The Wire / Tropes E to L

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You come at the tropes, you best not miss.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness: The show manages to stay very consistent, but there are some examples.
  • Early episodes occasionally include video footage from security cameras pointed at the action. This gets dropped after a while, though these shots make a return during the series finale as a fond nod to the early episodes.
  • Omar swears in his very first scene, but it's quickly established as a notable character trait that he never swears. Michael K. Williams was even given permission to remove any curse words from his dialogue if any mistakenly got put in.
  • In the sixth episode, "The Wire," Avon and Stringer enter the Pit in slow motion and scored with music, a blatant violation of the show's rules about a lack of any artificial storytelling techniques except for the montages at the end of each season. Nothing like it ever happens anywhere else, making it even weirder on rewatch.
• Election Day Episode: The episode "Margin of Error" centering in large part on the Democratic primary race for Mayor of Baltimore, including the campaigning and game-playing in both the Carcetti and Royce camps. Somewhat unusually, it extends out into other areas, showing the impact of the election on the police (specifically, how Kima and another detective are forced to serve as uniformed officers for a day to monitor the polls so that they can't complete their investigation of a politically sensitive murder before the election) and the street (with Randy being given money to distribute flyers for a candidate). The actual mayoral general election is so uneven against the Republicans that it doesn't get any focus at all.^note Save for a short exchange between Carcetti and Davis afterwards.
• Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age: Cutty learns Revolvers Are Just Better no longer applies, now sheer firepower (15 bullets per mag) is more important than a reliable weapon.
  Cutty: The game done changed.
  Slim Charles: Game's the same — just got more fierce.
• Embarrassing Nickname:
  • Some people get saddled with very unflattering street names, including Snot Boogie, Stinkum and Dookie.
  • Major Colvin reveals that McNulty's old nickname was "Bushy Top." He's not overjoyed when that gets brought up.
• Empathy Doll Shot: Discussed in season five, when Gus complains about a fellow journo's habit of submitting these.
• Empty Cop Threat: Almost never happens because the gangs have more credible threats and can act more swiftly. The cops acknowledge that this threat is empty once—right before it's noted that lying to the Grand Jury can be prosecuted.
• Ending Theme: A downbeat song called "The Fall"
• Enemy Civil War: Season 3 turns into this rather quickly.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Omar and the BPD against the Barksdales, to the point that after turning a blind eye to Omar's exploits for his collaboration, Kima wonders if they are still cops.
  • Brother Mouzone and Omar, once they discover they weren't actually enemies and it was Stringer all along
  • Avon prefers to endorse Marlo and introduce him to The Greek connection for a fee rather than endure an East Baltimore (Prop Joe) prominence.
• Enhance Button:
  • A realistic example pops up in Season 2 when the police "enhance" a screencap of a license plate. The difference between the two images isn't any more than a real "Sharpen" tool would produce in Photoshop.
  • Prez at one point in Season 3 works some magic with a security footage on a computer and gets a license plate number by blowing up the right portion of the image. Lampshaded hilariously.
    Prez: Nothing there. It's so tiny. No mere mortal can... *click* You see what he just did? *click* What? He did it again? Who is this man? *click* Where does he come from? *click* Can anybody stop him? Please don't hurt us. *click* Please my eyes, my eyes. It's so big and clear and bright!
    Daniels: Sometimes, you still scare me, you know that?
• Epigraph: Each episode begins with one, usually spoken by a character in the episode. The only episodes which avert this are the finales for seasons 4 and 5, where the quotes are instead a notice for animal control ("If animal trapped call 410-844-6286.") and a quote from H.L. Mencken ("...the life of kings."). However, they are both displayed prominently in the episodes themselves.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil:
  • The Greek's syndicate includes Greeks, Ukrainians, and Israelis (in addition to whatever nationality the Greek himself really is—probably Greek Cypriot, we think anyway) and does business with both Polish and black associates.
  • Whatever else you might say about Marlo Stanfield, he does keep Snoop—a woman, and a lesbian (albeit extremely butch) at that—as basically the Number Three in his organization.
• Escalating War: The entire fight between Valchek and Sobotka in season 2 stems from when both men donate stained glass windows to a local church, and Sobotka refused to withdraw his larger, more expensive window which had been installed first. Valchek has Sobotka investigated in terms of where he got the money, having the officers in his district ticket the Union workers' cars, and doing a "random" DUI screening in the morning to catch the Union guys coming out of the bar, so the Union retaliates by stealing his valuable district surveillance van from right under his nose and shipping it from port to port, sending him photographs from each destination. And even better, even after Sobotka is killed, the van continues to travel around the world, and when Valchek gets the final envelope there's even a bit of what sounds like admiration in his voice.
• Establishing Series Moment: The Wire starts with McNulty talking with a witness while investigating a murder. The subject of the conversation is not about what happened, but about who the victim was and includes a casual jab at the American way. It demonstrates that this series has a different outlook than your usual police procedural, and indicates where on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism the series falls.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Several examples
  • Stringer and Avon, who are like brothers, betray each other for the sake of the business.
  • Proposition Joe is betrayed by Cheese, his ambitious nephew. Ironically Joe had revealed his connection with the Greek to Marlo to prove Cheese's innocence -and save his life- regarding an Omar robbery. Joe remarks he treated Marlo like a son before Marlo capitalizes on Cheese's betrayal.
  • Kima tells the higher-ups in the BPD that McNulty and Lester are faking the serial killer. In a bit of a subversion, the latter two aren't even angry when she tells them it was her, and agree that it had to be done.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Many of the gangbangers respect a "Sunday Truce" prohibiting violence on that day. When two clueless hitmen spot Omar taking his grandma to a church, they make a move on him. Both Omar and Avon are completely livid at this breach, and it's mentioned that other drug lords are equally outraged. Avon orders the hitmen to replace Omar's grandmother's hat—her "church crown"—which was ruined in the attack.
  • Burell, who while not as evil as the others in this list is still not squeaky clean, is clearly disgusted when the Commissioner refuses to speak to Kima's girlfriend after Kima is shot and looks to be doing his best to comfort her.
  • Omar's code of not killing anyone not in the game as well.
    Bunk: A man must have a code.
    Omar: Oh, in-deed.
  • Avon and his sister put family before everything else, Stringer and Avon always put a high value on their genuine friendship until business gets in the way.
  • Chris Partlow is a hitman who has no mercy for pedophiles. To him, Michael's step-father didn't deserve a clean death inside a vacant house, but a brutal bludgeoning for everyone to see. Even Snoop was shocked when she watched him commit the act. David Simon states that the standard is a result of Chris being a victim of molestation himself.
  • Bodie bordered on evil territory at times, but even he couldn't stomach Marlo's methods for dealing with his enemies.
• Everybody Has Standards: Jimmy points out that murdering state witnesses is unacceptable even in a place like Baltimore.
• Evil Is Petty:
  • In Season 2 Valchek has a personal vendetta with Frank Sobotka (chairman of the stevedore's union) after a local church accepted the latter's donation of a stained glass window over his own. He considers the Major Crimes Unit's investigation at the time to be solely a means of getting revenge on the man, and absolutely blows his top when he is told that the case is about more than a few dockers helping to run drugs into the city.
  • Even by the standards of Baltimore's criminal underworld, Marlo Stansfield is an absolute monster. He will order the death of absolutely anyone he wants to, simply for the feeling of power it gives him (this includes a store security guard who he purposefully antagonises in the first place).
    • He forces Ol' Face Andre to hand over a silver ring which had a lot of sentimental value for him after the stash house he ran for Marlo got raided by Omar.
• Evil Power Vacuum: The internal leadership problems and the decay of the Barksdale organization are quickly exploited by Proposition Joe and by Marlo. The ascendancy of the former means a reduction of the violence, the opposite is true for Marlo's.
• Evil Matriarch: De'londa Brice who is a criminal version of a Stage Mom and (to a lesser extent) Brianna Barksdale.
• Evil Sounds Deep: A few of the drug dealers. Stringer and Slim Charles are the most obvious examples.
• Evil Virtues: The higher-ups of the drug trade had to fight or outwit their way to the top and as a result are more hard-working, competent, smart, determined and reflective than most of their counterparts from the other side of the law, who spend more efforts on playing politics than on fighting crime.
• Evil Will Fail: In season 1, the nature of "The Game" of drug dealing has everyone looking out for themselves, to the point where innocent bystanders or even friends who might pose a risk have to be dealt with. It's this repeated brutality that ends up winning allies for the investigation team again and again from players who want out after someone they care about gets hurt.
  • And invoked by Carver in Season 3's first episode, where he tells the hiding dealers "You do not get to win!"
• Exact Words / Loophole Abuse:
  • Dennis is filled in on a major reason the local school system is so broken in Season 4: the school maintains its government funding so long as each student attends even one school day a month, so the school administration doesn't expend much effort in tracking down and penalizing students who have already hit that quota, leading to severe truancy issues.
  • Legally, the police are supposed to stop interrogating potential suspects as soon as they ask to see legal counsel, leaving cross-examination to the courts. In the Season 1 episode "The Detail", Bunk cleverly gets around that rule by convincing D'Angelo to write a letter of condolence to William Gant's (nonexistent) children, trying to trick him into confessing to Gant's murder. When Maurice Levy yells at Bunk for keeping the interrogation going after D'Angelo asked to see his lawyer, Bunk points out that he didn't actually "interrogate" him; he never asked him any questions, and didn't record any of his statements.
  • Burrell and Rawls told the Commanders to get the crime rates down by any means, so Bunny Colvin "followed" their command and goes on to try to implement a legal-drug zone policy while ramping hard on drug crime outside of those locations. When hearing what he's done Burrell is aghast while Rawls is sincerely amused as Colvin did do what he was asked.
• Expy:
  • Johnny Weeks, Bubbles' friend and fellow addict, is basically an extension of Leo Fitzpatrick's character from Kids.
  • Tommy Carcetti is based in part on Martin O'Malley, Mayor of Baltimore 1999-2007, Governor of Maryland 2007-15, and Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. Oddly, O'Malley himself apparently exists in the world of The Wire, having been referred to once in season 5.
  • By the same token, Nerese Campbell, the President of the City Council, is clearly based on Sheila Dixon, Council President for all of O'Malley's term and his successor when he ascended to the Governorship. Also like Campbell, Dixon was caught up in some shady campaign finance dealings; she was eventually convicted of misdemeanor misappropriation and forced to resign.
• Expospeak: Very little from a story standpoint, and no As You Know explanations. You can't skip an episode to follow the plot, and if you don't have a cursory knowledge of each season's field, then be sure to have a web browser open and a pause button handy. The closest the show gets is Bunk and Lester saying as McNulty flirts with women in a bar:
  Lester: Ain't he married or some shit now?
• Eye Scream:
  • In season 1, the most conspicuous injury (and the injury to which the most attention is paid) that Brandon receives when he undergoes torture at the hands of the Barksdale gang is that one of his eyes is gouged out, while the other is left not only intact, but open after death.
  • Prez pistol-whips a teenage drug runner, blinding him in one eye.

