Due South: "All the Queen's Horses"
Aug. 29th, 2008 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"All the Queen's Horses" (DS 2.14)
Original air date: April 11, 1996
Favorite quote:
BUCK FROBISHER: Aha.
ROBERT FRASER: What've you got there?
FROBISHER: I found it. Found the brake.
FRASER: What makes you think it's the brake?
FROBISHER: It's written right on it. Brake.
FRASER: Enh. Could be a ruse.
FROBISHER: To what end?
FRASER: Something criminal.
FROBISHER: Are you insinuating that an entire design crew has deliberately mislabeled the key elements of a train?
FRASER: It is possible!
FROBISHER: I'm talking to a lunatic.
FRASER: Now, y'see, this is what's wrong with you, Buck. You discount everything but the probable. It's why you couldn't make that shot.
FROBISHER: Don't think that you can twist the knife. It was springtime. I had my allergies. My eyes were cloudy.
FRASER: Whatever helps you sleep.
Spoilers.
I'm not even going to try for a coherent analysis this time. Just some observations:
Leslie Nielsen + Gorden Pinsent = pure comedy gold. I adore every scene the two of them have together in this episode. (I admit, I could do without the fart jokes, but I do want to point out the way the episode uses the joke--his own noxious miasma is what makes Frobisher immune to the terrorists' sedative gas. From the comedic parareal to the surreal in one easy step.) And the sheer goofy inventive joy of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot fills me with delight.
I notice--again--how much Ray does not want any part of Fraser's weirdness. He saddles up and does what needs to be done, including jumping onto a speeding train while holding a deaf half-wolf, but it's always under protest. Where Ray Kowalski is combative, Ray Vecchio is balky.
I love the way Fraser's superhero parareality/function as a narrative device gets simultaneously commented on and pushed aside:
THATCHER: I thought you were--
FRASER: Dead? No, ma'am.
THATCHER: How did you--
FRASER: It's not important. What is important--
THATCHER: Not important? I grieved for you.
FRASER: You did?
THATCHER: Briefly.
FRASER: Understood.
We're never going to know how Fraser got from falling off the train into the gorge to lassoing the train from the handcart. And while he's right that it isn't important, it's also important that it isn't important, if that makes any sense. The details don't matter because this is how Fraser functions in the narrative. And by commenting on that, the show turns the sheer implausibility from a detriment into an asset. It's not parareality, which falls apart under scrutiny; it's surreality, which has an ineffable logic of its own.
The crux of this episode is, of course, the kiss.
(I should mention that although I like Thatcher a good deal, I am not a fan of the Fraser-Thatcher romance--as opposed to the Fraser-Thatcher relationship, with all its complications and landmines--so I'm far more interested in looking for subversion and undercutting than I am in reading the kiss straight. And I think the show rewards a subversive approach.)
The visual image is stunning: two red-uniformed Mounties locked in an embrace on top of a train, and for that alone I can see why they went with it. And there's a certain narrative inevitability to it, as Randal Bolt recognizes and remarks on: "Now, this amuses me, y'see? Superior officer, junior officer. Boss, worker. The empowered, the unempowered. And look, they're even hugging each other! A beautiful thing, don't you think?" The romantic comedy tropes that Fraser has gotten entangled in before ("Victoria's Secret Part I," "An Invitation to Romance") are very definitely in play (see, for example, the business with the hairpin), and I think it's possible to see them as the runaway train, carrying Thatcher and Fraser along with them.
Because there's something peculiarly generic about the way romance gets discussed in this episode. "There are times between men and women," Frobisher says to Thatcher, to Fraser (and Ray says to Dief at the end, which surely is the strongest sign that something's being undercut here)--and in Frobisher's inarticulate embarrassment, that's about as far as we get, aside from some vague double entendre. And that's echoed by the weird adrenaline-junkie sexual relationship between Randal Bolt and his chief henchwoman, which is proved to be utterly superficial and generic by the cheerful lack of hesitation he shows in murdering her. The only thing relevant to this situation on top of the train, in other words, is that Fraser is male and Thatcher is female. And if Thatcher's outburst has a point, that point is that gender is the least important factor in the equation:
THATCHER: What makes you think we're so different? You graduated first of your class, and so did I. You received medals for field work. So did I. You wear red serge. I wear red serge. The only difference between us is that you're a woman and I'm not.
