Due South: "Red, White, or Blue"
Sep. 8th, 2008 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Red, White, or Blue" (DS 2.17)
Original air date: May 16, 1996
Favorite quote:
FRANCIS BOLT: You recall the games we used to play in Uncle Jimmy's mortuary?
RANDAL BOLT: Those weren't games, Francis. You pickled my dogs.
FRANCIS: Let the dogs go, Randal.
RANDAL: [weeping] They weren't dead.
FRANCIS: Let them go, I say.
--or--
RAY: "So what's the Mountie like?" He's Superman, all right? What d'you expect me to say, he's a moron? He dresses up in that damn red suit every single day of his life like a signpost--
FRASER: Oh, come on, Ray, that's not fair. I don't wear it all the time. The truth is, there are times I wish I didn't have to wear it. The thing itches. It itches three hundred and sixty-five days of the year--unless of course it's a leap year, in which case it itches three hundred and sixty-six days--but the point is, I don't wear it intentionally. It's part of my obligations.
RAY: We are not talking about clothes here, Fraser, okay? We're talking about you. The most irritating man in the world.
FRASER: Ray, I know I irritate you. But you have to believe me, I'm not trying to irritate you. It's not part of some sort of master plan.
Spoilers
Francis Bolt is by far my favorite Due South villain. Randal mostly annoys me (except for the one line: "If it's that no account lawyer, you can feed him to the pigs. While his bones are still soft."), but Francis, aside from looking like a nebbish and yet being both the brains and the spine of the Bolt operation, has the combination, charming in a fictional character, of being a complete flaming nutbar and being entirely self-aware:
RANDAL: I'm the modern version of Doctor Prescott!
FRANCIS: No, you're not. You're not, Randal, and neither am I.
RANDAL: What're you saying?
FRANCIS: See the world for what it is, Randal! We're not patriots. We're thieves. Uncommon, but thieves nonetheless. And once again you're on the verge of ruining a perfect plan!
I also like the way the episode uses him as a very deliberate mirror and contrast to Fraser. (Their initials reverse: BF--FB. Which is probably a coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was deliberate.) Paul Gross, who wrote the teleplay, is clearly taking the opportunity to experiment with the narrative conventions, thus both the beautiful cross-town argument between Fraser and Ray, which I'll be coming back to, and Francis Bolt's stint as omniscient second-person narrator:
FRANCIS BOLT: Where did you get the animal?
FRASER: It's rather a long story.
BOLT: I have time.
FRASER: I've forgotten most of it.
BOLT: Well, that's unfortunate. It's an interesting story, and bears repeating. Mid-May, two hundred and twelve miles northwest of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territories. Wait--is that "Territory" or "Territories"?
FRASER: Territory.
BOLT: Thank you. I crave accuracy. So you'd been dispatched to track down big game poachers that were coming across the border from Alaska. Despite your training, you could not have foreseen that the poachers would convert a mineshaft into a bear trap. You have no idea how long you lay there. When you came to, you discovered you were not alone. Your first thought was to save the animal. That's admirable. But not without certain drawbacks. When you came to, you were alone, without any visible means of escape. So you sat down to collect your thoughts. But how could you have thought that the animal would be so grateful as to come back and try to repay the favor? You were knocked out for a third time. But despite the gaffe, a bond was formed, and you've been together ever since. You're wondering, of course, how I know the details of the story. Suffice to say, I know many things, and it's no accident that you were on board that train. Can you guess who I am now?
FRASER: Yes, I think I can. Your name would be Francis Bolt. YOu were born in Oregon in 1949.
BOLT: 1950.
FRASER: 1950. You are a theoretical mathematician by training and a recluse by choice. You have a younger brother named Randal--
BOLT: Who you arrested. That was a mistake.
FRASER: He broke the law. I would arrest him again in a heartbeat.
The intercutting of Bolt's narrative with the flashbacks of Fraser and a half-grown Dief in the mineshaft make it clear that in fact Bolt does know the details, just as Fraser knows details about him, and Bolt's "Suffice to say" works much like Fraser's "That's not important." Bolt craves accuracy; so does Fraser, whose particular disease it is to be unable to keep from correcting people, even in the middle of an argument. (I have considerable sympathy for him on that one, because, yeah.) Bolt comes up with plans, which is uniformly Fraser's job as well ("I have an idea, but you're not going to like it."). Both of them are not what they appear to be, on several different levels.
