Due South: "Bird in the Hand"
Jan. 11th, 2008 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South 2.4, "Bird in the Hand"
Original air date: December 21, 1995
Favorite quote:
ROBERT FRASER: Grab the lamp, go crack his skull! Make it look like a freak lighting accident!
BENTON FRASER: A freak lighting accident?
ROBERT FRASER: Well, sure, sure. Happens all the time. Lightning strikes the wires, sends a jolt through the line, lamp hops up, hits him in the skull, splits it in two. And he never has a chance to prevent it, happens so fast.
Spoilers.
There are so many things I want to say about this episode, I don't quite know how to organize myself. So I'm going to make a list, with the understanding that the order of items is purely arbitrary.
1. I love Turnbull.
2. The Daddy Issues are baa-aaack. This episode harkens back both to the pilot and to "Manhunt," the latter in an allusion that's very nearly a quote:
B. FRASER: It was always the same with us, wasn't it? I mean, if I knew there was something bothering you, something personal, I wouldn't ask. I wouldn't push it. I used to tell myself it was out of respect for you, but the truth is, I was afraid. It was that fear that got you killed.
R. FRASER: If you had asked, I wouldn't've told you.
B. FRASER: Why? I could've helped. I could've done something.
R. FRASER: Father, asking his son for help? It's not an easy thing to do, y'know. Would be like admitting I was old.
B. FRASER: Or human.
R. FRASER: Ah. You wait 'til you're my age. Wait 'til some young turk comes up and says, "Can I give you a hand with that, Pops?" See if you say yes.
This supports my idea that "Manhunt" is a sort of alternate retelling of the pilot, since Buck Frobisher rejects Fraser's help on exactly the terms that Robert Fraser here describes. I also think it's interesting that as far as this episode is concerned, Buck doesn't exist. It's like Due South has two very slightly AU timelines, one in which Buck exists and one in which he doesn't. Or that Buck and Gerrard are matter/antimatter versions of each other, and can't be brought together or the universe explodes. But for Gerrard to be Robert Fraser's "best friend on the force," as Fraser describes him to Borland and McFadden, Buck has to be ignored.
And the same is true for the symbolic shuffling around of father figures. Either Buck or Gerrard may be a double of Fraser's father, but not both at once. This is a place where Due South's cavalier attitude toward continuity works in its favor, because we can have both the story about the father-betrayer and then have the more enduring story about partnership.
3. Because I am a big geek this way, I read "Bird in the Hand" as a retelling of Hamlet in which the revenge tragedy part never quite comes off. And it never quite comes off, importantly, because Fraser, unlike Hamlet, has ethical principles that are like unto the Rock of Gibraltar. It's a revenge tragedy in which the revenger chooses not to cooperate, and this despite everyone--Ray, Robert Fraser, McFadden, even Gerrard himself--expecting, encouraging, and downright daring him to avenge his father's death. Gerrard makes an excellent Claudius, and Ray a lovely Horatio ("He'd shoot him for you if you asked," Robert Fraser says, and I think we all know that it's true and that's why Fraser can't ask). And Robert Fraser comes about as close as he can to saying "Revenge my foul and most unnatural murther": "The bastard is sitting in there bragging about how he had me killed, and all I'm asking is that you do one small thing for me. Shoot him in the stomach and let him bleed to death. Think of it as a son's gift to his father." He couches it in terms of filial duty, again as in Hamlet, and here--unlike with Ray and McFadden--Fraser admits he feels the pull:
B. FRASER: Dad, I know what he did. And believe me, it takes every bit of restraint I have not to walk back into that room and separate his head from his shoulders.
R. FRASER: Oh, should always go on an impulse, son.
B. FRASER: But I cannot do that, and neither could you.
Fraser is given the chance over and over and over again, and he does not yield. He refuses to be molded by the story everyone else is trying to tell.
