The Best Character Endings On The Wire, Ranked

If ever there were two Wire characters who understood how the system really operates behind closed doors, they were Bill Rawls and Stan Valchek, two high-ranking Baltimore city police officers who had no problem playing the politics game to get ahead.

Rawls, originally the head of the homicide division, is first introduced as an antagonist to the perpetually insubordinate Jimmy McNulty, one of his detectives whose nosiness damages the department's clearance rate and forces him to open an investigation into local drug lord Avon Barksdale, much to his chagrin. Stan Valchek, on the other hand, plays a larger role in the second season, when a personal grievance against longshoreman union chief Frank Sobatoka, over a stained glass window in a local church, leads to his calling for a special task force to investigate the man.

Ultimately, neither man had much patience for good police work if and when it stepped on their respective toes. But both were perfectly willing to slit throats to advance their own careers. In the end, Valchek replaces Daniels (who barely served) as city police commissioner, and Rawls follows Carcetti to Annapolis to serve as the chief of state police. It just goes to prove that the system examined in The Wire rewards selfishness and corruption, as opposed to integrity. If anyone won the game, it was these two crooked slimeballs.

"Prez" was never meant to be a cop. Before we meet him, he'd shot up his own car and filed a false report. One of the first things he does onscreen is discharge his firearm by mistake, and he later blinds a kid by clocking him in the face with his service weapon. His relation to Major Stan Valchek (his father-in-law) prevents him from being fired, but not from being stuffed away in the back office where his dangerous incompetence can't hurt anybody else.

Surprisingly, he proves to be a remarkably talented code cracker during this soft suspension. He may have been dumped on Cedric Daniels' various task forces because the departments he'd worked in had little use for him, but those task forces came to rely on and respect him. Unfortunately, his rash nature comes to the fore yet again when he punches his father-in-law for an insult. Later, his career in law enforcement ends, instantly and tragically, when he kills another officer by mistake.

It should've been the end for Prez, but he finds a new calling in public education. He initially struggles to reach and control his problematic inner city students. But he eventually becomes something of a rock for these kids, whose lives have been defined by neglect and abuse. But this show was never about happy endings. One of the last lessons Prez learns is one of the harshest: you can't save them all.

Few characters get happy endings during The Wire. Most are fired, killed, imprisoned, replaced, or otherwise left to fend for themselves in a system that's unforgiving and vicious. And nobody seems more destined for death and despair than Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins, a heroin addict and police informant. By season five he's been constantly neglected by the police he often helped, repeatedly rejected by his family that he'd hurt one too many times, brutally beaten, and is reeling from the loss of several friends to the opioid devil.

So it's surprising, after years of watching him try and fail to bootstrap himself out of addiction, to see him actually pull it off. Bubbs ultimately learns he can't rely on others to save him; he has to succeed where his friends failed and find the strength to survive within himself. And he does, despite years of setbacks and false starts. His journey remains quite possibly the most haunting, tragic, and authentic depiction of addiction in the history of television, and it ends triumphantly with Bubbs, rejected no more, joining his sister's family for dinner.

Sadly, his role as an addict isn't left unfilled when he cleans up. "Dukie" Weems, a local student, ultimately takes his place as the junkie. When the endless wheel of rot and despair examined by The Wire is nice enough to eject someone into a happy ending, it makes sure to exact payment from whichever poor soul fills the vacancy.

When we're first introduced to Councilman Carcetti, ripping then-police Commissioner Burrell a new one at City Council over the felony rate, it's natural to assume he's just another cutthroat politician who only pretends to care. After all, learning more about the characters of The Wire rarely makes us like them more, even if further examination does humanize them. But Tommy surprises us, pleasantly, over the course of the series. He's no saint — he has an infidelity problem, for starters — but he does genuinely care about cleaning up an ailing, broken city.

When he becomes Mayor, he starts off on a good foot, genuinely trying to get things moving in the right direction. But then reality sets in. The schools are in severe debt. The Republican governor is no help, and if Carcetti wants that job eventually (he does indeed), he can only embarrass himself so much asking for assistance. The police are then left hanging out to dry due to their funding being stripped for the schools, and yet crime remains a top political issue in Baltimore.

At this point, sadly, Carcetti does indeed become who we thought he originally was. Backed up against a wall politically, he begins tolerating, and then demanding, that the police "juke the stats," meaning massage them to make the crime rate seem more palatable than it is. It's this betrayal of his own ethics that forces out Commissioner Daniels after only days on the job.

Omar's death is undoubtedly one of the most abrupt and unexpected moments of the show. He's shot dead so fast you might've had to rewind to make sure that it had actually just happened. Yep, it did. Omar Little, the stick-up man who struck fear into the hearts of even the hardest criminals in Baltimore, and made robbing them look easy, was indeed taken out by a little kid, in a dumpy corner store, while buying cereal. What?

On a lesser show, it would be infuriating to see such an iconic character flushed down like this. But The Wire earned the right, and the more you examine it, the more appropriate you realize it is.

Omar usually strolled around with body armor and a shotgun, but his name and reputation were so powerful he hardly needed either. Dealers he hadn't even known were there would often toss their stash at him when he went outside, unarmed and in his bathrobe, to run errands. Nobody who knew him wanted to be on his bad side.

So naturally, he isn't taken out by any of the ruthless kingpins he loved to antagonize, but by a kid too young to truly understand who he is. Youth disrespecting and upending the establishment is a common theme in The Wire, and not even Omar himself, to whom the rules rarely applied, is ultimately able to escape it. It's all in the game, yo.

"When I look at you, I see a man without a country. You ain't hard enough for this right here. And maybe, just maybe, you ain't smart enough for them out there."

Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell's less educated but wiser partner, is correct in this assessment. Stringer long sought to legitimize both himself and the drug empire he helped run with the aesthetics and language of business, but this is a mirage. He wasn't above using force to resolve disputes when dialogue and compromise failed to produce a more respectable version of a drug game that was inherently violent and grotesque.

Stringer understands the streets, but not the world outside and above them, where criminal conspiracies are hatched over three martini lunches, not street corners. His misguided ambition ultimately brings him into contact with four people he can't control: Clay Davis, a corrupt state senator who promises to open all the doors of the corporate underworld to Stringer only to rob him blind; Marlo Stanfield, the newcomer with no respect for the "rules" of the drug game or any of its established players; Brother Mouzone, a hit man that doesn't take kindly to the hit Stringer put out on him; and Omar Little, the stickup man whose boyfriend he savagely murders. But it's Avon himself who set Stringer up to be taken down by the latter two, after realizing his old friend's grandiose delusions have imperiled everything they'd built.