Due South: "North"

[truepenny]

Due South 2.1, "North"
Original air date: November 9, 1995
Favorite quote:
RAY: We gotta get him to turn this plane around right away.
FRASER: On the other hand, there could be a struggle. He might refuse to cooperate. In which case we have to fly the plane ourselves. Now this might be possible with some assistance from air traffic control. And I did read a flight training manual in my grandmother's library. There were a couple of pages missing, but I'm sure nothing vital. And I'm guessing there are a lot of similarities between a Sopwith Camel and today's light aircraft.



Chronologically, I think "North" (DS 2.1) has to take place after "Vault" (DS 2.2), because "Vault" has the aftermath of Ray getting shot in "Letting Go" (DS 1.22), whereas in "North" he's clearly fully recovered. I've chosen, however, to go with the order in which they aired because thematically and emotionally, "North" comes first. This is the episode about putting Ray and Fraser's friendship back together, as is painfully obvious from the very beginning:

RAY: Look, I gave up two weeks' vacation in Miami for this.
FRASER: Well, as I recall, it was your idea.
RAY: No, as I recall, I said maybe. As in maybe we should go north and fix up your father's cabin. You, on the other hand, could've said no.
FRASER: Well, you don't have to do this.
RAY: Well, yes, I do. Because it's like a, uh, a whatdoyoucallit, a death-bed confession. You have to honor it. Besides, where else but Canada can I spend two weeks hard labor living off the land?
FRASER: Well, I for one am glad we're going.

Ray is indulging in revisionist history again, as he does in "The Wild Bunch" (DS 1.15) (and it's going to become obvious in the course of the episode where he gets that particular habit from). But what's worse than that, worse than Ray's thinly veiled hostility, is the flatness with which Fraser says, Well, I for one am glad we're going. The tone is the opposite of the words, and moreover, it's what I've labeled Fraser's Batman-voice, the voice of the Mountie and the voice of Fraser's first line of defense. The quick-fix catharsis of Ray taking a bullet for Fraser has not in fact repaired all the damage their friendship has suffered.

And with Fraser retreated into his Mountie-ness, there's no chance of the damage being repaired. You cannot have a relationship with the Mountie; it slides off him like water off a duck's back. So the episode's first order of business is obviously to knock Fraser's Mountie-self out from under him.

This is harder to do than you might think, and one of the things I like about the cheerful implausibility of the episode plot is that its agenda is perfectly blatant: throw things at Fraser until he caves. The plane crash doesn't do it. The head wound doesn't do it. Blindness doesn't do it:

FRASER: If we move hard, drive fast, we should be able to intercept him before nightfall. Any questions?
RAY: Yes. How far do you think you're going to get with that gash on your head?
FRASER: Oh, Ray. Head wounds always look worse than they actually are. Can you give me a reading please?
RAY: It's your compass. You read it.
FRASER: I can't.
RAY: Well, neither can I.
FRASER: Well, you'll have to, Ray.
RAY: Why?
FRASER: I'm blind.
RAY: [does one of his spectacular slo-mo double takes] You're blind?
FRASER: As a bat.
RAY: Well, why didn't you say something?
FRASER: No point making a bad situation worse.
RAY: Worse? Fraser, you can't see! C'mon, we're going back to the plane.
FRASER: Well, Ray, I still have four senses intact!
RAY: You can't see!
FRASER: Ray, I'm blind. I'm not deaf. Now I've spent my entire life in the north woods, tracking criminals. I have a natural advantage here. There isn't a thing in this forest I can't hear, taste, touch, smell, feel. It's a finely tuned ability gained from years of experience. So if you'll just stand aside, I'll be on my way.
[straight into a tree]
RAY: That was a tree.
FRASER: Yes, it was. A white ash. [Fraser tastes the tree] Fraxonus americana to be exact. Shall we?

Fraser's becoming increasingly loopy as a result of his head wound, but it takes partial paralysis to actually knock him out of the game (even blind and only dubiously mens sana, Fraser can light a fire when Ray can't):

FRASER: [slung over Ray's shoulder] Ray, if at any point during our trip, I should become a burden to you, you'd let me know, wouldn't you?
RAY: Yes, Fraser.
FRASER: And you'd carry on without me?
RAY: Absolutely.
FRASER: Without hesitation?
RAY: Oh, in a heartbeat.
FRASER: That's good.

