If you have not seen The Wire:
Step 1) Stop reading immediately (though you probably would do this anyway). There are spoilers below, and I will not be held responsible for ruining the greatest show of all time.
Step 2) Watch the entire series on HBO Go. If you do not get HBO, this is a fixable problem.
Step 3) Come back and read all of the character reviews I've completed so far. If you enjoy good TV, you will binge all 60 episodes and finish the show before I finish the character rankings.
Step 4) Find a new job. In retrospect, that was a bad decision watching a full season of The Wire every day for five days because your employer expected you to show up to work. You need a means to pay for HBO so that you can watch all the episodes again.
On with the rankings!
25) Brother Mouzone
Brother Mouzone doesn't get a lot of screen time in the series, but he's the linchpin of several great scenes during Season Two and Season Three. Originally brought to Baltimore by Avon Barksdale to protect his operation, Mouzone doesn't have the appearance of muscle for a drug gang, what with the glasses, suit, and bowtie and all. However, it's clear from his first appearance that he means business when he shoots Proposition Joe's lieutenant Cheese with a quick draw.
Shooting Cheese alone makes Mouzone nearly satisfying enough to merit consideration on this list (apologies, Slim Charles), but there's more to him than that. Mouzone speaks eloquently and is very well-read. He commands enough respect to keep rival gangs away just by quietly sitting on a bench, perusing The Economist or whatever. Some feel that this makes Mouzone sort of a caricature of sorts, a gimmick not unlike Clay Davis compulsively blurting out "sheeeeeiiiiiiiitttttt", but I think this is just because we don't get much backstory on him, and I bet a lot of people would think the same thing about Omar if we only saw select "action" scenes. When Omar threatens to kill him, he says "I'm at peace with my god. Do what you will." You get the feeling that there's a pretty interesting history behind this guy. Sadly, The Wire never has time to explore it.
Greatest Character Moment: Who could forget the alley confrontation between Mouzone and Omar?
24) Marlo Stanfield
The primary villain of Seasons Three through Five, to the extent that one has to be designated, Marlo is the powerful leader of a drug gang from the second we meet him, and ultimately rises to be the primary kingpin in Baltimore in Season Five. We don't know much about Marlo's history, just that he's soft-spoken and you don't want to mess with him and his lackeys.
After watching the series once, I spoke to friends about what a terrible character I think Marlo is, but after re-watches and pondering it more, I think I confused "terrible" with "hateable". Marlo has pretty much no redeeming qualities and mostly just sits back and avoids doing the dirty work, issuing soft-spoken commands when necessary. He doesn't get fired up about anything until the second-to-last episode of the series. The point is, you're supposed to hate Marlo, and the show does a great job of making you desperately hope the major crimes unit will bring him down.
Greatest Character Moment: I think that most people best remember Marlo's impassioned outburst at the jail linked above, but this scene takes the cake, as he calmly steals a lollipop from a drug store in front of a security guard, whom Marlo implies is powerless to do anything about it.
23) Chris Partlow
Security Guard: Look, I told you I ain't stepping to. I ain't disrespecting you, son.
Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way.
Security Guard: What?
Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way.
Security Guard: Man, I don't want it to be --
Marlo Stanfield: You want it to be one way.
Security Guard: [Losing temper] Man, stop -- [pulls himself together] -- Stop saying that.
Marlo Stanfield: But it's the other way.
Chris is Marlo's number-two and he's loyal to a fault, committing murder after murder because "it had to be done". He's the one who kills and hides victims in the vacant houses in Season Four, a fact that evades the police for nearly the entire season and reaches ghost-story status with the kids on the street.
Yet, it's clear that Chris isn't just some bloodthirsty serial killer. He does what he does out of allegiance to Marlo and not from any sense of rage or hatred for his targets. Before pulling the trigger, he typically tells the victim to relax, assuring him/her that it will be quick. The main exception to this was when Michael Lee asked for Chris' help in dealing with his brother Bug's abusive father. Rather than a quick, painless shot to the head, Chris angrily beats the man to death, which some believe to be his way of unleashing some suppressed demons from his own childhood.
Greatest Character Moment: Aforementioned beating, shown here beginning at 4:56
22) Chester 'Ziggy' Sobotka
Ziggy is loud, cocky, annoying, whiny, and stupid. Though they don't ever share a scene together, he'd do a great job making Herc look like a model citizen and a beacon of common sense. He's extremely aggravating to watch make obvious mistakes over and over again that result in him getting robbed, beaten, or just plain ridiculed by his fellow stevedores.
That's more or less the point of Ziggy for the first seven or so episodes of Season Two, but the home stretch fleshes him out a lot more. He has one of the best epigraphs (the character quotes shown before the beginning of each episode) of the entire series:
"How come they don't fly away?"
Ziggy says this when observing a group of ducks that are free to leave their cage, but don't. The ducks don't leave because they have clipped wings, which effectively traps them where they are.
The parallel here is that Ziggy, too, is trapped, and the show leaves it pretty open-ended as to whether that's truly Ziggy's fault. The later episodes of the season imply that his father, Frank Sobotka, was unattentive to Ziggy as a child and we see him enabling Ziggy's bad behavior as an adult. Maybe Ziggy was always destined to be a piece of shit, but without effective guidance from his father, he turns into a raging screw-up who's always demanding respect that he never earns. That takes a turn for the tragic when he finally snaps and murders Double G, followed by turning himself in. The Wire actually makes you feel bad for this guy -- something you would have never thought possible after four episodes of his nonsense.
Greatest Character Moment: The "seeing eye duck" stunt was funny, but his best scene is his final one with Frank at the prison. Heartbreaking.
21) Wallace
Another tragic figure, Wallace is an intelligent kid with a good heart that becomes unfortunately mixed up in the drug trade simply because that's the situation he was born into. He's seen helping out younger kids in Baltimore's projects with their math as well as bringing them food. He's the first character we see to seek an escape from his current situation, deciding he wants nothing to do with drug dealing after seeing the way in which the Barksdale crew murdered Omar's boyfriend. He cooperates with the police and is put in witness protection away from the city, and heck, that's boring, so he finds his way back to Baltimore, where he meets his demise at the hands of his best friends.
This was Michael B. Jordan's big break as an actor because everyone who watched Season One was gripped by Wallace's tragic story. He's the guy on the streets you feel for the most (outside of possibly D'Angelo) and his death was just the first of many sad ones over the course of the series' run. He is the first of the five significant characters killed off in the second-to-last episode of a season, and the second of many characters to die (or nearly die) in the same episode in which they deliver the epigraph quote. In a pretty depressing sense, Wallace's death was a true "Welcome to The Wire" moment.
Greatest Character Moment: His death scene. It's one of the worst scenes to watch, but you can't say enough about Jordan's performance here.
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