F

• "Facing the Bullets" One-Liner: Stringer Bell's last words, when cornered by Omar Little and Brother Mouzone, are "Get on with it motherf-".
• Fake Guest Star: Quite a few. This is yet another series where many "regulars" were not billed as such. The first season gave us Lester, Prez, Herc and Carver, as well as Omar, Bodie, Wallace, Wee-Bay and Landsman, all of whom were credited as guest stars. Some of those later got opening-credits billing, but not all. Perhaps the most glaring example happened in season four, wherein Namond and Randy were clearly the central characters for that season, with Mike and Dukie close behind. None of them were credited in the opening credits. The fifth season does promote Dukie and Mike, but arguably both have less screen time after that.
• Fake Nationality: Sergei, supposedly from the Ukraine, is played by Chris Ashworth, born and raised in the USA. "The Greek," too; played by American Bill Raymond. In-universe example with "The Greek"... who's not even a Greek. He does head a mostly-Greek gang though—and he might be Greek Cypriot anyway.
• Fake Relationship: Cedric Daniels actually was in a relationship with his wife Marla (obviously), but they have secretly broken up just when her career in politics is about to take off. Daniels is actually involved with Pearlman at that point, but for public appearance's sake, he still shows up to a dinner his wife is hosting for several important guests before going upstairs to wait until they're gone.
• Faking the Dead: The audience is led to believe that McNulty is dead, and a wake is being held for him in a Baltimore pub; that is, until he then starts laughing uncontrollably when one of his fellow officers makes a joke about him. It turns out that the "funeral" is a retirement party in the uniquely morbid style of the Baltimore P.D.
• Failure Is the Only Option: No matter who gets put away, the Game is the Game.
• Fanservice: Avon runs his drug operation out of a strip club, Orlando's. The show is occasionally kind enough to include an establishing shot of a dancer.
• The Farmer and the Viper: In season 5, Proposition Joe takes a certain up-and-comer named Marlo under his wing and teaches him how to be a truly successful kingpin. He is rewarded appropriately for his efforts.
• Fat Bastard: Quite a few, including Jay Landsman, Bill Rawls, Ervin Burrell, and to a lesser extent Proposition Joe.
• A Father to His Men: Colvin, especially towards McNulty and Carver.
• Favors for the Sexy: Judge Phelan nurses a torch for ASA Rhonda Pearlman, who uses this—on several occasions—to gain authorization for wiretaps, DNRs, and warrants for the Major Case Unit. Reaches it's apogee in the season 3 episode "Reformation", where she, in order to gain his approval for a very dubious wiretap, actually crosses her legs Catherine Tramell-style and gives him what is implied to be a view of her vagina.
  Daniels: Quite the legal mind.
• False Rape Accusation: An 8th grade girl has sex with two boys in the school bathrooms, and when they shun and scorn her afterwards, they get accused of rape. In the end this ruins quite a few lives and sends ripples through the entire criminal underworld after Randy, who acted as lookout at the door, discloses his knowledge of Lex's murder to avoid punishment for his involvement. However, we never hear directly from the girl in question - one of the male students asks Randy to be the bathroom lookout, and Assistant Principal Donnelly refers to the event as a rape when talking to Randy - so both what the girl consented to and what she later claimed happened are unknown. She does drop the charges against the two boys later on.
• Feed the Mole: After Burrell was surprised to learn about the bug in the Barksdales' back office at Orlando's during season 1, Daniels realized that Carver was Burrell's informant on the detail, since Carver had been at an in-service training that day. Subverted in that Daniels wasn't actively trying to figure out who the mole was.
• Fell Off the Back of a Truck: Nick, Ziggy, and Johnny Fifty almost make this literal with their way of stealing shipments.
• Financial Abuse: After the Barksdale organization collapses and the money flow to Wee Bey's family dries up, Wee Bey's wife De'londa pressures her teenage son Namond to become a drug dealer so she can continue her lavish lifestyle, even going on a shopping trip to New York when Namond is picked up for slinging.
• Flash Back: Used once. In the Pilot. To a scene from earlier in the pilot. Enforced by HBO against David Simon inclinations, who ended up conceding it was probably a good addition anyway.
• Flipping the Bird: Rawls' Establishing Character Moment. These are for you, McNulty
• Flush the Evidence:
  • The Season 2 episode "All Prologue" has D'Angelo Barksdale flush his drug stash down a prison cell toilet.
  • During a raid on a brothel led by Detective "Bunk" Moreland, a gung-ho cop prepares to knock the doors down. Bunk stops him and asks what he's doing, and the other cop responds that he's going by standard procedure, to knock down the doors and enter rapidly before evidence can be destroyed. Bunk stares at him for awhile and then asks if the other cop thinks the brothel is going to flush the whores down a toilet.
• Foil: Because one of the primary themes of the show is the cyclical nature of the city and it's inhabitants, it'd be easier to count the characters across seasons who aren't foils for one another:
  • In the second season, Nick and Frank Sobotka serve as a foil for D'Angelo and Avon Barksdale. Both are uncle-nephew duos who are born into the same business, and both involve the nephew trying to break away, but their respective environments (working class Polish vs. inner-city Black) and subtle differences in character dynamics ia contrast.
    • Later on, Namond Brice serves as an additional foil for D'Angelo, as another aspiring corner boy raised in the game, with direct family ties to the highest-level players. Like D'Angelo, Namond has a strong, influential mother who pushes him towards a life of crime as the only valued means to provide for his family, but he just isn't cut out for that world. What distinguishes the two is that in Namond's case, "someone spoke up for him," namely, Bunny Colvin, his adopted father, something that never happened for D'Angelo, as lamented by McNulty.
  • Stringer and Proposition Joe are both pragmatic businessmen, but while Stringer wants to be sophisticated and to rise above a life in the underworld, Joe is his own boss, is happy with being a simple druglord, is content to work and use a dingy appliance store as his headquarters and has no desire for legitimacy.
  • Slim and Cheese are both high-ranking lieutenants of the game, but while Slim is loyal, friendly, competent and reflective, Cheese is a treacherous, incompetent, impulsive asshole.
  • Norman Wilson and Michael Steintorf in Mayor Carcetti's cabinet. Norman will usually vouch for an approach that will benefit Carcetti in the long term while Steintorf vouches for a more immediate benefit. Carcetti almost always has to choose between the two; though he would rather lean on Norman's side in a morally conscious stance, the struggles of the Mayoral office make Carcetti have to rely on Steintorf's more morally gray position.
  • Jimmy McNulty and Bunny Colvin. They both came out of the Western District, have a passion for real police work, and share the motto of "Fuck the Bosses." Both police end up pushing up against the law - or breaking it - in order to accomplish what they believe real police work looks like, and the result for each of them is effectively a forced early retirement. The difference is that whereas Jimmy is seen as someone who looks out for number one, as his actions up through the final season constantly put his allies in the line of ire from the bosses, or mess up their own cases, Colvin remains a respected member of the police force within his District, having built a reputation for being someone who looks out for his men. This also serves as Foreshadowing for Season 5, as Bunny's radical impact in establishing Hamsterdam is only possible due to his rank and access to departmental resources. Jimmy is totally incapable of any comparable transgression until he gets access to city-wide resources through his Serial Killer gambit in Season 5.
  • Bodie and Wallace are ultimately shown to be foils for one another. Both corner kids grew up in the game, in poverty, starting at the lowest level. Both boys also eventually reach their breaking point when forced to face the extreme disregard for life the game entails; Wallace when he witnesses the aftermath of Brandon's vicious execution, and Bodie when Marlo has Little Kevin killed for no real reason, as Little Kevin wasn't even a snitch. Both also blame themselves for the situations that push them to the edge; Wallace is the one who made the call to Stringer, and Bodie is the one who encouraged Little Kevin to go speak to Marlo after he is picked up by the police. And finally, their decisions to finally heed a moral line result in them being executed by their respective kingpins, marked as snitches. Their similar trajectory is meant to emphasize the inevitability of the fate of the "pawns" of the game, as well as the complete disregard the game has for individual merit and personal strength.
  • The 3 cops Herc, Carver and Prez could have ended up like the 3 corner boys Bodie, Poot and Wallace, and vice-versa had their situations been different.
• Fluffy the Terrible
  • The street names for many hardened criminals are not particularly scary, such as Cheese and Peanut.
  • Major Colvin is a tough veteran of the police force whose nickname is "Bunny."
• Foreshadowing: Many instances
  • The chess conversation in the first season about how pawns get sacrificed, while the people in power stay in power.
  • McNulty's confession that he doesn't want to end up "on the boat" in the pilot
  • Kenard pretending to be Omar;
  • Almost all of Bodie's appearances in season four foreshadow his death
  • Prez not wanting to see Randy get chewed up by the system.
  • An early fifth-season episode has Gus suspect that one of his photographers is planting dolls to create more sensational Empathy Doll Shot photos. As the season develops, one of his writers will start faking sensational news stories.
• Forever War: In the first episode Carver corrects Greggs remarking there isn't such a thing as a "war on drugs", as wars end. Recalled from time to time, on one occasion the police finds the streets empty and jokingly declare they have won.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend:
  • Subverted. It seems as though Wallace has been pretty well forgotten by Poot and Bodie after season one, but the mention of his name in season four provokes Bodie into panicked alarm.
  • Inverted with Brandon.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: a rare example of this done well. You sometimes have to wait several episodes for a minor plotline to advance at all, and it might be by a single line of dialogue; however, since you really have to be paying attention to enjoy this show at all, it usually works.
• Framing the Guilty Party:
  • McNulty and Bunk put Omar on the witness stand, knowing that he will perjure himself to convict Bird in retaliation for Bird's torture of Omar's boyfriend. Everyone on both sides of the case knows Omar is lying out his ass. Everyone except the jury.
  • A large quantity of heroin is planted in CO Tilghman's car to ensure that he will face severe criminal charges for smuggling the tainted heroin that led to five deaths.
  • Marlo has Chris kill a taxpayer and has the only witness blame Omar for it. Bunk is given a hard time by his peers when he tries to exonerate Omar, because, as Bunk himself pointed out in the past, Omar is guilty of several other unsolved murders. Bunk was in fact ready to let Omar take the fall until Omar reminds him that doing so will give the real murderer a free pass.
  • A variation in the final season: The scheme pulled by McNulty and Lester is based on a fictional and fabricated case intended to attract funds towards police work and judicial coverage and then divert the efforts against Stanfield, because Marlo's conviction is just a matter of getting proof. They just have to make a switcheroo and conceal the illegal procedure in the end. Unfortunately Levy gets in their way Spotting the Thread and it backfires, greatly.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During a police/community meeting about drug dealing in city neighborhoods, a chart shows the success of enforcement efforts with drug arrests going up between 2003 and 2004—however arrests for every other crime are down. This of course reinforces the third season's premise that the drug war distracts from real police work.
• Freudian Excuse: The show goes to some pains to show how the street villains of the series are the product of the environment they grew up in as children. More specifically, Chris Partlow is confirmed by Word of God to have been molested as a child.
• Freudian Slip: When McNulty is decrying the idea of ending the Barksdale investigation in Season 3 due to lack of progress, he complains that two years earlier they'd left "a real bastard" (Stringer) on the street and then asks if "we're gonna let that same son of a bitch beat me again?". The rest of the team notices, but McNulty does not and continues on his rant.
• From Camouflage to Criminal: A fan theory about the Stanfield gang believes that some members, especially Chris Partlow, may have spent time in the military, based on their rigid discipline and the training new members get in marksmanship. Commented on in-universe as well, as Cheese quips "Y'all some Semper Fi motherfuckas ain't ya? Where Cheese go to enlist?" during a deal with the Stanfield gang.
• Functional Addict:
  • McNulty is a professionally functional alcoholic. It gets lampshaded by his FBI profile. The trope is subverted because he is not fully functional as Rhonda Pearlman gets to lament, (nothing is more useless in bed than an Irish drunk) and his alcoholism is one of the causes behind the wreckage of his romantic relations.
  • Bunk is overall a more successful one, although he embarrasses on occasion because he's not as good at holding his liquor or dealing with the aftereffects, the most notable occasion being the time he pukes at work in front of Lt. Daniels.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": The Baltimore police have a tradition of holding rowdy Irish wakes for their own. After a poignant eulogy, they culminate in a passionate sing-along of the Pogues' "The Body of an American." They apparently use this tradition for retirements as well.

