aims higher with the dredging of the canal (not for personal gain—Frank has enough seniority personally that the docks would have to become completely automated for him to be unable to find enough hours—but for the well-being of the workers). This implies a closer criminal collaboration with The Greek.
  • Marlo is practically obsessed with the crown and is nothing but a cold tyrant who enforces his will with an iron fist during his rise and rule.
  The crown ain't worth much if the nigga wearin' it always gettin' his shit took.
  • Ambition is Marla's defining trait and to satisfy it she recommends practical, if amoral choices. She also cites ambition as being the chief trait that first attracted her to Cedric, but his ambition has since given way to his conscience.
  • When Carcetti is forced to choose between helping the city he was elected to save and his own political ambitions, he chooses the latter to avoid hurting his chances of being elected governor. He rationalizes he would be able to help from a higher office, but it's strongly suggested that he would have new priorities by then.
  • Templeton wants to become a household name in journalism and work in a big paper -the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post- and has no qualms about fabricating stories to achieve that.
• Amoral Attorney: Maurice Levy not only defends members of the Barksdale gang (as well as other drug crews), but introduces them to investors, advises them on who "needs to go", and sells confidential court papers under the counter to all comers thanks to a stooge in the courthouse Although Levy is at least realistic in that he doesn't just defend the drug lords because he's evil, but rather because he makes extra profit doing it, so he really does fit the "amoral" part. When he learns that Marlo Stanfield is using a cell phone, he says that he'll be making a lot of money from Marlo soon because the cops will have charges against him soon.
• And Another Thing...: Colvin is about to leave the room after having informed Burrell about Hamsterdam when he turns around and lets them know the Sun is aware of it.
• And Then What?: Lester gives McNulty a speech about how every case, no matter how big or glorious, ends, and you've got to have something else in your life.
  Lester: Tell me something, Jimmy. How exactly do you think it all ends?
  McNulty: What do you mean?
  Lester: A parade? A gold watch? A shining Jimmy-McNulty-Day moment, when you bring in a case sooooo sweet everybody gets together and says, "Aw, shit! He was right all along. Should've listened to the man." The job will not save you, Jimmy. It won't make you whole, it won't fill your ass up.
  McNulty: I dunno, a good case—
  Freamon: Ends. They all end. The handcuffs go click and it's over. The next morning, it's just you in your room with yourself.
  McNulty: Until the next case.
  Freamon: Boooooy, you need something else outside of this here.
  McNulty: Like what, dollhouse miniatures?
  Freamon: Hey, hey, hey, a life. A life, Jimmy. You know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you're waiting for moments that never come.
• Antagonist in Mourning:
  • Downplayed with Valchek, but still notable by his callous standards after Frank Sobotka's demise.
    Valchek: Almost feel sorry for the son of a bitch.
  • McNulty spends half the show trying to build a case on Stringer, and finally gets him on tape incriminating himself. That very afternoon, Stringer is betrayed to Omar and Brother Mouzone, who ambush and murder him. McNulty is distraught.
    McNulty: I caught him, Bunk. On the wire, I caught him. He doesn't fucking know it.
• Antagonistic Governor: After Tommy Carcetti (a Democrat) becomes Mayor of Baltimore, he finds out just how deep the problems with Baltimore's finances are and needs help from the state to save the city from a huge budget hole. Unfortunately the governor (a Republican) views Carcetti solely as a potential political rival and sets up an endless and petty series of humiliations for Carcetti before offering his "help" in the form of a Leonine Contract. Carcetti angrily refuses, which not only does immense damage to the city's schools and police force in the final season, but marks the point where Carcetti starts transforming from an ambitious and narcissistic but basically well meaning guy into a Corrupt Politician who forgets all his principles for the sake of his ambition.
• Anti-Climax: Discussed during the arrest of Avon Barksdale. McNulty states that he expected the moment to feel more satisfying. He and Daniels then call back the SWAT team and unceremoniously arrest Avon themselves with barely a word spoken.
• Anti-Hero:
  • Jimmy McNulty is an alcoholic, womanising cop in Baltimore who has taken every action possible to try and fight the drug problem in Baltimore. Despite him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope long ago he still is better than the drug dealers in Baltimore. Not all of them just some of them.
  • Omar Little also counts. He robs drug dealers, has killed others and his actions have lead to other's deaths. But he lives by a strict code and will never harm someone who is not in the game. Hell, he never curses in a show filled with foul mouths
• Anti-Villain: There's a plethora of them, as all but the most minor or monstrous of characters are shown as having a lighter or more sympathetic side, Pet the Dog moments, or having a point of one kind or another. Below are just a few examples:
  • The most poignant case is probably Wallace, a young boy who has been more or less abandoned by his junkie mother. He's a cheerful, bright kid who is only part of the drug trade to provide for his brothers and sisters, (who he's shown being a Parental Substitute to, complete with helping them with their homework, making sure they have lunch to eat at school, etc.) and is completely horrified after witnessing the "muscle" of criminal empire that he works for viciously torture and murder a thief who stole from them. The experience gives him PTSD and sends him into using drugs for the first time. Later he attempts to pull a Heel–Face Turn and get out of the drug trade by giving the police information about the Barksdale Organization, the criminal empire Wallace works for. A couple of weeks of being forgotten by the police and loneliness of not fitting in or having any friends makes him go back to the drug crew he worked with, just to be around friends and people who understood him. He gets a bullet in the head for his trouble.
  • D'Angelo Barksdale is a drug dealer not because he wants to be; on the contrary, he's pretty opposed to it, (saying at one point that there's nothing good about working in the drug trade except the money) and something of a fish out of water, as he's a kind and often decent guy caught in a cutthroat world. The problem is that his entire family, back to at least the days of his grandfather, have been criminals and drug dealers to one degree or another, and so it's assumed that everyone born into the Barksdale clan will somehow work to continue supporting the family through the game. (And as D'Angelo's mother Brianna points out, without The Game, as the show calls the drug trade, not only couldn't they support the family, but they probably wouldn't even be a family, just a bunch of people begging for change or looking for food in a dumpster.) One of many subplots of the first season is painting a portrait about how, just because D'Angelo was born who he was, he's forced into The Game whether he wants to do it or not, and how he becomes more and more trapped in a world that he doesn't belong in as his kingpin uncle Avon and Avon's coldblooded Dragon-in-Chief Stringer only get more and more ruthless to stay ahead.
    All my people, man, my father, my uncles, my cousins, it's just what we do. You just live with this shit until you can't breathe no more. I swear to God, I was courtside for eight months, and I was freer in jail than I ever was at home. ... I want it to go away. I want what Wallace wanted. I want to start over. That's what I want. I don't care where. Anywhere. I just want to go somewhere where I can breathe like regular folk.
  • Frank Sobotka is a classic Well-Intentioned Extremist. Frank's a Working-Class Hero who has spent his entire adult life working in the Baltimore docks, as it's hinted his family has for generations before. And for 30 years, he's seen the docks slowly dying off as the city goes further downhill, as politicians steal from and neglect the workers and the various criminal empires drive people and business away. In desperation to see the people he's worked with for decades have some sort of future and see future generations of Sobotkas be able to make a living working the docks, Frank makes a deal with international criminal mastermind "The Greek" where Frank and the other dock workers will ensure that The Greek's shipments of drugs, prostitutes and stolen goods are safely smuggled through the dock and past customs. With the money earned from doing this, Sobotka doesn't enrich himself, but instead frantically lobbies the city and state politicians into rebuilding and revitalizing the docks, which would not only give new hope to the people working the docks, but would do the city of Baltimore itself a lot of good. As Frank says of himself as the whole plan is falling apart under police investigation and shortly before The Greek has him murdered:
    I know I was wrong. But in my head, I thought I was wrong for the right reasons.
