Wu's on First
Directed By: Tim McCann
Story By: Julie Martin and James Yoshimura
Teleplay By: Anya Epstein and David Simon
Beat reporter Elizabeth Wu (Joan Chen) covers the murder of a Calvert County police officer that Pembleton is investigating. Though she ends up getting an angle on the story, she realizes out she's being manipulated by the man who killed the police officer in the first place. Kellerman gets visited by his brothers Drew (Eric Stoltz) and Greg (Tate Donovan), who are on the run from a couple of bookies.
This episode contains examples of:
- All for Nothing: Drew and Greg had stolen what they believed to be Babe Ruth's uniform from when he played in Baltimore, hoping the money they could get from selling it would finance their trip to Florida. However, a pawnshop owner points out it isn't the real uniform.
- Crowd Song: Kellerman leads the bar patrons in a drunken rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game".
- Establishing Character Moment: Wu shows up early enough on the crime scene to get the relative details, phones them in to her editor, and then takes the receiver out of the only pay phone in the area so her rival, TV reporter Dawn Daniels, can't call in the story before her. This shows her as an Intrepid Reporter Going for the Big Scoop, but doing it intelligently.
- Literary Allusion Title: To the famous Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on First?"
- Mirror Character: Quite a few critics picked up on how Wu is a mirror character to Pembleton, with both of them being The Determinator when it comes to their work, and both bending the rules without breaking them.
- Take That!: David Simon gets his shots against the newspaper business when he has Wu's editor talk about how the truth is less important than a good story, and how that led the paper to win a Pulitzer, both of which are Simon's Real Life Berserk Button.
- You Do Not Want To Know: When Lewis finally catches up with Kellerman in jail and asks him what happened, Kellerman says this word for word.