And this episode is very interested in what Fraser is. We start with the RCMP's media relations expert telling him, "You're already on their television sets and on the covers of their magazines, but they want more. They want your inner soul." Fraser responds to this threat by provoking Inspector Thatcher into interrupting the interview; since he agrees with her instantly and without the slightest hint of surprise that their encounter on top of the train should remain secret, I think we can put this in the same category as his maneuver in "Heaven and Earth," by which his seemingly inadvertent and disastrous confession to Ray gets Fraser exactly what he wants, viz and to wit, Frannie cut off at the pass. Here, he gets the media relations expert derailed and he boxes Inspector Thatcher into a corner where she has to talk about the kiss with him, even if she's talking about not talking about it. Because notice what he takes the opportunity to say:
FRASER: Furthermore, sir, I followed your instructions and I've tried to erase the . . . contact from my memory.
THATCHER: You have?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: And have you succeeded?
FRASER: No.
(At which point they are interrupted by the hapless Cooper--although I am sad that we don't get Dean McDermott in this episode, I am amused by the inescapable corollary that Ottawa is sending all its most SPECIAL Mounties to Chicago. No wonder Thatcher seems most days like she's at the ragged end of her patience.)
Fraser is playing a very delicate game of disobedience by obedience here, and Thatcher is drawn into colluding with him, at least briefly. The thing, though, that strikes me about this interchange, and which I think is relevant to the rest of the episode, is how lonely Fraser seems. He's not trying to trap her as a move in the exchange of cliches that is romantic courtship ("there are times between men and women"); he's trying to get her to acknowledge the contact between them. That word, which he suggests and Thatcher latches on to, I think is actually pointing at something important. They made contact. They touched each other. And Fraser has so very little human contact in Chicago. Except for Ray, and Ray's not talking to him:
FRASER: You're not talking?
RAY: No.
FRASER: You're really not talking?
RAY: That's right, Fraser, I'm really not talking.
FRASER: Just so I can be really clear in my own mind, Ray, other than telling me that you're not talking, you are, in fact, not talking.
RAY: That's about the size of it.
FRASER: I see. Is there something I should know?
RAY: [meaningfully] You should.
FRASER: Well, this thing that I should know, do you think you could perhaps provide a hint as to what it might be? [Ray passes him the magazine with Fraser's picture emblazoned on the cover] Oh. I see. Well, I suppose I should probably just--
RAY: Get out of my car.
FRASER: Understood.
Ray is feeling unappreciated, which echoes back to the second episode of this season, "Vault," in which Ray is trying to get Fraser to admit he feels unappreciated, and in fact, in a lot of ways, Ray and Fraser's argument here is really a continuation of the argument they have in the bank vault about whether or not Fraser is, as Ray says, a human being.
I love this scene. I love it for its ingenuity, for its surreality and the way that slides into contrarealism. I love it for Fraser's Ray Vecchio impression. I love it for the way that Fraser is trying to talk about who and what he is, for the self-awareness that we almost never get far enough behind the Mountie mask to see. I love it for its timing. And I love it for the way it ends, with the push over the top and then the reveal. (Also, parenthetically, I think it's interesting the gyrations and gymnastics the show has to go through to get Ray Vecchio to punch Fraser and vice versa. Or to get the appearance that Ray has punched Fraser and vice versa. Notice that we will not have the same difficulty with Ray Kowalski.) But the most important part is the borderline meta discussion of what Fraser is and why. Fraser's confession that his dress uniform itches, his further confession that he has a critical perspective on his own behavior (since that, after all, is what he's using Ray to ventriloquize, much as he uses Dief to ventriloquize his own common sense and down to earth pragmatism). And finally:
FRASER: But the point of the anecdote is this. That while I was helping her, I knew that you would be irritated with me, and I'm sorry, but I seem . . . I seem to be powerless to prevent that. I don't know. I don't know if it's some sort of flaw in my upbringing or some genetic abnormality or perhaps it's just some aberrant property in the Tuktoyaktuk water system.
RAY: Don't put this on the water, Fraser, this is a conscious thing that you do, okay? You cover everything up, you squash it down. It's like that time with Frobisher when that guy Counter, he stabbled you in the shoulder--
FRASER: Geiger.