  • Omar Little is a criminal who only steals from other criminals. He's extremely personable, witty, badass, a Friend to All Children, and lives by a strict code of conduct that includes never swearing and never stealing from or harming anyone not involved in the criminal underworld, not even when they see him committing a crime and it could possibly result in him being arrested or convicted as a result. He even spreads around some of the profits of his robberies to others in the neighborhood. He's still a thief who has killed or crippled many of his targets during the course of his thefts, and, as the show points out, is part of the continuing Baltimore's Vicious Cycle of crime and decay, especially since the children that Omar is so charitable towards idolize him and aim to imitate him, which will someday get them caught in the cruel world of The Game.
    Omar: Don't get it twisted, I do some dirt too, but I ain't never put my gun on nobody who wasn't in the game.
    Bunk: A man must have a code.
    Omar: Oh no doubt.
  • In the final season, Detectives McNulty and Freamon go Jumping Off the Slippery Slope to catch Marlo Stanfield, the most ruthless and murder happy drug kingpin that Baltimore has ever known, who has dozens of murders tied his ambition to rule the entire Baltimore underworld. In the process of hunting Marlo they are forced by circumstances to take actions including falsifying the existence of Serial Killer, altering crime scenes and innocent deaths to make it look like the killer's work, kidnapping a barely functional and helpless homeless man, using an illegal wiretap, committing fraud within their own police department, all of which inadvertently also gets in the way of other investigations. McNulty in particular is hit with this, as his behavior spirals into a self-destructive course, and he finally realizes it towards the end of the season, when he tries to justify all his actions only be hit with a Heel Realization.
    You start to tell a story, you think you're the hero. And then when you get done talking...
• Anyone Can Die: At least one major character dies in every season: Wallace in Season 1, D'Angelo Barksdale and Frank Sobotka in Season 2, Stringer Bell in Season 3, Bodie in Season 4, Proposition Joe and Omar Little in Season 5.
  • The last was a particularly powerful example of the trope, as Omar was built up as a larger-than-life, unstoppable force of nature throughout the series, only to be shot in the back of the head while buying a pack of cigarettes by a nobody kid...
  • Not to mention a host of secondary characters that can and will be killed off in droves.
• Arc Words:
  • The phrase "new day" frequently comes up when people talk about or try to change the system. Carcetti runs with the slogan "It's a new day in Baltimore", and multiple drug crews form the "New Day Co-Op." McNulty and others will occasionally use "new day" to talk about a potentially bright future, either sarcastically or not.
  • "Same as it ever was" gives the lie to the "new day" arc words. Nothing really changes, at least for the better.
  • "The game", the name given for the drug trade, gang and political wars of Baltimore.
    Cutty: The game done changed.
    Slim Charles: Game's the same — just got more fierce.
  • "Keep my name out of it," from people refusing to get involved.
  • Variations of it being "your turn," usually for something bad to happen to them, showing that people are at the mercy of a cyclical system.
  • "Chain of command", among the cops, usually the speaker's way of indicating what's happening is not up to them.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • In "Clean Up", D'Angelo Barksdale decides to quit the Game:
  "Where's Wallace? Where the fuck is Wallace? Huh? Huh? String? String? Look at me! Where the fuck is Wallace?"
  • And a possible callback in "Final Grades", when the System fails Randy:
  "You gon' help, huh? You gonna look out for me? You gonna look out for me, Sergeant Carver? You mean it? You gonna look out for me? You promise?! You got my back, huh?!"
• Armor-Piercing Response: At the end of the first season, D'Angelo Barksdale is convinced by his mother Brianna to be the Fall Guy for his drug kingpin uncle Avon, because Avon's activities support their entire family. The result is D'Angelo getting sentenced to 20 years in prison. While in prison, D'Angelo decides he wants to distance himself from his pre-prison life, a decision that includes distancing himself from his uncle. Unfortunately, this makes it seem to Stringer—who's running the outside parts of the operation while Avon is incarcerated—that D'Angelo is too much of a liability, and so Stringer has him killed and has the killer make it look like a suicide. When McNulty finds out about the death and quickly concludes it was no suicide, he goes to D'Angelo's girlfriend to tell her about his suspicions, and never visits Brianna. When Brianna finally hears about this and comes to McNulty for answers, including why he never approached her with his suspicions, McNulty's response leaves her devastated.
  Brianna: Why go to her first? Why not come to me?
  McNulty: Honestly? I was looking for someone who cared about the kid. I mean, you did make him take the years, right?
• Arson, Murder, and Lifesaving: Often the case with Jimmy McNulty. Described by one of his peers as " a picture postcard of a drunken, self-destructive fuck-up", none of this stops Mcnulty from taking on cold and dead cases and knocking them out the park. May not be saving lives, but he's certainly saving the Homicide Unit's clearance rate when he's not trashing it with vindictive (yet factual!) memos.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: In "Duck and Cover," Ziggy Sobotka gets a duck, which he calls his "attorney". He feeds it only peanuts and whiskey. By the next episode, it's dead. The other stevedores lampshade Ziggy's idiocy.
• Artistic License – Geography: In season 2, the prostitutes who were being trafficked are shown with Republic of Russia passports. There is no such thing as a "Republic of Russia". There's the Russian Federation, which is divided into a multitude of subjects, some of which are republics and some of which aren't.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety:
  • During the famous Cluster F-Bomb investigation scene in "Old Cases", McNulty tries to figure out the angle of a bullet entry and exit wound. So he takes out his loaded service weapon and points it at himself to simulate it. All perfectly in character.
  • Any time Roland Pryzbylewski handles a weapon. It establishes him as a colossal screw-up who is a liability to Cedric Daniels' detail. Within minutes of his first appearance, Prez has already fired a stray round into the wall of the office, because when trying to show off his light trigger pull to Carver, he takes the clip out of the gun but forgets to clear the round in the chamber. And then there's the fatal mistake that ends his police career when he accidentally kills a plainclothes cop.
  • Many Barksdale soldiers are shown behaving in this manner, showing their general level of incompetence. This is played superbly in the opening of "Stray Rounds". A street-corner shootout breaks out between Bodie's crew and a rival gang, with about five or so shooters on each side. Dozens of rounds are fired, none of them aimed carefully, almost all while on the run, and many are simply wild blind fire. It comes off as the precise opposite of the glamorous action gunfight. Both sides scatter as soon as sirens are heard, with the only casualties being a few car windows and a young boy in a nearby building.
• Artistic License – Military: The second half of the fifth season has some plot points that revolve around whether or not a reporter is making up details in his stories. As part of his stories, he interviews a former Marine who served in Iraq. When the reporter first meets the Marine, the Marine talks about an "M niner niner eight", which (he explains) is a Humvee. He also calls a .50 caliber machine gun an M50 (which is actually an M2). Later, the Marine's credibility is called into question. Even a fellow Marine is questioned on the subject. In the second interview, the Marine correctly identifies the machine gun as a .50 caliber machine gun, but the audience is supposed to be left with the notion that the former Marine is a credible source of information, despite a few mistakes in his story.
  • While reconstructing the Kesson murder at the scene, McNulty points his own loaded service weapon at his head to get a better idea of the angle the shot came from.
• Artistic License – Law: Unlike what Rhonda claims, Maryland is two party consent state. As per the Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act of 1978, it's illegal to record a phone call unless all the parties agree, so her proof against Levy is not only invalid but obtained under criminal circumstances.
• As the Good Book Says...: Proposition Joe sends flowers to Butchie's funeral with a note quoting the first part of Isaiah 5:20 ("Woe to them who call evil good and good evil").
• As You Know:
  • During D'Angelo's funeral, Joe approaches Stringer to talk shop and prefaces one of his propositions with a summation of the Barksdale dilemma: prime real estate but weak product. Stringer interrupts Joe and asks "when are you gonna tell me something I don't know?", urging Joe to get to the point.
  • We meet Ziggy when Frank tells him he's fired. A conversation between two nearby dockworkers reveals that Frank is Ziggy's father, something they would not need to say at that point but something we need to know.
  • Early in his conversation with Lou, Frank refers to himself as "your kid brother", so the viewers now understand their relationship, even though the two are all by themselves at Lou's house.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Valchek only appears once in season 1, after the fallout from Prez's incident in the projects. He then plays a major role in season 2 onwards.
  • Kenard is seen in a quick season-three scene playing with two other kids before he gains more screentime in the fourth and fifth seasons.
