The Wire Makes Shipping Gripping By Lyall Cresswell At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

It’s difficult to imagine that any crime drama could take the everyday drudgery of haulage work, transport contracts and shipping and make it compelling, but that’s what the second season of “The Wire” has achieved. Following on from the ground-breaking first series, which focused on Baltimore’s drug corners, the focal point of the cult HBO show moves to the dockyards and follows both the trucks leaving the docks, and drug use on the streets.

In a partial move away from the gangland corners, Season 2 of ‘the Wire’ is concerned with the complex dealings between the stevedores and the smugglers who operate in the shipping yards. In an ailing industry of stacking and unstacking cargo containers, where boats are unloaded and trucks begin the first stage of their haulage work contracts, the unit tracks the smuggled goods which come into the city of Baltimore.

How it begins

The case begins with Beadie Russell, an inexperienced Port Authority officer on her beat on the dockyards, checking the customs labels of the haulage companies’ cargo. She finds the dead bodies of thirteen young women in a container. The disgraced Jimmy McNulty soon arrives to nose around ‘the box’ and they deduce that the girls were being imported for forced prostitution. When it is discovered that the makeshift air supply on the container had been smashed shut, the deaths take on murder status and Beadie Russell is stuck with an unenviable “whodunit.”

Meanwhile, the special unit under Lieutenant Daniels are investigating the stevedores’ union who are under suspicion of smuggling, and the murders eventually become part of their investigation.

Telephone screens

Unlike most cop shows, The Wire spends a great deal of screen time on the details and drudgery of police work. Lester Freamon and Prez map the paper trail, logistics and delivery work of drug buys and distribution.

In particular, the show features a number of scenes where a computer is used to track the returnloads of ships being unloaded and the haulage companies who provide the lorries for delivery work. We not only see the screens that the dock checkers use to track the cargo but we also see them moving from ship to dock. Somehow ’The Wire’ manages to keep the monotony of transport contracts exciting.

And like HBO shows that have gone before it, such as ER and the West Wing, ‘The Wire’
doesn’t shy away from mystifying details, such as the technical terminology and cop jargon used in every day life. The result is a series of street scenes where people talk a confusing kind of street lingo: the dealers and cops alike.

The Dockers

Frank Sobotka, a union leader, who turns to crime in order to raise funds to save his union, is one of the main protagonists in Series two of ‘the Wire’. However, the Wire is one of those rare shows which allow the audience to sympathise with the criminals, and this is true of the position Frank Sobotka finds himself in. Frank is charged with keeping the struggling and underemployed dockers’ union alive, and smuggles an occasional illegal returnload for a mysterious criminal called “The Greek”. Using the extra money for the benefit of union workers when they get injured or fall on hardship, Frank becomes a middle man moving smuggled goods through the docks. The cargos are being diverted from the scrutiny of customs, but when Frank Sobotka suspects that the cops are onto him he begins intentionally misplacing legal cargo to see if the police will follow the haulage companies.

Following trucks around Baltimore? Somehow The Wire makes transport contracts, delivery work and the dockyards seem like good TV.

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