Bump bump bump to say that Sepinwall has finished his
Wire recaps with the end of season 3 as of a few months ago (convenient as I am rewatching the series with my girlfriend (her first time) and just finished s3 last night) over at his new blog at HitFix.com. The "veterans" versions (including s4+5 spoilers) can be found
here. He also conducted an interview with George Pelecanos on his contributions to the series, particularly his always brilliant-and-heartbreaking penultimate episodes
right here.
EDIT: I'd just also like to talk a little about Season 3 in general, which I found very flat and unsatisfying the first time I watched it, but am certainly more convinced of this time. I think part of the reason I didn't enjoy S.3 the first time around was because a lot of it is actually laying groundwork for the two seasons to follow (a ballsy move by Simon and co., considering they didn't actually know they were getting a Season 4 while they were making S.3, and indeed wouldn't get it for 22 months) by introducing Tommy & the City Hall plotlines and Marlo & his crew and Cutty & his gym and setting Prez up for his exit from the BPD and his switch to teaching, as well as a lot of other characters and situations that will reverberate on down through the rest of the series (Slim Charles, looking deeper into Prop Joe's organisation, Omar realising that he needs to continue his vendetta against the Barksdale crew by himself, leading to his gradual decline and fall in S.5, heck there's even a brief bit of newspaper intrigue).
I think it also helped that I am watching the seasons in much closer succession than the first time I saw them, meaning that not only do S.3's connections to S.4 and S.5 become more clear, but the way that S.3 is a culmination of a lot of what happened in the first two seasons carries a lot more weight as well, meaning something like the scene where Brianna confronts Stringer and Avon about the possibility of D's death being a murder, or pretty much any scene with Avon and Stringer together have all the tension and subtext come through clear as day.
Season 3 of
The Wire is the mathematical center of the show, but it's also the dramatic center, with most of the plotlines serving as bridges to past or future events. Viewed this way, the Hamsterdam plotline begins to make a lot more sense as well, in that
The Wire is largely a story about the inescapable and cyclical nature of institutions, be they political institutions, or ingrained methods of doing police work, or The Game. And Hamsterdam (and to a lesser extent, Stringer's ideas about running The Game) is an example of what happens when someone attempts to step outside of that cycle and use counter-intuitive methods to better the lot of the people in The Game (or in Stringer's case, simply insulate himself from the inherent dangers of the current way The Game is played, dangers which eventually get him killed). It is important in the overall structure of the series that this comes in the middle, after an awful lot of business-as-usual before it, and an awful lot of the same after it. Particularly in the way that Hamsterdam itself falls, due largely to many separate parties all assuming the worst about each other- despite the fact that secretly and without each others knowledge, they're all looking for a way to keep Hamsterdam running, if only they could insulate themselves from the negative press. Seasons 1 and 2 do an awful lot of contending that the world doesn't necessarily need to be the way it is, Season 3 shows us how that this is true, and then 4 & 5 confirm the true nature of things, often ramped up to extreme levels with Marlo's ever-growing pile of bodies or Season 5's musical chairs with the Police Commissioner position.