  • Anthony Colicchio was initially an unnamed background character in Major Colvin's unit before gaining an abrasive personality and more dialogue.
  • Jeff Price (a court reporter for The Baltimore Sun) appears in one season three sequence (a press conference) asking a question, then becomes a full-fledged supporting character in the fifth and final season.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Herc is annoyed by the fashions of the local street kids and mockingly asks one where he can get one of those cool hats with the sideways brims. Oblivious to the irony of the question, the kid patiently explains that it's a regular hat simply turned sideways. The flummoxed Herc has no response
• Asshole Victim: In the very last episode, Cheese, who has been a Jerkass Smug Snake drug dealer and gangster since his debut, mistakenly admits in the middle of a self aggrandizing speech that he sold out his uncle Prop Joe to Marlo Stanfield, which resulted in his uncle's death. Within a couple of seconds of doing so, Slim Charles, (who had acted as the uncle's Number Two for the past two seasons) shoots Cheese in the head right in front of the various drug lords who were assembled for a meeting. Of the dozens there, only one protests...because it means they lost the money Cheese was going to kick in to a joint project. All the others stand around muttering things like "Motherfucker had it coming", and "That's what you get" before they leave his body to lie there in the street.
• At Least I Admit It: This seems to be the crux of Omar's takedown of drug lawyer Maurice Levy in season two: When told that he's a leech, stealing from those who steal the lifeblood of the city, Omar's only response is, "Just like you, man."
  Levy: Excuse me, what?
  Omar: I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. (shrugs) S'all in the game, though, right?
  Levy: (stares at the judge, who just shrugs)
• Attending Your Own Funeral: Jimmy McNulty is given a mock Irish wake at Kavanaugh's pub, just like other cop characters who'd been killed off when their actors passed away in real life. In this case, McNulty's career as a detective is what's "dead". He lies on the pool table, posed with a bottle of Jameson's whiskey and a cigar, just like the others, while Jay Landsman gives a funny eulogy. But McNulty is talkative and can't stay still and the other cops complain about this.
• Author Avatar: While David Simon's journalism background influenced the final season (he also cameos as a reporter), a more straightforward Author Avatar is Jimmy McNulty to Simon's co-creator Ed Burns, who was a similarly hot-headed but intelligent detective in his police days, who was a driving force behind major drug arrests of the gangsters that influenced the Barksdales. However, Prez also fills this role, his switch from policing to school teaching in season 4 following Burns's own career path, with much of his real life experience influencing Prez's storyline. It must be said though that Burns left the police of his own accord, rather than retiring after shooting another cop.
• Author Tract: The series can be seen as one five-season-long tract on how selfishness, ambition, and stupidity are keeping American institutions in a vicious cycle of incompetence.
• Authority in Name Only: Police Commissioner Ervin Burrell is seen as a "hack" by Mayor Clarence Royce, who plans on ousting him and replacing him with Deputy Commissioner Bill Rawls if he's reelected. Tommy Carcetti defeats Royce in the mayoral race, saving Burrell's job. Due to Burrell's failure to bring the matter of a murdered state's witness to the Mayor's attention before it became a campaign issue^note Which had been a major part of Carcetti's election platform, Carcetti asks Burrell to resign. Burrell refuses and tells Carcetti that he would have to fire him and that if he leaves, he will not go quietly. Carcetti at the same time can't fire Burrell without having ready an African-American replacement due to the fact that Carcetti himself is a white mayor in a city with a majority black population. Finding a replacement is further complicated by a lack of ranking African-American officers in the department besides Burrell. There is only one African-American Deputy Commissioner named Hawthorne, who is over 70 years old, and no African-American officers over the rank of Colonel. The next highest ranking African-Americans in the department are Majors and Lieutenants, most of whom such as Major Reed are loyal to Burrell and his methods of policing. Carcetti decides to strip Burrell of his power as Commissioner and give all decision making up to Rawls, while leaving Burrell as a figurehead for the press and ministers.
• Auto Erotica: After hearing D'Angelo's proffer, Perlman is so excited by the possibilities of the case that she comes on to McNulty when they get back to police headquarters and the two have sex partially in the back seat of her car.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • The Major Crimes Unit shines over regular units due to its painstaking police work and meticulous data gathering and interpretation, in radical contrast with the departments policy of drug-on-the-table and short-term arrests that lead to nowhere. At the core of it lies Lester Freamon, who in Daniel's words is by himself the MCU.
  • Some examples outside the MCU include Bunk and McNulty's surgical reconsfucktion and McNulty's tide calculations.
• Axes at School: There's a dramatic moment in Mr. Pryzbylewski's middle school classroom when a disturbed girl, fed up with teasing, abruptly stands up, whips out a box cutter, and cuts two deep slashes into another girl's face. What really bothers Mr. Pryzbylewski is that after the heat of the moment, none of his other inner-city students seems to be at all traumatized. In fact, it's routine for them to bring weapons to school, although they generally conceal them somewhere outside rather than smuggle them into the building.

B

• Back for the Finale:
  • The series pulls this off spectacularly over the course of its final season with every living major character and many minor ones making cameos across the season. Surprisingly, all of them feel natural and don't interfere a bit with shows realism as most of the characters return for about 1 or 2 seasons and most of the previously departed characters had not been said to have ever left Baltimore making it all rather plausible.
  • Shardene is a very literal example of this trope. After helping the cops set up contact with a Russian stripper early in Season 2, and while it's established that she and Lester have shacked up, neither he nor anyone else so much as mentions her ... until one of the last episodes, and then she comes to Kavanaugh's with him in the last episode.
• Backseat Changing Room: Gender-Inverted Trope. After Avon Barksdale gets out of jail, Stringer Bell and Shamrock pick him up and bring him new clothes, too. As they drive away from the jail, we see Avon toss his old clothes out the window of the moving car.
• Bad Cop/Incompetent Cop: Inherent in the System. The show is full of them. This doesn't mean that all cops are bad or incompetent, but those who aren't so limited by the system that they often can't do their work properly. The top brass are so devious, biased, prejudiced and so full of personal vendettas that it prevents them from doing any actual police work. When Judge Phelan and McNulty set in motion the creation of the MCU, Rawls makes it his top priority to screw McNulty over. The Deputy Ops himself is reluctant to do any meaningful police work either, which is why the first Barksdale detail is so composed of unwanted "humps". The whole thing is so disorganized that the only time the top brass do have to act selflessly (after the shooting of Kima Greggs), the amount of personnel that swarms to the scene just clutter everything until Rawls has to give orders for unnecessary personnel to get lost.
  Cedric Daniels: You'd rather live in shit than let the world see you work a shovel.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • Scott Templeton, who wins a Pulitzer for his fabricated story while Gus is demoted, though it’s implied his guilt won’t let him enjoy it and that his lies will probably be exposed eventually.
  • The Greek and his cronies in the second season get away scot-free with the police still having no idea who they really are; even the criminal organizations that use their services have no clue who these guys are at all. Made worse when they resurface in the story a couple seasons later and we see that they've managed to avoid prosecution and are back in business in Baltimore. Curiously, the audience has about as much idea of their identities as the police do.
  • Senator Clay Davis, who is a compulsive conman with strings everywhere and a silver tongue. By his own wits, he is able to overturn a charge of corruption brought by the Baltimore D.A., who wanted to shine at his expense; unwittingly, the failed prosecution also brought down the federal syndication that the FBI wanted to pin on him.
  • Valchek, possibly the most self-serving police official in a series where there is a lot of competition for that dubious honor, becomes police commissioner so he can juke the stats for Carcetti. Rawls becomes superintendent of the Maryland State Police. Really, everywhere you look as the series ends, the amoral are triumphant and the idealistic are shoved to the margins. This is not an accident.
• Bad Guy Bar: Orlando's is the strip club, plotting nefarious deeds variant. Butchie's bar is the dingy, neutral variant; criminals from a variety of different organizations seem equally likely to spend time there, and it is the location of choice for Stringer Bell or Proposition Joe to parley with Omar Little from season two and onwards.
