Why I Can't Hate Frank Sobotka

[00:00:00]I finished season two of The Wire at about 2 in the morning and I sat there kind of angry at myself because I wanted to hate Frank Sabodka. I really did.

[00:00:08]This is a man who ran a dock where 13 women suffocated to death inside a shipping container and I couldn't do it.

[00:00:14]I couldn't hate him. I still can't. And I've been chewing on why ever since. So, I want to walk you through it because I think the reason I can't hate Frank says something about the whole show, maybe about all of us. Let me back up for anyone who needs it. Frank runs a steodor's union down on the Baltimore docks. And by the time I meet him, there's barely a union left to run. The membership shrinking. There's not enough work to go around. The whole port feels like something the modern world already decided it was done with. Containers, automation, cheaper labor a whole ocean away. You can watch an entire way of life dying in the background of nearly every shot, and it aches. Frank feels it in his gut, so he goes looking for a way to save it. He wants the harbor dredged deeper and the grain pier reopened so the big ships come back and his guys have work again. That takes money, political money, money he does not have.

[00:01:05]So he cuts a deal with the Greek. He starts letting certain containers slide through the docks quietly, no questions asked, and the cash comes back to keep the lights on. He tells himself he doesn't want to know what's inside those cans. But I think he always knew. I think a piece of him knew from the very first one, and he swallowed it anyway.

[00:01:23]Here's what got me. Frank barely keeps a scent of that money for himself. No boat, no big house, nothing. He slides it quietly to his own guys when they're drowning. There's this thing he does where a worker walks into the union bar, orders a drink courtesy of Frank Sabatka, and walks back out with a few thousand in his pocket to get through the month. That's who the man is when nobody's watching him. And honestly, put yourself where he's standing for a second. 50 men count on you to sign their checks. You grew up with these guys. Some of them are the sons of the men who taught you the trade. The men who covered for you back when you were young and useless. Now the work is gone and you're the one who has to look every one of them in the eye and say sorry.

[00:02:04]Then somebody slides an offer across the table. Make one box disappear. Just look the other way. And everybody eats for another year. It's real easy for me to say I'd never take that deal while I'm sitting on my couch with a full fridge behind me. Sitting across from 50 families though. I honestly don't know what I'd do. And that scares me a little. That's the hook the show sinks into you. Frank is a man going under, grabbing the only rope he can reach, even while he can feel the rope is rotten in his hands. And season 2 keeps giving me reasons to love the guy. He talks about surviving Reagan, surviving every union buster who ever came for them. When he starts going on about how we used to build things in this country, he's grieving. He's grieving his whole world right there in front of me. I felt that one in my chest and I didn't want to. But I don't get to let myself off that easy because the exact same season that made me love him spends just as much time building a case against him.

[00:02:57]And it is brutal. Start with that container. 13 women trafficked dead.

[00:03:02]Frank made money off the very pipeline that killed them. He looked away on purpose. And looking away on purpose is its own kind of guilt. I can't pretend it isn't. Then there's this kid Ziggy.

[00:03:14]God. Ziggy. Loud. lost, getting humiliated on those docks every single day, basically screaming for his father to see him. And Frank is too busy trying to save the union to save his own son.

[00:03:26]There's a moment where Nick, his nephew, has to remind him out loud, "That's your son." Because Frank keeps treating Ziggy like he's somebody else's problem. He poured everything he had into that union, and there was nothing left over for the boy who needed him most. That's the part I can't shake. Frank treated the docks like the only future a Sabotka was ever allowed to want. And he built that cage himself with his own hands. He never once told Ziggy there was a door.

[00:03:52]So, I had to ask myself something uncomfortable. Was any of this really about the men? Or was it about Frank?

[00:03:58]Because his brother Lewis stayed clean the whole time, retired, out of the rackets, wouldn't touch a dime of it. We barely see Lewis all season, and he might be the only Sabbatka who walks away with his hands clean. That comparison just sits there the whole time, quietly judging Frank. And I think somewhere deep down, Frank knew it, too.

[00:04:16]Which leaves me with the ugliest read on the whole thing. Maybe Frank was never all that selfless. Maybe underneath every speech was a man who was simply terrified of being the president who failed. A man chasing a legacy. A man who could not stand to lose face. Even at the point where losing face was the only thing that would have saved his family. He donated a stained glass window to the church. You know, beautiful thing, expensive, grander than the one Major Val's parish committee had planned. So Frank's window ended up in the place of honor. And Val never forgave him for it. That window, that stupid, prideful little window, is the thing that gets him killed. So, which is it? Tragic hero or self-righteous fraud?