RAY: What?
FRASER: The man's name was Geiger.
RAY: His name was Geiger Counter?
FRASER: No, just Geiger. No Counter. And he stabbed me in the leg.
RAY: Leg, shoulder, what difference does it make?
FRASER: Well, Ray, when you're the one being stabbed, the difference is remarkable.
RAY: The point is, Fraser, he stabbed you, and were you angry?
FRASER: I was in pain.
RAY: We're talking about anger here, Fraser, a human emotion. Are you human? Because if you are, human beings feel things, okay? They feel anger, they feel love, they feel lust and fear, and sometimes, and I know you don't want to hear this, sometimes they even cry.
Now, Fraser knows that. And we know Fraser knows that, because we've seen him cry. In "Victoria's Secret, Part II." And I think that connection is a clue that what Ray's really trying to talk about here isn't Geiger all the way back in "Manhunt" (1.3), but Victoria--anger, love, lust, and fear are all particularly a propos to Ms. Metcalf, not so much to Mr. Geiger. Weren't you angry at her? Ray is asking, or even, Weren't you angry at me? And Fraser's response--I was in pain--is, if we're talking about Victoria, completely true on the emotional level as well as the physical. And Victoria is the great rupture in Fraser and Ray's friendship, and marks the point at which Ray cannot pretend ignorance of the fallible human being behind Fraser's Mountie façade. And being Ray, once he can't pretend ignorance, he can't leave it alone, and thus his quest in various episodes in season 2 to get Fraser to admit to being imperfect. And Fraser understands that that's what he's doing:
FRASER: I've never hated you, Ray. I've envied you maybe.
RAY: Envied me?
FRASER: I'm not proud of it, but you have a kind of freedom I wish I had. Sort of an existential honesty.
RAY: Are you saying I'm honest?
FRASER: In your heart, yes.
Point 1: The unspoken corollary is that in his heart, Fraser believes himself to be a liar.
Point 2: "I'm not proud of it" is a nearly direct quote from "Letting Go" (1.22), in reference to Ray getting shot: "Well, I'm not proud about that, but I'll admit I did get a certain perverse pleasure out of it."
Point 3: And that connection makes sense of Fraser saying, "I've never hated you, Ray," because up to this point in this episode, Fraser hating Ray hasn't even been on the table; it's been all about Ray's resentment of Fraser. So in fact, they are still talking about Victoria and about the fallout she left in her wake.
(Inspector Thatcher, it occurs to me very suddenly, can be read as a kind of splinter/mirror/echo/replacement for Victoria. She doesn't appear in the series until after Victoria's departure; she has certain things in common with her--dark hair, beautiful voice, dominant personality, and a completely bipolar reaction to Fraser: "Hate. Love. Those two emotions about cover it," as Victoria says, or as Thatcher puts it, "I'm confused, Sergeant. My feelings are very confused." Like Victoria, Thatcher is wiling to use her sexuality to get what she wants (as a minor example, consider the way she lures the goon close enough to clobber in "All the Queen's Horses"). Also, of course, Thatcher's speech to Fraser about the likeness between them dovetails nicely with my theory about Victoria as Fraser's Id. Thatcher is, thankfully, not as destructive as Victoria, although she has her own moments of Id (the occasional references to her sex life--since she does have one, unlike Fraser--her spa retreat in "Asylum", her general refusal to wear any RCMP uniform, not brown, not blue, not red (and Fraser's repeated "Red suits you" probably has reproach in the subtext of the compliment), her ambition. Notice also that Thatcher has no problem expressing her anger, the specific point of Fraser's repression that Ray is fixated on; I love her forever for finally giving Agent Ford the punch in the nose he's deserved for two seasons. And she falls into Victoria's pattern of unobtainability. Fraser can want her, but he can't have her.)
And Fraser never answers that question: were you angry? I think Ray comes to accept that:
RANDAL BOLT: No happy ending to this story, morning glory!
RAY: Just in case he's right, I just want you to know, I mean, I know you are what you are and you can't help that, but it's really hard to have a saint for a friend. Go!
[they dodge gunfire]
FRASER: I'm not a saint, Ray.
