“My balls are cold,” says McNulty (Dominic West) in his first line of dialogue in the second season of The Wire. He is freezing to death from sailing through the waters of the port of Baltimore, after his superiors sent him there due to his intractable character. The policeman notices the rusty warehouses, the working class decay of the area. They are soon contacted by radio: there is a white private boat, twenty meters long, with its engines stopped. They check what their situation is. “In the canal, near the bridge,” they respond from the headquarters.
The bridge, as can be seen in the images, is that of Francis Scott Key, 2.5 kilometers long, which is now in the news for its collapse this past morning. A cargo ship hit one of the pillars, causing the boat to explode and the infrastructure to collapse, where vehicles fell 30 meters high into the Patapsco River. But, before this tragic news of which the number of victims is unknown, he had been immortalized by David Simon in one of HBO’s masterpieces.
David Simon, who had trained as an events journalist at The Baltimore Sun from 1982 to 1995, where he began to understand how both the police and the criminal network around drugs worked. When he switched to audiovisual productions such as Homicide, which adapted a book of his, or The Corner, he did not abandon his journalistic role of denouncing reality. And in The Wire, focused on the drug world of his city, he dedicated the second season to the entry of illegal goods through the port.
In the season, the bridge was an omnipresent character. There was the rescue in the first scene. McNulty finds the body of a woman on the Baltimore Bridge but Rawls sends him to the county police because the body is on the east side of the Key Bridge. Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) and his nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber) chatted with Francis Scott Key in the background stealing the shot. And the last time port union treasurer Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) is seen alive is when he is left under the bridge with the Greek mafia.