4. There hasn't been a convenient place to talk about the make-over of Ray Vecchio, but I do want to note that it's happening. The new short cropped hair with its increased gravitas, the earth-tones and black clothing--a far cry from the orange shirts and purple jackets of early Season 1--the hints that Ray isn't merely ethically sloppy and prone to cutting corners, but has actually worked against the law in his career (interestingly, these hints get even more explicit in Season 3, see "Eclipse" and "Dead Guy Running"): as a presence on the screen, Ray becomes much darker in Season 2, and I think that extends into less literal arenas as well.
5. Jeez, this season is interested in Fraser's performance of gender. I noticed this time through that "Bird in the Hand" is a very male-dominated episode (Elaine and Louise St. Laurent have brief appearances, but everyone else, including the feds and the criminals, are sporting a Y chromosome). Which, you know, it's a TV show, I wouldn't think twice except that (a.) Due South is remarkably conscientious about writing women, just as it's remarkably conscientious about writing people who AREN'T WHITE, so when it produces a plethora of men, I suspect it's done so on purpose, and (b.) Fraser uses the homosocial set up, exploiting the weakness of the American/Canadian male gender role, especially for men of his father's generation:
RAY: What the hell was that all about?
FRASER: Well, we needed an advantage, Ray, so I had to unnerve them. And there's nothing more unnerving to men than talking about feelings.
And Fraser is critiquing his own performance as a man in the specific reason he blames himself for his father's death. Afraid to ask about anything personal, afraid to express love. And Robert Fraser makes the gendered argument explicit:
R. FRASER: He was my friend. I had to bring him in myself. I owed it to him.
B. FRASER: Well, what did you owe me?
R. FRASER: Oh God. Going to be this kind of conversation.
B. FRASER: You know, you were so afraid to open up, it's as though you chose to be killed rather than expose your feelings.
R. FRASER: That's ridiculous!
B. FRASER: Well, it's more or less what happened, isn't it? ... The thing is, I'm no better. I mean, I never loved anyone as much as I loved you.
R. FRASER: No, stop that kind of talk right now!
B. FRASER: And I could never, ever say it.
R. FRASER: Well, if you did, I would've hit you. ... Ah, 's my fault. Shouldn't've left you with your grandmother all that time. You don't know until it's too late the effect that women can have on you. For years, you're living a perfectly normal life, then one day, right out of the blue, you start thinking about feelings and emotions. That was my mistake. Not yours, son. Now, you go ahead. You blubber on.
B. FRASER: No, I'm fine, thank you.
R. FRASER: Well, you're not going to sulk now, are you?
B. FRASER: I'm not sulking. I don't sulk.
Robert Fraser tends to view women as alien creatures, his wife as much as his mother; his conception of gender roles is, fairly explicitly, what Benton Fraser is trying to define himself against.
6. The episode is also very interested in Fraser's performance of Fraser. One of the things Turnbull does, for instance, is to give us someone Fraser looks practically normal in comparison to. And I'm fascinated throughout the episode by the way bits of a very different Fraser keep getting through the mask. He tells McFadden and Borland, "Gerrard is serving a life sentence. Whatever my feelings, they ended with his imprisonment," just as he tells Ray, "I simply want to see Gerrard returned to prison. That's all." But even before he admits to his father that that's not quite true, his body language is telling a different story. He punches Gerrard, which was certainly not necessary in any practical sense, and the scene in his office proves, despite Ray's conviction otherwise, that Fraser can play bad cop when he wants to. (RV: All right, so here's the plan. Good cop, bad cop. BF: And I play? RV: Take a guess. BF: Ah.) And the only props he needs are a chair with wheels and his boot. (I also noticed that his methods are elegant, minimalist, and do not ever require him actually to touch Gerrard.) This is the Fraser we were introduced to in the pilot and haven't seen much of since: there is something wild underneath that Mountie mask. His throwing his knife at Gerrard to get him to shut up is merely the clincher. (And spiking McFadden's gun with it is a quintessential Fraserism which I adore.) Fraser has violence in him; again, the face he presents to the world is the result of a series of very conscious and difficult choices.