FRASER: I think you have that backwards, ma'am.
THATCHER: You know what I mean!
FRASER: Yes, I do.
THATCHER: I'm not made of stone.
FRASER: I'm very much aware of that.
THATCHER: Are you?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: You are?
FRASER: I know you have a heart, and I think it beats just the same as mine.
THATCHER: You think it does?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: What about right now?
FRASER: It's racing.
THATCHER: Out of control?
FRASER: It's a runaway.
[clinch]
But notice the bait and switch here. What Thatcher's talking about--what Fraser's talking about--isn't the question of whether they're romantically and/or sexually attracted to each other. It's the question of likeness.
And the question of gender performance, which Season 2 has been circling around in a number of different ways--most obviously in "Some Like It Red," but (looking back at my commentaries) also in "Vault" and "The Witness" and "We Are the Eggmen"). Because Thatcher's Freudian slip points to the disjunction between her status and her sex. She is, like Fraser (and, of course, like real people), a mix of traditionally "masculine" and "feminine" traits; unlike Fraser (who has no difficulty at all in acknowledging his feminine side by performing Miss Fraser), she is deeply uncomfortable with the contradictions she finds.
This conversation, about the ways in which Thatcher mirrors Fraser, is overlaid with, and ultimately usurped by, the recurring "there are times between men and women" motif. And really, that kiss seems to have about as much meaning as Buck's floundering. And that's because--I think--Thatcher can't bring herself (to borrow some of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala's climbing jargon) to stand up on it:
THATCHER: You realize, Fraser, that what happened between us can never repeat itself. Unless, of course, the exact same circumstances were to repeat themselves.
FRASER: By exact same circumstances, sir, do you mean we would have to be aboard a train loaded with unconscious Mounties that had been taken over by terrorists and were heading for a nuclear catastrophe?
THATCHER: Exactly.
FRASER: Understood.
(I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that Fraser calls Thatcher "ma'am" for most of the episode and reverts to "sir" here, although possibly there is some relation to the question of gender performance.)
Fraser has offered her a way out of her double-bind--"I know you have a heart, and I think it beats just the same as mine" is clearly an offer, not so much of romance per se, as of alliance--and she turns him down. She denies him, denies the likeness between them. In essence, what she's saying, like Buck, is "there are times between a man and a woman," that there was some metaphorical conjunction of planets that caused their kiss and now that it's over--it's over.
But there's another strand to the question of romance here, and it's over with Buck and Bob:
R. FRASER: You want proof?
B. FROBISHER: Absolutely.
FRASER: All right. Let's hear it.
FROBISHER: Very well. On April 23, 1957, sixty miles north of Destruction Bay, two young men stood on a rope bridge which spanned a canyon. On the other side of that bridge, a young woman was being held in the clutches of a deviant. They had two cartridges between them and one rifle. They knew it was an impossible shot, but each one knew that whoever made that shot would secure the love of that woman. The first man tried. He failed. And the second man tried, and he won the whole shooting match.
FRASER: And we were very happy, Caroline and I.
FROBISHER: Yeah, I know that. I know that, I know that. But the question is, the two men, through their long years of friendship, often talked about that impossible shot, and when they did, what did they call it?
So we have the twin themes of rivalry and friendship, and the emphasis in the story is on the continuation of the friendship. Much the same thing happens when Buck is trying to talk to the younger Fraser:
B. FROBISHER: Your mother married a good man.
B. FRASER: Yes, she did.
FROBISHER: I suppose in a way that your father and I were rivals, but in the end we forged ahead. We overcame, no matter what. What I mean is that between men and women there are things . . . between men and women there are things which arise, feelings . . .
FRASER: She's my superior officer, sir. That's all.
FROBISHER: Well, enough said.
Again, there's the rivalry-trumped-by-friendship idea, and also the idea that these things that arise between men and women are somehow not really part of a person's identity. They're just things that arise. Between men and women. And Fraser's response, by focusing on Thatcher's structural identity as his superior officer, reinforces that idea.
But--as Due South has a habit of doing--we revisit the story of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot again, both when Buck makes a similarly impossible shot and at the end:
R. FRASER: Did I congratulate you on that shot?
B. FROBISHER: Yeah, I hit the target.*
FRASER: Well, anyway, it ranks right up there with the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot.