RAY: Well, I know that you're not a saint saint, like in you got your own day. I mean a saint in the sense of a--
FRASER: What, like a metaphor?
RAY: Yeah, yeah! Like a metaphor!
FRASER: Yeah, but Ray, don't you see, you are as well. I mean, we all are. Even them. D'you know what I mean?
RAY: Well, that's what scares me. I think that I do.
FRASER: Yeah! Well, that's probably why you and I have become such close--
RAY: All, all right, don't get all mushy on me.
Now, of course, even on a metaphorical level, it's really hard to see anything saintly about the Bolt brothers, but at the same time we, like Ray, have to admit we know what Fraser means. I find the metaphor of the grail knight more congenial myself, and certainly Francis and Randal Bolt are men with grails they pursue, even if those grails are cheap plastic knock-offs fit only for holding ditchwater. And also, of course, the fact that Fraser sees everyone in this way explains a tremendous amount about him and why he CAN'T not help. And at the end of the episode, as Ray and Fraser are back on track with their particular line of vaudeville crosstalk, I think we can understand that Ray has accepted this about his friend. Fraser has never hated him. And if he was angry at Victoria, he's never going to be able to say so. Ray may finally be accepting that he can't ask Fraser to be something he isn't, anymore than he can ask him to not be what he is.
And for the second-to-last episode of his tenure, that's a pretty good epiphany.
Original air date: May 16, 1996
Favorite quote:
FRANCIS BOLT: You recall the games we used to play in Uncle Jimmy's mortuary?
RANDAL BOLT: Those weren't games, Francis. You pickled my dogs.
FRANCIS: Let the dogs go, Randal.
RANDAL: [weeping] They weren't dead.
FRANCIS: Let them go, I say.
--or--
RAY: "So what's the Mountie like?" He's Superman, all right? What d'you expect me to say, he's a moron? He dresses up in that damn red suit every single day of his life like a signpost--
FRASER: Oh, come on, Ray, that's not fair. I don't wear it all the time. The truth is, there are times I wish I didn't have to wear it. The thing itches. It itches three hundred and sixty-five days of the year--unless of course it's a leap year, in which case it itches three hundred and sixty-six days--but the point is, I don't wear it intentionally. It's part of my obligations.
RAY: We are not talking about clothes here, Fraser, okay? We're talking about you. The most irritating man in the world.
FRASER: Ray, I know I irritate you. But you have to believe me, I'm not trying to irritate you. It's not part of some sort of master plan.
Spoilers
Francis Bolt is by far my favorite Due South villain. Randal mostly annoys me (except for the one line: "If it's that no account lawyer, you can feed him to the pigs. While his bones are still soft."), but Francis, aside from looking like a nebbish and yet being both the brains and the spine of the Bolt operation, has the combination, charming in a fictional character, of being a complete flaming nutbar and being entirely self-aware:
RANDAL: I'm the modern version of Doctor Prescott!
FRANCIS: No, you're not. You're not, Randal, and neither am I.
RANDAL: What're you saying?
FRANCIS: See the world for what it is, Randal! We're not patriots. We're thieves. Uncommon, but thieves nonetheless. And once again you're on the verge of ruining a perfect plan!
I also like the way the episode uses him as a very deliberate mirror and contrast to Fraser. (Their initials reverse: BF--FB. Which is probably a coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was deliberate.) Paul Gross, who wrote the teleplay, is clearly taking the opportunity to experiment with the narrative conventions, thus both the beautiful cross-town argument between Fraser and Ray, which I'll be coming back to, and Francis Bolt's stint as omniscient second-person narrator:
FRANCIS BOLT: Where did you get the animal?
FRASER: It's rather a long story.
BOLT: I have time.
FRASER: I've forgotten most of it.
BOLT: Well, that's unfortunate. It's an interesting story, and bears repeating. Mid-May, two hundred and twelve miles northwest of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territories. Wait--is that "Territory" or "Territories"?
FRASER: Territory.