G

• Gangbangers: Half the cast are in drug gangs. The corner boys and hoppers of Baltimore's drug underworld may talk, act and dress like the bangers they see and hear about in mass media, but they learn to grow out of that mentality quick if they want to move up the ladder. Kingpins like Avon, Stringer, Prop Joe, and Marlo are savvy, shrewd, cunning and, above all, low-key. Flashy, attention-seeking gangsters don't last on those streets.
• Gangland Drive-By:
  • Subverted and subjected to a Take That! in the fifth season. During one attack on a rival gang, one member of the Stanfield gang convinces Snoop to do a drive by because of how cool it looked in Boyz n the Hood, (obviously not having learned the intended message) and they promptly miss all the targets. Snoop manages to kill only a single target because she gets out of the car, carefully aims, and shoots one member of the fleeing gang.
  • In season 3, a few members of Avon Barksdale's gang plot an ambush on a Stanfield corner involving a drive by, and to try to counter the loss of accuracy that is typical with drive bys, the guys in the car - Country, Bernard and Chipper - are only going to attack once Cutty and Slim Charles have struck the Stanfield gang and had them distracted. Gerard and Chipper, however, are far too eager for glory and decide to attack without waiting for the signal and to disregard all the tactics they had been told to use, including keeping their driver out of the line of fire. Unbeknownst to them, a lookout for the Stanfield gang spots them before they even try to pull it off, so the gang is armed and ready when their car goes by. The result is that Country and Chipper are killed, while Cutty, Slim Charles and Bernard barely make it out alive.
  • Both Snoop and Chris each manage to pull off one successfully in the third season. Snoop's involves riding by Poot's corner on a motorcycle, stopping there, and then opening fire on Poot with a handgun before riding off, only succeeding in killing Rico, the Barksdale soldier accompanying Poot. Chris's is an episode later, when, suspecting that a woman named Devonne has seduced Marlo as a trap, he notices a suspicious car at the meeting place. Chris has his driver pull up alongside the other vehicle, at which point Chris puts a shotgun shell through the window, wounding Avon and killing a henchman named Tater, before driving off.
• Gangsta Style:
  • Played straight frequently, but shown to be ineffective, because most 'gangstas' have no idea how to use guns. A shootout between two gangs is shown in season two where they fire like this, (half the time covering their eyes) and the only person they hit is an innocent child upstairs in an apartment not far away.
  • Actively defied by Marlo, Chris and Snoop—the first thing they do on recruiting Michael is teach him how to shoot properly. He lampshades the trope later when he's teaching Dukie how to shoot; he tells him not to do any of that "gangsta bullshit" when using his gun. Cutty and Slim are also shown aiming down the sights when shooting. The minor drug dealers may not know how to shoot, but the professional muscle know how to do it right.
    Snoop: Fuck them West Coast niggas. In B'more, we aim to hit a nigga, you heard?
• Gayngster: Omar and Snoop. Omar receives quite a lot of flack for it, while Snoop is treated as one of the guys.
• Generic Ethnic Crime Gang: The Greeks. The organization is multi-ethnic, including Vondas and Gleikas who are certainly Greek, Eton who is Israeli and Sergei who is Ukrainian, not Russian. The leader of the gang is only known as "The Greek" and he's not even Greek
• Genre Deconstruction: Of crime dramas.
  • Law enforcement operates through "salutory neglect", passing off really hard cases to other agencies, juking the crime stats so it look likes the force is doing good on paper and pulling off the occasional buy-bust for the news. Policing is a taxing, thankless job so many simply concentrate on climbing the hierarchy so they can have enough in their pensions. Actual police work is boring at best and deadly at worst. The cops who actually want to do their jobs inevitably messes up their personal lives and careers.
  • Gangster life isn't all is cracked up to be either since too much flash could attract attention from cops. Paranoia is rife because you could be killed for suspicion of being a traitor.
• Genre Shift: There is humor throughout the show, but Season 5 is driven by absurdist dark comedy as much as drama. It was the only place left to go after the downward spiral of despair the city went through in the first four seasons. Hard to say what makes the better punchline—McNulty's FBI profile or Clay Davis's trial. Or maybe it was Valchek becoming Commissioner.
• "Get Out of Jail Free" Card: Omar in season two (for testifying in a court case). In the end, the card itself hardly matters.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • Jimmy McNulty and Rhonda Pearlman in Season 1, Ep 3.
    Rhonda: Let me understand. You're married and a date is a room at the Best Western with the blinds closed. Now you're single and a date is you coming over unannounced to learn the legal requisites for a pager intercept.
    McNulty: Pretty much.
    Rhonda: No.
    McNulty: Okay. I hear you.
    (cut to McNulty and Rhonda enthusiastically rutting in bed)
  • An incredibly drunk McNulty in "Duck and Cover":
    McNulty: I'm looking you in the eye, Gus, and I'm telling you, I'm not driving a car tonight!
    (cuts to McNulty driving across three lanes and drunkenly singing along to "Transmetropolitan" by The Pogues)
• Glory Hound: Chipper and Gerard decide they want all the credit for hitting the crew on Marlo's corner, and drive in before they get the signal. It gets them both killed.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: The East side and West side gang lords have a truce day where they meet and play a high-stakes basketball game. This series is full of examples of this, fairly cordial interactions between sworn enemies.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Stringer decides to have D'Angelo killed, even though D'Angelo is the nephew of Avon, who is Stringer's brother in all but blood, because he fears him flipping since the prison time seems to be getting to him.
  • Major Colvin, frustrated by the lack of headway against the drug trade made by traditional policing initiatives, decides to allow open dealing in three limited areas as a way of getting his district's crime numbers down.
  • The hitmen assigned to Omar decide to attempt to kill him even though it's a Sunday morning and he's taking his grandmother to church.
• Gold Digger: Squeak's taste for expensive jewelry leads Bernard to skim the profits in order that she get them. It earns him a beating and demotion to getting burner phones.
  • Donette seems this way, to a lesser extent, although it may be justified somewhat by her having had a child by D'Angelo.
• Gone Horribly Right: Hamsterdam. It works as intended, as the citizens retake the streets and corners with the dealers all concentrated in three largely abandoned blocks. But as it solves some problems, it creates others: with no need for lookouts the kids who did that job are now unemployed,^note until Carver suggests to the dealers that they rehire the kids as "auxiliary police" to keep thieves away from Hamsterdam, the "warrior" cops like Colicchio don't really know what to do with themselves, and with all the addicts now concentrated in the neighborhoods theft and overdoses increase, along with general lawlessness, at first.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: So many well-laid plans:
  • The undercover buy with Orlando in Season 1 gets him killed and puts Kima in the ICU.
  • Frank's scheme to use smuggling profits to lobby politicians for a dredging of the canal to save the dock jobs fails completely: his arrest makes him politically toxic and he loses all support, he himself gets killed, and the union local is decertified, making it unable to mount any opposition to Krawczyk's plans to convert the granary pier into luxury condos.^note And his own son commits a murder in the bargain
  • Avon's attempt to strike back at Marlo with a drive-by hit on one of his corners gets two of his own soldiers killed because they couldn't wait and follow instructions.
  • Bubbles' plan to get back at the guy regularly robbing and assaulting him by making a sodium cyanide gelcap for the man to steal instead leads to Sherrod's death when he uses the gelcap himself, leaving Bubbles so guilt-ridden he tries to hang himself
• Good Adultery, Bad Adultery / Sympathetic Adulterer: In season 1, D'Angelo hooking up with Shardene despite having a long-term relationship and young child with Donette (whom he led Shardene to believe he was separated from) was depicted very sympathetically. His wife Donette hooking up with Stringer in season 2 wasn't depicted so sympathetically, especially since Stringer was the one who arranged D'Angelo's death.
• Good Cop/Bad Cop: Subverted: season one, episode five has this shtick turning into "Bad Cop, Pissed Cop" when Bodie sees right through Herc and Carver's attempt to use it on him.
• Good Is Not Nice: Many of the cops who can be considered decent are nevertheless rough around the edges, in varying degrees.
• Good-Guy Bar: Kavanagh's, the bar where McNulty and Bunk regularly go to drink, and where the Irish wakes are held.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Omar has a pretty distinctive antihero scar running down the left side of his face, which goes a long way towards solidifying him as a badass. Interestingly, that scar isn't a prosthetic—Michael K. Williams actually has a scar like that, which he got from a bar fight. Marlo has a less noticiable scar around the left side of his jaw, which is also an actual scar. Nobody seems to notice that Hassan Johnson (Wee-Bey) has a scar on his jaw almost identical to Marlo's.
• Gossip Evolution: The deaths of Stringer and Omar transform with the telling.
• The Government: From season 3 onwards, there is a very substantial subplot focusing on City Hall and how the whims and rivalries of politicians affect the War on Drugs in Baltimore. The general conclusion is that the office politics that already exist within the police department and its ability to tackle crime are only made worse because of the impossible demands of the mayor's office, who aren't willing to commit any resources that could damage their own career paths but do want to benefit from the PR of "reducing" the crime rates. Even an Obstructive Bureaucrat like Burrell is clearly frustrated by it:
  Commissioner Burrell: To Carcetti, I'm a hack. Royce was no different. Maybe I am. But every day, they send over a new priority. Go after the bad guys. No, change that. Make quality-of-life cases. Get on top of the murders. On second thought, run the whores out of Patterson Park. You think the mayor tells the schools how to teach kids, or the health department how to do its job, or sanitation how to pick up trash? But, get elected, and suddenly, they know police work.
• Gracefully Demoted:
  • Bumbling detective Michael Santangelo is demoted from the Homicide Department to a patrol officer after he refuses to help Major Rawls spy on and kick fellow detective (and the closest thing the show has to a main character) Jimmy McNulty off the force. Santangelo later admits that despite the fact that the reassignment is supposed to be a punishment, he actually prefers the position, as he keeps his old pay rate, it gets him away from Rawls and others like him, and Santangelo is much more competent at being a beat cop than he ever was as a detective.
  • Santangelo's story also gives Jimmy the impetus to ask for a demotion to patrol, as Jimmy realizes that his obsession with solving cases as a detective exacerbates all his worst traits. Between this epiphany and forging a new relationship, Jimmy steps away from investigative work to try to get his life in order. It works... for one season.
• Grammar Nazi:
  • Judge Phelan admonishes McNulty for a report plagued with grammatical mistakes. It's a justified trope since an official document should be written properly, and also because in real life, judges are notorious for being very picky about grammatical errors and other solecisms. The complaint reflects more on McNulty's dissipated ways.
  • In the pilot Rawls insists that McNulty's punishment report be written in a certain format with no spelling mistakes. And be sure to use those little dots. "Deputy likes dots". When Jimmy relates his task to his Sergeant, Landsman doesn't give a damn about it.
    Landsman: Fuck you and your dots.
  • After reading the detail's Door Stopper of a report requesting phone surveillance, Ronnie comments, "You guys can't spell for shit."
  • Being a grammar watchdog is part of the job description of city editor Gus Haynes, of The Baltimore Sun. In one of his first scenes, Gus schools Alma Gutierrez, a rookie journo on the usage of "to evacuate". Buildings are evacuated, not people, unless you mean the persons are getting an enema. David Simon was chastised in a similar way back in the day, but Alma is not entirely incorrect.
• Gratuitous Foreign Language: In the second season's opening credits, a passport ostensibly from the Russian Federation (despite still having Communist stationary and reading "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" at the top of one page) reads: ??????????? D????? ??????????? (Fedorovskal Dovlasch Lschtvkrfyrsht). The passport's gender reads M and something that looks like a cross between an F and ?, and the "transliterated" name is "Dobrav Naberezhnyi".
• Greedy Jew: Maurice Levy, the Amoral Attorney who profits handsomely by protecting drug dealers, makes a number of references to his Jewish culture, while Rhonda Pearlman, his honest counterpart, is also Jewish, but you'd never know it. McNulty at one point calls Pearlman "a member of [Levy's] tribe," but in the context he may very well be referring to the fact that they're both lawyers. (David Simon said he based Levy on some real Jewish drug lawyers he knew in Baltimore—insisting that all or nearly all such attorneys in Baltimore were Jewish—and claimed privileges to use the trope, as Simon is Jewish himself.)
• Greek Chorus:
  • The touts, who you constantly hear (and sometimes see) in the background shouting out the name of the latest brand of heroin. "Brands" like "WMD" "pandemic" and "election day special" are amongst the more memorable ones. These are often punctuated with shouts of "Five-O!" or, famously, "Omar! Omar coming!".
  • Or in once instance, "Haha! Check out that little kid getting his ass beat!"
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Doesn't matter who you work for; the cops, the drug gangs, the schools, the government or the press. If you dare to buck the system in the name of what's right, then the institution to whom you were loyal will find a way to destroy you for it. If you play loyal and are willing to do horrible things for your superiors, then you may be rewarded, or you may be chewed up as cannon fodder. Nobody is portrayed as better than anyone else.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • Bodie escapes from juvenile hall in Prince George's County^note just outside Washington, about 40 miles from Baltimore by simply grabbing a mop bucket to pass the guard booth and then walking out the side door. And the disguise is not even tested as the guard is distracted chatting with a lady. Grabbing the mop may have been less about needing a disguise and more about wanting help standing after the vicious beating he had taken. He's next seen trying to hitch a ride 'right outside the jail'.
  • Add Maryland's Department of Correction to the agencies depicted as being severely dysfunctional. Yes, in real life, guards do smuggle drugs into prisons for inmates, and face criminal charges over it when caught. However, the prison would likely be on an extended lockdown after five deaths from tainted heroin in one night, not only making D'Angelo's murder impossible but ensuring an intense investigation that might have found that Officer Tilghman was bringing in the drugs without relying on Avon giving him up.
  • Even under normal circumstances, prisons are laid out, and guards deployed, to make it very unlikely that two inmates would be alone with each other behind a closed door.
  • Also when Omar and his crew put on disguises and convince the muscle at the Barksdale stash house to carry him up the stairs on his wheelchair before they rob them.
• Gunpoint Banter: Brother Mouzone and Omar have a very genial standoff - each complimenting the other on their choice of weapon and Nerves of Steel.
• Gun Porn: Given that Baltimore is a shooting gallery, a great deal of weaponry is inherent to the narrative. One prominent example occurs when the Barksdales are readying their arsenal to wage war on Marlo, including grenades and lots of semi-autos.
• Guns Akimbo:
  • Done briefly by Marlo during a target practice session.
  • Omar wields two guns when he robs Marlo's poker game.

