
Jimmy McNulty managed to anger the major and is paying for the consequences.
The second season shifts the focus to the loading docks of Baltimore, where the local union leader, Frank Sabotka, is involved with a criminal organization and showing a lot more money than would be expected of a dock worker, thus sparking the interest of a district commander(one Sabotka managed to anger), who gets the familiar faces of season 1 on a detail to catch Sabotka. Mixed into the whole mess are 13 women who die of suffocation in a loading container. The story focuses on the dockworkers and the criminal organization some of them are involved with. The Barksdales aren’t entirely forgotten but aren’t the focus here.
The policework stays much the same, involving wiretaps, cameras and waiting, as things happen in reality I quess. McNulty is once again the police the series follows the most. On the criminal side the Sabotka family gets the most screentime, with the most interesting one being Sabotka’s son, Ziggy, who mostly clowns around, and as he describes himself, is “the punchline of every joke”. He is drawn towards criminal activity due to easy money involved therein, but doesn’t succeed at that very well because no one takes him seriously. To sum it up he is the archetype of a failure and in a way embodies the message of the second season, which to me was living in poor conditions with little money easily leads people to crime. The loading docks are getting less and less traffic and the dock workers less and less work, which means less money of course. Set against this you understand why some of the dockworkers are lured to the money in crime, which in this case involves helping with smuggling and stealing loading crates that arrive at the docks.

Three and a half inches of diamond as Sabotka describes what he wakes up with in the morning.
Season 2 takes a few episodes to get its pace together, but soon enough the series has you in again. I like the new characters a lot and the shift from the city to the dock area is welcome change in scenery and blows a lot of fresh air into the series. Its not too big a jump since the characters on the police side stay the same, more giving the season a tone of its own and still carrying the characters from the first season with it.
I have just have to mention the intro song again. This time its Tom Waits himself performing Way Down In The Hole with film material from the docks: Boats and loading crates being loaded and unloaded. HBO does intro’s extremely well, managing to sum each of their series in a minute and a half. The Wire perhaps even more so with a stroke of genius: Having the same song with five different versions serve as the intro to each of the seasons. If I ever hear Way Down in the Hole somewhere else it will bring this series to mind instantly. Otherwise there is very little music in the series. Although there was a brilliant episode with Johnny Cash’s Walk the Line playing, while each of the characters did their morning routines. Not including that, music is used very sparingly, not that I put all that much attention into things.
The Wire season 2 is extremely good. All the favorite characters from the first are present and the level quality doesn’t see any drops compared to the first, which sadly happens all too often with series. Six Feet Under changed into a direction I didn’t like as well as Rome. With the Wire season 2 is what you liked from the first one with a new set of criminals. Just bear with it for the first few episodes and you’ll enjoy the hell out of it.