7. The other thing about fathers in this episode is the way that Gerrard keeps saying Fraser is just like his father, and not only is it not a compliment, it's practically a warning:
B. FRASER: He said I was just like you.
R. FRASER: Shows you how much he knows.
B. FRASER: He knew what I was going to do.
[BF turns around, straight into Gerrard's plank]
R. FRASER: Look out, son.
The suggestion is that Fraser's likeness to his father is a liability, and I think it's not unfair to draw the corollary from that that the reason it hasn't killed him, and doesn't kill him, is that he has Ray. (Either Ray.)
8. Is it an accident that Gerrard--played by Ken Pogue, who bears a not insignificant resemblance to Leo G. Carroll--is staying in the Hotel Waverly?
9. We also get an excellent moment of meta when Gerrard is taunting Fraser: "What's wrong, Constable? People not behaving the way you want them to? The good guys don't wear their white hats and the bad guys don't like black?" Particularly in this episode, where the most honest person around is the arms dealer, it's an excellent summation of the clash between Fraser and Chicago (using Chicago here as a metonymy for the real world) that powers the show's engines. Fraser wants people to behave, and he can't have what he wants.
10. Ray as much as Fraser wants what he can't have. Ray doesn't want to be pushed outside of the role he's comfortable in: "I'm in a bad mood because I'm not used to arresting people and then immediately bailing them out, okay? It's embarrassing." Again, as in "Chinatown," Ray is taking Fraser to task for being what he is: a weirdness magnet, and someone who never thinks about appearances in pursuit of his duty. He's making things Fraser's fault that aren't Fraser's fault so much as part and parcel of who he is. This contrasts sharply with the moment in "Mountie and Soul" when Ray Kowalski takes Fraser to task for embarrassing him. RK's complaint is that Fraser hung him out to dry; RK tried to back his play and Fraser disavowed the play. That's a different issue--a partnership issue--than RV's constant refrain of oh gawd you embarrass me, which is about RV wanting Fraser to play by a different rulebook, which Fraser is constitutionally incapable of doing. And if he were willing to try? The rules of his reality would not let him. Ray Vecchio wants the world not to be weird: "All of this leads me to the conclusion that the more I know about this case, the less sense it makes, and I don't wanna know anything else, you understand?" This seems to me to be a good capsule summary of Ray Vecchio's attitude; he lets Fraser drag him into things, but it's always under protest--and the protest, although overridden, is genuine. Ray doesn't like Fraser's reality--he doesn't like that it is reality.
11. But this does not mean that Ray does not like Fraser. Despite what Ray says:
FRASER: Well, if Nash wanted him dead, why would he have sent us there?
RAY: Well, maybe he wanted to kill us, too.
FRASER: What possible motive could he have for that?
RAY: You know, sometimes you're the most annoying man that I know. There's plenty of times that I want to kill you, and I'm your best friend.
FRASER: Now, Ray, that's just not true.
The true measure of Ray's feelings we find both in the fact that he continues to follow Fraser into weirdness and danger, and in the odd, macho, and yet quite touching scene in which he attempts to become an accessory before the fact to Gerrard's murder.
12. Another thing I haven't found a good place to mention is the running joke between Ray and Fraser:
RAY: Does it hurt?
FRASER: Yes, Ray.
("Manhunt")
FRASER: Does it hurt?
RAY: Of course it hurts.
("Letting Go")
RAY: Did that hurt?
FRASER: Like a hot poker.
("North")
RAY: Feel better?
FRASER: Well, no, Ray. I have a bullet in my leg.
("Bird in the Hand")
And since it's a neat deconstruction, both of male machismo and of female self-abnegation, it fits here as well as anywhere.
13. I love the flawed human Fraser shining through the cracks. And I love him for not yielding even though he wants to. Fraser's ethics, as I have said before, are not situational. He doesn't give himself exemptions.