H

• A Half-Dozen Guys in a Basement: Major Crimes in season 1 is based out of a basement in a nondescript location.
• Hand Cannon: Omar possesses a Desert Eagle, but he uses it sparsely. When he's actually out robbing people, he prefers smaller handheld guns or a Sawn-Off Shotgun that he can hide under his trenchcoat.
• Happy Marriage Charade: Cedric Daniels and his wife are separated, but they still pretend to be happily married to keep up appearances so she can get her political career off the ground.
• Hard Work Fallacy:
  • Deconstructed with Bodie, a lowly soldier in The Game who figures that by doing everything he's told and working hard in the drug trade he can eventually advance beyond his station. By the later seasons he's still in the same position if not worse off, and realizes that The Game is rigged.
    Bodie: We like them little bitches on the chess board.
    McNulty: Pawns.
  • One of the overall themes of the show is also how institutions will "juke the stats" to present a rosier picture of its accomplishments than reality would suggest. It primarily attributes this to the attitude that police or teachers simply need to work harder/smarter to catch criminals/educate students without giving them the necessary resources to do so.
• "Harmful to Pets" Reminder: Ziggy Sobotka buys a duck, and goes to the Stevadore's local bar to play an elaborate bit about having gone blind and acquiring the duck as both his guide animal and lawyer, and he and the bar patrons start pouring it saucers of beer and shots of Whiskey. After just few days of this, the duck drops dead, and the same bar patrons hypocritically wonder out loud what kind of idiot gives a duck whiskey.
• Harmless Villain: How many see Marlo Stanfield. It really comes back to bite the cops in the ass.
• Hate Sink: Cheese Wagstaff, who is one of the few people in the series to have no redeeming qualities, and is a mix of violent, treacherous, arrogant, rude, and stupid, and is a deadbeat dad to boot.
• Headbutting Heroes:
  • A minor case in season 3. The MCU is slowly turning into a dump unit for solving impossible cases, but McNulty doesn't want anything with it and continues his investigation on Stringer Bell. On the other side, Lester Freamon is compliant out of loyalty to Daniels and happy to do actual police work after years in terrible units. They both annoy each other at the beginning, with McNulty appealing to Lester's pride and longing for puzzles to solve and Freamon berating Jimmy for being a selfish jackass pissing on the unit he himself created. Hilariously, they both give themselves food for thought.
  • Jimmy locks horns with almost every ally at some point or another.
    Daniels: We're all pieces of shit when we're in your way. That goes with the territory.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: While the heel/face lines are often very blurry to begin with, basically any time a character involved in organized crime decides to become an informant, they inevitably die. The most prominent example is probably Bodie Broadus.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Herc is constantly waffling between fairly stupid but well-meaning grunt and dangerously incompetent ladder climber. Eventually he starts working for Levy, but uses the opportunity to leak Marlo's cell number. Then he erases all that goodwill by milking Carver for insider info and sabotaging the investigation that his own leak made possible.
• Hello, Attorney!: Rhonda Pearlman. Both in and out of universe.
• He Knows Too Much: Several examples; the standard anti-informant measure.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Avon and Stringer have known each other since childhood and have been a package deal ever since. They have disagreements, but at the end of the day, it's all "us."
• Hidden Depths:
  • Pryzbylewski is initially dumped on the Barksdale detail because he's an incompetent detective who once accidentally shot up his own car in a panic. On his first day he accidentally discharges his gun in the office, and later gets another car destroyed by needlessly inciting the local community. The only reason he doesn't get fired is nepotism. However, after being restricted to office duty, he begins to excel and becomes a specialist in penetrating the drug dealers' heavily slurred, slang-laden, and coded communications. He also becomes a decent teacher during season 4.
  • In his appearances during seasons 1-3 Wee Bey is portrayed as an unrepentant hardened criminal with no shame for his actions. In season 4 though its clear that he sees his son headed down the same path and doesn't want him to end up in prison like him and lets Colvin take him in.
  • D'Angelo, in "The Buys", is shown to be quite fond of Chess. He also develops an appreciation for good literature while in prison.
  • Bubbles often shows that he's smarter and more knowledgeable than you'd expect for a hobo junkie, which makes his current situation more sad.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The Greek rarely meets contacts directly, instead sitting and inconspicuously reading a newspaper nearby while his second-in-command Spiros talks to them, allowing him to know what's going on and remain anonymous.
• History Repeats: A motiff tied-in to the immovableness of the system. In the series finale several characters end up in situations that harken back to the pilot episode. Most notably, Detective Leander Sydnor goes to Judge Phelan and asks with his help investigating a major case (just like Jimmy McNulty did, in a conversation with the exact same character, five seasons prior). The "Where Are They Now" Epilogue insinuates that Baltimore is a cyclical place, and that characters will always end up in certain roles (e.g. Michael becomes the new Omar, Dukie becomes the new Bubbles, Carver takes the torch from Daniels, etc)
  Same as it ever was.
• Hollywood Law:
  • Throughout the series some officers are shown on both the day, evening and night shifts in a short period of time, some even within the same day. The Baltimore Police Department rarely gives shift changes until the next fiscal year.
  • Officer Tilghman asks the warden and state troopers coming to search his car if they've got a warrant. While the warden responds that under the terms of his employment he consents to searches of his vehicle anytime he parks it on prison property. This is probably true, but he didn't even need to say that, as federal and state courts have repeatedly held that any searches of people, vehicles or anything else under prison jurisdiction require only reasonable suspicion, not probable cause, due to the higher security requirements of prisons.
  • Throughout the last two seasons, Tommy Carcetti repeatedly refers to a possible gubernatorial challenge in 2008, after serving two years as Baltimore mayor. Maryland's gubernatorial elections are held on the midterm cycles - 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, etc. The new governor would have been elected the same year that Carcetti was elected mayor - 2006 - and up for re-election in four years, not two.
  • The Baltimore Police Department's Comstat system is in real life known as 'Citistat'.
  • While all of the police department characters hold ranks that did exist in the Baltimore Police Department at the time of the show's production*, the show's chain of command skips over a few ranks. In the real chain of command, from the Commissioner downwards is Deputy Commissioner, then Chief, then Colonel, then Lieutenant Colonel, then Major, Captain, Lieutenant, Sergeant, and lastly, Detective/Officer. In The Wire, any mention of the ranks of Chief, Lieutenant Colonel, and Captain are omitted. Presumably this is to avoid confusion and make the relationships between different members of the hierarchy clearer to the viewer.^*The rank of Colonel, as held by Raymond Foerester, and later Cedric Daniels, was retired in July of 2016, along with Lieutenant Colonel, in an effort to streamline operations and give all divisions within the department an equal degree of priority. All personnel holding the former ranks being appointed to the rank of Chief, a title formerly used only by certain civilian employees within the department
  • Cutty's nurse looking into his prior admission history and learning that way of his criminal past is a major HIPAA violation that could at the very least get her suspended.^note Then again, this is Baltimore ...
• Homage: the opening scene of the fifth season recalls a sequence from Homicide: Life on the Street (another David Simon series) in which two detectives bluff a perp by convincing him that a photocopier is actually a Lie Detector. This ruse was unsanctioned but used anyway by real BPD detectives.
• Honey Trap: The Barksdales attempt to carry out a hit on Marlo by sending a woman named Devonne to seduce him. Subverted when Chris Partlow senses a trap, and thus is able to foil the attempt. Marlo then personally executes Devonne outside her house.
• Honor Before Reason: Despite his difficult financial circumstances due to the collapse of the shipbuilding industry in the city years ago, Lou turns down his brother Frank's offer to serve on a commission looking into improvements in the docks that would pay him a monthly stipend, because it came as a result of Frank's cronyism and backroom dealing.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Shardene.
• Horrible Judge of Character
  • Wallace never believed Bodie and Poot would kill him to rise higher in the Barksdale organisation.
  • Burrell told Daniels he can keep Prez and Freamon in his unit. He had no idea they are the smartest guys in there.
  • Prop Joe takes Marlo under his wing, under the belief that Marlo can learn how to be more diplomatic and businesslike. Marlo murders Joe as soon as he gets the Greek drug connection, and dissolves the New Day Co-Op.
• How's Your British Accent?: A Take That! to the fact that Dominic West actually is British, McNulty puts on a ridiculous English accent to go undercover at a brothel in season two.
• Human Traffickers: The Greeks, an international crime syndicate which first appears in season 2, engages in sex trafficking among several other illegal activities such as the drug trade. They first come to the attention of the BCPD when a group of Eastern European girls are left to suffocate in a crate in the Baltimore docks.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: When cross-examining Omar at Bird's trial in Season 2, Levy notes Omar's extensive criminal history and suggests that for all his protestations of nobility in not targeting those not in the game, his admitted occupation of robbing drug dealers is really just a way of profiting off the drug trade, an evil enterprise that destroys a lot of lives. Omar turns it right back around on Levy:
  I do it with a gun. You do it with a briefcase.

