Baltimore. Due to constant pressure to lower crime rates in the city, police major Colvin has a radical idea: he will allow the drug dealers to deal drugs freely in an abandoned area, a sort of free zone nicknamed "Hamsterdam", far away from the city. This "evacuation" actually works, the crime rates decline, but when his superiors find out, including Commissioner Burrell, they have Colvin fired and hastily arrest anyone before shutting down the free zone. Councilman Carcetti wants to exploit this public anger to run for mayor. Avon Barksdale, the head of the Barksdale drug organization, is released from prison, and allows Omar and Mouzone to kill his lawyer, Stringer Bell, who wanted to set them up to kill each other and to build Federal buildings to legalize the crime business. Officer Jimmy McNulty and his crew used wired phones to catch Avon possessing weapons, in violation of his probation. Avon is thus again sent to prison, while his rival, Marlo, fills the vacuum with his own drugs.
The third season of the hyped crime series "The Wire" started to lose steam: only episodes 3.8 and 3.11 are great, while the rest is good, yet somehow strangely routine, predictable, calculative, mechanical and stale. A certain "The Wire"-fatigue can be sensed here. It is getting predictable that these kind of shows use "hit-and-miss" tactics by throwing 50 characters at some 20 stories, hoping at least some of them will stick. One of these subplots really does work: major Colvin's fascinating thought experiment on simply allowing drug dealers to deal in a far away "free zone", in order to remove them from the city, figuring that this is simply in their nature, and that fighting against this kind of determinism is futile. Other subplots fair less: Stringer Bell's plan to go into real estate and councilman Carcetti's ploys to get elected for mayor lead to lukewarm conclusions, without much payoff, whereas McNulty's wire tapping team seems too often like a rehash from the previous two seasons at times (a rare exception is a genius trick in which McNulty's men arrest Bodie and empty his pockets in order to take his mobile phone and secretly replace it with an identical, "wired" mobile phone, which they return to Bodie).
The subplot involving Dennis is interesting at first, showing how the character is so disenchanted by hard work of mowing the lawn that he decides to take the easy way out and work for Avon Barksdale as a criminal, only to realize he cannot kill people, and thus changes his mind again and returns back to his normal life. But this happens already half-way into the season, and it is puzzling why the rest of the season is wasted on just showing Dennis training boxing, again and again, even though this does not serve any purpose in the story anymore (at least not in this season). Too much of this is repetitive, and one feels these 12 episodes could have easily been summed up into just four or five. The series needed more inspiration akin to episode 3.8 (one genius moment has Barksdale set up a "date-trap" for his nemesis Marlo, but goofs when one of Barksdale's solders exits the van and goes to buy some drinks at the restaurant, and is recognized by Marlo's friend Snoop) or 3.11 (the significant conversation on the rooftop between Avon and Stringer Bell is ostensibly about business, but in reality one is giving the reasons for why the other must be eliminated) and a better editor to trim down this whole affair, since just randomly cramming more and more subplots does not automatically make for a great series.
Grade:++
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