Original air date: December 21, 1995
Favorite quote:
ROBERT FRASER: Grab the lamp, go crack his skull! Make it look like a freak lighting accident!
BENTON FRASER: A freak lighting accident?
ROBERT FRASER: Well, sure, sure. Happens all the time. Lightning strikes the wires, sends a jolt through the line, lamp hops up, hits him in the skull, splits it in two. And he never has a chance to prevent it, happens so fast.
Spoilers.
There are so many things I want to say about this episode, I don't quite know how to organize myself. So I'm going to make a list, with the understanding that the order of items is purely arbitrary.
1. I love Turnbull.
2. The Daddy Issues are baa-aaack. This episode harkens back both to the pilot and to "Manhunt," the latter in an allusion that's very nearly a quote:
B. FRASER: It was always the same with us, wasn't it? I mean, if I knew there was something bothering you, something personal, I wouldn't ask. I wouldn't push it. I used to tell myself it was out of respect for you, but the truth is, I was afraid. It was that fear that got you killed.
R. FRASER: If you had asked, I wouldn't've told you.
B. FRASER: Why? I could've helped. I could've done something.
R. FRASER: Father, asking his son for help? It's not an easy thing to do, y'know. Would be like admitting I was old.
B. FRASER: Or human.
R. FRASER: Ah. You wait 'til you're my age. Wait 'til some young turk comes up and says, "Can I give you a hand with that, Pops?" See if you say yes.
This supports my idea that "Manhunt" is a sort of alternate retelling of the pilot, since Buck Frobisher rejects Fraser's help on exactly the terms that Robert Fraser here describes. I also think it's interesting that as far as this episode is concerned, Buck doesn't exist. It's like Due South has two very slightly AU timelines, one in which Buck exists and one in which he doesn't. Or that Buck and Gerrard are matter/antimatter versions of each other, and can't be brought together or the universe explodes. But for Gerrard to be Robert Fraser's "best friend on the force," as Fraser describes him to Borland and McFadden, Buck has to be ignored.
And the same is true for the symbolic shuffling around of father figures. Either Buck or Gerrard may be a double of Fraser's father, but not both at once. This is a place where Due South's cavalier attitude toward continuity works in its favor, because we can have both the story about the father-betrayer and then have the more enduring story about partnership.
3. Because I am a big geek this way, I read "Bird in the Hand" as a retelling of Hamlet in which the revenge tragedy part never quite comes off. And it never quite comes off, importantly, because Fraser, unlike Hamlet, has ethical principles that are like unto the Rock of Gibraltar. It's a revenge tragedy in which the revenger chooses not to cooperate, and this despite everyone--Ray, Robert Fraser, McFadden, even Gerrard himself--expecting, encouraging, and downright daring him to avenge his father's death. Gerrard makes an excellent Claudius, and Ray a lovely Horatio ("He'd shoot him for you if you asked," Robert Fraser says, and I think we all know that it's true and that's why Fraser can't ask). And Robert Fraser comes about as close as he can to saying "Revenge my foul and most unnatural murther": "The bastard is sitting in there bragging about how he had me killed, and all I'm asking is that you do one small thing for me. Shoot him in the stomach and let him bleed to death. Think of it as a son's gift to his father." He couches it in terms of filial duty, again as in Hamlet, and here--unlike with Ray and McFadden--Fraser admits he feels the pull:
B. FRASER: Dad, I know what he did. And believe me, it takes every bit of restraint I have not to walk back into that room and separate his head from his shoulders.
R. FRASER: Oh, should always go on an impulse, son.
B. FRASER: But I cannot do that, and neither could you.
Fraser is given the chance over and over and over again, and he does not yield. He refuses to be molded by the story everyone else is trying to tell.
