Due South: "The Mask"
Jan. 25th, 2008 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyDue South 2.6, "The Mask"
Original air date: January 18, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: So you fell.
FRASER: Yes, I fell.
RAY: You fell.
FRASER: Yes, Ray. I fell.
RAY: Oh, no, you see, that just doesn't make any sense because Mounties don't just fall. They leap, they bound, they grand jete, but they don't just fall.
Spoilers.
I have two problems with this episode, which I'd like to get out of the way up front.
1. Ray's pursuit of Louise St. Laurent, which I find (a.) unconvincing and (b.) creepily close to sexual harassment. Ray's "Yes means yes and no means yes" reinterpretation of St. Laurent's open hostility, which has been a motif since "The Witness"--
RAY: She wants me bad.
FRASER: I think she wants to kill you.
RAY: That, too.
---is a textbook standard technique for men who feel their power being threatened. I can't decide if it makes it better or worse that Ray is apparently correct: St. Laurent is interested in him sexually even though she also apparently hates him.
Clearly, this is another variation being rung on the theme of women in authority, since we're going to see the same conflict play out between later in the season between Thatcher and Fraser, but I honestly can't tell what it is the writers think they're doing with it here. Ray is never less sympathetic than when he's romantically involved with a woman, and while I don't want to read him as sexually harassing St. Laurent, there's always part of me that wants to know why she lets him get away with it.
(The thing I do like about it is the way it's going to be echoed in Seasons Three and Four, as Ray Kowalski's relationship with ASA Kowalski both doubles and deconstructs the ideology of romance Ray Vecchio is using here with ASA St. Laurent.)
2. The desire to have one's cake and eat it, too. The episode apparently wants us to identify Eric with the Inuit hunter in the Pilot:
ERIC: I shot a caribou once. The next time I looked, it'd turned into a man.
FRASER: You saved my life. I was grateful.
But it also wants us to believe that Eric has known Fraser since he was a child:
ERIC: I remember, you almost fainted the first time I brought you into one of these.
FRASER: I was ten.
ERIC: You were scrawny then.
FRASER: I still am.
ERIC: But you can still move fast.
Okay, leaving aside the fact that the Inuit hunter in the pilot is played by Eric Schweig and Eric is played by Rodney A. Grant (who is, incidentally, not Tsmishian, but Omaha), to me it seems very clear that Fraser and the hunter do not know each other. The hunter's mistrust of Fraser would be out of character for someone who's known him since he was ten.
Now, the hunter is a trickster figure, as Eric is, and in fact an identity between the two characters makes perfect sense to me. I just can't reconcile that identity with this episode's need to make Eric and Fraser old friends. I understand that need, too, btw: the descent of Victoria and Albert and their family, and the construction of the sweat lodge, requires a familiarity that Fraser cannot logistically have with the family of someone he met in the pilot who is not a resident of Chicago. It's just that you can't have both.
With those caveats entered, I like this episode a lot. After the open contrarealism of "Bird in the Hand," it's nice to have the ambiguity of the surreal, the raven which Fraser may or may not see, the raven which may or may not also be Eric. I like the way the episode plays with the conventions of caper movies (the ninja-esque thief with his high-tech equipment turns out to be a teenage Tsmishian, the bluffs and double-bluffs, the fact that the criminal mastermind turns out to be the mousy middle-aged woman) I love the way the different threads of the story tie together. I love the allowable inference that it's from Eric that Fraser learned to tell stories instead of saying directly what he means:
FRASER: It was you, wasn't it?
ERIC: Me?
FRASER: On the roof of the museum.
ERIC: What took you to the roof of a museum?
FRASER: A thief.
ERIC: David's friend, Joshua Springer, perhaps.
FRASER: I don't think so. It was you.
ERIC: I was here. You can ask your wolf.
FRASER: It was you.
ERIC: I heard a story once. It tells of a man who became a raven and went to Skyworld to steal the sun. Raven stole the sun and brought it back to his people, so they could have light. But this left Skyworld blind. Perhaps it was a raven you saw on the roof.
FRASER: No. It was a man I saw on the roof.