I

• I Coulda Been a Contender!: Characters like Wallace, Omar, Michael, Randy and Dukie just didn't quite make it thanks to poverty and turned to crime.
  • In an example closer to the Trope Namer, Avon Barksdale was once a talented Golden Gloves competitor before following his father into a life of crime. However, it seems like he was much more successful as a drug lord then had he continued to be a boxer.
  • Cutty, too, alludes to his past as a boxer, telling Bodie about his older brother's killer left, and is shown working out on a bag.
• Identifying the Body: After the Barksdales start retaliating against Omar and his gang, they gruesomely torture and kill his boyfriend Brandon before dumping his body to Make an Example of Them. Omar asks McNulty to "see Brandon" to confirm it's really him, who accompanies him to the morgue. The sight is unbearable enough to cause the normally stoic Omar to howl in rage and despair.
• I Never Said It Was Poison:
  • After a gang shootout, Bodie wipes fingerprints off the guns used, puts them in a backpack, and throws the backpack from a car into the river, where it lands on a barge and is turned over to the police. Cole and Norris later interrogate Bodie, produce the backpack and claim they found his fingerprints on one of the guns. Bodie calls their bluff and asks for a lawyer.
  • During an interrogation, Herc accidentally reveals too much about his informant (Randy), which gets the kid branded as a snitch, his house firebombed, his foster mother hospitalized, and generally ruins his life.
  • An example entirely between criminals: Brother Mouzone clues in to the fact that Stringer was responsible for Omar coming after him because the usually shrewd Stringer tips his hand asking, in a surprised tone, about the existence of more than one assailant.
  • An even more understated example than the one above: after Brianna Barksdale learns from McNulty about how her son D'Angelo's death in prison wasn't a suicide, she confronts Stringer and Avon. When the conversation gets to Brianna softly asking Avon if him and D'Angelo had beef, Avon shuts her down, saying he could never do that. However, he says "I ain't have shit to do with it" at the end, to which she says "to do with WHAT?!". To Brianna, this slip up signals that Avon knows what really happened (at the very least).
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The titles of the finales of every season (or the second-to-last episode, in Season 5's case) relate back to the area of the city that season five focuses on, always having something to do with finishing a task.
  • The finale of Season 1 (which focuses on the police) is called "Sentencing".
  • The finale of Season 2 (which focuses on the docks) is called "Port in a Storm".
  • The finale of Season 3 (which is about city politicians) is called "Mission Accomplished".
  • The finale of Season 4 (which is about the school system) is called "Final Grades".
  • The second-to-last episode of Season 5 (which is about the city newspaper) is called "Late Editions".
  • Applies to the proper finale as well; "-30-" signals the end of an article or press release.
• Idiot Ball:
  • Brianna calls Avon out for sending D'Angelo in an ill-fated drug run without proper backup or decoys, when Avon feels that he couldn't trust anybody else.
  • The always smart Stringer Bell tipping his hand to Brother Mouzoune when he asks "them?" (re: Mouzone attacker/s) and without hiding his surprised tone. Avon calls him out for questioning Mouzone, as a soldier like the Brother should be left to his own devices.
• If It Bleeds, It Leads: Invoked by Lester and Jimmy during their serial killer scheme; they know that the more lurid the story is, the more coverage it will get. The trope is later discussed and namechecked by Gus when the case draws the attention away from the indictment of Clay Davis.
• Imminent Danger Clue:
  • A moving shadow on a nearby wall in the alley where the undercover Kima and Orlando are parked tips her off that the supposed drug buy is not what it seems; moments later he is killed and she seriously injured by two gunmen.
  • D'angelo thinks Wee Bay picking him up and taking him to a dark house is this (as he had a conversation about this subject earlier), but it turns out he was being Wrong Genre Savvy and was just being taken to help with some fish tanks.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy:
  • In Series 2, Bodie's crew and another gang unload dozens of rounds at each other and fail to cause even a single injury... except for a little boy in an upstairs bedroom who gets a stray bullet through the head. Most of the bangers don't even aim properly when they shoot, and have their eyes closed when they pull the trigger.
  • Omar is less than 20 feet away from Avon after he uses a fake phone call from Wey to lure him out of Orlando's, but all of his shots miss.
• Incompatible Orientation:
  • McNulty starts to pull the moves on Greggs, but he is informed better by Bubbles
    Bubbles: You a dog McNulty? Cos if you are, you are barking at the wrong pussy.
  • Greggs and McNulty go to a lesbian bar where he contemplates hitting on a girl, but he is discouraged
    Greggs: Please, don't embarrass yourself.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: Inverted;
  • Herc hides a camera in a brick wall during the fourth season, which is then immediately found by a drug dealer and placed in a pigeon cage.
  • In season 2, Herc buys a small microphone with Carver's money, intending to record some incriminating evidence quickly and then return the mic for a refund. They place it in a tennis ball in the gutter next to the dealer's street corner, but he unknowingly picks it up and throws it into traffic out of boredom. Hilarity Ensues as they're forced to hire Herc's cousin to pose as an informant named "Fuzzy Dunlop" to recuperate the costs.
    Carver: Fifteen... hundred dollars.
    (beat)
    Herc: Twelve-fifty with the police discount. (sighs) It just couldn't stand up to the modern urban crime environment, man.
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: Stringer should really have been concerned that Bodie and his friend didn't notice the black SUV that was no more than one car behind them every step of the way from Baltimore to Philadelphia and back again. If it hadn't been Stringer's men, there would have been trouble.
• Informed Attractiveness:
  • In Season 2, McNulty and his Marine Unit partner Claude Diggins note how attractive a floater they pulled out of the river is. It's ultimately revealed that she was being smuggled into America as a prostitute.
  • Carver is rejected for the role of an undercover john because Pearlman says he doesn't look like he needs to pay for it. This results in McNulty being the selected undercover.
• Informed Judaism: In contrast to the explicitly Jewish defense lawyer Maurice Levy, you would never know that assistant state's attorney Rhonda Pearlman is also Jewish^note beyond, possibly, her name if it weren't for two things: Word of God and a very subtle remark by McNulty. He referred to Pearlman and Levy with the phrase "your twisted little tribe". Since he was complaining that they were both officers of the court, it's not even clear that he meant any Jewish subtext.
• Inherent in the System: The overarching theme of the series is that the characters are trapped inside the machinations of the city of Baltimore, and no one can ever really shake up the system. It is possible to achieve a few minor victories here and there, but as long as the system is the system, they can only be temporary at best and the system always will snap back into place. This affects every aspect of the city:
  • Law enforcement: Police brass are only interested in looking good to their superiors, which means they are constantly directing their subordinates to focus on short-sighted actions that will temporarily produce favorable statistics while failing to address the roots of crime.
  • Drug gangs: Ambition and greed for power to control more of the drug trade will always drive the gangs to war with each other over territory, perpetuating the cycle of violence that imperils profits, attracts police attention, and cuts lives short.