Fraser's fiercely defended self-sufficiency is clearly partly based on a fear of being a bother to other people. But we notice that the more incapacitated Fraser becomes, the more whole-heartedly Ray steps up to the plate. Although this is going to become much more of an issue with Ray Kowalski, there is real meaning to Ray forcing Fraser to admit, at the very end of the episode, that he knows what he's doing. Ray needs a chance to be the competent one.

And he needs a chance to consciously choose his loyalty to Fraser, which is one of the things his father's ghost is doing in the episode, giving Ray something to define himself against: "This man is going to die if I don't get him out of here. Now, I don't care what that makes me, but what it doesn't make me is you."

Both fathers are emphatically present in this episode and working to divide Fraser and Ray, Mr. Vecchio in the name of enlightened self-interest, Sergeant Fraser in the name of duty. This conflict externalizes the fundamental difference between Fraser and Ray, but also proves that both of them can overcome it. Fraser's situation is actually the easier of the two, since his father's exhortations take no account of reality--but notice that Sgt. Fraser's first lines are a direct echo of Fraser's earlier speech: "You're going to have to move fast and drive hard if you're going to bring this man in alive." Fraser's father is, this suggests (and as I've suggested in other episode analyses), the origin of the Batman-voice: Fraser's Super-Ego is his channeling of his own idealization of his father. But Fraser is also capable of distancing himself from that idealization: "Do you ever listen to yourself?" he asks his father in exasperation.

Ray's situation is harder, both because Mr. Vecchio is the voice of the survival instinct and because--unlike Fraser's father--he clearly has long practice and a good deal of investment in his emotional abuse of Ray.

MR. VECCHIO: Look at you. Loser.
RAY: You oughta know, Pop.
MR. VECCHIO: You never listened to me. You never knew what was good for you. You never listened and you never learned.
RAY: And when did you tell me, Pop? Huh? When you didn't come home for dinner five nights a week? Or when I found you passed out on the floor on Saturday night from too much partying with the boys?
MR. VECCHIO: Hey, hey. It wasn't up to me to talk. It was up to you to listen.
RAY: Yeah, well, I'm not listening to you anymore.
MR. VECCHIO: I'm your father.
RAY: That's right, Pop. You are my father.
[and Ray walks away from him]

Ray clearly learned to rewrite the past to suit himself from his father, and it's both beautiful and incredibly important that he goes directly from this conversation to making a confession to Fraser--and never mind the bad guy trying to kill them both. As with "The Deal" (DS 1.17), there's a parallel made between an incident in Fraser's childhood and an incident in Ray's, and once again the first version we hear from Ray is not accurate. In this case, their two stories emblematize their relationships with their fathers:

FRASER: You know, Ray, my father taught me how to build a fire when I was six years old. Took me out into the woods, gave me a piece of flint, a hunk of granite, and then he walked away without turning back.
RAY: You had to make a fire out of stones?
FRASER: You know, the funny thing--I have absolutely no memory of the fire itself, but I have this very vivid memory of the darkness and knowing that I was all alone.
RAY: My dad, uh, he wasn't a father-and-son type of guy.
FRASER: He took you camping.
RAY: Yeah, well, of course we went camping. The one thing he did teach me was how to look out for number one.
FRASER: A police officer puts others first.
RAY: My father hated cops.

And Mr. Vecchio's reaction to this conversation explains why Ray goes immediately from facing down his father to confessing to Fraser:

MR. VECCHIO: I heard that.
RAY: Nobody's talking to you.
MR. VECCHIO: You tell a stranger something like that. About your family.
RAY: He's not a stranger, he's my friend.