BOLT: Thank you. I crave accuracy. So you'd been dispatched to track down big game poachers that were coming across the border from Alaska. Despite your training, you could not have foreseen that the poachers would convert a mineshaft into a bear trap. You have no idea how long you lay there. When you came to, you discovered you were not alone. Your first thought was to save the animal. That's admirable. But not without certain drawbacks. When you came to, you were alone, without any visible means of escape. So you sat down to collect your thoughts. But how could you have thought that the animal would be so grateful as to come back and try to repay the favor? You were knocked out for a third time. But despite the gaffe, a bond was formed, and you've been together ever since. You're wondering, of course, how I know the details of the story. Suffice to say, I know many things, and it's no accident that you were on board that train. Can you guess who I am now?
FRASER: Yes, I think I can. Your name would be Francis Bolt. YOu were born in Oregon in 1949.
BOLT: 1950.
FRASER: 1950. You are a theoretical mathematician by training and a recluse by choice. You have a younger brother named Randal--
BOLT: Who you arrested. That was a mistake.
FRASER: He broke the law. I would arrest him again in a heartbeat.
The intercutting of Bolt's narrative with the flashbacks of Fraser and a half-grown Dief in the mineshaft make it clear that in fact Bolt does know the details, just as Fraser knows details about him, and Bolt's "Suffice to say" works much like Fraser's "That's not important." Bolt craves accuracy; so does Fraser, whose particular disease it is to be unable to keep from correcting people, even in the middle of an argument. (I have considerable sympathy for him on that one, because, yeah.) Bolt comes up with plans, which is uniformly Fraser's job as well ("I have an idea, but you're not going to like it."). Both of them are not what they appear to be, on several different levels.
And this episode is very interested in what Fraser is. We start with the RCMP's media relations expert telling him, "You're already on their television sets and on the covers of their magazines, but they want more. They want your inner soul." Fraser responds to this threat by provoking Inspector Thatcher into interrupting the interview; since he agrees with her instantly and without the slightest hint of surprise that their encounter on top of the train should remain secret, I think we can put this in the same category as his maneuver in "Heaven and Earth," by which his seemingly inadvertent and disastrous confession to Ray gets Fraser exactly what he wants, viz and to wit, Frannie cut off at the pass. Here, he gets the media relations expert derailed and he boxes Inspector Thatcher into a corner where she has to talk about the kiss with him, even if she's talking about not talking about it. Because notice what he takes the opportunity to say:
FRASER: Furthermore, sir, I followed your instructions and I've tried to erase the . . . contact from my memory.
THATCHER: You have?
FRASER: Yes.
THATCHER: And have you succeeded?
FRASER: No.
(At which point they are interrupted by the hapless Cooper--although I am sad that we don't get Dean McDermott in this episode, I am amused by the inescapable corollary that Ottawa is sending all its most SPECIAL Mounties to Chicago. No wonder Thatcher seems most days like she's at the ragged end of her patience.)
Fraser is playing a very delicate game of disobedience by obedience here, and Thatcher is drawn into colluding with him, at least briefly. The thing, though, that strikes me about this interchange, and which I think is relevant to the rest of the episode, is how lonely Fraser seems. He's not trying to trap her as a move in the exchange of cliches that is romantic courtship ("there are times between men and women"); he's trying to get her to acknowledge the contact between them. That word, which he suggests and Thatcher latches on to, I think is actually pointing at something important. They made contact. They touched each other. And Fraser has so very little human contact in Chicago. Except for Ray, and Ray's not talking to him:
FRASER: You're not talking?
RAY: No.
FRASER: You're really not talking?
RAY: That's right, Fraser, I'm really not talking.
FRASER: Just so I can be really clear in my own mind, Ray, other than telling me that you're not talking, you are, in fact, not talking.
RAY: That's about the size of it.
FRASER: I see. Is there something I should know?
RAY: [meaningfully] You should.
FRASER: Well, this thing that I should know, do you think you could perhaps provide a hint as to what it might be? [Ray passes him the magazine with Fraser's picture emblazoned on the cover] Oh. I see. Well, I suppose I should probably just--
RAY: Get out of my car.
FRASER: Understood.
Ray is feeling unappreciated, which echoes back to the second episode of this season, "Vault," in which Ray is trying to get Fraser to admit he feels unappreciated, and in fact, in a lot of ways, Ray and Fraser's argument here is really a continuation of the argument they have in the bank vault about whether or not Fraser is, as Ray says, a human being.
