...and sure enough, after dark, the party rages on. At least they're not quite in international waters, so we can be fairly sure that it's just a bunch of old white douchebags getting sloppy drunk and not, like, a Senator trying to marry a Cuisinart. McNulty and Diggins apparently have nothing better to do than sit in their freezing police boat, listening to rich assholes' laughter screeching through the night.

We get a new opening credits sequence -- Tom Waits singing his own song, over shots of shipping activities, Slavic women's passports, and lots and lots of drug business -- and then the season's first epigraph: "Ain't never gonna be what it was." -- Little Big Roy. That's a question you can take up with David Byrne.

We return from the credits with a gaudy stained-glass image of a noble police officer holding his uniform hat over the head of a beatific little child as we hear Prez passionately explaining that, after three years in Auto Theft, he hadn't learned anything, and didn't even want to be a cop anymore. The window glass swings around so that we can see it's being admired by Stan Valchek, who clearly isn't listening to Prez at all; to drive the point home, he actually stands the window up on his desk, between his face and Prez's. Maybe this is a story Prez would do better to stick in a blog. But no: Prez says that he thinks that's why he shot up his car. The Barksdale case, though, was something Prez wanted to do, so he was thinking he'd do well in Narcotics. Valchek is still ignoring Prez hard when a knock comes at the door; he lets in a guy with more glass, in wooden crates, which he leans up against a wall. Prez manfully returns to his theme, saying that if there aren't any openings in Narcotics, he could try Assets Forfeiture, but it's all for naught, as unis carry in more glass, and Valchek leaps out of his chair to bitch at them to be more careful. He goes over to check out the latest deliveries, and Prez follows, explaining, "Lester Freamon had us deep into the money. Real deep. We could've seized real estate, cash, vehicles -- all kinds of stuff. If the bosses-- I mean, if command had let that case go forward, we were on it." The result of Prez's appeal is Valchek pulling out a stained-glass tchotchke: "Look at that. It's the dove." Prez is like, "It sure is, ass." Valchek carefully steers the dove over to his desk, as Prez, ever the optimist, asks what he thinks. After a moment, Valchek says that Prez will take the sergeant's exam the next month: "And, because I have Andy Krawczyk's ear, and because he has City Hall's ear, you're gonna make sergeant." He places the glass in the window as he goes on: "Then you're gonna come out here to the Southeast, where, because I'm your father-in-law, you're gonna be assigned a daytime shift in a quiet sector. Then you're gonna take the lieutenant's exam, where you'll also score high." Prez is forced to say, because Valchek wasn't listening when he said it before, that he doesn't care about making rank. Valchek looks up sharply as Prez explains, "I want to work cases. Good cases." Valchek turns his attention away from his dove, for the moment, as he declares, "Roland. Listen to me. You did good with the drug thing. You buckled down, you did the work, and except for that thing with the grand jury, you helped take some of the stink off yourself. Now if you'll just shut up and listen to me, you might actually have a career in this department." Prez swallows hard, and wonders if maybe the most charitable explanation is true and his father-in-law has actually gone deaf.