Due South: The Wild Bunch

[truepenny]

Due South, 1.15, "The Wild Bunch"
Original airdate: Feb. 16, 1995
Favorite line:
JUDGE SHERMAN: You're the cop that got Justice Powell committed to County Psychiatric.
RAY: Hey, look, just because a judge gets carried out of court on a stretcher screaming a particular detective's name--
JUDGE SHERMAN: No, no, no, no. I'm very honored. Really. Y'see, I've always wanted to know, just how many members of his immediate family did you actually indict?
RAY: Well, four, including the toddler, but that was an unfortunate error--
FRASER: Your honor, about my wolf?



This episode does not work. It's a pity, because there are things about it I like a lot (which I'll get back to in a minute), but it fails fundamentally because it's unwilling to carry either of its premises through to a logical conclusion.

Premise A: Diefenbaker is a wild animal.
Premise B: Diefenbaker is Fraser's best friend.

Under Premise A, which is the premise under which Diefenbaker is confiscated by Animal Control and sentenced to death, he does in fact have to be put to sleep, or at the least given to a zoo (I don't know the laws on these things, and what would actually happen to a wolf that bit a Chicago Animal Control Officer). If Diefenbaker is a wild animal and the world of the show is going to treat him as one, he cannot be saved. Regardless of the pet-theft ring, he's still bitten two people and is demonstrably not under control. As the judge says, "What you have here is a wild animal living in an apartment--by your own admission, has bitten more than one individual and is responsible for the death of at least one other animal. This is not Lassie!"

(Let's not even talk about the whole responsible pet ownership and why hasn't Maggie been spayed, pray tell? thing, okay? Take it as read.)

But then there's Premise B, which is the show's operating premise: that Diefenbaker is more than just a wolf:

RAY: Wanna talk about it?
FRASER: No.
RAY: Come on. You love that wolf.
FRASER: You loved your car.
RAY: Yeah, but a car isn't a person. I mean, a car is nothing but a hunk of metal--steel, bolts, and leather. ... I mean, I know that. But the wolf, it's the damnedest thing, but it's like there's a person inside of him.

Notice in this episode that both Willie and Fraser talk to Diefenbaker as if he can understand them (and can play Monopoly). This premise allows us to believe that Dief did in fact do all these things in defense of his beloved, the husky Maggie, and that his actions are therefore defensible and pardonable. But if Premise B is true, then the entire episode falls apart, because there is no reason that Diefenbaker couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't tell Fraser she's been wrongfully confiscated, instead of biting first Officer Benedict, and then Fraser himself. Especially biting Fraser: if the two of them truly can communicate, all Dief has to do is get him to TURN AROUND. In other words, we've got a classic TSTL (Too Stupid To Live) plot, only muddled because we've got that competing Premise A that suggests the reason Dief doesn't tell Fraser is that he can't. Because he's a wild animal, and Constable Fraser's pathetic anthropomorphizing of him has only harmed the wolf as much as the man. Except that if the show believed that and wanted its audience to believe that, Dief wouldn't be there trying to save Maggie in the first place.*

(There's also a problem wherein this episode seems to have forgotten that Dief is deaf, even though it references him pulling Fraser out of Prince Rupert Sound. If I work at it hard enough, I can rationalize that away, but it does involve real effort.)

If Premise A is true, then Dief is dead. If Premise B is true, then Dief shouldn't have done any of the things he did that put his life in danger. The episode's trying to have it both ways--following and discarding its premises as needed for maximum emotional manipulation and yet still getting to the happy ending--and that just doesn't work. Fraser would tell the writers so, if they would listen to him.

And, as I said, it's a pity, because the things the episode is trying to do are very interesting. The courtroom scene is painful precisely because of the collision of Premise A and Premise B, and the way that, for the duration of that scene, Premise B, which we as the audience have accepted to be the truth, is recast as Fraser's culpable insanity. We're just as guilty as Fraser is, just as helpless. Fraser's anxious, projective monologue about why Dief stayed in Chicago tells us more about Fraser than he would want it to. And the scene in which Fraser is trying to get the nerve to shoot Dief is painful regardless of the contortions required to get us there. (I don't like Lincoln, the second Dief, nearly as well as I like Draco, the third Dief, but I will say for Lincoln that my GOD he's beautiful when he's running.) It's shameless manipulation, but it's also effective, and it's effective because the truth in Fraser is perfectly there. His heart and his duty are at odds; unlike Ray and Willie, he is determined to follow duty, even though we can see it killing him.

