Final Grades (S04E13)
Airdate: December 10th 2006
Written by: David Simon
Directed by: Ernest Dickerson
Running Time: 78 minutes
Season Four of The Wire stands as the series' most profoundly desolate chapter to that point. It is therefore scarcely surprising that its finale, Final Grades" plunges deeper into the abyss than any preceding season conclusion. Where earlier finales offered flickers of ambiguous hope or cyclical repetition, Final Grades delivers a near-unrelenting cascade of institutional failure and personal devastation, its darkness serving as the inevitable culmination of a season meticulously charting the systematic abandonment of an entire generation of Black children.
This pervasive grimness is masterfully established in the cold open, a sequence of pitch-black humour that lays bare the horrifying banality of the drug war’s toll. Sergeant Jay Landsman, the perennial cynic of Homicide, vents his spleen at the relentless tide of red names flooding the unit’s case board – victims of Marlo Stanfield’s empire, their bodies stashed like refuse in vacant row homes turned charnel houses. The fleeting glimmer of apparent good news – a rare black name suggesting a solved case – is brutally extinguished when it’s revealed to be Sherrod, the hapless boy Bubbles had tried, in his own damaged way, to mentor. Bubbles’ guilt-ridden confession over Sherrod's accidental poisoning, is the catalyst for his own near-suicide. Landsman’s momentary departure from the interrogation room provides the space for Bubbles to attempt hanging himself, a desperate act swiftly thwarted by the detectives. In a profoundly rare moment of genuine humanity from the usually sardonic Landsman, he elects to erase Bubbles’ name from the board entirely, refusing to categorise him as another statistic. Instead, he orchestrates Bubbles’ placement into rehab, where he would be counseled on a long and arduous path to recovery by former drug addict Walon. It’s a solitary, fragile thread of redemption in an otherwise suffocating tapestry of loss.
Tragically, no such thread exists for the quartet of boys who served as the season’s heartbreaking protagonists. Michael Lee, having long since shed any vestige of innocence, is fully consumed by Marlo Stanfield’s ruthless organisation. He is no longer merely a corner soldier but a cold-blooded executioner, his proficiency in murder earning explicit praise from the chillingly pragmatic Chris Partlow. Dukie, whose innate intelligence and quiet potential offered the most poignant glimmer of hope, succumbs entirely to the gravitational pull of the streets, abandoning high school to join Michael on the corners . Randy Wagstaff, despite Carver’s desperate and ultimately futile intervention on his behalf, is condemned to the horrors of the group home. The episode offers no sugar-coating: we witness the immediate, predatory dynamic as older, larger boys instantly mark him for years of systematic robbery, brutal beatings, and the ever-present threat of sexual violence.
The sole exception among the four is Namond Brice, but his escape from this grim trajectory is itself a testament to the extraordinary, almost miraculous confluence of forces required to bypass the city’s crushing machinery. It demands an unlikely alliance: Cutty Wise, leveraging his street credibility; Howard "Bunny" Colvin, offering his unconventional sanctuary; and crucially, Wee-Bey Brice, Namond’s incarcerated father. In a moment of startling clarity and paternal responsibility rare within the Stanfield orbit, Wee-Bey finally recognises that his son possesses neither the temperament nor the constitution for the gangsta life he himself embraced. He compels his fiercely ambitious but ultimately self-serving wife, De’Londa, to relinquish custody to Colvin. Namond thus gains entry into the relative stability and middle-class normality of Colvin’s home – a victory, yet one that underscores the sheer improbability of such salvation occurring organically within the system.
Namond’s personal reprieve, however, exists in stark, ironic counterpoint to the overwhelming institutional failure that defines the episode. Colvin witnesses the ignominious end of his experimental classroom, shut down by a school administration more invested in bureaucratic compliance than pedagogical innovation. The experiment collapses with the same inevitability as Hamsterdam, his earlier social experiment in the Western District. His academic partner, Dr. Parenti, proves less concerned with the children’s welfare than with leveraging the programme’s brief success for professional clout among his ivory tower peers. Prez, initially buoyed by his students’ unexpectedly high scores on standardised tests, is swiftly deflated when informed the benchmarks were deliberately lowered – a cynical act of statistical and financial manipulation designed to paint a falsely rosy picture of systemic efficacy. The message is clear: the system is not broken; it is working exactly as designed – to produce manageable statistics, not educated children.