FROBISHER: Well, you realize of course that I knew you were always the one she loved.
FRASER: Oh, now you're saying you missed intentionally.
FROBISHER: We were friends.
FRASER: No, we weren't.
(What I love most about Nielsen & Pinsent's performances is the way they perfectly capture the feel of a forty-plus year friendship, with the way they know each other inside out and rag on each other and bicker, but do it with perfect security in the strength of the other's regard.)
This version of the story suddenly regrants the agency it's been denying to Caroline all damn episode. It's not a simple matter either of "there are times between a man and a woman" or of two men competing for a prize. It's about love--the love between Caroline and Bob, and the love between Bob and Buck. And since, as I've said, one of the things I like best about the glimpses we get of Caroline is the sense that she was Bob's partner in marriage, those two different kinds of love are actually not as widely separated as friendship is from the things that arise between a man and a woman. This final reimagining of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot therefore (if you push a little) offers the escape from the binary thinking of gender roles that Thatcher can't quite bring herself to accept from Fraser.
[Dief grumbles]
RAY: I know, big fella. But there are times between men and women when things come up. You know, feelings.
[Dief makes a noise eloquent of skepticism and disgust]
RAY: Enough said.
Dief's not buying. And Dief is probably the most sensible character on the show. The essentialist argument (that all you need is "man" and "woman" and, well, things will come up) is, if not entirely debunked--for that does seem to be a pretty good explanation of the kiss--at least emphatically rejected as inadequate. That's not all there is to relationships between people, and the show knows it.
---
*I can't make out the line at all; this is the guess provided by this transcript.
Original air date: April 11, 1996
Favorite quote:
BUCK FROBISHER: Aha.
ROBERT FRASER: What've you got there?
FROBISHER: I found it. Found the brake.
FRASER: What makes you think it's the brake?
FROBISHER: It's written right on it. Brake.
FRASER: Enh. Could be a ruse.
FROBISHER: To what end?
FRASER: Something criminal.
FROBISHER: Are you insinuating that an entire design crew has deliberately mislabeled the key elements of a train?
FRASER: It is possible!
FROBISHER: I'm talking to a lunatic.
FRASER: Now, y'see, this is what's wrong with you, Buck. You discount everything but the probable. It's why you couldn't make that shot.
FROBISHER: Don't think that you can twist the knife. It was springtime. I had my allergies. My eyes were cloudy.
FRASER: Whatever helps you sleep.
Spoilers.
I'm not even going to try for a coherent analysis this time. Just some observations:
Leslie Nielsen + Gorden Pinsent = pure comedy gold. I adore every scene the two of them have together in this episode. (I admit, I could do without the fart jokes, but I do want to point out the way the episode uses the joke--his own noxious miasma is what makes Frobisher immune to the terrorists' sedative gas. From the comedic parareal to the surreal in one easy step.) And the sheer goofy inventive joy of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot fills me with delight.
I notice--again--how much Ray does not want any part of Fraser's weirdness. He saddles up and does what needs to be done, including jumping onto a speeding train while holding a deaf half-wolf, but it's always under protest. Where Ray Kowalski is combative, Ray Vecchio is balky.
I love the way Fraser's superhero parareality/function as a narrative device gets simultaneously commented on and pushed aside:
THATCHER: I thought you were--
FRASER: Dead? No, ma'am.
THATCHER: How did you--
FRASER: It's not important. What is important--
THATCHER: Not important? I grieved for you.
FRASER: You did?
THATCHER: Briefly.
FRASER: Understood.
We're never going to know how Fraser got from falling off the train into the gorge to lassoing the train from the handcart. And while he's right that it isn't important, it's also important that it isn't important, if that makes any sense. The details don't matter because this is how Fraser functions in the narrative. And by commenting on that, the show turns the sheer implausibility from a detriment into an asset. It's not parareality, which falls apart under scrutiny; it's surreality, which has an ineffable logic of its own.
The crux of this episode is, of course, the kiss.
(I should mention that although I like Thatcher a good deal, I am not a fan of the Fraser-Thatcher romance--as opposed to the Fraser-Thatcher relationship, with all its complications and landmines--so I'm far more interested in looking for subversion and undercutting than I am in reading the kiss straight. And I think the show rewards a subversive approach.)
