The Wire
Final Grades
TV Flash files “Final Grades” as a desk essential hour — The Wire (2002–2008) on HBO, season 4, episode 13, aired 2006-12-10, 60 min.
From the desk
How this hour is filed
This leaf is S04E13: listed hour 50 of 60 in the The Wire guide, last listed hour of season 4. It aired 2006-12-10 (60 min). The listed hour before it is “That's Got His Own” (S04E12). Next is “More with Less” (S05E01).
Essential hour: “Final Grades”. Season four’s report card. The kids were the institution.
Catalog log
Broadcast listing — not a TV Flash recap.
In the Season Four finale, the bodies from the vacants pile up while Burrell offers his support to Daniels and admonishes Rawls for crossing him. A distraught Bubbles finds himself at his wit's end after his revenge plan backfires.
Viewer FAQ
Where does Final Grades sit in the The Wire guide?
S04E13 is listed hour 50 of 60 — last listed hour of season 4, season 4 episode 13.
When did The Wire S04E13 air?
Final Grades aired 2006-12-10 and is listed at 60 minutes.
Where should I start The Wire?
Episode one of season one. The show is a five-volume novel; skipping the corner season to “get to the good part” is how you miss the grammar.
In the series
Why this series still plays
Watch it as a civic novel that happens to be television: each season a new institution, the same city refusing to be solved. Characters function inside systems, not merch. Start at the corner; stay for the report card — and for a newsroom closer that still argues with the first wire.
Open on a street that is already an argument. The first hour of The Wire does not introduce a hero so much as a jurisdiction: a corner, a courtroom, a police department already lying to itself about what it can solve. David Simon and Ed Burns write Baltimore as a set of interlocking machines — drugs, docks, City Hall, schools, the newsroom — and then ask television to behave like a novel that refuses a narrator’s mercy. If you came for an antihero origin story, the text will starve you politely. If you came to…
Filed against
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Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell is The Wire’s MBA language trying to colonize a street that will not be colonized — civic instrument, not brand extension. David Simon’s Baltimore treats institutions as leads; Stringer is the corner with a…
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- Lance Reddick as Cedric Daniels
Lance Reddick’s Cedric Daniels is The Wire’s institutional still center — David Simon’s Baltimore as interlocking machines, a novel in five civic volumes, the corner never the point. Badge as ethics, not as merch. On TV Flash he is cable…
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Sonja Sohn’s Kima Greggs made The Wire’s detective work feel like a civic novel, not a merch cop show — David Simon’s Baltimore in five institutional volumes, the corner never the point. On TV Flash she is the badge inside the system:…
- Clarke Peters as Lester Freamon
Clarke Peters’s Lester Freamon made The Wire’s detail work look like poetry — dollhouse miniatures, quiet fury, institutions as characters. Novelistic HBO crime needed his patience. On TV Flash he’s the detective who always had a longer…