4. There hasn't been a convenient place to talk about the make-over of Ray Vecchio, but I do want to note that it's happening. The new short cropped hair with its increased gravitas, the earth-tones and black clothing--a far cry from the orange shirts and purple jackets of early Season 1--the hints that Ray isn't merely ethically sloppy and prone to cutting corners, but has actually worked against the law in his career (interestingly, these hints get even more explicit in Season 3, see "Eclipse" and "Dead Guy Running"): as a presence on the screen, Ray becomes much darker in Season 2, and I think that extends into less literal arenas as well.
5. Jeez, this season is interested in Fraser's performance of gender. I noticed this time through that "Bird in the Hand" is a very male-dominated episode (Elaine and Louise St. Laurent have brief appearances, but everyone else, including the feds and the criminals, are sporting a Y chromosome). Which, you know, it's a TV show, I wouldn't think twice except that (a.) Due South is remarkably conscientious about writing women, just as it's remarkably conscientious about writing people who AREN'T WHITE, so when it produces a plethora of men, I suspect it's done so on purpose, and (b.) Fraser uses the homosocial set up, exploiting the weakness of the American/Canadian male gender role, especially for men of his father's generation:
RAY: What the hell was that all about?
FRASER: Well, we needed an advantage, Ray, so I had to unnerve them. And there's nothing more unnerving to men than talking about feelings.
And Fraser is critiquing his own performance as a man in the specific reason he blames himself for his father's death. Afraid to ask about anything personal, afraid to express love. And Robert Fraser makes the gendered argument explicit:
R. FRASER: He was my friend. I had to bring him in myself. I owed it to him.
B. FRASER: Well, what did you owe me?
R. FRASER: Oh God. Going to be this kind of conversation.
B. FRASER: You know, you were so afraid to open up, it's as though you chose to be killed rather than expose your feelings.
R. FRASER: That's ridiculous!
B. FRASER: Well, it's more or less what happened, isn't it? ... The thing is, I'm no better. I mean, I never loved anyone as much as I loved you.
R. FRASER: No, stop that kind of talk right now!
B. FRASER: And I could never, ever say it.
R. FRASER: Well, if you did, I would've hit you. ... Ah, 's my fault. Shouldn't've left you with your grandmother all that time. You don't know until it's too late the effect that women can have on you. For years, you're living a perfectly normal life, then one day, right out of the blue, you start thinking about feelings and emotions. That was my mistake. Not yours, son. Now, you go ahead. You blubber on.
B. FRASER: No, I'm fine, thank you.
R. FRASER: Well, you're not going to sulk now, are you?
B. FRASER: I'm not sulking. I don't sulk.
Robert Fraser tends to view women as alien creatures, his wife as much as his mother; his conception of gender roles is, fairly explicitly, what Benton Fraser is trying to define himself against.
6. The episode is also very interested in Fraser's performance of Fraser. One of the things Turnbull does, for instance, is to give us someone Fraser looks practically normal in comparison to. And I'm fascinated throughout the episode by the way bits of a very different Fraser keep getting through the mask. He tells McFadden and Borland, "Gerrard is serving a life sentence. Whatever my feelings, they ended with his imprisonment," just as he tells Ray, "I simply want to see Gerrard returned to prison. That's all." But even before he admits to his father that that's not quite true, his body language is telling a different story. He punches Gerrard, which was certainly not necessary in any practical sense, and the scene in his office proves, despite Ray's conviction otherwise, that Fraser can play bad cop when he wants to. (RV: All right, so here's the plan. Good cop, bad cop. BF: And I play? RV: Take a guess. BF: Ah.) And the only props he needs are a chair with wheels and his boot. (I also noticed that his methods are elegant, minimalist, and do not ever require him actually to touch Gerrard.) This is the Fraser we were introduced to in the pilot and haven't seen much of since: there is something wild underneath that Mountie mask. His throwing his knife at Gerrard to get him to shut up is merely the clincher. (And spiking McFadden's gun with it is a quintessential Fraserism which I adore.) Fraser has violence in him; again, the face he presents to the world is the result of a series of very conscious and difficult choices.