Eric's story relates to his purpose in Chicago, to the raven he obviously knows Fraser saw on the roof of the museum, and to the masks themselves (which, if you notice the placard, are "The Thief"). The episode makes no bones whatsoever about its symbolic underpinnings; Fraser explains them explicitly to Ray:
FRASER: The bird is the Raven. The Raven is the trickster. The trickster came to return the masks to the Tsmishian people.
RAY: Ravens do not break into museums.
FRASER: No, they don't. But Eric did. Eric is the trickster. What he discovered is that the masks were fake. Now he knew if he led me to the fakes, I would in turn lead him to the real ones.
RAY: Oh. So that's what we're doing.
FRASER: Yes, it's all part of his game.
RAY: Great. So now we're playing his game and you're tracking by vision.
FRASER: Yeah.
RAY: Normally that would be cause for concern. But seeing that we don't have any hard evidence or any real clues, dreaming some up might not be such a bad idea.
And what's interesting is that Fraser knows Eric is the trickster, and he knows he can't win against the trickster--he may not even want to win against the trickster--but he has to play the game out anyway. He and Eric obviously both know the rules; they both know how the scenes have to be played. "Tracking" David to the room where the fake masks are hidden ("That was easy," Ray says doubtfully. "Yes. Very," says Fraser, meaning, as Fraser so often does, something quite different from the words that come out of his mouth.), the showdown in the museum: "You win, Mountie," Eric says, but it's for the benefit of Ray and Ms. Kelly. Eric knows, and Fraser knows, that the trickster is always going to win the shell game.
And Fraser lets him win. He keeps his mouth shut:
RAY: Well, at least you got your masks back.
FRASER: Yeah. It would seem that everything's where it should be.
He hits seem just slightly too hard, and more than that, the question of where the masks "should be" is something that the episode worries like a dog (or a wolf) with a bone. The authority figures (the curator, the representatives of France and Canada, Thatcher) are all unquestioningly convinced that the masks belong in the museum. David is convinced they belong with the Tsmishian. Eric very cunningly never says one way or another, but Fraser recognizes the truth. And Fraser himself is clearly torn between his obedience to authority and his instinctive sense of justice. (Notice also the difference between the way Fraser tells the story--that the masks were taken from the Tsmishian by a missionary who then sold them to the two governments--and the way Ms. Kelly tells the story--that the Tsmishian sold the masks themselves.) And, of course, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that of the authority figures available, two (the curator and the Canadian representative) are corrupt, one (the French representative) is skulking around playing spy, and Thatcher is so desperate for romance that she blinds herself to the truth.
Fraser actually makes a subversive decision. He doesn't blow the whistle. His obedience is to authority, but his sympathy is always with the underdog.
The other interesting thing about this episode is that it raises the question of Fraser as a trickster, as a mask-wearer. He is exceptionally blind (and, yes, I'm using that word deliberately) to sexual subtext throughout the episode:
RAY: I think she wants him.
FRASER: For what?
culminating in Thatcher's embarrassed half confession about her fling with the curator, and Fraser's response:
FRASER: Sir!
THATCHER: What?
FRASER: Quite honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.
THATCHER: Oh. Good. Thank you.
FRASER: Yes, sir.
She almost knows that he's maintaining a polite fiction like it was a battleship, but she can't quite tell. And Fraser isn't letting her in. His façade of ignorance is perfect, unblemished, unshakable, until Thatcher leaves and Dief makes a comment.
FRASER: What?
[Dief makes one of his wookiee noises]
FRASER: Oh please.
Now, of course, we don't know what Dief said, but Fraser's exasperated, dismissive, almost cynical response--so dramatically different from the wide-eyed, stolid innocence he was showing Thatcher mere seconds ago--lets us make an educated guess. Fraser doesn't let himself recognize sexual subtext, not with Ray, not with Thatcher. Only with Dief, just as it's only with Dief and his father that he admits to understanding colloquial idioms, that he'll let his sarcasm out where it can be detected by other people. The Mountie is his armor, and he's not taking it off.
Original air date: January 18, 1996
Favorite quote:
RAY: So you fell.
FRASER: Yes, I fell.
RAY: You fell.
FRASER: Yes, Ray. I fell.