  • Labor unions: The dockworkers aren't making enough money to support themselves, but can't rehabilitate their industry without political capital, which they're too poor to afford, so they have to resort to criminal connections, which do further damage to the dockworkers' position.
  • Local government: To keep their jobs, politicians must be more concerned about getting re-elected than actually governing well. Everything they do is dictated by how it will play to voters, affect their fundraising, and earn them political alliances. If they don't play the game, they'll get voted out and replaced by someone who does.
  • Public education: Teachers, just like cops, are under pressure by top officials to produce favorable statistics rather than do their real jobs. Their time is taken up by manipulating standardized testing practices and scores to give the illusion of quality education while actually leaving many students behind.
  • The media: Sensational and low-quality online reporting is making it harder and harder for journalists to do their jobs. The managers of once-prominent newspapers are slashing their budgets and staff while focusing on shallow stories to compete with the rest of the industry in a race to the bottom.
• Innocence Lost: The young characters (Wallace, D'Angelo, Bodie, Dukie, Michael).
• Internal Reformist: Daniels, Colvin, Carcetti, Stringer Bell and Proposition Joe try new approaches in their respective lines of work and trades. They all get defeated, crushed or assimilated by the game.
• Interrupted Suicide: Landsman and Norris return to the interrogation room just in time to cut Bubbles down from his attempt to hang himself.
• Intimate Telecommunications: In season 1, the group of detectives who have wiretaps on the Barksdale drug empire listen in on one member of the gang having phone sex with one of his girlfriends. The detectives are all amused by the cheesy descriptions the two are using and such, but after the phone sex ends the two have a discussion that's actually relevant to the case.
• Insistent Terminology: Lester Freamon, a highly capable detective, was forced into pawn shop unit for thirteen years and four months.
  • Rarely on this show is anyone referred to as a "cop". They're a "Police". Just like that: "a Police." If you're a cop, it's pronounced "Poh-LEESE." If you're street, it's "POH-leese." This is largely Truth in Television.
• In-Series Nickname: Quite a few of them, several of whom are Only Known by Their Nickname.
  • Bird (real name: Marquis Hilton)
  • Black (real name: Marlo Stanfield). Oddly, this nickname is only ever used when people mention that he has this nickname. In actual conversation, he's called by his real name.
  • Bodie (real name: Preston Broadus) Also referred to as "Mr. Shit" and "Mr. Entrapment" by an amused McNulty
  • Boris (real name: Sergei Malatov). He hates this nickname:
    Sergei: Boris. Why always "Boris"?
  • Bubbles/Bubs (real name: Reginald Cousins)
  • Bushy Top (real name: Jimmy McNulty)
  • The Bunk (real name: William Moreland)
  • Bunny (real name: Howard Colvin)
  • Cheese (real name: Calvin Wagstaff)
  • Cutty (real name: Dennis Wise)
  • Dee (real name: D'Angelo Barksdale)
  • Dukie (real name: Duquan Weems)
  • Fifty (real name: Johnny Spamanto)
  • Fruit (real name unknown)
  • Herc (real name: Thomas Hauk)
  • Horseface/Horse (real name: Thomas Pakusa)
  • No Heart Anthony (real name: Anthony Little)
  • Poot (real name: Malik Carr)
  • Prez/Prezbo/Mr. P (real name: Roland Pryzbylewski)
  • Proposition Joe/Prop Joe (real name: Joseph Stewart)
  • Puddin (real name: Herbert De'Rodd Johnson)
  • Shamrock (real name: Shaun McGinty)
  • Slim Charles/Slim/Tall Man (real name unknown, although presumably, his first name is Charles)
  • Snoop (real name: Felicia Pearson)
  • Snot Boogie (real name: Omar Isaiah Betts)
  • Socks (real name: Lester Freamon). This is his old nickname from his Patrol days in the Southern, and only his old beat partner is ever seen using it; however, others are likely to call him "Cool Lester Smooth" whenever he pulls something especially slick.
  • Stinkum/Stink (real name: Anton Artis)
  • Stringer Bell/String (real name: Russell Bell)
  • The Greek (real name unknown)
  • Vondas (real name: Spiros Vondopolous, and he later states that even this isn't his real name)
  • Wee-Bey (real name: Roland Brice)
  • White Mike (real name: Michael McArdle)
  • Ziggy/Zig/Fucknuts/Malaka (real name: Chester Karol Sobotka)
  • Becomes a plot point when Bunk has to track down Kenneth Dozerman's missing service weapon, and the only evidence he has to go on is the thief's nickname: Peanut. Which brings up hundreds of hits in the police computer.
  • Jay Landsman ties two murder cases together on the tenuous grounds that each has a suspect known as "D".
  • Also concealed a minor bit of characterization: Cheese is Randy Wagstaff's Disappeared Dad.
  • Herc and Carver try to cover up using the listening device (hidden in a tennis ball) by crediting their information to a fake informant (Herc's cousin) they named "Fuzzy Dunlop."
  • To general amusement, Major Colvin reveals McNulty was known as Bushy Top when he first worked patrol in the Western District.
• Instant Death Bullet: Quite frequently for a show renowned for its realism, though justified at times.
• Insult Backfire:
  • Omar's Shut Up, Hannibal! given to Levy. (I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase)
  • A conversation about Vondas and his outfits where The Bunk shows his knowledge.
    McNulty: You know what they call a guy who pays that much attention to his clothes, don't you?
    The Bunk: Mm-hmm, a grown-up.
  • McNulty and The Bunk talking to D'Angelo and Bodie.
    McNulty: This is just us talking right? Just you, me, my partner and... what did you say your name was?
    Bodie: I didn't say shit.
    McNulty: Just you, me, my partner and Mr. Shit here.
• Ironic Echo: Many. Prominent examples include:
  "Who's your daddy now?" Judge Phelan, McNulty
  "I'll take anybody's money if he's giving it away." Senator Davis, Namond Brice
  "I'm tired of this gangster shit." Stringer Bell, Marlo
  "A man must have a code". The Bunk, Omar (quoting Bunk) quite a bit later.
  "Get on with it, motherfucker." Stringer, Bunny Colvin.
  "Move, shitbird!" Prez in the first season, then Valchek in the second.
  "Fuck you, fat man." Bird in the first season and Kima in the fourth, both times said to Jay Landsman in the same exact tone. Jay clearly recalls the first instance the second time around.
  "A title 3 makes this case, or you don't do it all. Chain of command" McNulty vs Daniels in the first episode and then inverted in the season 4 finale. The second time, they seem to be very much recalling the first conversation.
  "That whole area [Howard Street] is like Inner Harbor East ten years ago—New Westport is like Howard Street ten years ago." Andy Krawczyk's pitching sale to Stringer Bell in 2004 and to Marlo in the finale.
  A particularly sarcastic one in Season 4 as Randy repeats to Carver all the promises he made and couldn't keep as Carver leaves the hospital where his foster mother is in intensive care following the firebombing.
• Ironic Nickname: Both "Little Man" and "Little Kevin" are anything but, with the latter example being lampshaded during Herc's search for him.
• Irony In addition to the many ironic echoes above:
  • Stringer is very insistent about locking doors. In his final scene, several locked doors prevent him from escaping
  • In the finale, Marlo leaves the game with Stringer Bell's utopia at hand; legitimate businessman above street pettiness. For Stanfield however this is a personal hell
  • After a impune killing spree, the one Pay Evil unto Evil crime done by Chris leads to his life imprisonment. The brutality of such action may hinder this "empathic" interpretation, though.
• I Shall Taunt You: Omar uses this against Marlo, who places his name and street reputation above everything.
  Marlo Stanfield: MY NAME IS MY NAME!
• It Will Never Catch On: In one of the prequel shorts, we see a young Omar robbing an innocent man at a bus stop with his older brother Anthony and a friend. When Omar is disgusted with the robbery and forces the older boys to return the man's money, the friend rolls his eyes and says, "You're not cut out for this shit." Yeah...