7. The other thing about fathers in this episode is the way that Gerrard keeps saying Fraser is just like his father, and not only is it not a compliment, it's practically a warning:
B. FRASER: He said I was just like you.
R. FRASER: Shows you how much he knows.
B. FRASER: He knew what I was going to do.
[BF turns around, straight into Gerrard's plank]
R. FRASER: Look out, son.
The suggestion is that Fraser's likeness to his father is a liability, and I think it's not unfair to draw the corollary from that that the reason it hasn't killed him, and doesn't kill him, is that he has Ray. (Either Ray.)
8. Is it an accident that Gerrard--played by Ken Pogue, who bears a not insignificant resemblance to Leo G. Carroll--is staying in the Hotel Waverly?
9. We also get an excellent moment of meta when Gerrard is taunting Fraser: "What's wrong, Constable? People not behaving the way you want them to? The good guys don't wear their white hats and the bad guys don't like black?" Particularly in this episode, where the most honest person around is the arms dealer, it's an excellent summation of the clash between Fraser and Chicago (using Chicago here as a metonymy for the real world) that powers the show's engines. Fraser wants people to behave, and he can't have what he wants.
10. Ray as much as Fraser wants what he can't have. Ray doesn't want to be pushed outside of the role he's comfortable in: "I'm in a bad mood because I'm not used to arresting people and then immediately bailing them out, okay? It's embarrassing." Again, as in "Chinatown," Ray is taking Fraser to task for being what he is: a weirdness magnet, and someone who never thinks about appearances in pursuit of his duty. He's making things Fraser's fault that aren't Fraser's fault so much as part and parcel of who he is. This contrasts sharply with the moment in "Mountie and Soul" when Ray Kowalski takes Fraser to task for embarrassing him. RK's complaint is that Fraser hung him out to dry; RK tried to back his play and Fraser disavowed the play. That's a different issue--a partnership issue--than RV's constant refrain of oh gawd you embarrass me, which is about RV wanting Fraser to play by a different rulebook, which Fraser is constitutionally incapable of doing. And if he were willing to try? The rules of his reality would not let him. Ray Vecchio wants the world not to be weird: "All of this leads me to the conclusion that the more I know about this case, the less sense it makes, and I don't wanna know anything else, you understand?" This seems to me to be a good capsule summary of Ray Vecchio's attitude; he lets Fraser drag him into things, but it's always under protest--and the protest, although overridden, is genuine. Ray doesn't like Fraser's reality--he doesn't like that it is reality.
11. But this does not mean that Ray does not like Fraser. Despite what Ray says:
FRASER: Well, if Nash wanted him dead, why would he have sent us there?
RAY: Well, maybe he wanted to kill us, too.
FRASER: What possible motive could he have for that?
RAY: You know, sometimes you're the most annoying man that I know. There's plenty of times that I want to kill you, and I'm your best friend.
FRASER: Now, Ray, that's just not true.
The true measure of Ray's feelings we find both in the fact that he continues to follow Fraser into weirdness and danger, and in the odd, macho, and yet quite touching scene in which he attempts to become an accessory before the fact to Gerrard's murder.
12. Another thing I haven't found a good place to mention is the running joke between Ray and Fraser:
RAY: Does it hurt?
FRASER: Yes, Ray.
("Manhunt")
FRASER: Does it hurt?
RAY: Of course it hurts.
("Letting Go")
RAY: Did that hurt?
FRASER: Like a hot poker.
("North")
RAY: Feel better?
FRASER: Well, no, Ray. I have a bullet in my leg.
("Bird in the Hand")
And since it's a neat deconstruction, both of male machismo and of female self-abnegation, it fits here as well as anywhere.
13. I love the flawed human Fraser shining through the cracks. And I love him for not yielding even though he wants to. Fraser's ethics, as I have said before, are not situational. He doesn't give himself exemptions.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-12 09:25 am (UTC)I love all your other points, especially about the "wildness" in Fraser (symbolized by that big honkin' knife).
