All Due Respect (S03E02)
Airdate: September 26th 2004
Written by: Richard Price Directed by: Steve Schill
Running Time: 58 minutes
The Wire ascended from mere television to cultural phenomenon partly because its creator, David Simon, possessed the rare humility to recognise his work transcended personal authorship. This openness allowed him to recruit an extraordinary roster of esteemed writers whose lived experiences and literary prowess elevated the show far beyond conventional cop drama. Foremost among these contributors was Richard Price, the lauded novelist whose seminal works like Clockers dissected the intricate, often brutal, symbiosis between crime, law enforcement, and urban decay – the very lifeblood of The Wire. The show paid early homage to Price’s influence by casting him as the English literature teacher in the pivotal Season 2 episode All Prologue. By Season 3, Price had formally joined the production team, ultimately penning five episodes. His debut, All Due Respect (Season 3, Episode 2), is a masterclass in slow-burn tension, institutional failure, and the tragicomic consequences of systemic misinterpretation – proving Simon’s collaborative vision was not just generous, but essential.
Like many Wire episodes airing early in a season, All Due Respect operates with a deceptive slowness. On the surface, little appears to happen in terms of the overarching narrative arcs. The Major Case Unit (MCU), despite the Herculean efforts documented in Seasons 1 and 2, finds itself with little tangible success to show. Their painstaking investigation into the Barksdale and Proposition Joe organisations seems stalled, hitting a wall of frustrating inertia. Wiretaps, the unit’s technological lifeline, yield mostly mundane chatter or, worse, cruel false promises. The pivotal moment arrives when Cheese, a key lieutenant for Proposition Joe, is overheard on a wiretap expressing deep, anguished regret over shooting a "dawg." The MCU detectives, led by the perpetually frustrated Cedric Daniels, seize upon this. They interpret it as a smoking gun – a confession to a murder in the escalating, bloody turf war triggered by the demolition of the Franklin Terrace projects, which forced crews like the Barksdales into new, contested territories.
The devastating irony, the very heart of Price’s script, is that the "dawg" is not a person, but a literal dog. Cheese, diversifying his criminal portfolio into the brutal world of underground dogfighting, had mercy-killed his own terrier after it lost a fixed fight. The fix was orchestrated by rival dogfighters Dazz (Darrell Hadari) and Jelly (Jayon Noel), manipulating the outcome for profit. The MCU’s desperate projection of their narrative onto the wiretap – seeing drug war where there was only animal cruelty – leads to a catastrophic chain reaction. Convinced they have Cheese on a murder charge, they arrest him, hauling him into interrogation with the explicit aim of flipping him against Proposition Joe. The ensuing scene is pure, cringe-inducing farce born of institutional arrogance. It takes agonising minutes for the detectives to grasp the truth, culminating in an utterly humiliating fiasco. Cheese faces only minor animal cruelty charges, meaning he walks free almost immediately. The wiretap, compromised by the botched arrest, is rendered useless. The bitterest pill? Cheese, enraged by the dogfighting betrayal, had actually ordered Jelly’s assassination – an act the MCU misinterpreted as part of the drug war.
Meanwhile, the Barksdale organisation, under Stringer Bell’s increasingly corporate strategising, attempts a radical shift: reducing "bodies" by offering independent dealers a generous cut of profits instead of resorting to violence to expand into new territories vacated by the projects’ demolition. This policy of carrot over stick meets wildly varying success. Bodie Broadus, tasked with approaching the young and ambitious Marlo Stanfield, encounters immediate, chilling resistance. Advised by his savvy financier and rim shop owner, Vinson (Norris Davis), Marlo coldly rejects the Barksdale overture. His refusal, delivered with unnerving calm, is a declaration of war, signalling the arrival of a new, more ruthless player utterly unbound by Avon Barksdale’s old codes.
The episode also deepens the thematic exploration of institutional futility through the Western District. Herc and Carver’s Sisyphean daily grind against corner boys reaches a grim crescendo when their colleague, Officer Kenneth Bozeman (Rick Otto), is shot and critically wounded during a routine bust over a mere three vials of coke. The sheer disproportion – life-altering injury for negligible street-level narcotics – crystallises the utter pointlessness of the war on drugs as waged on the corners. This tragedy forces Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin into profound soul-searching. Following a pivotal consultation with the pragmatic local clergyman, The Deacon (Melvin Williams), Colvin experiences his radical epiphany. Drawing a parallel to the unenforced liquor laws of the 1950s and 60s – where paper bags discreetly concealed illegal alcohol purchases – Colvin decides to end all drug busts in his district. His "paper bag" speech is a revolutionary, albeit deeply flawed, act of acknowledging the unenforceability of the drug war at the street level, prioritising community safety over hollow statistical victories.
Price’s writing excels in establishing the episode’s deliberate, almost novelistic tempo. He grants sufficient space to vital subplots without sacrificing momentum: McNulty’s dogged, seemingly futile quest to uncover the truth behind D'Angelo Barksdale’s death; Daniels seeking solace from his crumbling marriage and professional despair in the arms of Rhonda Pearlman; Cutty’s humbling struggle to go straight through backbreaking labour alongside Spanish-speaking immigrants; Omar’s relentless, almost ritualistic stick-ups against the Barksdale organisation; and Tommy Carcetti’s early, calculated political manoeuvring, attempting to recruit Commissioner Burrell with promises of budgetary support. Each thread is woven with precision, contributing to the season’s tapestry of interconnected systems failing or adapting.
The most indelible moment, however, is a direct homage. The awkward, tension-filled encounter in a cinema lobby between Narcotics detectives and Barksdale crew members, each accompanied by dates, is lifted almost verbatim from Price’s 1992 novel Clockers. Its inclusion isn’t mere fan service; it’s a powerful meta-textual wink, grounding The Wire firmly within the literary tradition Price helped define, and demonstrating how seamlessly his novelistic eye translated to the series’ unique rhythm.
Crucially, All Due Respect introduces The Deacon, played by Melvin Williams. This casting is profoundly significant beyond performance. Williams was a notorious real-life Baltimore drug kingpin in the 1980s, the very figure who served as a primary model for Avon Barksdale. Arrested by The Wire’s co-creator, former homicide detective Ed Burns, Williams served time before turning his life around, becoming a community figure – precisely the role he embodies on screen. His presence infuses the episode, and the entire series, with an unparalleled layer of authenticity and haunting meta-resonance.
All Due Respect may not feature car chases or dramatic shootouts in the conventional sense. Its power lies in the quiet implosion of the MCU’s hopes, the chilling emergence of Marlo Stanfield, Colvin’s radical pragmatism, and the devastating comedy of errors born from the police’s inability to see the world as it truly is. Richard Price, drawing on decades of immersive urban storytelling, crafts an episode that is simultaneously a meticulous procedural, a profound character study, and a searing critique of institutional blindness. It is a testament to David Simon’s genius in recognising that the story of Baltimore, and by extension America, was too vast, too complex, for any single voice. By yielding the floor to masters like Price, The Wire achieved not just greatness, but an enduring, uncomfortable truth – a truth delivered here with the quiet, devastating force of a misinterpreted word about a dead dog.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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