Due South: The Blue Line

[truepenny]

Due South 1.16, "The Blue Line"
Original airdate: March 9, 1995
Favorite line:
RAY: Officer in pursuit of black Cadillac in pursuit of two guys on ice skates. Why is that so hard to believe?



One of the things I like about Due South, and about Paul Gross, is that they are aware that Benton Fraser is an almost inhumanly pretty piece of beefcake. And the show uses that, in a variety of ways, but it doesn't think it's important:

DAWN CHAREST: Have you ever done any product endorsements?
FRASER: ... Not that I'm aware of, no.
DAWN CHAREST: Has anyone ever told you you have phenomenal bone structure?
FRASER: Yes. A starving Inuit.

Fraser doesn't care about his looks, or about anybody else's (when he talks about Victoria, he talks about her voice); the fact that his face can stop traffic--or, in this case, completely derail a conversation--only frustrates and embarrasses him. As far as I can tell, Fraser's beauty gains him nothing whatsoever.

---

This episode hearkens all the way back to a question Ray asks in "Free Willie" (DS 1.1.):

RAY: You could've gotten me killed.
FRASER: No, no. I'd never allow that. You're my friend. You're my best friend, I'd have to say.
RAY: I am? Hey! Exactly how many best friends have you had?

And here's Ray's answer.

[Mark Smithbauer has just clocked Fraser with a wine bottle and run off]
RAY: What a jerk, man. I'm gonna run him down and bust him.
FRASER: No.
RAY: Why? Because he's a hockey star?
FRASER: No. Because he was my best friend.

The other person Fraser identifies as his best friend (Ray identifies Dief as Fraser's best friend in "The Wild Bunch" (1.15), but Fraser always says, simply, "He's my wolf," and I think "wolf" here points to a relationship similar to friend, but not the same. Fraser and Diefenbaker own each other.) is Mark Smithbauer, who is a Grade A USDA certified asshole.

In this, as in so many other things, Fraser seems to have been equipped with a toggle switch where most people have a dimmer. Fraser's ethics, as I said in an earlier post, are not situational: something is either right or wrong. Period. And as far as personal relationships are concerned, once he's given his loyalty, it is apparently literally impossible to make him take it back. Because God knows if it was possible, Mark Smithbauer would have done it.

In fact, one of the things the episode is about is what being a friend means. It starts with Ray winding Fraser up (with tremendous and obvious affection) by turning left without signalling, and throughout, while Ray bitches and moans as per usual, he's there with Fraser every step of the way. He even goes into a conference with Welsh that he has to know is going to end badly because Fraser wants him to. But mostly he's just there, trying to make Fraser understand--or at least acknowledge--the way the real world works, but not rejecting him or deserting him when Fraser throws himself at the wall one more time. This is contrasted, implicitly rather than explicitly, with Mark:

RAY: Nothing like old friends, huh, Fraser? It's good to know, no matter how many years apart, you can still get an 8 by 10 glossy out of 'em.
FRASER: It's been a long time, Ray. There's no reason to assume he'd remember me.
RAY: Eh. More excuses.
FRASER: He was my friend, Ray.

Fraser tells us, and Mark (who is pretending--as he will later confess--not to remember him), about their friendship:

MARK: So where'd we meet?
FRASER: Inuvik.
MARK: Nah, you gotta be wrong. I haven't been there since . . . I don't know how old I was.
FRASER: Thirteen. We used to play hockey on the pond behind your dad's barn.
MARK: No kidding, huh?
FRASER: Every day after school. And you'd never let anybody leave. As a matter of fact, when it got dark, you'd pull out your dad's tractor and turn on the lights and we'd stay there 'til . . . 'til somebody's folks showed up, made us go home, do our homework. Usually, it was my grandmother.
MARK: You think I'd remember something like that, eh?
FRASER: No. You've traveled a long way since then.

Although they don't get used in this episode, I think the words "home" and "lost" are floating around. Mark has very obviously lost his way home, and that's tied in to his inability to accept Fraser's friendship. "I don't need any more friends," he says furiously. "I need someone I can count on." By which he means, someone who will take his money--although the episode is very careful to show that that kind of loyalty is entirely undependable. Unlike Fraser's which is as unto the Rock of Gibraltar. (Notice again the tension in the show between the obsession with money and the rejection of money.) The definition of friendship--and friendship between Mark and Fraser--is explicitly identified as a problem:

FRASER: You don't seem to engender friendship, do you?
MARK: Well, in my experience, friends stay around just long enough to see you get what they think you deserve.
FRASER: ... Maybe so.

I find it painfully sad that Fraser can't disagree with Mark here. And it makes me wonder about the friends--and "friends"--Fraser had between Mark and Ray. Mark is an asshole, as I said, but the funny thing is that the episode makes me believe in the friendship between him and Fraser, and even that, somewhere down underneath all the arrogance and stupidity, Mark may even be worthy of having Fraser as a friend. He does, after all, do the right thing, both when he discovers he can't throw a hockey game after all, and then when he makes his public confession--and when, with really kind of unexpected dignity, he takes his lumps:

FRASER: I'm sorry it had to turn out this way.
MARK: Yeah. This is the only way it could've turned out.

