I love this show, but the feeling I get while watching it is despair. It makes me think that nothing really ever gets fixed in this world, it just gets shuffled around.

EEz28, please put a spoiler tag over that. A lot of us here like to go in fresh and without expectations.

who the hell was O-Dog?? Wow, I coulda sworn it was Michael! Gotta watch again...

It was Michael.


-Doc

From Wikipedia:

O-Dog

* Played by: Darrell Britt-Gibson
* Appears in

Season four: "Corner Boys;" "That's Got His Own" (uncredited) and "Final Grades."

O-Dog is a teenage soldier being trained to kill by Chris and Snoop in Season 4 of "The Wire". He is hanging out with Michael Lee when Monk Metcalf shoots Dennis "Cutty" Wise. In the season finale, he ambushes and murders Preston "Bodie" Broadus with two shots to the head.


If you look back at the episode, Michael shoots a corner boy a little later, his first kill. The scene following of him in the back of the car thinking about what he's done would lose its poignancy if he killed someone prior.

The commentary tracks on S4 confirm it was O-Dog, not Michael.

But after the corner boy, Chris says, "Now you can look them in the eye", indicating that his first kill was to the back of the head.

I have to go back and watch this... as I could have sworn on a stack that it was Michael, and that's what everyone else I know who watches the show thinks.


-Doc

I agree, but the thing I love about The Wire is that it actually does what "the news" tries, often unsuccessfully, to do. It shines the light on a lot of problems that either get overlooked by the general public (drug addiction, homelessness, corporate media) or pushed to the side and ignored due to their sheer enormity (inner-city schools, self-interested politicians, underfunded police forces). For the most part, it does this very realistically (with the exception of Omar 'Bruce Wayne' Little). Unfortunately, most of these problems are the kind of problems that most people agree need to be fixed, but have no idea how to go about fixing them.

I am also located in MI, have a Comcast subscription and had the same problem on the Monday when the second episode of this season was supposed to show up On Demand. I checked the On Deman listings every day the whole week and it never showed up. I ended up watching it when HBO finally showed it on Sunday night. Every other Monday besides that one I have been able to watch the new episode after work On Demand.

The entire McNulty scheme is unsettling, as is his spiral downward (as it's supposed to be, I would imagine). Were my roommates and I the only ones, who, upon hearing Lester's request for more and seeing McNulty's resulting, "you gotta be kidding me" look, turned to each other and said, "Holy shit, McNulty's going to kill a homeless dude!"?


-Doc

As said, it was definitely not Michael. Chris meant that he could look others in the eye because he has now killed someone. A symbol of respect, I guess...

How is there so much confusion here? I could have sworn that it was Micheal that shot Bodie?

Well, both David Simon and the actor who plays Michael (along with the other corner kids and the actor who plays Prop Joe) say it wasn't Michael, so...there you go.

Both of them mention it was a source of confusion among viewers, though.

crap, sorry about that guys, I really didn't think I was giving anything away. Won't happen again.

All of those people are on the commentary? I gotta see this.

The David Simon commentary was on a separate episode, but the corner kids and Robert F. Chew (who plays Prop Joe and served as an acting coach for the kids) are all together on one track; it's pretty entertaining.

i was thinking the same thing. then he found donald, and i thought he would stalk this guy until he dropped dead in an alley and then set up another crime scene.

Just finished watching the track with Robert Chew and the kids. Was pretty good. One of the guys was praising everybody, Robert Chew had some interesting tidbits to say, and funny stuff from the kids.

i thought it was michael as well. thanks for the correction.

if you remember earlier in the episode, Chris and Marlo discussed that Michael shouldn't kill Bodie because he had worked under him, and his first kill should be someone he doesn't know.

Which is why I thought it WAS Michael... he "manned up". Thanks for the correction, though, guys. I haven't listened to the commentaries yet. Ashame it's so (clearly, for a lot of people) confusing. In a show like this that demands complete attention from the viewer, it's ashame when something like this that should be clear inadvertantly changes a major story point due to lighting, costume, look-alike actors, whatever.



-Doc

SAME! Then I thought they were going to hold onto him until he died (fine line to murder...), but instead, he dropped the poor bastard up in DC.

-Doc

Are you being serious? The cast in primarily black. I watch the show with two white roommates and two black ones. None of us have ever had any difficulty identifying who it was doing what on screen, and yet in this case, we all thought it was Michael. The sheer amount of confusion on this board proves that we were not alone, and I'm being racist? Get over yourself.


-Doc