J

• Jerkass: A very large amount, but a special mention goes to Valchek, Rawls, and Cheese.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Lampshaded in Rawls's speech to McNulty telling him not to beat himself up over Kima getting shot as it was not his responsibility. After going over everything he doesn't like about McNulty and admitting that he hates McNulty's guts, he says that for that reason if it were in any way McNulty's fault that Kima took two that night he would have long since let him know that he felt that way.
  • Invoked by Watkins when he reminds Royce that Carcetti was right about the state matching funds being available for the city to use for witness protection, but Royce never made the city's money available.
• Job-Stealing Robot: Frank Sobotka is horrified by the upcoming trend of automation -after he's shown it's already in full use in the port of Rotterdam- as this would render the stevedores' job obsolete.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • Inverted; several times, the Baltimore PD wants the FBI to come in and take over (they're better funded and equipped, and glad-handed when it comes to manpower), but they refuse because they only want terrorism or corruption cases and political calculations obstruct the way in later seasons.
    McNulty: What, we don’t have enough love in our hearts for two wars?
  • The homicide cops hate McNulty with a passion after he aggravates the workload of the Homicide unit when he proves the case of the thirteen dead women doesn't belong to another jurisdiction as initially assigned. The heads of the other agencies do argue about the jurisdiction but Rawls is able to dodge the case until McNulty intervenes as payback against Rawls, who exiled him from the Homicide unit.
  • Valchek brings the FBI into the investigation when he realizes his case is no longer focused on his target, Frank Sobtoka, who's inadvertently gotten into bed with an international racket dealing in drugs, women trafficked for purposes of prostitution, and stolen goods (especially cars and high-end electronics). The unit are actually glad to have them, although it means they have to re-prioritize their targets, and the feds withdraw their support as soon as the union corruption charges have been made.
• Jury and Witness Tampering: The premiere episode has a witness killed and drug lieutenant D'Angelo Barksdale acquitted for murder, via witness tampering. Protecting the life of state's witnesses -or solving their murder cases- becomes a very serious political issue afterwards.
• Just a Gangster: The trope namer, and it contains several examples
  • Avon's quote to Stringer when he rejects Stringer's proposals to make the Barksdale Organization a legitimate group is the source of the trope name. Avon has grown up in The Game and knows that the outside world doesn't hold anything for him.
  • Marlo would desperately wish to have the option to remain Just a Gangster, but his hand is forced into becoming legitimate, which ironically is his own private Hell.
• Just a Kid:
  • Bad idea, Omar.
  • Said by Vinson during the final minutes of the series finale, regarding Michael's rise as the new stick up man, a la Omar.
    Vinson: Shit, you just a boy!
    (Michael fires his shotgun at Vinson's knee)
    Michael: And that's just your knee.
• Just Like Robin Hood/Karmic Thief: Omar Little often epitomizes the Robin Hood archetype. He steals from drug dealers and has been seen on more than one occasion giving money to poor kids. Additionally, Stringer tells Avon at one point that his 'Robin Hood' style is why he's so untouchable, despite the sizable bounty on his head; he's known to share his take of the drugs with addicts in the areas he settles in, so they won't pass on his whereabouts to the Barksdales.

