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Due South: An Eye for an Eye
Due South 1.13, "An Eye for an Eye"
Original airdate: February 2, 1995
Favorite line:
RAY: All right, stand back and watch how we do things here in America. No Neighborhood Watch, no caring for your fellow man, just good old fashioned intimidation.
FRASER: You know, Ray, your methods are a constant source of inspiration to me.
RAY: Ah, well, thank you, Benny.
Spoilers, of course.
This is an excellent episode, but it's also prickly and difficult to like, much like its protagonist, Herb Colling. I admire the writers very much, actually, for making Mr. Colling intransigent and angry and real (and uncharmed by Fraser), and for presenting the problems of his neighborhood without trying to pretend they can be fixed, and especially not by a band-aid applied by the Powers That Be. They hit that at the very beginning of the episode:
RAY: What kind of bozo comes up with a safety tip like that?
FRASER: [reading from the pamphlet] The Mayor's Blue-Ribbon Panel on Safety for Senior Citizens.
RAY: Yeah, a bunch of do-gooders sitting around solving other people's problems, sipping on cappuccinos.
The scene in the Senior Center makes it clear just how inadequate the blue-ribbon panel's ideas are, but the episode goes one step further and indicts Fraser as well: "I had no right," he says to Lt. Welsh, "to compare my experiences to theirs and offer up solutions to a problem that was far more severe in their minds than I could possibly anticipate." Fraser is guilt-tripping himself, of course, as Welsh's remark about the hair shirt shows, but at the same time the episode is pointing insistently at the inherent problem. Fraser's solution is better than the blue-ribbon panel's, but he's no less guilty of playing Lady Bountiful, and Mr. Colling refuses to play Grateful Peasant. Some episodes of Due South buy into a Capra-esque worldview; this one does not.
One thing I like about Due South is the fact that it remembers to populate its world with people who are not white. In this episode, I think it was a particularly good decision to make both the mugger and his victim/assailant black, as are most, though not all, of Mr. Colling's neighbors. Because the story is about how poverty will make people turn on each other, and although that is, inevitably, in part a racial problem (because it's a class problem and because in America the two can't be separated out tidily), by making both mugger and victim the same race, they're refusing any number of stereotypical scenarios about blacks preying on whites or whites preying on blacks. And by making both characters black, they are saying--as they're going to say again in "White Men Can't Jump To Conclusions" and "Mountie and Soul"--that white people aren't the only ones with stories and viewpoints. Which for a television show in which both lead characters are white men is pretty darn nifty.
The other thing that's really interesting about this episode is the mugger himself. Steg. He has no other name, and we only learn that much of his name very late in the episode. He and Ray and Fraser are the only young people in the episode (and the wry jokes about ageism--"Well, you know, the aged are just like people, too. Only, they're older" and then, turning it around: "You know, children are just like people, only smaller"), and the thing about Steg is, he's anonymous, identity-less. He's no one. He has no morals, no friends (even the yahoos on the bikes at least have each other), no connections to anyone else and no center within himself.
RAY: It's like the guy doesn't exist.
FRASER: Well, maybe he doesn't, Ray, at least not to the casual observer.
One of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Invisible Man," hinges on exactly the same observation about social invisibility as this episode, and although I have no knowledge of or opinion about the likelihood that the writers (being in this case Carla Kettner, Jeff King, and Kathy Slevin) have read Chesterton, it's at least a pleasing coincidence that this episode's detective work has a slight Golden Age flavor to it. Tracking, of course, is something that both Sherlock Holmes and Peter Wimsey excel at, and the discovery that one has tracked the wrong person ... well, it happens to Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, and Fraser and Ray are doing an exceptionally good Holmes and Watson impersonation along with it. But I've distracted myself. My point is that Steg is anonymous to the point of being non-existent, with his claustrophobic and miserable room, the way he's associated with that most irritating and personality-less of ephemera, junk mail, and the way he watches the denizens of the neighborhood without their watching him in return. The camera even treats Steg like the monster in a horror movie: shadows and misdirection and his habit of emerging into frame from the direction you least expect him. He does it in the initial mugging, and he does it again when he waits in Mr. Colling's closet. But the episode never makes him a horror movie monster. He is as much a victim as his own victims--"I ain't got no credit card"--and in the end he is just as helpless and frightened of Mr. Colling as Mr. Colling was of him.
There aren't any good answers; the episode offers a partial and tentative optimism as Mr. Colling's community service seems to consist of playing chess with a juvenile offender, and we are invited to see a reluctant trans-generational bond being formed as the kid whines and complains, but is nevertheless sitting there playing chess:
KID: Who cares?
MR. COLLING: I do! You sit here long enough, maybe you will, too.
But the episode isn't trying to pretend that this is anything but fragile and partial and possibly not enough. Chicago is anarchy and entropy and even Fraser can only stand against it temporarily.
