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Nothing neat at end of "The Wire"

Those of you who were hoping David Simon would wrap up The Wire, his bleak saga of Charm City, in a neat package last night on HBO were probably disappointed.

Those of you who were hoping David Simon would wrap up

The Wire

, his bleak saga of Charm City, in a neat package last night on HBO were probably disappointed.

To paraphrase McNulty, who was as close to a hero as this series ever got, it was what it was. In other words, a sprawling, confounding and grim urban portrait, shot through with cynicism and gallows humor.

Certainly, there were moments of redemption in last night's expanded final episode (spoiler alert): Bubbles sitting down at the grown-ups' table; a Norman Rockwell tableau; a semi-sober McNulty resting on the back stoop with Beadie, listening to the crickets; Lester doing woodwork in what looked like a Cialis commercial.

The problem is, none of these scenarios seemed all that convincing, and certainly not permanent.

Far more prevalent - and truer to the spirit of The Wire - were those no-bad-deed-goes-unrewarded outcomes: Cedric Daniels being forced out as deputy police commissioner because he refused to cook the crime statistics for the mayor; drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield walking away scot-free; and most tellingly, the next generation, Michael and Duquan, turning out as respectively a trigger-happy stick-up artist and a hopeless junkie.

Simon reserved his most bilious outcome for his former profession: newspaper journalism. The Sun's unprincipled reporter, Scott Templeton, was not only shielded from his turpitude, he was awarded the Pulitzer, daily journalism's most prestigious prize.

No, the final episode wasn't pretty, but after five seasons of this magnificent series, it did bring us full circle. In the end, Simon left Baltimore just as he found it: sliding sickeningly downhill.