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: In the finale, the police department needs to explain several apparent murders (which McNulty had faked at the scene(s) to look like the work of a serial killer that did not really exist). Rather than admitting that they were faked, the mayor wants to blame them on a mentally ill homeless person the police had recently picked up. McNulty objects to putting the blame on the mentally ill man; deputy of operations Bill Rawls (one of the series' antagonists), however, does so anyway, and it keeps McNulty from facing any legal consequences.
• Badass Boast:
  • Omar Little, who has just taken out Stinkum while injuring Wee-Bey: "'Ey yo, lesson here Bey. You come at the king, you best not miss."
  • From Carver, threatening a hiding drug runner in Season 3. Somewhat less badass in practice, as the corner boys run rings around the Western DEU, but still quite good for the delivery and wording:
    Carver: Hey listen to me you little fucking piece of shit! Imma tell you one thing and one thing only about the Western boys you are playing with: We do not lose! And we do not forget! And we do not give up! Ever! So I'm only going to say this one time: If you march your ass out here right now and put the bracelets on, we will not kick the living shit out of you. But if you make us go into them weeds for you, or if you make us come back tomorrow night, catch you on a corner, I swear to fucking Christ, we will beat you longer and harder than you beat your own dick! Because you do not get to win, shitbird; we do!
  • From Wee-Bey Brice, best drug soldier the West Side ever saw, through prison glass to his nasty wife who is trying to force his son to be a gangster like him (to keep her in furs, essentially), which he does not want:
    Brice: Remember who the fuck you are talking to right here. Remember who I am. My word is still my word. In here, in Baltimore, in any place you even think of calling home, it'll be my word that finds you.
  • "Police work detective, police work". Carver's answer to an impressed Lester about how he procured Marlo's number (courtesy of Herc, actually)
  • Lester in the second to last episode shows the clock to Marlo to demonstrate to his face the code was cracked and he is the one who has beaten him
• Badass Bookworm: Brother Mouzone inspires fear and respect in the entire Baltimore drug organization, with good reason, despite his small stature, bow tie and glasses, devotion to Harper's magazine, and frequent use of big words and carefully crafted sentences.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Brother Mouzone is possibly the epitome of this trope. Not only does he wear an immaculate three-piece suit at all times (with a very sensibly-sized handgun underneath), but also Nerd Glasses and a little red bowtie. But do not underestimate his ability to fuck you up.
• Badass Israeli: Eton Ben-Eliezer, the Greek's drug lieutenant.
• Badass Longcoat: Omar Little uses a duster to conceal his kevlar vest and double-barreled shotgun while robbing drug dealers.
• Badass Pacifist: In "The Hunt", the police and a SWAT team are about to arrest Avon Barksdale in his office. Sitting in their car, McNulty and Daniels are unimpressed with the show of force. So the two proceed to simply walk up the stairs to the office like a walk in the park, wordlessly put the handcuffs on Avon, then walk out. The only words being when McNulty tells Stringer, "Catch you later."
  Jimmy McNulty: This isn't as much fun as I thought it would be...
  Cedric Daniels: SWAT guys do love to break out their tools, don't they?
  Jimmy McNulty: Do they think there's Tony Montana up there? These guys probably haven't touched a gun in years. [beat] Ah, fuck this shit. You and me, Lieutenant.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: The fifth season opening contains at least two things that appear to be spoilers but in context were misleading in a rather ironic fashion: various newspaper covers mentioning a Serial Killer of the homeless with a possible sexual motive which McNulty and Freamon made up to get the Police department more funding, and a picture of McNulty laid out as if it were part of a wake which was really just a mock-wake held as a send-off before he was taken off active police work.
• Bait-and-Switch: D'Angelo, and the audience, think Wee-Bey is taking him into a darkened, abandoned, apartment to kill him, just as we had earlier seen Poot and Bodie do to Wallace. It turns out he's just showing Dee how to feed his fish while he's hiding out in Philadelphia.
• Bald of Authority: Cedric Daniels and Howard Colvin. Ellis Carver also becomes one.
• Based on a Great Big Lie: Used in-universe in season five: Scott Templeton, junior journalist at the Baltimore Sun, is prone to embellishing his claims just enough to avoid detection, partly to avoid layoffs and partly to earn a better job at a bigger paper. Only his editor really suspects him, but nobody believes him. Then Scott goes big and pretends he has been contacted by a serial killer who has been targeting homeless men in the city, making him nationally famous and the darling of upper management. The twist, however, is that the killer himself doesn't exist, and even Scott doesn't know that — he was made up by McNulty, who's trying to fabricate a lurid story to secure funding for the chronically broke police department. McNulty, pleasantly surprised by this turn of events, happily calls Scott pretending to be the killer and plants more information (seriously freaking him out in the process), knowing Scott can't call him on it because his earlier lie would be exposed as well. In the end, Scott angles for a Pulitzer prize, and Gus airs his suspicions to the paper's management, which loses him his job.
• Bastard Understudy: This is D'Angelo's role in the Barksdale Organization in Season 1. He's being groomed and taught to someday be the man of the family and inherit the business from his drug kingpin uncle, Avon. Secretly, however, D'Angelo has grown extremely jaded about both the drug trade and his family planning out his whole life for him, and is practically dying to go all Defector from Decadence.
• Bathos: As part of its ruthless deconstruction of the Criminal Procedural and Police Procedural genres, the series would occasionally interrupt its moments of cynical crime drama or violent main character deaths with goofy or absurdist comedy, which David Simon deliberately inserted because otherwise the series would be unbearable to watch. Particularly good is the moment where Wee Bey all but orders D'Angelo into his house at gunpoint with the lights off, and both D'Angelo and the audience are tensed up waiting for him to get whacked...only for Wee Bey to turn the lights on and explain that he brought D'Angelo in to show him how to feed his fish while he's out of town.
• Bathroom Stall Graffiti: "Rawls Sucks Cock" at the Baltimore Central Police station staff men's room.
• Batman Cold Open: The series opener begins this way. McNulty is introduced while investigating the murder of a guy named Snotboogie. The little episode makes a statement about the America Dream, a major theme of the series, but the Snotboogie murder itself has nothing to do with the plot of the rest of the season.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Subverted in Season 1. When Stringer and D'Angelo suspect that someone in the Pit crew is a police informant, Stringer recommends that D'Angelo invent a fake reason to withhold the crew's pay; he believes that the informant will be the one member of the crew who doesn't raise a fuss, since they'll be the one most eager to avoid attention and stay on the boss' good side. Of course, the audience already knows that there isn't an informant, and that the police have been getting their information by tapping the gang's phones. Turns out that the person who doesn't complain about being denied pay is actually Stealing from the Till, not snitching.
  • In season 2, Bell arranges for heroin cut with rat poison to be given to Tilghman to smuggle in to prison, resulting in at least five deaths. The resulting investigation not only allows for payback against Tilghman for the way he's been treating Barksdale and his men over his brother's death at Wee-Bey's hands in the past, it allows Barksdale to get early parole as a reward for identifying Tilghman as the officer doing the smuggling.
  • Fails twice, and succeeds once, in Season 3.
    • The MCU decides to arrest Cheese, not because they think he'll give up his bosses, but because they believe that Joe will replace him on the corner with the denser and more talkative Drac, his own nephew, who might give up his bosses on the wiretap. But then Joe picks Lavelle to replace Cheese instead.
    • The mayor holds up Daniels' promotion to major as a way to convince Daniels's wife to drop her primary bid against a sitting councilwoman who is one of the mayor's strongest supporters. Instead, Daniels decides to give up on the promotion.^note By the end of the season, however, the mayor has changed his mind and decides to back Marla, and Daniels's promotion does through.
    • Brother Mouzone sends Lamar into the gay bar for several days running looking for Omar rather than going in himself, since he knows that Lamar's discomfort with gay men will eventually make him so hostile that the bar will not want him back and someone will let him know where Omar can be found. This time it works.
  • In season 4, Marlo's men kill the delivery woman at Andre's shop and shoot him with the instructions to finger Omar as the shooter so Omar will get some serious time. But for Bunk, this would have worked.