Another step in the Destruction of Benton Fraser. They didn't make him go through with it, but just the potential is enough. And compare that scene--Fraser aiming for Dief, who's running for freedom and turns back for Maggie--with the end of "Victoria's Secret"--Ray aiming for Victoria, who's running for freedom and has turned back for Fraser. Only Victoria really is a dangerous wild animal, and instead of shooting his best friend, Fraser is shot ... by his best friend.

The other thing that works very well in this episode is the thematic presence of the Riv, the way the episode proposes, examines, and accepts with qualifications the idea that Fraser : Diefenbaker :: Ray : the Riv. Ray is in mourning for the Riv, very explicitly as if it were a person. And of course the motor pool car only makes it worse:

FRASER: It's a nice glove box. [the latch comes off in his hand] Very spacious. Good seat covers. ... Motor pool?
RAY: I thought we agreed not to talk about it.
FRASER: Ah, of course. Of course. The loss of a loved one is always a shock.
RAY: Fraser.
FRASER: No, I'm sorry, Ray. But I do understand. You'd be hard-pressed to find a finer example of Detroit's automotive engineering than the 1971 Riviera.
RAY: Enough! Okay? Enough. You took the Riv, you drove it all over the countryside, you gave it to a convicted felon, you ran it into a ditch, and you forced me to blow it up. You've done enough.
FRASER: Lives were saved, Ray.
RAY: And yours was spared. ... I loved that car.
[the motor pool car dies]
[Ray does a slow burn at Fraser]
RAY: Not a word.

(One of my favorite Benton Fraser moments of all time is the moment when the bolt on the bench seat gives way, and you can see Fraser deciding not to say anything, in a very distinctly "the customs of your people are strange, but I will honor them" way. That moment alone justifies every penny, Canadian and American both, that Paul Gross ever has made or ever will make from his involvement in Due South.)

The parallel between Dief and the Riv is made explicitly:

RAY: Look, Fraser, even I know that animal's your best friend.
FRASER: Yes, but he is an animal.
RAY: Oh, and the Riviera is just a car?

And then, in the exchange I quoted above, just as explicitly rejected: "a car isn't a person." Ray knows the difference between a wolf and a Buick. The end of the episode circles back, though, to the ways Dief and the Riv both are and aren't alike:

RAY: Oh, I guess it's kind of a nice cyclical thing. You blowin' up the Riv and me saving your wolf. On the other hand, my Riv can't be replaced, and your wolf seems to have tripled.
FRASER: Why can't it be replaced?
RAY: Fraser, '71 Rivieras are extremely rare. I traveled all the way to Buffalo to find that car. They're impossible to find!
FRASER: Huh.
RAY: Huh what?
[Fraser points at the passing green 1971 Buick Riviera with a FOR SALE sign in its window]

It's worth observing the degree to which Ray indulges in revisionist history vis-a-vis Fraser and the Riv. Fraser did not drive the Riv all over the countryside; Ray did. Fraser didn't give the Riv to a felon; the felon took the Riv pretty directly from Ray himself. Fraser didn't drive the Riv into a ditch; Ray did. And Fraser did not blow up the Riv, any more than Ray saved Dief. Joint efforts, both. Ray's emotional calculus is rather reductive.

But the parallel between Dief and the Riv works, just as the horrible double-bind Fraser is caught in works. Fraser's intense sense of personal responsibility is almost enough to carry the episode on its own.

RAY: Is that your father's rifle?
[Fraser nods]
RAY: Why don't you let me do this for you?
FRASER: No. He's my wolf.

But they couldn't think of a way to get Fraser into the double-bind without breaking the rather delicate structure on which our disbelief is suspended. Either Diefenbaker has to die or the entire show has to commit to a level of explicit contrareality that is completely contrary to its ethos. The show is right to refuse both choices, but, therefore, shouldn't have put them in play in the first place.

---
*I'm suddenly very very grateful that Due South never did a "Normal Again" episode (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6.17). Because, ouch.

Comments

[callunav.livejournal.com]

The courtroom scene is painful precisely because of the collision of Premise A and Premise B, and the way that, for the duration of that scene, Premise B, which we as the audience have accepted to be the truth, is recast as Fraser's culpable insanity. We're just as guilty as Fraser is, just as helpless.

