truepenny | Due South: You Must Remember This

Due South 1.11, "You Must Remember This"
Original airdate: Jan. 5, 1995
Favorite line:
FRASER: Ray, I don't mean to press the point, but we're standing behind a 1971 Buick Riviera. They, on the other hand, are hurtling down a hill at roughly forty-seven miles an hour in a six-ton steel-plated military weapons carrier.
RAY: Works for me.
FRASER: Very good.

(I've been forgetting to put up the spoiler warning. So, you know. Spoilers.)

This is far from being my favorite episode, but it's a great deal more interesting in hindsight, when it can be looked at in conjunction with "Victoria's Secret." The story of Ray and Suzanne Chapin is clearly foreshadowing the return of Victoria Metcalf into Fraser's life, and not only because this is the episode where Fraser starts to talk about her.

Significantly, he's talking to himself.

(If there is a moment in the entire run where I hate Ray Vecchio, it's this one:

RAY: How often in a lifetime does this type of thing happen? I mean, has it ever happened to you?
FRASER: Well, I ... uh ...
RAY: No, of course not. You're a Mountie. What does a Mountie know about women?

I know Ray doesn't know what he's dismissing, but that cavalier reduction of Fraser to The Mountie is still cruel. And thoughtlessly cruel, which is almost worse. Ray is remarkably self-centered throughout the episode, which is one of the things the series does believe about love--or more accurately limerence: it makes a person incredibly self-absorbed and selfish.)

This episode also starts asking questions that the series is going to continue to circle and sniff and gnaw on--much like Diefenbaker with a package of chips--about love. What is it, how do you recognize it, what do you do with it? And one of the most interesting things is that the answers this episode apparently gives are lies. Or at least deeply problematic.

One problem with the definition offered is brought up in the episode itself; the fact that it's a definition by men and for men and a definition that considers women as an alien species. "Women don't have signs," Gardino says to Elaine. "Men have signs. Women have biological imperatives. It's true. I read it." And Elaine very rightly identifies this as nonsense: "Jeez. Gardino, it's no wonder your wife left you for a pot-roast." One of the things I like about Due South is that while the male characters may not always be aware that women are human beings just as they are, the show is always aware of it. Fraser is always aware of it.

So that's one big problem with how Ray conceptualizes love: it's all about how the man feels about the woman. That's not love (any more than it's love when it's all about how the woman feels about the man). The show's going to circle back to this point in "Strange Bedfellows," where the flaws in this Ray's arguments are exposed by that Ray's actions. Notice that the story Ray concocts to explain Suzanne's actions makes her dependent on him: "That's why she's sending me signals, Fraser. She wants me to rescue her." Where in reality, Suzanne doesn't need Ray, or anybody else, to rescue her, and wouldn't even if she wasn't an ATF agent.

The other problem with Ray's view of love is that it's heavily invested in the love-at-first-sight model. Love-at-first-sight is something the show is conflicted about, because its format and genre tend to demand that love-at-first-sight work, but it doesn't. (I'll have more to say about this when we get to Fraser's various "romances," but in a nutshell, my feeling is that they aren't so much romance as Fraser's inability to say "no.") And this is where Victoria starts to loom very large, because her relationship with Fraser is entirely a matter of love-at-first-sight, and that love-at-first-sight is a lie. Or, at least, an insufficient truth. Victoria may love Fraser, but she hates him more. And what Fraser feels for her is, I think, at least as much about his alienation, his loneliness and tiredness, as it is about her. I can also see a thematic echo in Diefenbaker's obsession with fast food in this episode: immediate gratification, but it's bad for you. Empty calories instead of nourishment.

We don't know yet, in this episode, that Victoria was a criminal, that she begged Fraser not to take her in and he did anyway, so we won't realize until later what Ray's arc in this episode is setting up.

RAY: I find her, I gotta arrest her, too. End of story.
FRASER: Well, yes.

But that's not the end of the story. Not for either of them. Not for Fraser because Victoria doesn't accept that as the end of the story, and not for Ray, because he does let Suzanne go--or tries to. And seems almost more betrayed by the discovery that she's a fed than he was by believing she was an arms dealer.

My theory about the two Rays is that Ray Vecchio is a foil for Fraser and Ray Kowalski is a mirror, and this may be the clearest moment to see Ray Vecchio as a foil. When faced with the same situation, he chooses--I don't want to call it "love," because calling it "love" is buying into the fairytale that Ray is trying to tell, so let's stay with limerence. He chooses limerence over duty. Fraser, of course, chose duty. And not "of course" because he's "a Mountie. What does a Mountie know about women?" But because he's Fraser and he understands duty and honor as more than just words.

(GARDINO: What are we gonna do, arrest ourselves?
RAY: No, but he will.
FRASER: I'm sorry, I would feel honor-bound.)

Fraser's ethics are not situational, and that can be funny, but the show also understands that it is very very hard.