[00:04:58]I went back and forth on that for weeks and eventually I got the feeling the show was quietly laughing at me for even asking because The Wire never lets me file people under heroes and villains.

[00:05:08]Everybody on it is some shade of gray all the way down and Frank is just the character who made me feel that the hardest. Look at how he actually dies. A cop named Val feels disrespected over a church window, so he goes to war over it. Parking tickets on the dock, DUI checkpoints in the morning, a surveillance van parked out there watching. Frank is too proud to eat it, so his guys steal the van. And now Frank is on the radar. That detail starts digging into the smuggling. The smuggling drags up the bodies, and the bodies put Frank in a room with men a whole lot scarier than any cop. Sit with that chain for a second because it took the wind out of me. A man ends up dead because his dirty money paid for a prettier window than another man's ego could handle. When I put it together, I actually paused the episode and stared at the wall for a minute. That's the whole show right there in one sad little sequence. The game does not care why you did it. It chews up the good ones and the bad ones with the exact same teeth.

[00:06:06]And it goes deeper for me. There's a line later in the series, Lester Freeman telling McNelte that the job will not save you. He's not even talking about Frank when he says it, but my god, it lands on Frank like a verdict somebody wrote out years in advance. Frank bet everything he had, his freedom, his son, his own life on a job, on the docks coming back. And I knew sitting there watching that they were never coming back. Containerization already won.

[00:06:34]Automation already won. History had closed that port in the ledger. And Frank was the last man down there arguing with the numbers. He thought his enemy was the Greek. He thought his enemy was Val. The whole 21st century was bearing down on one stubborn Polish Union man. And he kept swinging at it like it was somebody he could actually take. Nobody wins that fight. Nobody.

[00:06:56]And here is the part that genuinely got me. After all of it, the arrests, the investigation, Frank himself, the dead girls, the Greek just walks. His operation barely hiccups. The drugs keep moving. Frank burned his whole life down to the studs, and the machine he'd been feeding didn't slow down for a single second. That's the thing that stayed in my stomach long after the credits rolled. So, back to my problem. Why can't I hate this man? I think it's because to really hate him, I'd have to be sure I would have done better, and the show will not let me be sure. That's the whole trap. It keeps whispering that most of us aren't good people or bad people. We're just people standing wherever life happened to drop us, reaching for the least terrible option we can actually see from there. Give Frank a dock with a future in it, and he never even meets the Greek. He was a decent man who did some genuinely terrible things for a reason he could live with at night. And I understand that man. I've never sold my soul over a shipping container, but I understand wanting something so badly that you stop looking at what it's costing the people around you. I've been a smaller, cheaper version of that. most of us have. That's the thing that guts me about Frank. He needed to be the hero of his own story so badly that he never noticed he'd become a small replaceable part of somebody else's machine. If I had to put it in one sentence, it's this. Frank gave his life for a job that was already dead. And knowing it was dead is exactly what makes him so hard to hate and so impossible to forgive. Right at the end, he decides to do the right thing. He agrees to testify against the Greek to try and save Ziggy and Nick. And they lure him to one last meeting with a promise to help his boy. He walks in there anyway, takes the honest road, the hard one, right at the finish line, and he never gets to walk it because the Greeks man inside the FBI tips them off first and they cut him down before he ever says a word. I've watched that slow walk under the bridge more than once.

[00:08:57]every single time I want to reach into the screen and grab him by the collar and pull him back. Every single time I can't. So, I've made my peace with it sort of. The wire never actually asks me to decide whether Frank Sabatka was a good man or a bad one. It asks me something harder. Whether those two words were ever big enough to hold a real person in the first place. He gave everything for his people. He looked away while women died to do it. Both of those things are true about the same man and I have to carry both of them out of that season. That's the whole show for me standing in one broken guy on one dying pier. So, I want to hear from you.

[00:09:37]And I don't mean did you like Frank?

[00:09:40]That one's too easy. Here's what I actually want to know. If it were you standing in Frank's boots, 50 families leaning on you, and one box you've been told to just ignore, are you honestly sure you'd say no? Sit with it a second before you answer. then tell me down in the comments and be honest because after all this time I still don't fully trust my own