Yay! Turnbull -- making Fraser look normal, one pratfall at a time...
no subject
Date: 2008-01-12 12:47 pm (UTC)No content here
Date: 2008-01-12 02:33 pm (UTC)Re: No content here
Date: 2008-01-12 03:12 pm (UTC)Regarding continuity
Date: 2008-01-12 04:01 pm (UTC)Been reading this for a while now and enjoying your analysis tremendously. Regarding who Benton's father's best friend was, that role can shift throughout the course of one's life, and we are told in Mountie on the Bounty that there was a span of a few years where Fraser Sr. and Buck Frobisher did not talk. It could be during that time that the friendship with Gerrard sprung up. Assuming Benton was a child then, it could have seemed like a very long time, especially given that we've already seen that he does not have a true appreciation for who his father truly was.
Re: Regarding continuity
Date: 2019-07-09 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 07:18 pm (UTC)And I love him for not yielding even though he wants to.
Oh, yes. I love the way Fraser refers back to this, way ahead in "Ladies' Man," with the quote-- 'Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to it, the more ought law to weed it out.' It's very easy to convince yourself sometimes that something you really, really want is the right thing to do, but Fraser knows that in this case, even though it might *feel* right, it isn't.
RayV saying he'd understand if anything, you know, HAPPENED, is one of the weirdest and sweetest scenes between them, I think even moreso because Fraser never actually allows himself to openly acknowledge (1) what Ray is offering and (2) how much he would love to actually DO it.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-02 07:10 am (UTC)I love this. Many cool points here. :-)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-27 08:39 pm (UTC)While I've never seen The Man from UNCLE and can't comment, the Waverly is its own interesting reference for someone from Toronto (watching due South has become doubly fun since I moved here and started watching for landmarks!). The Waverly here is pretty much the most disreputable and infamous hotel in the downtown core (let me put it this way---if I needed a hotel for "only an hour," I'd go there. Except not really, because I assume it's as disgusting inside as it is outside).
I'd have to go and rewatch to say whether that reference is being used on purpose here, but it's definitely the first thing that jumps to mind when I hear "Waverly Hotel" in a show that filmed in the GTA. I can't imagine Gross or the other writers could use the name without some of that association, honestly.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-30 10:10 pm (UTC)I think in this episode we get an insight into the difference between the two Rays. While Vecchio would shoot Gerrard for Fraser if he asked, the other Ray wouldn't be able to do it. Oh Kowalski would shoot someone to protect Fraser or someone else. But I don't think he could kill Gerrard if he had the choice (see Beth Botrelle. I can't wait until you get to that episode)
This is why I ship Kowalski and Fraser. Vecchio is a good friend, but he doesn't have the same value system as Fraser. Underneath it all, Kowalski does.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:45 am (UTC)I met Ken Pogue. He was a semi-regular at the grocery store I clerked at. Being shy and Canadian (ergo, over-polite), I merely asked him if he acted on television and left it at that. I'm pretty sure he was in my area to get away so I left it at that.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-31 06:37 pm (UTC)But the point is, that Hamlet in the end can be driven to kill for vengeance sake... I'm not certain that if Fraser found himself dying with no hope of recovery that he'd wreak his revenge. In fact, I'm certain that he wouldn't, that unlike Hamlet he could face his own death and maintain his moral code (maintain the right.) I'm not saying he'd be happy about it, but he'd manage it.
Which is why I prefer Fraser to Hamlet, as a person. (And if my old tutors could see me now, talking about fictional characters as though they were real people, they'd throw their hands up in despair and give up teaching for good. But hey... the best fiction is real, so I may as well enjoy myself.)
no subject
Date: 2015-06-24 01:06 am (UTC)I hope I am not alone in this.
Aww!
Date: 2019-07-09 06:10 pm (UTC)