Freamon visits Daniels' office and tells him that they need audio surveillance on the payphones surrounding the projects to make the case.
Meanwhile, Carver and Herc track down Bodie to the Pit and violently arrest him for absconding from the juvenile detention center.
Bunk receives a ballistics report confirming that the shell casing from the Kresson murder is linked to the Barksdales, just as Landsman predicted.
He approaches from the front carrying a shotgun while nonchalantly whistling "The Farmer in the Dell," which scares the dealers and causes them to run into Brandon and Bailey in the alley.
Bodie notices Wallace a distance away playing with a Transformers figurine and throws a bottle at the wall near him in anger, yelling that the crew keeps getting robbed because they're not on their guard.
It also relates to the detail; as Freamon points out, they should have had the wire up in time to catch the discussion of Bailey's murder on the phones (and, if not that, certainly the kidnapping of Brandon).
The conversation Bodie and Poot have about HIV/AIDS transmission is taken almost verbatim from the non-fiction book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood.
An Entertainment Weekly review picked this episode as "amazing" because it begins to deliver pay-offs on the show's slowly developing plot lines.
The episode's most rewarding plot lines were those that involved D'Angelo's struggles with his conscience and McNulty's battles with the bureaucracy of the police department.