March 5 (Bloomberg) -- ``The Wire'' ends its five-year run in a hail of gunfire, resignations and reproach. Tony Soprano would be impressed.

The finale of David Simon's Baltimore-based series, which airs March 9 on HBO at 9 p.m. New York time, is powerful and poignant. The episode begins in City Hall, where Mayor Thomas Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) finds himself in the middle of a perfect effluvia storm.

It's not that the serial killer he's been promising to save Baltimore from has struck again. It's far worse than that: He now knows what viewers have known all along: The ``killer'' was created by Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) to force the mayor to free up funds the police can use to pursue real criminals.

The ruse worked perfectly: Drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), hit man Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and several of their associates are now in jail awaiting trial. Yet the scandal could prevent Carcetti from winning the governor's race.

We'll miss Carcetti, who was like Boss Hogg without the charm. He reminded us, week in and week out, that while there's little room for purity in urban politics, there's plenty of space for scheming, oily demagogues. I'll have fonder memories of police Colonel Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) and Assistant State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy), whose final dispositions drive home a regular ``Wire'' story line: The cream usually doesn't rise nearly as high as the scum.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Faithful viewers will also miss McNulty and his pals over at the cop shop, even though they sometimes did bad in order to do good. Not everyone was so ethically elastic, including detectives Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce), who showed a fondness for cigars and aphorisms. He compared the problems caused by creating the fake killer to war: ``Easy to get in, hell to get out.''

Simon also created world-class street criminals, not all of whom make it to the final episode. Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson) were wiped out earlier this season, and others are dispatched via cranial explosions in the last episode.

Stanfield, the undertakers' best friend, experiences a surprising chain of events that underscores another ``Wire'' message: Street criminals have much in common with the folks working in the ``legitimate'' economy.

Fake Stories

One of the themes of this final season was how journalism is responding to America's urban crisis. The answer isn't encouraging.

Simon, who worked at the Baltimore Sun for 13 years, gives a warts-and-all portrayal of his former employer. By the final episode, City Editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) is sure that some of the stories written by star reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) are as phony as McNulty's serial killer.

Simon clearly believes in the old -- and increasingly unfashionable -- creed that journalists should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In that spirit he leaves viewers with a disquieting image -- a young black male, maybe 12 years old, being led away in handcuffs.

``The Wire'' is history. The kid, Simon indicates, is the future.

(Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Dave Shiflett at dshifl@aol.com.

Last Updated: March 5, 2008 00:02 EST