The visual image is stunning: two red-uniformed Mounties locked in an embrace on top of a train, and for that alone I can see why they went with it. And there's a certain narrative inevitability to it, as Randal Bolt recognizes and remarks on: "Now, this amuses me, y'see? Superior officer, junior officer. Boss, worker. The empowered, the unempowered. And look, they're even hugging each other! A beautiful thing, don't you think?" The romantic comedy tropes that Fraser has gotten entangled in before ("Victoria's Secret Part I," "An Invitation to Romance") are very definitely in play (see, for example, the business with the hairpin), and I think it's possible to see them as the runaway train, carrying Thatcher and Fraser along with them.
Because there's something peculiarly generic about the way romance gets discussed in this episode. "There are times between men and women," Frobisher says to Thatcher, to Fraser (and Ray says to Dief at the end, which surely is the strongest sign that something's being undercut here)--and in Frobisher's inarticulate embarrassment, that's about as far as we get, aside from some vague double entendre. And that's echoed by the weird adrenaline-junkie sexual relationship between Randal Bolt and his chief henchwoman, which is proved to be utterly superficial and generic by the cheerful lack of hesitation he shows in murdering her. The only thing relevant to this situation on top of the train, in other words, is that Fraser is male and Thatcher is female. And if Thatcher's outburst has a point, that point is that gender is the least important factor in the equation:
THATCHER: What makes you think we're so different? You graduated first of your class, and so did I. You received medals for field work. So did I. You wear red serge. I wear red serge. The only difference between us is that you're a woman and I'm not.
FRASER: I think you have that backwards, ma'am.
THATCHER: You know what I mean!
FRASER: Yes, I do.
THATCHER: I'm not made of stone.
FRASER: I'm very much aware of that.
THATCHER: Are you?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: You are?
FRASER: I know you have a heart, and I think it beats just the same as mine.
THATCHER: You think it does?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: What about right now?
FRASER: It's racing.
THATCHER: Out of control?
FRASER: It's a runaway.
[clinch]
But notice the bait and switch here. What Thatcher's talking about--what Fraser's talking about--isn't the question of whether they're romantically and/or sexually attracted to each other. It's the question of likeness.
And the question of gender performance, which Season 2 has been circling around in a number of different ways--most obviously in "Some Like It Red," but (looking back at my commentaries) also in "Vault" and "The Witness" and "We Are the Eggmen"). Because Thatcher's Freudian slip points to the disjunction between her status and her sex. She is, like Fraser (and, of course, like real people), a mix of traditionally "masculine" and "feminine" traits; unlike Fraser (who has no difficulty at all in acknowledging his feminine side by performing Miss Fraser), she is deeply uncomfortable with the contradictions she finds.
This conversation, about the ways in which Thatcher mirrors Fraser, is overlaid with, and ultimately usurped by, the recurring "there are times between men and women" motif. And really, that kiss seems to have about as much meaning as Buck's floundering. And that's because--I think--Thatcher can't bring herself (to borrow some of
matociquala's climbing jargon) to stand up on it:THATCHER: You realize, Fraser, that what happened between us can never repeat itself. Unless, of course, the exact same circumstances were to repeat themselves.
FRASER: By exact same circumstances, sir, do you mean we would have to be aboard a train loaded with unconscious Mounties that had been taken over by terrorists and were heading for a nuclear catastrophe?
THATCHER: Exactly.
FRASER: Understood.
(I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that Fraser calls Thatcher "ma'am" for most of the episode and reverts to "sir" here, although possibly there is some relation to the question of gender performance.)
Fraser has offered her a way out of her double-bind--"I know you have a heart, and I think it beats just the same as mine" is clearly an offer, not so much of romance per se, as of alliance--and she turns him down. She denies him, denies the likeness between them. In essence, what she's saying, like Buck, is "there are times between a man and a woman," that there was some metaphorical conjunction of planets that caused their kiss and now that it's over--it's over.
But there's another strand to the question of romance here, and it's over with Buck and Bob:
R. FRASER: You want proof?
B. FROBISHER: Absolutely.
FRASER: All right. Let's hear it.
FROBISHER: Very well. On April 23, 1957, sixty miles north of Destruction Bay, two young men stood on a rope bridge which spanned a canyon. On the other side of that bridge, a young woman was being held in the clutches of a deviant. They had two cartridges between them and one rifle. They knew it was an impossible shot, but each one knew that whoever made that shot would secure the love of that woman. The first man tried. He failed. And the second man tried, and he won the whole shooting match.
