Television Review: Reformation (The Wire, S3X10, 2004)

Reformation (S03E10)

Airdate: November 28th 2004

Written by: Ed Burns
Directed by: Christine Moore

Running Time: 58 minutes

In David Simon’s meticulously rendered Baltimore, change occurs with a glacial pace, yet once set in motion, those tectonic shifts become utterly unstoppable. The city’s institutions and its inhabitants are caught in a current where adaptation, however painful or imperfect, often yields marginally better outcomes than futile resistance, which merely accelerates one’s demise. This profound truth, central to the series’ worldview, finds a potent and tragic illustration in Season 3’s pivotal episode, Reformation. Here, amidst the crumbling edifices of the drug trade, the police department, and city hall, multiple narratives converge to demonstrate how attempts at radical change – whether born of desperation, ambition, or genuine idealism – inevitably collide with the immovable bedrock of systemic inertia, political expediency, and human frailty, leaving devastation in their wake.

The episode’s title, "Reformation," resonates with bitter irony across several plotlines, but its most immediate and catastrophic application is to Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin’s audacious, clandestine drug decriminalisation experiment. Establishing de facto "free zones" – the infamous Hamsterdam – in the most blighted corners of West Baltimore, Colvin sought to corral the open-air drug markets, drastically reduce violent crime plaguing residential streets, and redirect police resources towards more serious offences. Crucially, Colvin operated with the fatalistic certainty, etched deep within him, that regardless of the scheme’s measurable success – and by conventional metrics, it was succeeding, with street-level violence plummeting spectacularly – it would ultimately come crashing down. The sheer scale of the moral and legal compromises demanded proved unsustainable; the experiment required turning a blind eye to rampant drug use and associated petty crime within the zones, tolerating a parallel, albeit regulated, criminal economy, and fundamentally violating the oath every officer takes. These burdens proved too heavy for some of Colvin’s subordinates. It is precisely this fragility that Herc exploits, tipping off Baltimore Sun reporters. Their subsequent visit to Hamsterdam transforms Colvin’s controlled experiment into an imminent public scandal. Cornered, Colvin resorts to desperate, short-term damage control, spinning elaborate lies to the press about an ongoing "major investigation" and barely securing a week-long reprieve – a stay of execution bought with fiction.

Yet, this reprieve proves as ephemeral as the free zones themselves. Recognising the inevitable, Colvin chooses to confess his scheme directly to Commissioner Ervin Burrell and Deputy Commissioner William Rawls. Their reaction transcends mere anger; it is volcanic fury directed less at the policy’s merits (or lack thereof) and far more at Colvin’s breathtaking insubordination and open flouting of the law. To them, he hasn’t just broken rules; he has shattered the fundamental chain of command and exposed the department to catastrophic political fallout. Colvin, anticipating this, accepts his immediate removal from command and a humiliating "vacation" – a bureaucratic purgatory. His last-ditch effort, presenting letters of support from community leaders praising Hamsterdam’s tangible reduction in violence, is dismissed by Burrell with contemptuous indifference. However, the political fallout escalates when Burrell must report to Mayor Clarence Royce. Facing the Mayor’s wrath and his own potential dismissal, Burrell desperately attempts to salvage his position by using Colvin’s very letters of community support – the same evidence he scorned when Colvin offered it – a cynical, last-gasp manoeuvre that proves utterly futile against Royce’s righteous indignation. The system, once threatened, reflexively protects its own hierarchy, sacrificing the innovator while the underlying problems remain unaddressed.

Simultaneously, the inevitable unraveling of Hamsterdam mirrors the equally inexorable consequences of the schism within the Barksdale Organisation. Avon Barksdale’s forces have struck back against Marlo Stanfield, eliminating some of his soldiers, but the escalating, brutal war unnerves Proposition Joe and the other Co-Op partners. They present Stringer Bell with a stark ultimatum: make peace with Marlo, however humiliating the terms, or be expelled from the Co-Op, losing access to their vital supply of high-quality narcotics. Avon, enraged by Marlo’s vicious retaliation against the "honeytrap" Devonne, refuses any notion of truce. Stringer, his vision fixed on legitimate business aspirations but increasingly disillusioned by Senator Clay Davis’s obvious corruption and the financial drain, chooses a treacherous path. Lacking Avon’s street credibility and physical force, Stringer makes the fateful, cold-blooded decision to eliminate his partner by contacting Colvin’s detectives, hoping the police will do his dirty work. It is a betrayal born of rational calculation utterly divorced from the street code, highlighting Stringer’s fatal disconnect from the world he seeks to transcend.

On another front, the Barksdale Organisation faces the relentless pressure of McNulty and Freamon’s investigation. Embracing a legally dubious but operationally brilliant tactic, they initiate a scheme involving pre-marked burner phones peddled to dealers. Freamon, posing as a con artist specialising in phone fraud, successfully dupes the organisation’s naive street lieutenant, Bernard. The necessary wiretap warrant, secured only through the ethically murky exploitation of Judge Phelan’s infatuation with Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, underscores the pervasive moral compromises inherent in the system. Pearlman’s calculated flirting, conducted even in the presence of her current lover, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, exemplifies the transactional nature of power within the city’s institutions.