RAY: Oh, no, you see, that just doesn't make any sense because Mounties don't just fall. They leap, they bound, they grand jete, but they don't just fall.
Spoilers.
I have two problems with this episode, which I'd like to get out of the way up front.
1. Ray's pursuit of Louise St. Laurent, which I find (a.) unconvincing and (b.) creepily close to sexual harassment. Ray's "Yes means yes and no means yes" reinterpretation of St. Laurent's open hostility, which has been a motif since "The Witness"--
RAY: She wants me bad.
FRASER: I think she wants to kill you.
RAY: That, too.
---is a textbook standard technique for men who feel their power being threatened. I can't decide if it makes it better or worse that Ray is apparently correct: St. Laurent is interested in him sexually even though she also apparently hates him.
Clearly, this is another variation being rung on the theme of women in authority, since we're going to see the same conflict play out between later in the season between Thatcher and Fraser, but I honestly can't tell what it is the writers think they're doing with it here. Ray is never less sympathetic than when he's romantically involved with a woman, and while I don't want to read him as sexually harassing St. Laurent, there's always part of me that wants to know why she lets him get away with it.
(The thing I do like about it is the way it's going to be echoed in Seasons Three and Four, as Ray Kowalski's relationship with ASA Kowalski both doubles and deconstructs the ideology of romance Ray Vecchio is using here with ASA St. Laurent.)
2. The desire to have one's cake and eat it, too. The episode apparently wants us to identify Eric with the Inuit hunter in the Pilot:
ERIC: I shot a caribou once. The next time I looked, it'd turned into a man.
FRASER: You saved my life. I was grateful.
But it also wants us to believe that Eric has known Fraser since he was a child:
ERIC: I remember, you almost fainted the first time I brought you into one of these.
FRASER: I was ten.
ERIC: You were scrawny then.
FRASER: I still am.
ERIC: But you can still move fast.
Okay, leaving aside the fact that the Inuit hunter in the pilot is played by Eric Schweig and Eric is played by Rodney A. Grant (who is, incidentally, not Tsmishian, but Omaha), to me it seems very clear that Fraser and the hunter do not know each other. The hunter's mistrust of Fraser would be out of character for someone who's known him since he was ten.
Now, the hunter is a trickster figure, as Eric is, and in fact an identity between the two characters makes perfect sense to me. I just can't reconcile that identity with this episode's need to make Eric and Fraser old friends. I understand that need, too, btw: the descent of Victoria and Albert and their family, and the construction of the sweat lodge, requires a familiarity that Fraser cannot logistically have with the family of someone he met in the pilot who is not a resident of Chicago. It's just that you can't have both.
With those caveats entered, I like this episode a lot. After the open contrarealism of "Bird in the Hand," it's nice to have the ambiguity of the surreal, the raven which Fraser may or may not see, the raven which may or may not also be Eric. I like the way the episode plays with the conventions of caper movies (the ninja-esque thief with his high-tech equipment turns out to be a teenage Tsmishian, the bluffs and double-bluffs, the fact that the criminal mastermind turns out to be the mousy middle-aged woman) I love the way the different threads of the story tie together. I love the allowable inference that it's from Eric that Fraser learned to tell stories instead of saying directly what he means:
FRASER: It was you, wasn't it?
ERIC: Me?
FRASER: On the roof of the museum.
ERIC: What took you to the roof of a museum?
FRASER: A thief.
ERIC: David's friend, Joshua Springer, perhaps.
FRASER: I don't think so. It was you.
ERIC: I was here. You can ask your wolf.
FRASER: It was you.
ERIC: I heard a story once. It tells of a man who became a raven and went to Skyworld to steal the sun. Raven stole the sun and brought it back to his people, so they could have light. But this left Skyworld blind. Perhaps it was a raven you saw on the roof.
FRASER: No. It was a man I saw on the roof.
Eric's story relates to his purpose in Chicago, to the raven he obviously knows Fraser saw on the roof of the museum, and to the masks themselves (which, if you notice the placard, are "The Thief"). The episode makes no bones whatsoever about its symbolic underpinnings; Fraser explains them explicitly to Ray:
FRASER: The bird is the Raven. The Raven is the trickster. The trickster came to return the masks to the Tsmishian people.
