Michael: Wire

Michael has grasped my attention the most in these episodes of the Wire. Unlike the other kids he hangs with he has grown up a lot with the fact that his mother is a drug addict who doesn’t seem to provide for ethier him or his much younger brother Bug. The way he reacts around older men suggests he doesn’t trust them. We notice this based on his reaction to the boxing gym coach Cutty, who has his flaws with the women and mothers of the children who work out in the gym. But we can tell Cutty just wants to really train Michael into becoming a boxer and Michael just thinks its weird that Cutty has taken an interest in him. Which leads me to believe that maybe he was molested by his father at an earlier point and thats what drives him to ask Chris and Snoop to kill his father. Michael shows them where his father is and Snoop asks  “What he do to you?” Michael doesn’t answer back and Chris just looks at him and understands . Though we didn’t get to see the brutal killing of his father in class, the way in which Chris kills Michael’s father wasn’t just about him being a junkie father to his kids. We also see how this pleased Michael afterwards when he tells his mother who had just returned from looking for the father ” Told you so”. It was a jab to her that he wasn’t ever coming back, and he would just let her think he had abandoned them again.

I feel Michael is very smart as he has obtained the interest of Marlo, Chris and Snoop’s gang leader, and has used that to his advantage to have them kill his father. Michael would have every reason to hate drug dealers for the fact that his mother is addicted to drugs and neglects her duties as a mother to him and his brother. But yet he uses the drug dealers to do justice on his father. Michael has this cool calculating dynamic to his very quiet, polite nice kid, big brother side.