Meanwhile, the realm of Baltimore politics descends further into cynical calculation. Tommy Carcetti, shedding any lingering idealism, confronts the brutal reality that his path to the Mayor’s office requires fracturing the Black vote. He coldly decides to manipulate his friend and colleague, Councilman Anthony Gray, into running against the incumbent, Royce, purely as a spoiler. Gray, oblivious to Carcetti’s machinations and his own limitations as a candidate, becomes the perfect pawn. Carcetti then plots with his advisor, Theresa D'Agostino, and his predominantly white allies, who cynically discuss "sprinkling" Black faces onto campaign materials to render it "less monochromatic." This subplot lays bare the machinery of racial politics, where tokenism is deployed for electoral advantage, revealing the hollowness beneath progressive veneers.

Amidst this institutional decay, however, emerges a genuinely redemptive arc: Cutty Wise’s profound reformation. Having recently exited "the game" and briefly been drawn into the escalating drug war, Cutty commits himself to establishing a boxing gym for neighbourhood youths. His initial efforts founder on the rocks of his own inexperience as a coach and the kids’ deep-seated rejection of authority figures. Yet, unlike the grand, doomed schemes of Colvin or Stringer, Cutty’s response is characterised by resilience. He refuses to abandon his mission, choosing instead to grant himself, and crucially, the sceptical youth, a second chance. His reformation is quiet, persistent, and grounded in the daily grind of earning trust, offering a stark, hopeful counterpoint to the catastrophic failures elsewhere.

As these internal pressures mount, Baltimore is further destabilised by the return of an external force: Brother Mouzone. Concluding his previous visit left business unfinished, he arrives determined to settle scores with those he holds responsible for his wounding – Omar Little or Stringer Bell. To reach Omar, he dispatches his hapless, openly homophobic associate Lamar to a Baltimore gay bar, tasked with finding Omar’s lover, Dante. The plan, chillingly efficient in its exploitation of prejudice and vulnerability, works with terrifying ease.

Written by Ed Burns, Reformation stands as a masterclass in The Wire’s unparalleled narrative architecture. Multiple, complex plotlines – policing, the drug trade, politics, personal redemption – are woven together with seamless coherence, each strand reflecting and refracting the central themes of institutional failure and the human cost of systemic dysfunction. The episode brims with sharp, often darkly humorous observations: Rawls’s casual patronage of the same gay bar targeted by Lamar inadvertently revealing his own sexuality; Burrell’s desperate, hypocritical deployment of community support arguments he previously dismissed; the sheer, grim cynicism permeating Carcetti’s political calculus.

Furthermore, the episode delivers a devastating character study of Jimmy McNulty. Despite the apparent professional success of the wiretap operation, McNulty’s profound social ineptitude is laid bare. His self-destructive inability to forge meaningful connections beyond his obsessive work has alienated his wife, estranged him from superiors past and present, and even distanced him from the previously idealised D'Agostino. His professional triumphs are utterly hollow, accentuating a loneliness that seems increasingly terminal.

Yet, for all its brilliance, Reformation occasionally stumbles into the territory of preachiness, a minor flaw in an otherwise flawless season. This manifests most prominently in another grand soliloquy from Colvin, this time directed at Carver, where he articulates the series’ (and Simon’s) scathing critique of the futile War on Drugs and the need for radical policing reform. While powerful, the speech risks substituting character for mouthpiece. Colvin is positioned as a flawed moral anchor – a man of principle who chose the wrong, illegal path – whose professional trajectory plummets catastrophically in this episode. This descent creates a profound thematic counterpoint to Cutty’s genuine, grassroots reformation. Where Colvin’s top-down, systemic attempt at change shatters against institutional rigidity, Cutty’s bottom-up, personal transformation, however arduous, offers a flicker of authentic hope, suggesting that meaningful change, if possible, must often begin at the individual level, outside the corrupted machinery of power.

Finally, viewed from the vantage point of the present day, Reformation possesses a poignant historical specificity. Colvin’s entire Hamsterdam experiment hinges on operating in the shadows, shielded from immediate public exposure. The notion that such a radical, city-sanctioned (if unofficially) decriminalisation zone could remain hidden long enough to even be attempted is utterly implausible in an era saturated with ubiquitous phone cameras and instant social media dissemination. The episode is thus firmly anchored in the pre-digital surveillance landscape of the early 2000s, a time when secrets, however large, could still linger in the Baltimore twilight for a fleeting, doomed moment. This temporal context adds another layer to the tragedy: Colvin’s experiment wasn’t just politically impossible; in the contemporary world, it would be logistically unfeasible from the outset. Reformation ultimately serves as a stark elegy for a specific moment in time and a brutal lesson: in Simon’s Baltimore, even the most well-intentioned attempts to bend the rigid structures of power are met with crushing force, leaving only the slow, painful, and often solitary work of personal redemption as a viable, if fragile, path forward.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)

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