Due South: They Eat Horses, Don't They?

[truepenny]

Due South 1.4, "They Eat Horses, Don't They?"
Original airdate: Oct. 13, 1994
Favorite line:
LEGGETT: [leering after Stephanie Cabot] You know what she needs, don't you?
FRASER: Well, yes. A world where people don't value life by the pound.



This, I think, is the episode where Due South hits its stride. We have fully developed and interconnected A & B plots, we have mystery and detecting, and the surreal begins to edge out the parareal as the show's dominant mode, and it does so (this is the thing that fills me with delight) by taking Fraser's pararealism just that one step farther.

RAY: You know what really annoys me? Why am I covered in crud and you look like you just got back from a hand laundry?
FRASER: I don't know. I've always been this way.

There's also a certain amount of surreality in Fraser's early morning ride with Stehpanie Cabot through the completely deserted streets of downtown Chicago, and in the moment where one of the otherwise characterless villains, faced with Ray and Fraser's apparent demise, blurts out, "God I have this dream about dying wrapped in frozen meat." This episode is also where they begin to play openly with the meta level:

FRASER: No matter what you say, you cannot base an investigation on a theory developed from the casting of a television series.
RAY: You're just mad because I was right.
FRASER: No, I'm not mad. It just doesn't make any sense.
RAY: Oh and putting horsemeat on your nose does?
FRASER: That was different.
RAY: You're telling me.

They're not going as far as contrarealism yet, but they are certainly paving the way for it.

The serious social and emotional commentary is all in the B plot: casual institutional racism; Mrs. Gamez's difficulties with her landlord; the completely unexplained--though commented on--absence of Mr. Gamez; Fraser again making a promise it seems impossible for him to keep And the Inuit story he tells Mrs. Gamez (which it seems to me is also an alternate retelling of "Manhunt") brings the thematic question of "home" and "lost" right back into the forefront.

FRASER: ... So when his enemy finally found him, Nakuk had nothing to protect him, and he was lost.
MRS. GAMEZ: That's a sad story.
FRASER: Yes, it is.

I find it really interesting here that Fraser says Nakuk (I am totally, by the way, guessing on the spelling, and if I've got it wrong, I apologize) is lost, not killed or defeated. He's suggesting, of course, that by running Mrs. Gamez will lose herself, in the same way Buck Frobisher lost himself. But it also seems that being lost is much more final and dreadful than being killed (which will turn out to be true in another six episodes); for me, the word has something of the same resonance here that it does in Tolkien, where it becomes possibly the most terrible word in the English language.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Lost *is* the most terrible word in the English language.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It really is, isn't it?

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yes.

Rather.

[renenet.livejournal.com]

Hi! Popping in to say that I'm reading these posts avidly. You know, just to confirm that your big squishy brain has an audience. Thank you!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Her brain's not squishy. It's crunchy. We established that a while back.

[renenet.livejournal.com]

Squishy...crunchy...fried calimari...whatever you say. It's all good.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

No arguments here. We love her crunchy brains. *g*

[sasha-feather.livejournal.com]

I'm just watching Due South now, so I'm going back and reading along with your thoughts. Which are helping me enjoy the show more, because-- the science on this one seemed really bad. ( Parasites from wild horse meat? Food outbreaks happen all the time, from much more mundane causes. ) But yes, now I see how they are messing around with realism, and how Fraser is basically a Knight Errant.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's a very good description of him.

[sasha-feather.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks to both of you.

Sarah, your perceptive analyses help me dress up base fangirl squee in a tasteful mantle of adult-pattern thinkyness.

Sasha, you've put your finger on why Fraser is so affecting--he pushes the Romantic buttons as an embodiment of chivalry.

Slings & Arrows has sent a whole new herd of caribou down due South. (Due South is discussed, drooled over, ficced and vidded across a huge LJ community. I'm delighted and proud of a fandom that first blossomed with older technology, but including far-thinking folk who archived their output so that seven years later it's still available to us.)

[bghost.livejournal.com]

You are correct about "lost" being one of the most terrible words in the English language. As Tolkien uses it, and as it resonates in much literature, "lost" equates to "damned", completely outside of life and light and hope. In Biblical terminology Christ goes out to seek and save the "lost"... sheep, souls, etc. And in linguistic terms, one of the saddest words in the English language, "folorn" comes from Germanic "lost."

So yes, as Bob Fraser says to his son in Letting Go, there are worse things than being dead... "there's you for example," he says, with gruff sympathy, of Fraser before he's "found" himself.

In other words, being lost is far worse than being dead. And returning to 'that' idea... no wonder Fraser panics and goes blind in North! He insistently reassures himself that he's not lost, but he's blind, compassless, and so panicked he can't stand on his own two feet.

Thank Goodness for Ray in that episode, that he knew what he was doing.

And your commentaries are so good... they make me speculate wildly about the series and go off on tangents! Thanks for that.