  • In season 5, McNulty and Lester fabricate a serial killer so the city will restore enough funding to the police department for them to properly investigate Marlo.
  • Gone Horribly Right for Prop Joe that season. After failing to convince Marlo Stanfield to join the coop, he sets up Marlo to get robbed by Omar. The result is Marlo changing his mind and joining the coop, but it backfires. Marlo Stanfield begins scheming to destroy the coop from within by convincing Prop Joe's main drug contact, The Greek, to do business with him. He turns Prop Joe's nephew Cheese against him, which allows Marlo access to kill him. Afterwards, he disbands the coop and raises the price for the drugs he now controls.
• Batter Up!:
  • Bodie and "The Pit" crew beat up some rival drug dealers with bats. It's the weapon of choice when they don't want to bring down police attention.
  • In Season 2, Cheese Wagstaff's crew has a few members carrying bats when they gang up on Ziggy^note aka "Fucknuts" aka "Malaka" Sobotka, although most of the ass-whooppin Ziggy gets is from Cheese's fists.
  • In Season 3, some of Bodie's crew are on the receiving end from Marlo's boys. One of them is no older than thirteen.
    Young Corner Boy: I was workin' that bitch.
    Fruit: Yeah shorty, you hard.
• Battle Couple:
  • Omar almost always has one of his stick-up crew as a boyfriend. He goes through at least three over the course of the series.
  • Starting in season two, Omar joins forces with Tosha and Kimmy, who are vaguely implied to be lesbian lovers.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Proposition Joe gets information about the whereabouts of a police officer by calling the police station and asking about him. He changes his name several times during his phone call, all while doing his impersonation of a white person.
• Because I Said So: Omar gets asked by the rest of his crew why he only robs stashes from the Barksdale crew, and his answer is simply "Because."
• Being Evil Sucks: Unless you manage to get away with it. Though even that isn't always what it's cracked up to be, ask Marlo.
• Being Good Sucks: Not surprising considering the cynical nature of the show. Then again: the bad guys don't always have it easy either (see above).
• Benevolent Boss:
  • Cedric Daniels protects his subordinates who exhibit numerous displays of incompetence or disloyalty, even when this reflects badly on him.
  • Of the various Baltimore Police Department commanders, Howard "Bunny" Colvin is one of the few who are willing to solve problems and help underlings in need. Best shown when he delivers some compassionate criticism to Carver, which has a positive impact on Carver's career and helps him to become a caring public servant.
  • Jimmy Asher is a somewhat deconstructed example, as he's a kind, well-meaning man who is an ineffective and Clueless Boss. ** Lester Freamon makes the point that his non-intrusive, hands-off approach allows actual police work from the professionals.
  • Raymond Foerster is one. At Foerster's wake in season 4, Landsman says that Foerster spent 39 years in the BPD "without leaving a trace of bitterness or hatred with any officers, a miraculous career by BPD standards".
  • Jay Landsman appears aloof, but he truly does care about his subordinates, from lobbying Rawls on McNulty's behalf (although this partially comes from Jay's desire to keep the clearances that Mc Nulty brings in), administering Irish wakes for fallen officers, and cutting Bubbles loose after Sherrod's overdose.
  • Though the ruthless leader of a drug crew, Avon Barksdale has moments like this, from letting Cutty leave the organization on his own terms, and later providing funding for Cutty's boxing gym.
  • Tragically deconstructed with Frank Sobotka. While he takes good care of his fellow dockworkers and all of his schemes are for their benefit, he's so busy being a father to the union guys that he was never properly a dad to his own son. It also turns out that the union guys are willing to make a doomed moral gesture after his death and declare their loyalty to him despite the government warning that the union will be decertified unless they select new leadership.
• Bested by the Inexperienced: Omar Little, someone who has survived numerous shootouts and ambushes, is killed when an unsuspecting kid shoots him in the back of the head because he wanted to earn street cred.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • Ziggy Sobotka]] buys a duck and brings it into the stevedores' bar with him. When one of his co-workers calls him sick because of this, Ziggy retorts he's hardly the first guy in South Baltimore to seek the affections of a farm animal.
  • Jay Landsman is at one point seen telling the final part of a raunchy joke about a hunter raped by a bear. Jay is funny by default, but there's the silent but appalled reaction to the joke of the woman among his audience. She withdraws, clearly thinking that Jay is an asshole.
• Better Living Through Evil: The second season gives us Nick Sobotka, a stevedore in Baltimore's slowly dying dockworker union. As an honest man, he simply can't get enough work, as it's noted numerous times that there isn't enough traffic going through the port for people as far down the seniority scale as Nick, so he can only get a few hours a week, has to live with his parents instead of with his longtime girlfriend and son, try to avoid getting his car repossessed by parking it far away from home every night and hoping the repo man won't look that far, etc. Once he does a couple of jobs with the Greeks, who smuggle drugs, women and other goods into the dock, he makes tens of thousands of dollars, Spiros of the Greeks takes a fatherly interest in him, and Nick can start looking at the real possibility of getting a place with and providing for his girlfriend and son.
• Big Applesauce: McNulty puts Omar on a bus there to get him away from drug deal retribution, the West Side's drug connection runs through there for the first few seasons, and drug deals (and eventually hitmen) show up from New York periodically. The final shot of season 1 takes place in New York.
• Big Bad:
  • Avon in Season 1
  • The Greek in Season 2
  • Stringer Bell in Season 3
  • Marlo Stanfield in Seasons 4 and 5.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Stringer Bell is smarter than the average Baltimore gangster, but he is only really educated and intelligent by the standards of his street peers, and worse he tends to misunderstand the nature of the game, to the point of Avon often having to correct him when he attempts reckless solutions to his problems such as ordering a hit on a Senator. He overestimates his own intelligence and underestimates the intelligence of those around him as a result, not realizing that street smarts matter more than college smarts when it comes to street crime. Part of his problem is that he wants a low profile and doesn't want to act as Big Bad, but still has to before retooling his organization, and as Avon points out, he may be too smart for his fellow criminals, but he might not be smart enough for the white-collar world he aspires to, and is thus playing an intellectual more than actually being one.
• The Big Board: A corkboard laying out all of each case's suspects. Also, the white board in the Homicide division that shows all the open cases, unsolved ones in red. The big board eventually spills out over the walls as the cases get larger.
• Big "NO!": After a mother's son catches a stray bullet during a shootout.
• Big Sleep: Rampant in the first couple seasons. Glekas is the first character to exhibit Dies Wide Open at all, late in season 2.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • A brief sub-plot in series one concerned two older "humps" named Polk and Mahon. "Póg mo thóin" (pronounced Pogue Mahone and source of The Pogues' band name) is Irish for "Kiss my ass."
  • Season 2, Episode 3 has a scene where Bunk and Freamon are interviewing the crew of a ship (their crime scene), all of whom are speaking in various foreign languages and claim to speak no English. If you speak two or more of the languages,^note Or if you speak an Eastern dialect of Arabic: the first guy is Egyptian, and one of the others is Lebanese or Syrian; the dialects are similar enough that if you know one you can more or less follow the other. you quickly realize they're all saying almost the exact same thing ("I have nothing to do with this, I'm just trying to make some quick money for my kids and go home").
  • When the Greeks skip town, a Greek pop song plays with lyrics lamenting that a lover has gone away.
  • In Season 4, Episode 3, Namond is showing his friends the sketches of potential tattoos, including two Chinese characters which he say mean "lion" and "heart." His friends mock him, saying he had no way of knowing that they didn't actually say "bitch" and "pussy," but if you can read Chinese, you know that Namond is closer to the truth. However, the one he thinks means "lion" actually means "heart," and the one he thinks means "heart" actually means "tiger."
• Bittersweet Ending: What the series finale boils down to. History repeats as the system remains rock-firm and replaces certain corrupted characters with functionally identical ones, but a number of major characters nevertheless manage to have relatively happy endings.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Whenever Stanfield and his crew become involved, particularly in his ascendant Big Bad status in Seasons Four and Five, the series slips into this trope (rather than its usual Grey and Gray). Not for nothing is Marlo's nickname "Black".