RAY: Ravens do not break into museums.
FRASER: No, they don't. But Eric did. Eric is the trickster. What he discovered is that the masks were fake. Now he knew if he led me to the fakes, I would in turn lead him to the real ones.
RAY: Oh. So that's what we're doing.
FRASER: Yes, it's all part of his game.
RAY: Great. So now we're playing his game and you're tracking by vision.
FRASER: Yeah.
RAY: Normally that would be cause for concern. But seeing that we don't have any hard evidence or any real clues, dreaming some up might not be such a bad idea.
And what's interesting is that Fraser knows Eric is the trickster, and he knows he can't win against the trickster--he may not even want to win against the trickster--but he has to play the game out anyway. He and Eric obviously both know the rules; they both know how the scenes have to be played. "Tracking" David to the room where the fake masks are hidden ("That was easy," Ray says doubtfully. "Yes. Very," says Fraser, meaning, as Fraser so often does, something quite different from the words that come out of his mouth.), the showdown in the museum: "You win, Mountie," Eric says, but it's for the benefit of Ray and Ms. Kelly. Eric knows, and Fraser knows, that the trickster is always going to win the shell game.
And Fraser lets him win. He keeps his mouth shut:
RAY: Well, at least you got your masks back.
FRASER: Yeah. It would seem that everything's where it should be.
He hits seem just slightly too hard, and more than that, the question of where the masks "should be" is something that the episode worries like a dog (or a wolf) with a bone. The authority figures (the curator, the representatives of France and Canada, Thatcher) are all unquestioningly convinced that the masks belong in the museum. David is convinced they belong with the Tsmishian. Eric very cunningly never says one way or another, but Fraser recognizes the truth. And Fraser himself is clearly torn between his obedience to authority and his instinctive sense of justice. (Notice also the difference between the way Fraser tells the story--that the masks were taken from the Tsmishian by a missionary who then sold them to the two governments--and the way Ms. Kelly tells the story--that the Tsmishian sold the masks themselves.) And, of course, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that of the authority figures available, two (the curator and the Canadian representative) are corrupt, one (the French representative) is skulking around playing spy, and Thatcher is so desperate for romance that she blinds herself to the truth.
Fraser actually makes a subversive decision. He doesn't blow the whistle. His obedience is to authority, but his sympathy is always with the underdog.
The other interesting thing about this episode is that it raises the question of Fraser as a trickster, as a mask-wearer. He is exceptionally blind (and, yes, I'm using that word deliberately) to sexual subtext throughout the episode:
RAY: I think she wants him.
FRASER: For what?
culminating in Thatcher's embarrassed half confession about her fling with the curator, and Fraser's response:
FRASER: Sir!
THATCHER: What?
FRASER: Quite honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.
THATCHER: Oh. Good. Thank you.
FRASER: Yes, sir.
She almost knows that he's maintaining a polite fiction like it was a battleship, but she can't quite tell. And Fraser isn't letting her in. His façade of ignorance is perfect, unblemished, unshakable, until Thatcher leaves and Dief makes a comment.
FRASER: What?
[Dief makes one of his wookiee noises]
FRASER: Oh please.
Now, of course, we don't know what Dief said, but Fraser's exasperated, dismissive, almost cynical response--so dramatically different from the wide-eyed, stolid innocence he was showing Thatcher mere seconds ago--lets us make an educated guess. Fraser doesn't let himself recognize sexual subtext, not with Ray, not with Thatcher. Only with Dief, just as it's only with Dief and his father that he admits to understanding colloquial idioms, that he'll let his sarcasm out where it can be detected by other people. The Mountie is his armor, and he's not taking it off.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-26 01:17 am (UTC)Which, you know, I think is reason enough. :)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-01 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 09:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-31 06:54 pm (UTC)By having a lead character who is "all things" to everyone and nothing to himself (because the last thing Fraser wants to think about is who he really is) the show can move more freely around issues like Ray's ethnic background and cultural heritage, gender roles and women in authority, what it is like to grow old and lose respect, both from others and oneself (manhunt for example... and we see in the Edge that Fraser is aware of that particular pain too.)
Sorry... I ran off on a ramble again.