Interesting. You describe this clearly enough that I can picture my own reactions with a pretty high degree of certainty, and I'm pretty sure that something like that would make me feel frustrated and angry with the show...rather as if, in point of fact, a friend had turned around and bitten me. I would feel stung by suddenly the show telling me I was in the wrong and/or crazy just because I had been willing to go along with it.

Of course, when I phrase it like that, I realize that my reaction would at least partially be because it would (as I'm imagining it) push one of my big ol' buttons. It's hard to appreciate the artistry when you're wrangling your panicked reflexes.

And compare that scene--Fraser aiming for Dief, who's running for freedom and turns back for Maggie--with the end of "Victoria's Secret"--Ray aiming for Victoria, who's running for freedom and has turned back for Fraser. Only Victoria really is a dangerous wild animal, and instead of shooting his best friend, Fraser is shot ... by his best friend.

Victoria is a human making a break for it, who manages to maneuver so that Fraser takes the bullet Ray intended for her, even though Fraser is the one that she turned back for?

It's worth observing the degree to which Ray indulges in revisionist history vis-a-vis Fraser and the Riv. Fraser did not drive the Riv all over the countryside; Ray did. Fraser didn't give the Riv to a felon; the felon took the Riv pretty directly from Ray himself. Fraser didn't drive the Riv into a ditch; Ray did. And Fraser did not blow up the Riv, any more than Ray saved Dief. Joint efforts, both. Ray's emotional calculus is rather reductive.

From that, it sounds as though Ray's not just got reductive emotional mathematics, but feels free to re-write reality that's only a few hours or days old, speaking to the one person who has to know that it's not true. It makes me wonder if this is Ray's version of being crazy-but-that's-just-how-he-is, or if he feels safe saying it to Fraser precisely because he knows Fraser will know it's not true - rather the way I'll say dreadful things to Julian when we're playing cards, things which I would never say to anyone else, precisely because I know she'll know how to take them.

I love the analyses you do - of Due South or most other things. It seems to me that you don't start talking until you've figured out what you think (or at least, don't hit 'post'). I admire that. And what you do say is lucid and interesting.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

1.) It isn't the SHOW calling Fraser crazy--it's the conflict of the show's surreality with the straight realism being here represented by the legal system of Chicago. Fraser sounds crazy because his world is crazy; as the audience, we're in Fraser's world, and it's only at moments like this (or the bit in "A Hawk and a Handsaw" where he tells the literal truth in order to get himself committed for psychiatric evaluation) that we're reminded that the world we've accepted is surreal and looks crazy to outsiders. The effect is rather that of trying to explain the premise of a show like this to someone who doesn't like fantasy.

2.) Victoria is human, yes. Ray shooting Fraser is an accident; Fraser literally and unintentionally gets between the gun and Victoria. It's a theme and variation thing.

3a.) We have no idea how long it's been between "The Man Who Knew Too Little," in which the Riv bites the big one, and this episode. Due South scoffs at continuity.

b.) I think Ray is expressing how it feels--and he's certainly not unjustified in feeling that the death of the Riv is All Fraser's Fault. And I think Fraser understands that this is emotional truth, not literal truth. It's certainly not a sign that Ray has lost contact with reality.

Actually, what it is, is a performance piece. Ray Vecchio truly does make the complaint, the bitch, and the kvetch an art form.

4.) Thank you!

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

*I'm suddenly very very grateful that Due South never did a "Normal Again" episode (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 6.17). Because, ouch.

Perversely, I kind of wish they *had*-- specifically, I wish they hadn't wasted their amnesia-story episode by making it a clips show. There's really not much amnesiac!Fraser in the episode at all, but what there is...! You get the feeling that a *serious* Fraser-gets-amnesia story could have been dS's "Normal Again." Or something like it. ("I *live* like this? Am I being punished...?")

Clashing primises

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, I don't remember this episode, and so I will rely on your description.

But this really sounds like the sort of thing that does give TV series a bad rep. They often ignor their own premise, even major ones. Blech. True magic, or magical realism, has to be consistent within its self. (grammar!)

I tend to spin things in my head to compensate for that, if I like the show. I probably figured that the courtroom scene sort showed how others, outside of the Dief-Fraser-Ray circle would view Fraser and Dief.

