A fitting elegy to a gritty, grim city

For me, “The Wire” ended a week ago when Snoop (Felicia Pearson) died. She was shot by Michael (Tristan Wilds), the young drug dealer who teetered on the edge of redemption all season, and her death, like her life, embodied both the show and the city it rhapsodically mourned.

An androgynous waif with legit, which is to say virtually unintelligible, Baltimore street vocals and real-life criminal cred (Pearson did time for manslaughter), Snoop committed murder the way other young women text-message their friends -- regularly and with an air of distracted enjoyment alarmingly close to boredom. She was neither immoral nor amoral, but post-moral. A morality vacuum, obliterating the illusion of choice the moment after it was made.

“How ma hair look, Mike?” she asked just before taking a bullet in the head, and you could hear the shrug in her voice. (Javier Bardem, eat your heart out.) Snoop did what she did -- killed lots of people -- because that’s what you do, you know, when you’re Snoop. It’s not any more complicated than that. Or at least not according to “The Wire.” The universe moves in slow, painfully familiar patterns that creep in that ever-widening gyre toward degeneration. Only a few small instances of transformation briefly postpone the decline.

This is where the finale of one of the few truly groundbreaking shows left us: in Baltimore, a city relying on perpetual cosmetic reinvention while the foundations buckle and the cellars fill with corpses. Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, “The Wire” is, was, no more a traditional portrait of Charm City -- Phillips’ crab cakes! The National Aquarium! The “Diner” guys! -- than it was a traditional cop show. Instead, it relentlessly (and at times, obsessively) focused on the shivering guts of the place. The cops, the criminals, the kids, the teachers, the bureaucrats, all the flawed threads of modern urban life were stripped and stretched and twisted together.

Each season brought a new caste under scrutiny. In the final season, it was the journalists of the Sun, squirming under the yoke of corporate ownership and blind self-congratulatory leadership. “The Wire’s” harsh critique of pride, fear, corruption and incompetence slipped through the newsroom and found Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), a doughy-faced reporter fabricating quotes and stories as fast as his Pulitzer-hungry editor in chief would publish them. Warnings by fellow journos, including righteous city editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) went, needless to say, unheeded, while those of us in the field spent the whole season waiting, longing, demanding that he get caught.

He didn’t, of course, because this is, was, “The Wire,” and justice, at least not lavish, soul-satisfying scoops of justice, is not on the menu. But Simon took his finale seriously and old school, wrapping up all the various story lines and giving viewers more endings than “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”

At the center of the season, the harebrained scheme -- a fabricated serial killer preying on the homeless -- hatched by Det. James McNulty (Dominic West) to get the department enough funding to continue its investigation of rising drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) fell apart. By the time it did, however, the mayor and too many City Hall big shots had bought into it for a whistle to be blown, so the matter was settled quietly to keep it out of the media, which would have damaged everyone’s credibility.

The bust that finally nailed Marlo was compromised, and McNulty and Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), his partner in crime, watched as Marlo walked and only a few of his men got real time.

The Baltimore sun rose and set, then rose and set again, and nothing much has changed, for better or worse. Offering what it has always offered, the finale of “The Wire” spun out a future that is believable if not exactly cathartic, with no heroes, no villains, only the endless repetition of a mortally flawed system in which everyone is somewhat complicit.

For McNulty and Freamon, it’s desk jobs in perpetuity or early retirement. They choose the latter and seem happy enough. Marlo too is forced into early retirement; he only walks if he quits dealing, becomes a legit businessman. Which, of course, he cannot do. We last see him succumbing to the undeniable seduction -- and inevitable death sentence -- of the street. Chief Daniels (Lance Reddick) refuses to play the mayor’s number game and resigns, Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy) becomes a judge, Mayor Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) is elected governor and Dukie (Jermain Crawford) is back on the street, but Bubbles (Andre Royo) manages to stay clean and is finally let out of his sister’s basement.

Only over at the Sun does Simon let hope stagger and fall, right onto a freshly ground ax. The mendacious Templeton not only rides out Haynes’ attempt to expose his lies, he wins the Pulitzer. And those of us waiting for the “Sun Must Return Pulitzer” denouement were stuck instead with the sight of Haynes being demoted to the copy desk.

It was a sad and lovely finale, with poignant images of Baltimore and its people; there was some shooting -- Michael’s a thug now, the drug wars continue -- and even some singing, at a fake wake for McNulty. Finales are difficult, and this one was as good as they get, satisfying, yet no sledgehammers. But it wasn’t the same, not without Snoop, who seemed the strange, unquiet heart of a great, unquiet show.

--

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com