FRASER: And we were very happy, Caroline and I.
FROBISHER: Yeah, I know that. I know that, I know that. But the question is, the two men, through their long years of friendship, often talked about that impossible shot, and when they did, what did they call it?
So we have the twin themes of rivalry and friendship, and the emphasis in the story is on the continuation of the friendship. Much the same thing happens when Buck is trying to talk to the younger Fraser:
B. FROBISHER: Your mother married a good man.
B. FRASER: Yes, she did.
FROBISHER: I suppose in a way that your father and I were rivals, but in the end we forged ahead. We overcame, no matter what. What I mean is that between men and women there are things . . . between men and women there are things which arise, feelings . . .
FRASER: She's my superior officer, sir. That's all.
FROBISHER: Well, enough said.
Again, there's the rivalry-trumped-by-friendship idea, and also the idea that these things that arise between men and women are somehow not really part of a person's identity. They're just things that arise. Between men and women. And Fraser's response, by focusing on Thatcher's structural identity as his superior officer, reinforces that idea.
But--as Due South has a habit of doing--we revisit the story of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot again, both when Buck makes a similarly impossible shot and at the end:
R. FRASER: Did I congratulate you on that shot?
B. FROBISHER: Yeah, I hit the target.*
FRASER: Well, anyway, it ranks right up there with the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot.
FROBISHER: Well, you realize of course that I knew you were always the one she loved.
FRASER: Oh, now you're saying you missed intentionally.
FROBISHER: We were friends.
FRASER: No, we weren't.
(What I love most about Nielsen & Pinsent's performances is the way they perfectly capture the feel of a forty-plus year friendship, with the way they know each other inside out and rag on each other and bicker, but do it with perfect security in the strength of the other's regard.)
This version of the story suddenly regrants the agency it's been denying to Caroline all damn episode. It's not a simple matter either of "there are times between a man and a woman" or of two men competing for a prize. It's about love--the love between Caroline and Bob, and the love between Bob and Buck. And since, as I've said, one of the things I like best about the glimpses we get of Caroline is the sense that she was Bob's partner in marriage, those two different kinds of love are actually not as widely separated as friendship is from the things that arise between a man and a woman. This final reimagining of the Great Yukon Double Douglas Fir Telescoping Bank Shot therefore (if you push a little) offers the escape from the binary thinking of gender roles that Thatcher can't quite bring herself to accept from Fraser.
[Dief grumbles]
RAY: I know, big fella. But there are times between men and women when things come up. You know, feelings.
[Dief makes a noise eloquent of skepticism and disgust]
RAY: Enough said.
Dief's not buying. And Dief is probably the most sensible character on the show. The essentialist argument (that all you need is "man" and "woman" and, well, things will come up) is, if not entirely debunked--for that does seem to be a pretty good explanation of the kiss--at least emphatically rejected as inadequate. That's not all there is to relationships between people, and the show knows it.
---
*I can't make out the line at all; this is the guess provided by this transcript.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-30 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-24 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-01 02:10 am (UTC)Just briefly, I live with a teenage boy, so let me tell you, men will always resort to fart jokes when they can. I sit in appalled amazement listening to my son and my Dad, both sensible men, laughing their guts out over things that leave me, as a woman, rather puzzled. So I think the fart jokes are just the male writers of the show revealing their inner daftness.
Seriously, you might know a man, you might love a man... you might think you know everything about him, that he's sophisticated, intellectual, spiritual etc... stick him in a room with a bunch of teenage boys and within minutes they'll be "letting rip" with the fart jokes. The guy could be the pope, it doesn't matter. Men think farts are funny.
Regarding the kiss on the runaway train... yes, it looked wonderful, and inevitable (and I really envy either one of the actors for being the kissee or kissed. I mean, they're both gorgeous.) I love the comic dismemberment of Fraser's hat! It's the "stetson of invincibility", but here it isn't destroyed, so Fraser's in no real danger, but it's mangled, which implies that maybe Thatcher's a bit too dangerous to get close to...
Also, again, the casual murder of Bolt's female accomplice... romance never works in dS... it always ends in failure or betrayal.
And Neilson and Pinsent... as you say, comedy gold.