I love this scene. I love it for its ingenuity, for its surreality and the way that slides into contrarealism. I love it for Fraser's Ray Vecchio impression. I love it for the way that Fraser is trying to talk about who and what he is, for the self-awareness that we almost never get far enough behind the Mountie mask to see. I love it for its timing. And I love it for the way it ends, with the push over the top and then the reveal. (Also, parenthetically, I think it's interesting the gyrations and gymnastics the show has to go through to get Ray Vecchio to punch Fraser and vice versa. Or to get the appearance that Ray has punched Fraser and vice versa. Notice that we will not have the same difficulty with Ray Kowalski.) But the most important part is the borderline meta discussion of what Fraser is and why. Fraser's confession that his dress uniform itches, his further confession that he has a critical perspective on his own behavior (since that, after all, is what he's using Ray to ventriloquize, much as he uses Dief to ventriloquize his own common sense and down to earth pragmatism). And finally:
FRASER: But the point of the anecdote is this. That while I was helping her, I knew that you would be irritated with me, and I'm sorry, but I seem . . . I seem to be powerless to prevent that. I don't know. I don't know if it's some sort of flaw in my upbringing or some genetic abnormality or perhaps it's just some aberrant property in the Tuktoyaktuk water system.
RAY: Don't put this on the water, Fraser, this is a conscious thing that you do, okay? You cover everything up, you squash it down. It's like that time with Frobisher when that guy Counter, he stabbled you in the shoulder--
FRASER: Geiger.
RAY: What?
FRASER: The man's name was Geiger.
RAY: His name was Geiger Counter?
FRASER: No, just Geiger. No Counter. And he stabbed me in the leg.
RAY: Leg, shoulder, what difference does it make?
FRASER: Well, Ray, when you're the one being stabbed, the difference is remarkable.
RAY: The point is, Fraser, he stabbed you, and were you angry?
FRASER: I was in pain.
RAY: We're talking about anger here, Fraser, a human emotion. Are you human? Because if you are, human beings feel things, okay? They feel anger, they feel love, they feel lust and fear, and sometimes, and I know you don't want to hear this, sometimes they even cry.
Now, Fraser knows that. And we know Fraser knows that, because we've seen him cry. In "Victoria's Secret, Part II." And I think that connection is a clue that what Ray's really trying to talk about here isn't Geiger all the way back in "Manhunt" (1.3), but Victoria--anger, love, lust, and fear are all particularly a propos to Ms. Metcalf, not so much to Mr. Geiger. Weren't you angry at her? Ray is asking, or even, Weren't you angry at me? And Fraser's response--I was in pain--is, if we're talking about Victoria, completely true on the emotional level as well as the physical. And Victoria is the great rupture in Fraser and Ray's friendship, and marks the point at which Ray cannot pretend ignorance of the fallible human being behind Fraser's Mountie façade. And being Ray, once he can't pretend ignorance, he can't leave it alone, and thus his quest in various episodes in season 2 to get Fraser to admit to being imperfect. And Fraser understands that that's what he's doing:
FRASER: I've never hated you, Ray. I've envied you maybe.
RAY: Envied me?
FRASER: I'm not proud of it, but you have a kind of freedom I wish I had. Sort of an existential honesty.
RAY: Are you saying I'm honest?
FRASER: In your heart, yes.
Point 1: The unspoken corollary is that in his heart, Fraser believes himself to be a liar.
Point 2: "I'm not proud of it" is a nearly direct quote from "Letting Go" (1.22), in reference to Ray getting shot: "Well, I'm not proud about that, but I'll admit I did get a certain perverse pleasure out of it."
Point 3: And that connection makes sense of Fraser saying, "I've never hated you, Ray," because up to this point in this episode, Fraser hating Ray hasn't even been on the table; it's been all about Ray's resentment of Fraser. So in fact, they are still talking about Victoria and about the fallout she left in her wake.