K

• Karma Houdini: Subverted by Marlo's ambiguous fate. Played straight many times: Maurice Levy, Andy Krawczyck, Scott Templeton, Valchek, The Greeks, and Senator Davis, among others.
  • None of the officers who beat Bodie and Bird in Season 1 seem to face any consequences.
  • The addict who assaults and robs Bubbles in Season Four sadly goes unpunished.
• Karmic Death:
  • While it's hard to say that Omar's death is considered karmic, due to the fact that he is somewhat of a sympathetic character, he is killed by a small child in a convenience store in the fifth season. The same kid who had seen Omar having a shoot-out in the street back in season three, and who Bunk noticed imitating Omar. He had previously stated in the series that he didn't consider children as a threat.
  • Cheese's death at the hands of Slim Charles as retribution for selling out Proposition Joe, his own uncle, which Cheese had essentially implicated himself in during the speech he was halfway through before Slim shot him.
  • Snoop's death, as Michael got the better of her by using the same techniques and advice that she and Chris Partlow had taught him.
  • Stringer's death also qualifies, as it's a direct result of his attempts to set Omar and Brother Mouzone against each other.
• Kavorka Man: Bunk is lazy, overweight, smokes a lot, has a bad attitude, and may very well be an alcoholic. He also cheats on his wife with beautiful women, who for some odd reason find him irresistible.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Marlo, at least once in the fourth season, when he flagrantly shoplifts lollipops just to intimidate the convenience store security guard. This being The Wire, though, it's played as much to explore his ego issues as to establish that he's just plain evil. The payoff comes when he has that same security guard killed by Chris Partlow and Snoop for daring to ask him to stop.
  • A friend of Shardene is abused while overdosed in a party and then thrown in a dumpster rolled up in a carpet. This deeply affects Shardene, D'Angelo's girlfriend, and snowballs into dire repercussions for the Barksdale organization.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Stringer Bell and Omar.
• Kingpin in His Gym: in Season One, Avon and Stringer are shown working out at the gym and on the basketball court while planning gangland operations.
• Knee-capping: Done by both Omar in the first stick up of the series, and then mirrored by Michael doing the same in the very last robbery of the series.
  Vinson: You're just a boy!
  Michael: And that's just ya knee.
• Knight in Sour Armor: The vast majority of the good cops know perfectly well just how much of a Crapsack World Baltimore really is, and how little of what they do will change it. However, this doesn't stop them from trying.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Implicit; Sobotka stages his own undoing by escalating a minor conflict against an influential police officer. The Greek however makes a pragmatic exit as soon as he learns he is under scrutiny, forsaking a valuable last container.

L

• Landslide Election: The Democratic candidate wins the offscreen mayoral election with over 80% of the votes. Baltimore being a one-party town, it's just mentioned in passing, along with a quip that anything less than that margin would had been an embarrassment. This is Truth in Television for jurisdictions dominated by a single party in the U.S., where it's the primary elections (i.e., the intra-party election to select the candidates) that are competitive, rather than the general election.
• Large and in Charge:
  • Avon and Stringer are both 6'3" and noticeably taller than most of their mooks, which adheres to the King, Queen and pawns analogy.
  • Prop. Joe and Fat Face Rick are heavyweight bosses. Rick even looks like the Shaquile O'Neal of drug dealers.
  • Slim is a very tall lieutenant at 6'5 1/2" and a straight example in the finale.
  • Daniels and Rawls are 6'4" and 6'3" commanding officers who are usually the tallest policeman of the room when not together.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In season 1, Nakeisha Lyles is a security guard who saw D'Angelo Barksdale shoot somebody in the 221 building she patrolled, but was bribed to lie on the stand about it. This contradicted the testimony of an earlier witness - William Gant - who was later killed by the Barksdales for testifying (even though D'Angelo walked free). Later on in the season, when the Barksdales are tying up loose ends (including killing witnesses) due to the police coming down, she is one of the first ones to die thanks to the bribery.
• The Last DJ: Lester Freamon was this before getting a second chance in the first season. McNulty and Daniels too, even though Daniels does eventually enjoy a string of rapid promotions, he is ultimately forced to retire his post as commissioner because he's unwilling to compromise his principles.
• Last Stand: Bodie:
  "This my corner, I ain't runnin' NOWHERE!"
• Law of Disproportionate Response: Major Valchek's actions against Sobotka and the dockworkers in season 2 are because he got outbid on a stained glass window at a local Polish Catholic church.
• Law Procedural: Occasional, especially in later seasons
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One editorial conflict at the Sun may very well apply to the show and its intellectual respect for the viewer; Gus defends stories with uncompromising integrity and deep sociological examination while the editor thinks such overcomplexity needs to be watered down to have any kind of success.
  Gus: I think you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything.
  Editor: I don't want some amorphous series detailing society's ills. If you leave everything in, soon you've got nothing.
• Leeroy Jenkins: After deciding that they want the credit for taking out Marlo's corner crew, Gerard and Chipper go driving right in without waiting for the phone call as they should have. It gets them killed.
• Less Embarrassing Term: When Mayor Royce finally hears about "Hamsterdam," he realizes—in an unusual display of progressive thinking—that Colvin might be on to something (or at the very least realized that it's a quick and cheap way of reducing the crime stats, thus burnishing his record) and wants to figure out a way to make it more general. However, he also realizes that "Baltimore legalized drugs" is guaranteed to play poorly in the press and kill a lot of incoming federal dollars, so he casts about for a less embarrassing way of saying "we legalized drugs." Unfortunately, by the time he settles on "harm reduction" as the acceptable term, the media has already caught wind of Hamsterdam and he has to fall in line. (This, incidentally, is the last time Royce is portrayed remotely positively.)
• Let Me Get This Straight...: Often used, though the way it's usually phrased is "let me understand". For example:
  Rawls:: Let me understand something. You are having the deputy bust my balls over a prior-year case?
  
  Rhonda: So let me understand. You're married, and a date is a room at the Best Western with the blinds closed. Now you're single, and a date is you coming over unannounced to learn the legal requisites for a pager intercept?
  McNulty: Pretty much.
• Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics:
  • A source of dysfunction and discontent among the ranks; the police work is not shaped to tackle the roots of the urban problems but to polish the clearance rates, juking the numbers if necessary. Unmodified data is leaked as a political weapon against the Commissioner, and detectives whose actions alter the workload of the Homicide unit are heavily frowned upon.
    Landsman: You know what he is? He is a vandal. He is vandalizing the board. He is vandalizing this unit. He is a Hun, a Visigoth, a barbarian at the gate, clamoring for noble Roman blood and what's left of our clearance rate.
    Daniels: The stat games... that lie, it’s what ruined this department. Shining up shit and calling it gold, so that Majors become Colonels and Mayors become Governors; pretending to do police work while one generation fucking trains the next how not to do the job.
  • The "numbers game" is also an inherent problem in the education system; instead of a balanced curriculum the teaching is focused on specific answers to test questions in order to improve the official ratings. The "no child left behind" policy is also portrayed as a cosmetic and hindering tool.
  • The same goes for the Baltimore Sun plot, and the paper's willingness to tolerate Scott Templeton's fabricated stories.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When Herc and Carver lose an expensive bug hidden in a felt-skinned Dunlop tennis ball, they create the fictional informant "Fuzzy Dunlop" (played by Herc's cousin) to help pay for the loss.
• Lonely Bachelor Pad: For a while, McNulty's apartment has nothing but a mattress on the floor, which makes it very uncomfortable when he wants his kids to visit.
• Lovable Rogue: Omar Little.
• Lying to the Perp: A Baltimore Police Department interrogation technique. "The bigger the lie, (the more they believe.)"
• Lyrical Dissonance: When the Greek mobs go fugitive and season 2 ends, they play the genuine Greek pop song "Efuge, Efuge". Its mood sounds just about right, but if you speak Greek you instantly realise it's actually a Break-Up Song: "She's gone, She's gone". On the other hand, the Greeks have just gone fugitive.