There *should* have been some deus ex machina move where Dief gets reported dead, and Ray and everyone claims that Dief is really just an odd looking Shephard mix that Ray got Fraser to make up for Dief, and they named him Diefenbacker II, but call him Dief in memory of Dief I. Except this violates Fraser's mountie not-lying thing.
Not to mention it would also take away the parallel to the Victoria escaping, Fraser getting shot sequence. (If you can believe that television writers get the chance to care about that kind of thing.)

I am inordinately pleased by you readings on Due South, I liked that show when it was on, and sometimes had a hard time explaining to myself why it worked. (Apart from the fact that 1) Gross does a beautiful dead-pan, you can sometimes tell exactly what he wants to you see, almost without doing anything 2) Ray Veccio- as you said, the rant/whine taken to an art form, and the most loyal pain in the ass 3) Dief- a deaf wolf in Chicago, 'nuff said!)



Kitty

There is a great deal to be said for rapidity ;
but it is not especially a good way of grasping reality.

---G. K. Chesterton
"On the prudery of slang"

[snarkydame.livejournal.com]

I've never read such insightful episode reactions. You make me take a much harder look at a show I always considered kind of shallow.

Fraser and his uniform

[(Anonymous)]

Ella writes: This is a tough episode for dog owners like me, who have those recurring nightmares about losing their dogs.

Anyway, you didn't comment on it, but I notice that this is just about the only episode I can think of where Fraser spends the majority of time in regular street clothes, instead of wearing his brown or red uniform, or the regulation undergarments of same. The other instance that comes to mind is Victoria's Secret, but I think he's out of uniform more in this episode. As you've noted elsewhere, Fraser's uniform is both his armour against the world, and his "super hero" costume, and the outward manifestation of his self-image (one could say his sense of self-worth and self-confidence). So in VS, but even more so here, we can see Fraser's choice of street clothes reflecting his sense of powerlessness. Like he says in A Hawk and a Handsaw, "You lose yourself and you have nothing." The red uniform can't protect him in the courtroom from losing Dief (so sad when the judge pronounces the sentence and Fraser just looks helplessly at his ineffectual documents). So for the rest of the episode, Fraser (not Paul Gross, but the fictional man Fraser) is out of character - not The Mountie, and out of uniform. And then he makes a conscious choice to *LIE* - not with words but with deeds. He covers up his wrist so Ray (Fraser's closest human friend) won't see that Dief bit him, so Ray - who's lame "I know a judge" represents the forlorn hope -- won't also give up. Of course, he goes back into law and order mode when he thinks someone else (Willy) is in danger.

One small aside - putting Lincoln next to Maggie in the last scene makes it much harder to ignore the objective fact that this supposed half-wolf is nothing but a regular old husky, and a pretty pedestrian-looking one at that. I wish they'd kept the dog Newman, who played Dief in the pilot.

Re: Fraser and his uniform

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oooh. That's a series of lovely and excellent points. Thank you!

(Also, yeah, I love Newman and Draco (the 3rd Diefenbaker), but Lincoln never does much for me. As you say, he's a husky and he looks it.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Either Diefenbaker has to die or the entire show has to commit to a level of explicit contrareality that is completely contrary to its ethos. The show is right to refuse both choices, but, therefore, shouldn't have put them in play in the first place.

Watching it a second time I'm inclined to read the "You know, you could have told me about this" at 44:25 as where the episode thinks it's answering this; while it is something of a TSTL plot, Premise B works for me as Diefenbaker being shy about first crush. Is that an excessively complex degree of anthropomorphising for this show ?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Or the old "a woman's reputation is at stake" gambit?

I'm not sure. This is the only episode in which Dief's interiority is the thing driving the plot, so there's nothing to judge against.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Actually, this episode worked for me very well. The reason why:

so for the entire show thus far, one of Fraser's huge, huge major beliefs, one of the major things on which he has based his entire personality, is that The Law Is Just. You go to court, you go to the law, you tell the truth, and things work out okay. I don't think it's an accident that Willy is a major character in this episode, Willy who is the first example we see of Fraser putting blind trust in the law, trust that should not in Willy's instance have been given to the law, and it worked out just fine.

So then we get to Fraser in court, and he gets up there, and he tells the truth, and he does absolutely everything exactly the way he believes he is supposed to, and the law says that according to the truth (and Fraser told the truth, or believed he did, even though I think that truth could have been told in a way more acceptable to the judge), the law says that according to Fraser's truth Dief dies.

