The Death of Omar

Kindly permit me to begin my blog by reviewing shit.

In Season 5 of The Wire, probably the best show ever to appear on TV, Omar Little (pictured above), likely the best character to appear on TV, gets blasted by Kenard, a preteen too retarded to fear him. If this is news to you, welcome to 2008.

Viewers were disappointed.  How could he die like this?  Over The Wire's five seasons, Omar had developed a mythical stature as a robber of drug dealers so respected and feared that knuckleheads dropped their drugs out of stash house windows at his feet, even though Omar often had no intention of robbing them in the first place.

For Jimmy McNulty the plot was a police procedural, but for Omar the Wire was always a western--and he played one of the craftiest gunslingers in fiction.  Because of his prowess and stature, viewers felt that a shootout at high noon was necessary--followed by Omar, the last man standing, riding off into the sunset with a trunk full of drug loot.

Instead he got blindsided in a neighborhood shop by a future midget--okay, a kid--someone not even he would suspect.  Blasted while trying to buy a pack of Newports.

For those who wanted it to end more dramatically, riddle me this: how?  Who in the show would square off against him?  Throughout the show's five seasons, the pissed-off drug lords whom Omar repeatedly robbed had only one strategy for killing him--trying to trick him.  Laying traps.  Trying to make him believe he was safe, in a state of truce.  Omar's response?  To read them like a winning poker player and always to make the right play.  Or to wait for them in the streets in vain, his enemies too confused and fearful to confront him.

If you want a shootout between the hero and the bad guy in the last scene, there are any number of John Wayne movies to suit you.  I guess, I don't watch many John Wayne movies.  This show is about a crime-ridden, corrupt place, where mythical heroes can't last long.  In a place like this, Omar had to go, and it couldn't be a dramatic, satisfying end.  It had to be a bullet in the back of the head.  Welcome to Bodymore.

--Yakshi