And he does actually make Fraser happy. Their impromptu hockey game in the frozen alleyways of Chicago, and the game at the end with the Riv taking the place of Mark's dad's tractor, clearly fill Fraser with delight. And they give us a different view of him, too. Not Constable Benton Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but a man who, when he was thirteen, wanted to be a hockey player:

FRASER: I owe you five dollars.
MARK: What?
FRASER: When we were thirteen, we made a bet. Who would get his face on a rookie card first. Been wanting to give this to you for a long time.

Fraser (who is in his dress uniform in this scene) has also traveled a long way since he was thirteen, but he hasn't forgotten anything. Something else he seems to be unable to do.

The other interesting thing in this episode is Diefenbaker's unabashed and unwavering adulation of Mark. In this, he clearly isn't Fraser's proxy--Fraser's loyalty may be unshakable, but it isn't blind--but I think, if you accept the idea that Dief does sometimes serve as an external expression of things Fraser can't acknowledge, that his worship of Mark is the reaction Fraser would like to be able to have:

FRASER: Mark Smithbauer.
RAY: You want me to report a hockey player?
FRASER: [indicating Dief, who makes the most appalling Wookiee-esque noises throughout this exchange] Well, he's a very big fan.
RAY: Oh yeah, what does he want, his autograph?
FRASER: It'll just take a little while. [to Dief] You stay here. I'll get it for you. [aside to Ray] He'd only embarrass himself.

In fact, right here Dief is serving as a stalking horse (stalking wolf?). Fraser's pleased anticipation looks like fan-worship, an impression which is heightened by an explicit yoking together of Dief and Fraser:

RAY: I'm guessing you two don't meet a lot of celebrities.
FRASER: Well, we were inspected by the Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of the R.C.M.P. once.

So as an audience, we may believe (as I think Ray does) that Fraser is projecting onto Dief. Which is why the reveal, that Mark was Fraser's best friend, is so effective, because it shows that Fraser and Dief are coming from completely different places vis-a-vis their reactions to Mark. So Dief is not simply reflecting something in Fraser, but at the same time, the episode doesn't let go of the identity between Fraser and Dief:

MARK: [about Dief, who will not stop staring at him] He's relentless, isn't he?
FRASER: Unfortunately, yes.

Fraser is talking about Dief, but since he himself has just come from tracking down the video-taped evidence of Mark sabotaging his own hockey stick, it applies just as much to himself. He's relentless even when he doesn't want to be. His unyielding, non-situational ethics are just as hard for Fraser to live with as they are for anybody else.

---

There's also another beautiful acknowledgment/undercutting/exploitation of Fraser's pararealism in this ep--which mostly has its feet pretty solidly on the ground, or at least on the ice:

RAY: Sixteen thousand fans screaming in unified hatred against one man, and you think you heard what one of them said?
FRASER: No, I think I saw what one of them said.
RAY: Like that's easier.
FRASER: ... I suppose not.

It's something about the way that Fraser's pararealism simply keeps topping itself (as with tracking a Lhasa Apso by mistake back in "Pizza and Promises" (DS 1.5)), and something about the way Fraser himself is a little taken aback, every time, at the discovery that not everybody is like this. Anyway, I love it.

---

On a completely different note--and in case you thought all my reactions to this show were refined and intellectual and serious--I have observed that I am becoming conditioned by Due South's situational eroticism. Just as in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., where we see Illya and Napoleon in suits so much of the time (not to mention Illya's famous turtlenecks) that a dress shirt unbuttoned enough for a glimpse of collarbone seems worthy of Gypsy Rose Lee, in Due South, Fraser in his brown uniform, sans coat, sans tie, and with his sleeves rolled up ... ::fans self:: This is the true and unworthy reason I will always love the brown uniform the best.

Comments

[aukestrel.livejournal.com]

This is one of my favourite eps of Season 1 because of the depth of characterisation for both Fraser and Smithbauer. It's kind of amazing you can see so much of who Smithbauer is when he gets maybe 20 minutes screen time. It's a heartbreaking episode too, especially where it falls in the overall Fraser characterisation arc.

And, hey, thanks for seeing past Smithbauer's unremitting asshole-ishness to some of his redeeming features. I'd note, too, that he tries to lie to Fraser, and he blusters a lot (and obfuscates and digresses), but he has a lot of trouble actually lying to him.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think there's a lot of continuity between the thirteen-year-old Fraser remembers and the man Mark Smithbauer has become. Thoughtless, not very bright, convinced that his hockey-playing abilities make him special, but not a bad person. Like a thirteen-year-old he blusters and shouts and bullies, but like you say, he's not very good at lying. And Fraser really is like a rock, because he lets Mark bluster himself out, and he's still standing there waiting for the truth. For most of the episode, really, Mark behaves like a thirteen-year-old in a grown up's body--I think the argument could even be made that the episode is suggesting Mark hasn't had to grow up, unlike Fraser. (Mark's dad is still alive.) There is definitely a contrast being made between the two thirteen-year-old boys and the very different adult men.

