Outside the Meeting Room of Villainy, where real reporters are doing real newspaper work, Gus summons Alma to his desk to account for the bland, flavorless Daniels quote that's stinking up her copy. Alma relates how Daniels refused to say anything remotely colorful on account of the paper reporting that he backstabbed Burrell. You can see the mental gears turning in Gus's brain: "It was Scott Templeton who got us that now-disputed quote." Anyhow, they're past deadline, so Gus axes the quote from Alma's story. Then he turns and stares at the meeting room as Whiting is patting Templeton on the shoulder. All right, Templeton -- no one makes Gus Haynes have to chop lifeless quotes out of stories because you poisoned a source against the paper. It just got personal, buddy.

Whether you've just closed a major drug bust or you're just making sure that the plates keep spinning so that nobody discovers the horrible deceit you've constructed, nothing tops a long day of detective work -- or just pretending to do detective work -- like a night of drinking down at the tracks. That seems to be Freamon's point of view, as he's well on his way toward making a dent in the bottle of whatever spirit he's toting around. McNulty is less enthused. "This is what you wanted," a happily liquored-up Freamon reminds McNulty. "Then why do I feel like shit?" McNulty responds. Perhaps it's because the full magnitude of your actions is only now dawning on you now that people like Kima and Beadie are finally condemning you for what you did instead of enabling your skullduggery. (That's merely a hypothesis, by the way.) Freamon attributes McNulty's mixed emotions to "post-partum depression" and drunkenly philosophizes that "it's the journey, not the destination." "We got Marlo Stanfield," Freamon adds exultantly, as if the thought just came to him. "What about the serial killer?" McNulty wonders. "Marlo is he," Freamon counters. An interesting interpretation -- and doubtlessly the correct one -- but I somehow doubt the top brass will be eager to accept that point of view, even after a couple of shots from Freamon's bottle.