Lester Freamon had to remind them who he was

Thirteen years and four months in a pawn shop making dollhouse furniture. That is what the Baltimore department did to Lester Freamon for working a case that bumped into the wrong people, and the number is the spine of this breakdown.

Lester was never a hump. He was real police who got buried for being real police, and he had made his peace with staying buried. What pulled him back out was being near someone who gave a damn, which turned out to be McNulty. The instincts came back intact. He went down to the boxing gyms and came up with a photo of Avon that McNulty's crew had never turned up.

The advice Lester gave him is the part people skip. When they ask you where you do not want to go, lie. McNulty did not listen, because McNulty was delusional, and that gap is the whole difference between them. Lester could have bowed out the way Bunk did, the way Greggs did. He helped McNulty build the homeless strangler case instead, working it with the same patience he had been putting into the dollhouse furniture.