• Black and Nerdy: Brother Mouzone exhibits some nerdy traits, such as being immaculately dressed in a bow-tie suit, a high-brow speaker, an avid reader, and an intellectual. However, he's also a ruthless drug gang enforcer.
• Black-and-White Insanity: Police commander Howard "Bunny" Colvin bemoans how police adopting a black and white mentality and an increasing determination to never compromise or question the "War on Drugs", regardless of its obvious failings, has changed being a police officer for the worse throughout his career. In one frustrated speech, he says that police officers are being turned into wartime soldiers, and outlines what he sees as the differences between the two. (According to him, one protects a community and the people within it, while the other kills their enemies.) He goes on to add that this has only succeeded in turning the very community that police are supposed to protect into their enemies.
  I mean you call something a war, and pretty soon everyone is going to be running around acting like warriors. They gonna be running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, racking up body counts. And when you at war, you need a fucking enemy. And pretty soon damn near everybody on every corner is your fucking enemy. And pretty soon the neighborhood you're supposed to be policing, that's just occupied territory....Soldiering and policing, they ain't the same thing.
• Black Comedy: Quite often. The most hilarious examples include Bodie ordering a wreath for D'Angelo's funeral in Season 2 or Herc and Carver trying to apply Good Cop/Bad Cop routine to Bodie in Season 1.
  • Chris Partlow and Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, two walking specters of death, often have some of the funniest moments of the show while they are carrying out murders in cold-blood. Snoop's purchase of a nail gun they use solely to cover up over 20 homicides is easily one of the show's best comedic moments.
  "Daaaaaaaamn! You didn't even wait 'til we was in the house!"
• Black Dude Dies First: At the end of the first episode Gant, the project maintenance man who had testified against D'Angelo in the Cold Open only to see him acquitted because the other witness recants, is found shot dead, the first character we've seen onscreen alive in the series to be killed.
• Blasé Boast: Omar Little is a stick up man, that is, an armed robber who targets only drug dealers and other criminals to steal from. There's something special about the following exchange in Season 2, at the start of the trial of a drugland assassin who tortured and murdered Omar's boyfriend Brandon.
  Asst. State's Attorney Ilene Nathan: What exactly do you do for a living, Mr. Little?
  Omar: I robs drug dealers.
  Asst. State's Attorney Ilene Nathan: And exactly how long has that been your occupation, Mr. Little?
  Omar: Oh, I don't know exactly, I venture to say about... eight or nine years.
  Asst. State's Attorney Ilene Nathan: Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for 8 or 9 years and live to tell about it?
  Omar: [smiles, shrugs, and sits back in his seat] Day at a time, I suppose.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Used for dramatic effect in the series finale. Dukie hits up Prez for some money, saying he's going to take a GED. Prez points out that he's too young to take that test but acquiesces anyway, and they part on the unspoken agreement that Dukie is about to spend his life as a homeless drug addict and they will never see each other again.
  • Clay Davis was also a frequent source of these. His impassioned speech on the stand while on trial for corruption was perhaps the biggest.
  • Bunk's line "The bigger the lie, the more they believe".
• Blind Black Guy: Blind Butchie lost his sight to a gunshot wound and was once a feared enforcer who got (mostly) out of the drug game after losing his sight. He acts as a mentor figure to Omar and his crew.
• Blood Knight: Felicia "Snoop" Pearson simply lives for shoot-outs and, by extension, killing. She even gets annoyed during a time of peace and prosperity for her organization's business, a time that most would dream for.
• Blown Across the Room: Omar's shotgun sends someone into disintegrating furniture in "Middle Ground".
• Bluff the Eavesdropper:
  • Marlo tricks Herc into wrongly arresting him in order to discover which agency is behind his surveillance.
  • Chris and Snoop find out which drug dealers are from New York and trying to muscle in on their territory by asking things only someone from Baltimore would know. Unfortunately, Snoop isn't that knowledgeable of local pop culture herself, and after she almost kills someone who gives a correct answer, Chris decides that he should handle asking the questions.
• Bluff the Impostor: Chris and Snoop's questioning of New York drug dealers in the fourth season.
• Bluffing the Murderer:
  • Bunk and McNulty try to break D'Angelo Barksdale (who recently became a father) by pretending that a picture of Bunk's kids is a picture of the children of a witness recently killed on the order of Avon Barksdale. (The witness didn't actually have any family.) After they go on talking about the kids now being orphans, and link it around to children getting killed as result of the drug trade, D'Angelo is visibly fighting back tears. While he won't talk directly, the detectives try to make him write a letter giving his condolences to the children, hoping that somewhere in the letter D'Angelo will inadvertently wind up Saying Too Much. Unfortunately for the cops, it's right then that D'Angelo's lawyer arrives and instantly sees through the ploy.
  • In "More With Less", two bluffs are used on a perp named DeShawn. First, Bunk makes claims that they took DeShawn's accomplice to McDonald's as a reward for cooperating (when he in fact refused to talk), and then has Detective Crutchfield escort the accomplice past the interrogation room with a bag of McDonald's food in hand, which scares DeShawn accordingly. Then Bunk and Jay Landsman trick him into thinking a photocopier is a lie detector. In reality the copier has several pages preloaded, some of which say true, and one that says false. The cops ask harmless questions until they run out of "trues", then ask about the crime, and when the kid tries to lie about it, "false" comes out.
  • Subverted. Bodie has to dispose of a whole group of guns from a shootout because a stray bullet kills a [[InnocentBystander young boy nearby. It ends up being an Unintentionally Notorious Crime. Unfortunately, when he tries to throw them off a bridge into the water below, the bag instead lands on a passing barge. When the cops bring him in, Cole and Norris show him the bag, lay out all the guns, and try to bluff that they found his fingerprints on one of the guns. Bodie cleaned all of the guns very meticulously, and thus knows there weren't any fingerprints left on them, so he challenges Cole to point to which one of the guns supposedly had his prints on it. When Cole picks the wrong one, Bodie just smiles, no doubt enjoying the irony since Cole had earlier accused Bodie of being too stupid to even realize that he was stupid.
• Body in a Breadbox: A containerload of bodies is found at the Baltimore docks to open season 2. Initially, the deaths are ruled as accidental on the assumption that they were immigrants and their air hole was covered by another container. However, McNulty, recently reassigned to the Marine unit, manages to prove that the women were murdered in Baltimore city waters, dumping all the unsolved crimes on his old boss and kick off the plot of Season 2.
• Bolivian Army Ending: "Bad Dreams" ends with Frank Sobotka walking to a meeting with the Greeks, not knowing that they plan to kill him.
• Book Dumb:
  • Common in the street hustlers side of the cast, most of whom did not finish high school and yet possess quite a bit of street cunning. This is occasionally highlighted by their malapropisms.
  • Several of the detectives are also examples. Legal professionals who read their reports often gripe about their terrible spelling and grammar. McNulty is the most prominent example. He's not particularly educated or well versed in academic subjects, but he's a brilliant detective and always sees himself as the smartest man in the room. After a disastrous date with a political strategist who is unimpressed by his blue collar lifestyle, he bristles, "I'm the smartest asshole in three districts and she looks at me like I'm some stupid fuck..."
• Book Ends:
  • The first season ends with a sequence showing that despite Avon and D'Angelo getting arrested, nothing has really changed in the projects, including Poot passing on D'Angelo's advice to separate payment and delivery.
  • The entire show ends with scenes showing that nothing has changed.
  • The first season intro song is used in the final montage.
  • And a specific episode example: "The Wire" opens and closes on the same image: Brandon's dead body displayed on the hood of a car, the beginning on the real thing, and the end in the photograph on Lieutenant Daniels' desk.
• Book Safe: Randy is a group home kid who tries to stash the cash he's been earning in the spine of a school textbook. When he finds it stolen, it's one of the worst gut punches in the series.
• Boom, Headshot!:
  • Chris Partlow trains his soldiers to shoot for the head if they're close enough and have a clear shot, or low enough that they'll be able to kill or incapacitate even a target that wears a Bulletproof Vest, as several of the drug dealers and stick up artists tend to do. We see it play out several times, perhaps most memorably when Chris and Snoop distract Bodie so that one of their men can sneak up behind him and shoot him in the head. Twice.
