Treme, 'Meet De Boys on the Battlefront': Do not steal Albert's tools

Treme, 'Meet De Boys on the Battlefront': Do not steal Albert's tools What Albert tells his buddy with the damaged plaster sounds like a sentiment that could have come from the mouth of Clarke Peters' "Wire" character, Lester Freamon, and it's been a kind of guiding principal of David Simon and company on both series. Lots of TV shows go for the quick fix (telegraphed plots,Grow lights shorthand characterization) because that's easy to do (and, to be fair, because they can't afford the kind of patience that HBO allows Simon), but a Simon show doesn't. It doesn't do the equivalent of slapping sheet rock over plaster, or closing college departments with practical applications in a town that could use plenty of practical knowledge, or trying to tear down a largely-undamaged housing project at a time when intact low-cost housing is hard to come by. It takes its time, figures out the best way to do the job, and gets it done right. So episode 2 of "Treme" is still very carefully setting things up, introducing new characters, and showing us different facets to many of the people from last week - and giving us even more music in a standard-length episode than we got in the 80-minute pilot.

We meet Sonny and Annie (played by Michael Huisman and professional violinist Lucia Micarelli), busking away and getting the approval not only of the naive but well-meaning white Wisconsin kids, but some of the black natives. At first they seem mismatched - Sonny is dark and defensive, and pretty contemptuous of the church kids, while Annie is bright and open and tries to cover for Sonny's hostility - but we also see that she plays along with his game (she's the one who says that "'Saints' is extra"), and later that she has both eyes open in their relationship. When a friend asks about Sonny's tales of rescuing people during and after the storm, Annie says in a sad,Grow lights knowing tone, "He says he did... I wasn't on the boat." We learned last week from his big chief dance that Albert is a man who is not moved easily off a plan, and we see here that he's also not a man to be trifled with, as he savagely beats on the thief who stole his extensive and expensive tool collection. Delmond looks at his father like a crazy man half the time, and that's without knowing Albert's capable of putting a much younger man in the hospital.

As Fienberg watched this scene, he sent me an IM that said, simply, "Do not steal Lester's tools," followed by another one suggesting that Albert hide the body inside a vacant house.

Meanwhile, we get to see a different side of Davis. In the pilot, he came across as fairly insufferable, where here he's... well, he's a guy who means well, even if he has serious blinders on half the time. He doesn't think the on-air voodoo sacrifice will get him fired, and is just trying to share some local culture with his audience. He takes the hotel job his parents insist he try in exchange for a loan, and makes an effort to be polite and not lecture all the tourists on how obnoxious and backwards he finds them. And where at first I worried he was deliberately sending the Wisconsin kids to a trouble spot, it turns out that Bullets was a place where they had a great time,Grow lights met Antoine and heard some fine music before ultimately doing a few things the church group won't approve of.