And, and this is Fraser's moral failing in this episode and the reason he gets into the double-bind, he decides to believe that the law must be right. He decides that Dief must be a wild animal and from that moment he doesn't hear a thing Dief says to him. You can see it throughout the entire scene when he is sitting with Dief in the quarantine cell: Fraser asks Dief if Dief wants Fraser to stay, and then Fraser gets up to leave, and Dief whimpers, as clear a sign as any I can think of that he doesn't want Fraser to go, and Fraser takes no notice. Dief paws at the back wall of the cell and barks in a way that in any other episode would have caused Fraser to assume instantly that there was something on the other side of that wall: here he does not. And the question he asks Dief, about duty, is entirely projection of Fraser's issues and the answer he gets is from his own head, because that is all you are doing when you talk to a wild animal, you are talking with yourself.

(It's worth noting that the answer Fraser gives himself to the question is not, necessarily, the one Dief would give; it's the only answer that means Fraser can live with himself if Dief dies.)

Fraser doesn't even notice when he sees the animal control officer wheel Maggie's cage by, even though he must see it for a whole two seconds, which is usually far more than enough for his superpowers to kick in. Dief barks when the cage goes by, and Fraser doesn't notice Maggie, and that is when Dief, who has been doing the equivalent of screaming loudly for the past ten minutes, quite justifiably bites Fraser.

The show never once denies Dief's interiority. Fraser gives his knowledge of it up to the law.

And Fraser is saved, ironically enough, by the fact that because Fraser is the way he is about the law, Willy is free to act as a moral agent and break that law to set Dief free. All of Fraser's deepest beliefs are two-edged swords.

The other arc of the episode, Ray's grief for the Riv, works the same way: at the beginning, Fraser is failing miserably to communicate with Ray about the car; he is genuinely pissing Ray off, because his attitude can be summed up by 'Lives were saved', and he doesn't understand that to Ray this does not make it automatically worth it. (He understands that Ray is grieving, but not that Ray really does not want to have had to shoot the car and is angry at Fraser for making him.) Ray forgives Fraser when he sees that Fraser holds himself to a worse standard, that Fraser would have shot Dief (despite the acknowledgment by both of them that a wolf is more than a car), and that Fraser genuinely would have made himself believe that it was worth it. Ray forgives Fraser because of the depth of the very self-destructive duty-is-all code that made Ray angry at him in the first place. Double-edged sword.

Of course, one reason I love this show so much is that the instant that Ray forgives Fraser, he gets a new Riv.

So yeah, actually in my opinion this is one of the better episodes of the series-so-far (note I am in my first time through it, though).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I like your reading better than I like mine.

[(Anonymous)]

Besides the implied neglect of not spaying or neutering pets in this episode, I also get a knee-jerk adverse reaction to the slams against animal testing. Animal testing is a necessary part of drug development and it saves human lives, but the animals are carefully screened. The animals involved are tracked from birth to death. Maggie would never have been taken for "lab" experimentation because there is no prior medical history on her. It's rare enough that dogs would be selected for animal testing. Their relatively long gestation period would make them unsuitable for short-term studies and their dissimilarity to human anatomy would make them unsuitable for long term studies. That's why labs use rats and monkeys.

So yes, as a scientist I object to the show's non-factual depiction of laboratory testing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I read it as a continuation of the limerance making you nuts thing, thematically.

But I hated this episode, as I will hate all episodes that threaten Dief, because TV is so very willing to torment animal characters (see, for example, Appa in Avatar: the Last Airbender--imagine Sokka being treated as Appa is treated in that episode and you completely break the tone of the entire series).

[libskrat]

ObDueSouthShakespeare: You can't tell me that Dief and Maggie talking to each other through the wall in the pound isn't a nod to Pyramus and Thisby. I kind of dig the dog pack as Rude Mechanicals.

[libskrat]

This also suggests a possible third way to analyze Dief's actions: he's pulling a Fraser, particularly Fraser in "A Hawk and a Handsaw." He doesn't tell Fraser about Maggie because he has no direct evidence (I don't think he ever finds out that Fraser has the MAGGIE collar), so his chosen option is to pretend to be mad (!) to get himself locked up and try to pull the rescue out of his tail somehow.

Which, you know, maybe not the world's greatest plan, but he's a wolf.

I like Vinnie playing Dief's Ray.

I’m reminded

[themadblonde]

Of an exchange from The Musketeers:
“I had to protect the Queen’s reputation!”
“You could have done that by not sleeping with her!”