If that's the case, then I think we can also see this episode as the moment at which Mark grows up at last. The scene where he confesses to Fraser is a scene between two adults (unlike the simulated campfire scene of two adults remembering childhood). And his press conference, and his reaction afterwards--those are adult. Big bonus points to the show, both for recognizing that being an adult is a good thing and for insisting that being an adult doesn't mean you have to give up the things you love. Mark's still playing hockey at the end of the episode, but he's not blustering any longer.

[aukestrel.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of the boy who's finally grown up. I hadn't thought about it that way. I also like how Mark has (cliched romanticism) found himself again at the end of the show, and I *really* like how he stands up and takes his lumps. There's so much wrapped up in that - the character's personal growth, Fraser's nonjudgmental expectations (that some see as manipulative), the larger commentary on sports figures and the culture of idolatry around them, and (perhaps) the inability of celebrities to be accountable for their behaviour. It's kind of a clear-eyed look at the situation that still says, "Hey, there are decent people out there anyway" that one doesn't generally see in more simplistic (US-style) fare.

PS

[aukestrel.livejournal.com]

Also? This is the first time I ever saw "slash" on screen. Before I knew what slash was. When Mark sits up and says he's not tired? And then they cut to the ice rink? I sort of stopped and looked at the tv and was, like, "Huh. Did they just... naaah."

Watching it again after discovering slash, hello, Mark was SO coming on to Fraser! *g* And that last scene in the dressing room - I swear to you, I was saying, "Just KISS him already!" to the screen.

Unghh.

[belmanoir.livejournal.com]

In this, as in so many other things, Fraser seems to have been equipped with a toggle switch where most people have a dimmer. This is so true. The intensity of Fraser's loyalties is just...heartbreaking. And he seems to toggle kind of easily, too...I mean, the story about his and Mark's childhood friendship, well, it seems to translate as "you were an obnoxious little shit who forced all his friends to play hockey for hours and hours every day, but there was nothing else to do in Inuvik so we put up with it."

Also, oh man, the brown uniform YES. Something about the stripe up the side of the pants just...*swoons*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yeah. You don't have to do much to be Fraser's best friend.

[1crowdedhour.livejournal.com]

In this, as in so many other things, Fraser seems to have been equipped with a toggle switch where most people have a dimmer.

I particularly enjoy your Due South posts. I should have mentioned that long ago. This sentence alone sums up so much, not merely about Fraser and the series as a whole. It illuminates matters so well, it deserves to be illuminated itself. If I embroidered samplers (or anything else) I'd consider it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

I adore your analysis of this episode. I generally dislike Smithbauer (because he treats Fraser so badly), but you've made me see him in a better light.

Fraser in his brown uniform, sans coat, sans tie, and with his sleeves rolled up
hubba hubba! and the suspenders! love those suspenders (emphasizes the shoulders and collarbones).

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

This episode's official Canadian footnote:

The mobster? Named Broda? The Turk?

Ahahahahaha. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turk_Broda)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I forgot to reply to say how COMPLETELY MADE OF GOOFY AWESOMENESS that is. Dude.

[(Anonymous)]

I am inclined to forgive Mark Smithbauer all his sins just for that scene of him and Fraser playing hockey in the street. Have we ever seen Fraser that happy and carefree? Even in his early scenes with Victoria there's a faint undercurrent of fear or regret; here he's just a kid again, and it's delightful. And while most people who make Fraser happy proceed to yank that happiness away by the end of the episode, Mark at least has the decency to be a jerk at the beginning of the episode and a friend to Fraser at the end.

I love the reluctant, tactful way that Ray tries to break it to Fraser that Mark may have taken the money, but what I love even more is that it's not necessary. Fraser isn't nearly as naive as Ray thinks he is. He knows it's a possibility, he sounds Mark out on the subject more than once, and he never seems convinced by Mark's denials. But he doesn't tell Ray that. And I don't know if Fraser's refusal to even discuss the question with Ray comes entirely from loyalty to his friend and a determination to give him the benefit of the doubt, or if part of it is his need to keep up the naive Mountie facade in front of Ray.

-- KSC

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fraser in his brown uniform, sans coat, sans tie, and with his sleeves rolled up ... ::fans self:: This is the true and unworthy reason I will always love the brown uniform the best.

I am greatly amused at this reaction, because I had a similar moment in this episode but for completely different reasons.

Paul Gross...in a hockey helmet.

Ahem. Sorry.