(Inspector Thatcher, it occurs to me very suddenly, can be read as a kind of splinter/mirror/echo/replacement for Victoria. She doesn't appear in the series until after Victoria's departure; she has certain things in common with her--dark hair, beautiful voice, dominant personality, and a completely bipolar reaction to Fraser: "Hate. Love. Those two emotions about cover it," as Victoria says, or as Thatcher puts it, "I'm confused, Sergeant. My feelings are very confused." Like Victoria, Thatcher is wiling to use her sexuality to get what she wants (as a minor example, consider the way she lures the goon close enough to clobber in "All the Queen's Horses"). Also, of course, Thatcher's speech to Fraser about the likeness between them dovetails nicely with my theory about Victoria as Fraser's Id. Thatcher is, thankfully, not as destructive as Victoria, although she has her own moments of Id (the occasional references to her sex life--since she does have one, unlike Fraser--her spa retreat in "Asylum", her general refusal to wear any RCMP uniform, not brown, not blue, not red (and Fraser's repeated "Red suits you" probably has reproach in the subtext of the compliment), her ambition. Notice also that Thatcher has no problem expressing her anger, the specific point of Fraser's repression that Ray is fixated on; I love her forever for finally giving Agent Ford the punch in the nose he's deserved for two seasons. And she falls into Victoria's pattern of unobtainability. Fraser can want her, but he can't have her.)
And Fraser never answers that question: were you angry? I think Ray comes to accept that:
RANDAL BOLT: No happy ending to this story, morning glory!
RAY: Just in case he's right, I just want you to know, I mean, I know you are what you are and you can't help that, but it's really hard to have a saint for a friend. Go!
[they dodge gunfire]
FRASER: I'm not a saint, Ray.
RAY: Well, I know that you're not a saint saint, like in you got your own day. I mean a saint in the sense of a--
FRASER: What, like a metaphor?
RAY: Yeah, yeah! Like a metaphor!
FRASER: Yeah, but Ray, don't you see, you are as well. I mean, we all are. Even them. D'you know what I mean?
RAY: Well, that's what scares me. I think that I do.
FRASER: Yeah! Well, that's probably why you and I have become such close--
RAY: All, all right, don't get all mushy on me.
Now, of course, even on a metaphorical level, it's really hard to see anything saintly about the Bolt brothers, but at the same time we, like Ray, have to admit we know what Fraser means. I find the metaphor of the grail knight more congenial myself, and certainly Francis and Randal Bolt are men with grails they pursue, even if those grails are cheap plastic knock-offs fit only for holding ditchwater. And also, of course, the fact that Fraser sees everyone in this way explains a tremendous amount about him and why he CAN'T not help. And at the end of the episode, as Ray and Fraser are back on track with their particular line of vaudeville crosstalk, I think we can understand that Ray has accepted this about his friend. Fraser has never hated him. And if he was angry at Victoria, he's never going to be able to say so. Ray may finally be accepting that he can't ask Fraser to be something he isn't, anymore than he can ask him to not be what he is.
And for the second-to-last episode of his tenure, that's a pretty good epiphany.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-10 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-14 09:09 pm (UTC)Francis Bolt is a wonderful villain, and a great way of bringing back Randal Bolt without having to have an(other) episode centred around, well, Randal Bolt.
Love & Sadness
Date: 2009-03-06 06:27 pm (UTC)What worked much better was the earlier "but you have a kind of freedom I wish I had. Sort of an existential honesty." Also, Fraser finding a way to make a typical Ray reaction of leaving a handicapped person to self-negotiate a set of doors into a POSITIVE is just sweet, sweet, sweet to me. It's seems to be the writer saying "And Ray's NOT always WRONG."
Finally, Fraser FLIRTS! "Red suits you" is TOTALLY provocative, & whether there's reproach in it or not, whether he's just goading her or sincere, it's still a boy teasing a girl about what she's wearing & in my book, that's flirting. & cute as hell.
Re: Love & Sadness
Date: 2009-03-07 08:40 pm (UTC)-- KSC
Absolutely makes sense
Date: 2009-03-09 01:39 pm (UTC)Re: Absolutely makes sense
Date: 2009-03-10 11:13 pm (UTC)-- KSC
Good way of looking at it....
Date: 2009-03-12 01:32 pm (UTC)I have an evil cold & called in sick yesterday, so I spent the day finishing the series. Very mixed feelings about the last two seasons, but my heart turned right over when Mr. Marciano opened that door. ;-) LOVED the little mustache. Men just look better w/ facial hair.
The really wild thing (& I didn't realise it until I saw yesterday's edition of Lio) is that I watched "Call of the Wild" for the very first time, & entirely w/out prior knowledge of the date's significance in the show, ON March 11th. How weird a coincidence is that?