There lay Omar, in the open body bag with the wrong man’s papers attached to it. The ‘Y’ incision from the fresh autopsy was clearly visible. Dead, naked and alone, he’d had his brains blown out a few hours earlier by a murderous child. And the best character on television was gone.

Omar — scarred mass murderer, robber of drug dealers, avenging angel, Bogeyman of the streets, survivor of a Batman-like dive from a high floor in a condo complex, lover of other men — got taken down by a hardened little kid while buying a pack of smokes at a grungy inner-city convenience store.

Every episode of this last season of The Wire seems to bring a new death. You thought Omar would get a cinematic departure, perhaps with him going up against Snoop and Chris one more time, guns ablaze. No…and that is in keeping with the show.

Death came to him in an almost pedestrian way he didn’t expect. There was no real drama — one shot and his brains were on the Plexiglas that encaged the Korean clerk at the store. At the Sunpaper, the inner-city murder seemed so unremarkable that it got cut from the paper for space reasons. No one came to claim his body. And then he almost got tagged with the wrong identity — a mistake caught at the last moment.

Within hours of his death, the legend was well on its way to being forgotten in his semi-fictitious world. But in the real world, we may not see a television character as good as Omar for a very long time.