  • How Tri takes out Jelly in Season 3, starting a gang war that makes life difficult for the police.
  • Lex walks right up to Fruit as he's leaving a nightclub with the woman who prompted him to do this, does it, and as she screams tells her to catch him later.^note The Stanfields make sure that never happens
• Born Detective:
  • Detective McNulty uses his preteen sons to trail Stringer through a market, and judging by their skill at it, he's taught a few things about tailing a suspect. While he is a loving father, this is an example of how terrible a person McNulty is at everything but being a detective. His ex-wife is pissed when she finds out and tries to take away his custody rights.
  • While not necessarily used about people who actually have been detectives since childhood, the Baltimore cops call anyone whose instincts for policework seem like they've been doing it since they've been in diapers "natural police". McNulty is regularly termed "a natural police" (sic — a Baltimore cop is almost always called "a police"), as is Lester Freamon (after he's allowed to show what he can do).
• Both Sides Have a Point: Stringer would rather not go all out against Omar, pointing out to Avon that an escalating war would get out of control quickly and be bad for business. Avon sees the logic, but also points out that it damages his reputation for Omar to be walking around with apparent impunity after having stolen drugs from him and killed some of his men. The two thus agree on Stringer's plan to lure Omar out by letting it be known that they want to reach some sort of agreement, and then killing him.Omar doesn't fall for it, however.
  • Doubled down on when Marlo and Michael have pretty much the same conversation in season 4.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Kenard. What separates him from others is that he is really psychotic, putting lighter fluid on a cat in one scene and committing a murder in the same episode.
• Break the Badass: Most people are terrified of the drug gangs that all but own the streets of Baltimore...and those gangs are scared of Omar Little, a shotgun totting stick up artist who only targets the drug dealers or their fronts for his robberies. Most of his victims immediately surrender rather than try to resist when Omar robs them, and the only ones who attempt to fight him are the Barksdale and Stanfield gangs, and both do so when each is at the peak of their power and the most powerful drug empire in town. Unusually for this trope Omar is a sympathetic character, as he's a badass Justified Criminal who has a strict moral code that includes never robbing or threatening anyone who isn't a gangster and being a Friend to All Children.
  • Prop Joe, who claimed he can have an entire family killed, said he might as well just kill himself if he finds out the hitman Brother Mouzone is after him.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Randy in season four may have been a mischievous and somewhat naive teen, but he's also a sweet and likable person that no one wanted to do bad things to. When Randy tells a teacher about the vacant house murders. everyone in the neighborhood gets wind of what Randy said and things start getting really bad for him, very fast. It's mild at first, with the kids at his school not wanting to associate with him, then it escalates into daily fights; enough to the point that his legal guardian forcibly withdraws him until he can be transferred to another school. Unfortunately, that never happens, because several nights later, two random thugs toss Molotov cocktails into his guardian's house and set it on fire. Randy is intact, but his guardian gets horribly burned and is unable to care for him anymore. So Randy has to go to a group home with other volatile neighborhood kids who beat him up everyday for what he did, despite Carver trying to adopt Randy to avoid that fate. When Randy briefly reappears in season five, he has become a hardened, violent individual.
  • Bubbles, the homeless addict and lovable police informant. After failing to clean himself up, he's targeted by a street addict who robs and beats him constantly. The police fail to help him out of the mess, so he takes matters into his own hands and plans to use potassium cyanide to kill the man, but Sherrod, another addict who's like a son to Bubbles, falls for the trap instead, mistaking the cyanide for heroine. Bubbles turns himself in for murder, and tries to hang himself with a belt in the interrogation room.
• Breakout Character: Initially slated to appear in only seven episodes before being killed off, Omar proved so popular with fans and critics alike that the writers changed his arc to make him a major character throughout the show's run. Although David Simon denies that there was ever any plan to kill him off in season 1.
• Breast Attack: The Barksdale Organization tries to deal with Marlo by using a Honey Trap to lure him into an ambush. Marlo, being a little bastard, investigates the girl doing so and finds her connection to the Barksdales. Instead he ambushes her, shoots her in both breasts and then again in the head as she's lying dead on the ground, to send a message.
• Briar Patching: Lampshaded AND Inverted: In the first episode, McNulty makes a bet with Landsman revealing where he would least want to serve: on a boat. Then later in the season, Lester warns McNulty, "When they ask you where you wanna go, and they are gonna ask you where you wanna go, do yourself a favor. Keep your mouth shut." Guess where we see McNulty working at the start of season 2?
• Bribe Backfire:
  • Engineered towards the end of the series. Lester Freamon deduces that Gary DePasquale in the state's attorney's office has been taking bribes to leak non-public court documents to the infamous Maurice Levy, who in turn sold them to his clients, drug kingpins. He persuades the leak to make one more offer to Levy, and he gets it on tape. This leverage ends up being the only reason the show ends with a Pyrrhic Victory instead of a straight Downer Ending.
  • Another way a bribe can backfire is when you think you're paying a bribe, but it's actually just a con. Stringer Bell learned this one the hard way, thanks to the slick-talking Clay Davis when he tried to transition from drug dealing to real estate development and government grants.
• Brick Joke:
  • When Ziggy meets Sergei Molotov for the first time, he derisively calls him "Boris" as a dig at his Eastern European heritage. Near the end of the season, when Sergei is being interrogated by the cops and refuses to speak, McNulty just shrugs and calls him "Boris" because he won't tell them his name. He rolls his eyes and mutters "Boris. Why always 'Boris'?" It gets a Call-Back in season 5 when Marlo calls him "Boris" when he meets Sergei in prison.
  • In Season 1, Judge Phelan tells Rhonda that if she keeps up the good work, she'll be a judge in 10 years or so. In the last episode, during the End Montage, she has become a judge.
• Brief Accent Imitation:
  • Jimmy McNulty tries to affect a British accent in a second-season episode... which is humorous, because while the character is from Baltimore, Dominic West is from Sheffield.
  • Proposition Joe calls the police to try to find out information on Herc, using three different accents (one for each operator he speaks to).
    Operator: Baltimore City Police Department.
    Proposition Joe: Uh yes, ma'am, this is Sydney Handjerker with Handjerker, Cohen & Bromberg. I'm trying to locate a Sergeant Thomas Hauk in regards to a client I'm representing?
    Operator: Hold, please. (the operator transfers him to another line)
    Lt. Hoskins: Mayor's office. Lieutenant Hoskins.
    Proposition Joe: (ghetto accent) Uh, ye-yes, hello. This is Ervin Pepper of Pepper, Pepper & Bayleaf. I'm calling in regards to a Sergeant Thomas Hauk in regards to a-
    Lt. Hoskins: He's no longer on this detail. Hold on for a minute. (he is transferred AGAIN)
    Lt Charles Marimow: Major Crimes. Marimow.
    Proposition Joe: (slow, measured voice) Uh, this is Dr. Jay, calling with test results for Thomas Hauk.
    Lt. Charles Marimow: He's on the street. You want to leave a message on it?
  • Carver prank-calls D'Angelo Barksdale posing as a Korean counterman. Herc finds it unconvincing.
    Herc: Sounded Chinese.
    Carver: Like you can fucking tell the difference.
  • Lester Freamon calls Marlo Stanfield in a ghetto accent to verify the validity of the phone number.
• Briefcase Full of Money:
  • Marlo's bribe for the Greeks in the fifth season. Mocked, because the Greek won't accept it as it comes, dirty from the streets. Marlo misses the point thinking it only means literally dirty, used not as in unlaundered and tries again.
  • Stringer Bell also gives a case full of drug money to "the faucet", a corrupt public official willing to approve building plans in return for a bribe only to later find out that the man he sees is just a random public official and the whole thing was just an elaborate scheme by Clay Davis to swindle him out of cash. This can be seen as a subversion of the trope of sorts as Levy points out that a State Senator like Davis wouldn't be willing to risk his career by walking around with briefcases full of drug money to give to public officials who might rat them out.