Ray has clearly been drilled in family loyalty, and the important thing in this episode is that he is learning, consciously, to let that go. "We can't choose our families, Ray," Fraser tells him, and the underlying theme of the entire episode is the unspoken corollary: we can choose our friends. And Ray chooses Fraser by telling him the truth about the alleged camping trip. Significantly, this story also revolves around learning how to make a fire:

... but what I really want is for him to teach me how to make a fire. So I'm waiting for him to come, right? And it starts to rain. [...] I waited and waited and he never came. So I go down to Fenelli's and sure enough, there he is, shooting pool with his friends. I go home, I take the tent down, and we never speak about it ever again.

Fraser's story is about self-sufficiency and abandonment and the way in which Fraser's sometimes terrifying self-sufficiency is the result of abandonment--and of the fear of abandonment. His reaction to his own injuries, the instinctive attempt to downplay them, conceal them, fits this directly. Ray's story is about neglect. Both the elder Vecchio and the elder Fraser were horrible fathers, but these stories make it clear that the elder Fraser was a horrible father because he had no idea of how to be a good father. The elder Vecchio just didn't care about his son. He cared about himself, and nowhere is that clearer than in the way he redirects blame: It wasn't up to me to talk. It was up to you to listen. And the way he's taught his son--by example--to lie to preserve his self-image.

Both Ray and Fraser are better men than their fathers, and they're better men than their fathers, this episode suggests, because they can break the cycle. Because they can be friends.

Comments

[snarkydame.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you're still writing these. Your analysis is always quite thought provoking -- and makes rewatching this show all the more interesting.

[herewiss13.livejournal.com]

I cannot tell you how much I'm enjoying these. If only DS were big enough, or recent enough, for some sort of book of essays like all the Joss Whedon tie-ins. These critical reviews would be a shoe-in.

As it is, I'm half tempted to print them out and stuff them in with my box-sets. :P

[sasha-feather.livejournal.com]

An excellent write-up, as usual!

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

excellent analysis. I particularly like the way you make sense of the nonsensical plot and Fraser's various weird injuries, and of the appearance of both dads...

[bghost.livejournal.com]

I've wondered while watching this episode, whether the bizarre injuries were originally intended to be physical, or genuinely psychological. Because the diagnoses Fraser gives himself is likely inaccurate... self disagnoses often are, and since when did subdural haemotomas heal themselves? But the episode dances lightly round this possibility (Vecchio senior comes nearest to stating it... 'loony tunes!') although Fraser himself clearly fears it(he warns Ray that he may become disoriented.)

I think Fraser's blindness ties in with his memory of it being dark, and of him being all alone in the woods, as well as his profound desire to punish himself for perceived crimes and infractions. (In Letting Go he tells Dief that he'll go blind if he looks... then carries on looking himself.) The darkness of the woods as a child, the sense of loss on being left by a well meaning but utterly inadequate father, manifests itself as blindness in a man who is still recovering from the whole Victoria ordeal. He ends up not just blind, but utterly unable to stand on his own two feet. And that, of course, ties in with the gunshot to his back, the bullet that can never be taken out, the wound that can never heal.

The 'batman' voice actually becomes more pedantic and more laughably at odds with his reality the more helpless he becomes, underscoring your point, truepenny, that it's a defence mechanism.

Interesting too, as you point out, that both Fraser and Ray wanted their fathers to help them with the fire... they both wanted their fathers to be there, figuratively and emotionally, and to teach them how to stay warm, and safe, and to provide them with illumination. Both men failed, for different reasons, but fortunately their sons, as you say, are better men. As Bob Fraser says in his diary about Benny... "seven years old, and already twice the man I'll ever be."

And Ray is obviously a far better man than he fears... he looks out for Benny, not number one, and in doing so reaffirms Fraser's faith in others, that human beings in general really are decent, and Ray in particular truly is his friend. Not only this, Ray reaffirms his own sense of himself as a human being, decent, fundementally honourable. No wonder he suggests they make an annual event of this... he's had his epiphany, realised that he is HIS man, not his father's. And that must be a wonderful moment for the character, for all the pain he's been through.

The definition of friendship

[themadblonde]

Interesting that Robert kept telling Benton to leave Ray behind, when Robert himself dictated the definition of friendship. I always love that moment of narrative in Manhunt, because I know that, in North (if not before) Ray V. will rise to that definition.