This systemic rot extends directly to the city’s highest offices. Tommy Carcetti, consumed by gubernatorial ambition, makes his fateful decision regarding the gaping hole in the school system’s finances. Convinced he can do more public good as governor than mayor, he finally rejects financial aid offered by the Republican governor – his future election rival. This purely political calculation, prioritising personal ambition over the immediate, desperate needs of Baltimore’s schoolchildren, is predicted to condemn them to at least two more years of educational dysfunction. The sheer cynicism of the act is so profound it even elicits visible discomfort from Norman Wilson, Carcetti’s own usually unflappable and cynical strategist.
Amidst this educational and political collapse, another crisis – the sudden disruption of the drug supply caused by Omar Little’s audacious heist on Proposition Joe’s stash – is resolved with characteristic pragmatism. After distributing the loot share among his partners, Omar realises the impracticality of holding such a vast quantity of product. He proposes selling it back to Proposition Joe at a discount, a deal the shrewd Eastside kingpin readily accepts, restoring the fragile equilibrium of the drug trade. Yet, this resolution fuels Marlo Stanfield’s pathological paranoia. Convinced his dominance is perpetually under threat, he orders Spiros Vondas, Joe’s shadowy Greek supplier, to be tailed – a move that inevitably sows seeds for future, bloodier conflicts.
Marlo also moves to eliminate another perceived vulnerability: Bodie Broadus. Bodie’s recent, uneasy interactions with Jimmy McNulty, coupled with his visible disgust at Marlo’s murder of Little Kevin, mark him as a potential informant in Marlo’s eyes. His assassination, carried out with chilling efficiency by Darius "O-Dog" Hill (Darrell Britt-Gibson), is the final catalyst for McNulty. Witnessing the murder of a corner boy he had begun, however awkwardly, to see as a human being – even a friend – shatters McNulty’s fragile attempt at a quiet life as a Western District patrolman. He successfully petitions Col. Cedric Daniels to rejoin the Major Case Unit, setting the stage for the next season’s central conflict to reignite.
Final Grades, penned by series creator David Simon and directed with characteristic gravitas by Ernest Dickerson, holds the distinction of being the longest episode of The Wire up to that point. This extended runtime feels necessary, not indulgent, allowing the weight of each tragic resolution to settle fully upon the viewer. The episode is also peppered with subtle intertextual references. Cutty, recovering in hospital, watches HBO’s Deadwood, a show sharing The Wire’s fascination with institutional power and frontier morality. Bodie, during a brief police detention, echoes Al Pacino’s iconic "Attica! Attica!" chant from Dog Day Afternoon, a moment highlighting how pop culture narratives permeate even the most desperate street corners. The recurring graffiti in the Homicide bathroom speculating on Deputy Commissioner William Rawls’ sexuality serves as a darkly humorous callback to a minor but revealing character detail established in Season Three.
Ultimately, Final Grades is a masterfully executed, devastatingly bleak piece of television. It confronts its grim themes – the systemic destruction of childhood, the futility of individual resistance against entrenched institutions – with unflinching, realistic resolution. There are no easy outs, no last-minute reprieves for the vast majority of its characters. However, it is precisely in this unflinching commitment to its thesis that the episode reveals a certain conventionality, particularly when measured against the series’ previous, more structurally innovative finales. The closing musical montage, a device familiar from earlier seasons, explicitly charts the immediate futures of the central characters, a stylistic choice that feels somewhat less daring than the ambiguous, lingering shots that concluded previous seasons. More significantly, the episode functions primarily as a potent cliffhanger, engineered to thrust McNulty – who was justifiably marginalised for much of Season Four’s school-focused narrative – back into the role of primary protagonist. His re-entry into the Major Case Unit, driven by Bodie’s murder and his burning need to confront Marlo Stanfield, sets the explicit agenda for Season Five.
This narrative pivot, while dramatically effective in reigniting the central law enforcement/drug trade conflict, slightly undermines the season’s unique focus. The overwhelming power of Season Four lay in its deliberate shift away from the police procedural to examine the school system as the new front line of urban decay. By concluding with McNulty’s return to the fold and the clear setup for his personal vendetta against Marlo, Final Grades risks re-centring the narrative on the very institutional actors (the police, the politicians) whose systemic failures created the conditions for the boys’ tragedies in the first place. It’s a necessary structural move for the series’ overall arc, but it momentarily pulls focus from the season’s most vital, harrowing subject: the children themselves.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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