  • The police pull some intel off the wire and pull up a bagman coming out of the towers. They pull him over expecting to find drugs, but really, they find a garbage bag full of cash. They are ordered to give him back his money and let him go.
• Broken Pedestal: Although it's accidental (see Chekhov's Gunman) Kenard's relationship to Omar looks like this. He's first seen wanting to play Omar in a game with some other kids; when he eventually meets him face-to-face, the guy is smashed up and limping on a crutch after his Super Window Jump, and Kenard seems decidedly unimpressed. He then trails him to a shop and shoots him in the back, looks shocked at what he's done, and runs away.
• Broken-Window Warning: Randy gets a Molotov Cocktail through his window for talking to the police.
• Bros Before Hoes: Gender-flipped - Det. Kima Griggs chooses to hang out with her male police officer colleagues over her girlfriend, ultimately costing her that relationship.
• Brutal Honesty: "Boys of Summer" sees Tommy Carcetti doing a mockery of what an honest campaign donation call would sound like:
  Tommy Carcetti: Hey there, Jim. Tom Carcetti here, remember me? We met at your sister's house you know, the one that's married to that Republican cunt. I know you don't remember me. I know you don't have any use for fucking politicians, and frankly, I don't give a flying fuck about what you think or what your concerns are. But I do care about what your cute little blonde wife thinks about so many things. But, Jim, the reason I'm calling is because I want you to write me out a check for $4,000, the maximum allowed by law. Because we don't trust you to actually mail that check, we're gonna send over a couple of furloughed DPW workers to beat the check out of you.
• Bulletproof Vest: The series has a tendency of making them useless. In season 1 it's noted that while a bulletproof vest was found on Omar's man John Bailey, it didn't do him much good against the 46 spent shell casings found around him. In season 4, Chris Parlow teaches his soldiers to aim for the head if close enough, or to shoot low enough to get under where a vest would protect. And ultimate badass Omar, who seemingly never leaves home without his vest on, gets killed by a kid that shoots him in the back of the head while buying a pack of cigarettes.
• Bungled Suicide: Discussed: Omar's brother "No Heart" Anthony got his nickname from bungling his suicide attempt when he was sentenced to several years in prison. He attempted to shoot himself in the chest, but came away with only "a contact wound and a new nickname".
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Jimmy McNulty is an alcoholic womanizer, an irresponsible manchild, a neglectful father, and overall an asshole. However, he's also natural police, known for coming up with creative solutions for hard cases.
• Burner Phones: Burners become crucial to the wiretapping cases from the second week onwards. Much of the series revolves around a surveillance and countersurveillance arms race between police and drug dealers.
  • Though the series didn't invent the term, it is probably more responsible for injecting the name "burner" into the public consciousness than any other piece of fiction.
• Busman's Vocabulary:
  • A gangbanger talks on the phone about "capping his dawg's ass". The police bring him in on murder charges, only to realize that he was talking about putting down an actual dog.
  • When Snoop is in the market for a nail gun, she's confused about what she should buy until the salesman starts using firearms terms like "caliber" to describe a model. She perks up and exchanges lingo with the salesman before handing him a wad of bills. When Chris asks what she bought, she rattles off the nail gun's attributes as if it's some kind of badass machinegun.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Avon and Wee-Bey have a darkly comedic version. While in jail in "Collateral Damage", a corrupt prison guard named Dwight Tilghman spends a great deal of time harassing Wee-Bey, and then brusquely refuses Avon's attempt to make a deal, which no one does to Avon. Eventually Wee-Bey hears the reason why Tilghman won't let up on him: Tilghman is related to someone that Wee-Bey killed on Avon's orders. Avon doesn't remember a thing about it, not even when Wee-Bey starts trying to supply details to jog his memory. (By the time Avon and Wee-Bey are in jail, their organization is responsible for around twenty murders in the past two years alone. Is it any wonder Avon can't remember them all?)
  Avon Barksdale: What's up with this motherfucker?
  Wee-Bey Brice: You remember LaDonte? [Avon squints in confusion] Burner from over in the Poe Homes, finally caught him over in the parking lot after school?
  Avon Barksdale: We did that?
  Wee-Bey Brice: Tilghman is LaDonte's cousin or some such. He found out I ate the charge for killing him, now he busting my chops.
  Avon Barksdale: LaDonte? [shakes head in confusion] I can't even remember that one. Need a scorecard to keep up with your lethal ass.
  • Ironically enough, Wee-Bey may not even have been responsible for that crime. When Wee-Bey was caught, his lawyer got the prosecutor to agree to take the death penalty off the table in exchange for a full confession...and Wee-Bey then tried to take responsibility for every killing ever committed by anyone in the Barksdale gang. While the cops definitely know that some of those were carried out by others, it's never made clear how many murders Wee-Bey took the fall for that he didn't commit. LaDonte's murder could have been one of those.
• But Not Too Gay: The fairly prominent gay character of Omar never gets a sex scene, and over three boyfriends and five seasons, only has three on-screen kisses. However, he does have a fairly steamy make-out scene with Dante, which goes beyond what almost any other show was depicting at the time, and he does very frequently appear shirtless; also, Episode 3 of Season 4 opens with him waking up naked in bed with Renaldo, and yes, you do get a (brief) shot of his front. Kima, a lesbian, does get a pretty graphic sex scene. Also, when the audience finds out that Rawls is gay, we never see any hint of him having a romance with another man.
• Butch Lesbian:
  • Kima drinks, sleeps around, and kicks in doors right along with the men of the series.
  • Snoop as well. She has the "One of the Boys" aspect down nearly to a tee to the extent of causing Viewer Gender Confusion, wearing almost exclusively baggy men's clothing (concealing her fairly feminine build seen on the one exception), being one of the top two enforcers for Marlo, and with a voice deeper than most males on the show. Her sexual orientation is only once referred to, and that fairly obliquely (where she claims that she, like Bunk, is "thinking about some pussy"), but the actress who plays her is also a Butch Lesbian.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Ziggy, though he mostly brings it on himself. He can be seen as a Deconstruction of the trope, once you see his fate at the end of the season: he gets so tired of being the punchline of every joke that he snaps and murders George Glekas after he cheats him in a business deal and humiliates him. He gets a lengthy prison term for the crime.
  • Old Face Andre. His misfortunes start when the stash house he runs for Marlo’s crew gets ripped by Omar. As payment for this “failure”, Marlo takes from him his silver ring, which he attached a high sentimental value towards. When Chris Partlow murders a convenience store owner, he is bullied into helping frame Omar for the murder by giving a false witness statement. Eventually, the police begin to suspect that Omar was in fact innocent of this crime, and haul Andre into court with a subpoena. Knowing that he either faces up to 10 years in prison for perjury if he sticks with his original story, or ends up in a vacant if he cooperates with the police, he runs to Proposition Joe in the hope that he will smuggle him out of Baltimore in exchange for a $2,000 payment. By this point Joe has already set up a co-op with Marlo’s crew, and gladly hands Andre over to them after having accepted payment.
  • Cheese Wagstaff, who is regularly owned by someone at least once per season. He doesn’t deserve any better, mind you.
• By-the-Book Cop:
  • Greggs. She refuses to cut corners in the identification of her shooters. In the series finale she is influenced by Carver's example below and the Cowboy Cops are brought down by this trope; they're not mad about it, since they were resigned to getting caught and were glad Greggs was the one to do it.
  • Carver is a very informal cop but Colicchio pushes his luck after a demonstration of excessive force and gets officially reported by Carver, who was initially flexible.
  • Even the bent Burrell gets in the act occasionally. When Carcetti has to do something about Herc's latest wrongdoing, Burrell shows up in a meeting with the actual book of police regulations to make a point that they could find the grounds to fire a saint if they go by the book.
• Byronic Hero: Most obviously, Jimmy McNulty, who is immensely self-destructive and arrogant, though good-hearted. His fifth season story arc especially shows his Byronic side. Other characters, such as Omar, Michael Lee, Slim Charles, and Nicky Sobotka, have their Byronic qualities as well.

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