Jimmy McNulty and Bodie: When mistakes have different consequences

Bodie Broadus started on the corner at thirteen. Never missed a count, never stole off a package, and at the end he worked out that the game was rigged and he was one of the little pieces on the chessboard.

McNulty saw himself in him. Both swore they were good at the job while the evidence said otherwise, and neither one wanted the top. McNulty wanted no part of being Rawls or Daniels or even Bunny. Bodie wanted no part of being Stringer or Prop Joe or Marlo. He wanted his corner.

Carver and McNulty came to respect his intelligence and his loyalty, and that loyalty did not stop him popping Wallace or disobeying Stringer, D'Angelo and Slim Charles. He lost it when he learned Marlo's crew took out Lil Kev, and when Poot pointed out that the two of them had done the same thing to Wallace, Bodie justified it. Delusional. McNulty ran the same play every time someone called out one of his mistakes, and his mistakes reached the politicians, the newspaper, the school board and the street. He never owned a single one.

The park bench is the center of this. McNulty bailed Bodie out after the police car windows and wanted him to snitch, and rather than take him downtown to a box he took him to eat and sat with him outside. What turned up there was not a code of the street or a code of the shield. Each of them ran on his own private code, and the two codes matched.

Bodie was going to sell out Marlo and felt justified doing it, the same way he felt justified about Wallace. Monk had already seen the pair of them get into a car, so it was a wrap before he said a word. Get down or lay down, with no Avon, no Stringer, and Slim Charles telling him he was on his own. He went out on his shield, on his turf, on the corner he built from nothing, the one Marlo wanted for its production and Michael ended up running.

McNulty failed upward his entire career. Bodie is the mistake he could not fail past. It drove him out of the Western and back into major crimes with one thing in mind, getting Marlo, and there was never a this one's for Joe moment waiting at the end of it.