Original airdate: February 2, 1995
Favorite line:
RAY: All right, stand back and watch how we do things here in America. No Neighborhood Watch, no caring for your fellow man, just good old fashioned intimidation.
FRASER: You know, Ray, your methods are a constant source of inspiration to me.
RAY: Ah, well, thank you, Benny.
Spoilers, of course.
This is an excellent episode, but it's also prickly and difficult to like, much like its protagonist, Herb Colling. I admire the writers very much, actually, for making Mr. Colling intransigent and angry and real (and uncharmed by Fraser), and for presenting the problems of his neighborhood without trying to pretend they can be fixed, and especially not by a band-aid applied by the Powers That Be. They hit that at the very beginning of the episode:
RAY: What kind of bozo comes up with a safety tip like that?
FRASER: [reading from the pamphlet] The Mayor's Blue-Ribbon Panel on Safety for Senior Citizens.
RAY: Yeah, a bunch of do-gooders sitting around solving other people's problems, sipping on cappuccinos.
The scene in the Senior Center makes it clear just how inadequate the blue-ribbon panel's ideas are, but the episode goes one step further and indicts Fraser as well: "I had no right," he says to Lt. Welsh, "to compare my experiences to theirs and offer up solutions to a problem that was far more severe in their minds than I could possibly anticipate." Fraser is guilt-tripping himself, of course, as Welsh's remark about the hair shirt shows, but at the same time the episode is pointing insistently at the inherent problem. Fraser's solution is better than the blue-ribbon panel's, but he's no less guilty of playing Lady Bountiful, and Mr. Colling refuses to play Grateful Peasant. Some episodes of Due South buy into a Capra-esque worldview; this one does not.
One thing I like about Due South is the fact that it remembers to populate its world with people who are not white. In this episode, I think it was a particularly good decision to make both the mugger and his victim/assailant black, as are most, though not all, of Mr. Colling's neighbors. Because the story is about how poverty will make people turn on each other, and although that is, inevitably, in part a racial problem (because it's a class problem and because in America the two can't be separated out tidily), by making both mugger and victim the same race, they're refusing any number of stereotypical scenarios about blacks preying on whites or whites preying on blacks. And by making both characters black, they are saying--as they're going to say again in "White Men Can't Jump To Conclusions" and "Mountie and Soul"--that white people aren't the only ones with stories and viewpoints. Which for a television show in which both lead characters are white men is pretty darn nifty.
The other thing that's really interesting about this episode is the mugger himself. Steg. He has no other name, and we only learn that much of his name very late in the episode. He and Ray and Fraser are the only young people in the episode (and the wry jokes about ageism--"Well, you know, the aged are just like people, too. Only, they're older" and then, turning it around: "You know, children are just like people, only smaller"), and the thing about Steg is, he's anonymous, identity-less. He's no one. He has no morals, no friends (even the yahoos on the bikes at least have each other), no connections to anyone else and no center within himself.
RAY: It's like the guy doesn't exist.
FRASER: Well, maybe he doesn't, Ray, at least not to the casual observer.
One of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Invisible Man," hinges on exactly the same observation about social invisibility as this episode, and although I have no knowledge of or opinion about the likelihood that the writers (being in this case Carla Kettner, Jeff King, and Kathy Slevin) have read Chesterton, it's at least a pleasing coincidence that this episode's detective work has a slight Golden Age flavor to it. Tracking, of course, is something that both Sherlock Holmes and Peter Wimsey excel at, and the discovery that one has tracked the wrong person ... well, it happens to Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of Four, and Fraser and Ray are doing an exceptionally good Holmes and Watson impersonation along with it. But I've distracted myself. My point is that Steg is anonymous to the point of being non-existent, with his claustrophobic and miserable room, the way he's associated with that most irritating and personality-less of ephemera, junk mail, and the way he watches the denizens of the neighborhood without their watching him in return. The camera even treats Steg like the monster in a horror movie: shadows and misdirection and his habit of emerging into frame from the direction you least expect him. He does it in the initial mugging, and he does it again when he waits in Mr. Colling's closet. But the episode never makes him a horror movie monster. He is as much a victim as his own victims--"I ain't got no credit card"--and in the end he is just as helpless and frightened of Mr. Colling as Mr. Colling was of him.
There aren't any good answers; the episode offers a partial and tentative optimism as Mr. Colling's community service seems to consist of playing chess with a juvenile offender, and we are invited to see a reluctant trans-generational bond being formed as the kid whines and complains, but is nevertheless sitting there playing chess:
KID: Who cares?
MR. COLLING: I do! You sit here long enough, maybe you will, too.
But the episode isn't trying to pretend that this is anything but fragile and partial and possibly not enough. Chicago is anarchy and entropy and even Fraser can only stand against it temporarily.