The Wire Season 2 Episode 9

The Wire Season 2 Episode 9: Stray Rounds. In what was, at least for me, a stroke of dramatic genius, David Simon and company chose to bookend this unsettling episode with Janus images -- two faces of drug dealing enforcement. The episode opens with ragtag incompetence and chaos as Barksdale's street level enforcer Brodie (J.D. Williams) tries to push interlopers off his corners with a show of firepower. A young boy getting ready for school catches a stray bullet and is left dead in the bedroom of his apartment. His mother's screams close the opening sequence and offer proof positive that change is needed. When Stringer Bell and Brianna Barksdale tell her brother Avon, who is still behind bars, of the trouble they're having holding onto their portion of the West Baltimore drug trade, he tells them he'll take care of it by pulling in some muscle from New York. Little do they or the viewers know what that portends, not just for the disputing drug slingers but for Stringer and Avon. The episode closes with the introduction of the new enforcer -- the unassumingly bespectacled and bow-tied Brother Mouzon (a terrific Michael Potts) looking up at the towers that he has been summoned to tame.