Due South: "I Coulda Been a Defendant"
Sep. 24th, 2008 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"I Coulda Been a Defendant" (DS 3.3)
Original air date: September 28, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: Oh come on, Fraser, we don't really have to sleep on the floor, do we?
FRASER: Yes.
RAY: Look, I do this, I want a badge. A Tuck In On The Floor, I Hurt My Back Badge.
FRASER: I'll get you one.
RAY: Okay.
Spoilers.
(N.b., this episode takes place one month after "Eclipse," per Elaine saying in that episode that she's only got a month before she becomes a real cop.)
We have to start with the boomerang.
BRUCE SPENDER: We just moved. New place, new town, new everything. We were in a gang, boys in a gang, and they didn't like me. But Kevin knew it. And the leader of the gang, his brother always wanted a boomerang. Can you imagine that?
FRASER: I can. I always wanted a bolo.
BRUCE: Yeah. Yeah. Same thing, same thing. Yeah. So one day Kevin found a boomerang. Found it in a closet, and he gave it to me so the other guys would like me. A beautiful boomerang. But the leader's brother wanted it. So we had to fight for it.
FRASER: You had to fight because that was the code of the gang?
BRUCE: Yeah. Kevin didn't like it. Didn't like it at all. But I had to stand on my own two feet. I had to. But I couldn't. And I disappointed him. I did. Because I got hit. I got hit a lot, and I lost. And I lost it. I lost my boomerang that Kevin gave me.
FRASER: Did you say he found it in a closet?
BRUCE: Yeah. Fancy boomerang. Found it. Found it in a closet.
FRASER: It was made of wood?
BRUCE: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful wood.
[Fraser shows Bruce a wooden coat hanger]
FRASER: Did it look sort of like this?
BRUCE: Sort of.
[Fraser pulls the metal hook out of the hanger]
FRASER: More like this then.
BRUCE: Just like that, yeah.
It took me a while to work through Bruce's story--and, by the way, if you're confused by the idea of an unreliable narrator, this is a beautiful example, because the story Bruce is trying to tell, and the story of what actually happened are very distinctly not the same thing. Bruce's story is a story about how Kevin took care of him, and on the first go-round it even kind of looks like that's the truth. I didn't get, at first, the import of Kevin's lie. But ignore what Bruce says about Kevin's motivations and feelings, and focus on what actually happens. Kevin and Bruce are new. They're in a gang. The leader's brother wants a boomerang. (Brothers are very important in this episode, but I'll come back to that in a minute.) So what does Kevin do? He "finds" a boomerang and he gives it to Bruce. Kevin Spender's clearly a smart and devious minded weasel, and you have to figure he knew exactly what would happen. The leader's brother would demand the boomerang. And Bruce had to fight. Because it was, Fraser says, "the code of the gang." Because, Bruce says, he had to stand on his own two feet. And he says Kevin didn't like it. But let's consider a couple things.
1. Bruce is echolalic: he repeats things. ("I repeat myself when under stress." Ray's observation is unkind, but accurate.) And he repeats things that have been said to him, like mantras or formulas. "I had to stand on my own two feet" doesn't sound to me like Bruce speaking for himself. It sounds like Bruce ventriloquizing Kevin.
2. Kevin doesn't like it, but then Kevin is "disappointed" in Bruce when Bruce gets the crap beaten out of him. These two things don't go together. And I think if Kevin really didn't like it, he would have made sure it didn't happen.
That's why it matters that the boomerang was only a coat hanger. Because it wasn't Bruce who wanted a boomerang to begin with. It was the other kid. Ergo, Kevin set Bruce up. Kevin gets his exhausting and exasperating brother beat up--without laying a finger on him--and he makes Bruce feel like he's the one who's done something wrong. Very slick.
And notice the pattern repeat itself. The bank robbery is Kevin's idea. Bruce makes it work and takes the fall. Get him to turn State's Evidence, and he doesn't have to go to jail (which since Kevin is a selfish asshole but not actually evil, we assume he doesn't want), but hey! He has to go into the Federal Witness Protection Program and Kevin doesn't have to deal with him! For seven years! Once again, Kevin Spender gets exactly what he wants.
Until Fraser and Ray enter the mix.
Brothers are thematically all over this episode, and so are sisters. And best friends.
"Are they good friends, howling wolves?" Bruce asks Fraser. "Loyal companions," Fraser says. And then we have this conversation, in which another of Fraser's "best friends" enters the canon:
BRUCE: Do you have a mother and a father?
FRASER: No, they're both dead.
BRUCE: Like me. Dead. Both of them. Dead. Dead. . . . Sister?
FRASER: No, I was an only child. Although, you know, I had a best friend in the village I grew up in.
BRUCE: Best friend, huh? Was he like your brother? So he took care of you, looked after you, like he was your brother? Was he like your brother?
FRASER: Yes, he was.
(It's quite obvious why they have to invent Innusiq: Mark Smithbauer just is not eligible--although he's quite like Kevin Spender, come to think of it.)
And then, after some very convincing brother-and-sister sparring between Ray and Frannie (in which, if you notice, Ray also repeats himself when under stress), this conversation:
RAY: I'm doomed.
FRASER: I don't understand this, Ray. I thought you liked Francesca.
RAY: Are you from another planet, Fraser?
FRASER: Not that I'm aware of.
RAY: Of course I like her. That's why I'm doomed. I gotta work with her in the same office every day and pretend like she's my sister.
FRASER: This makes no sense, Ray. All women are our sisters.
And before we get Ray's answer, they're interrupted. By Bruce's brother.
"It's my brother, my responsibility," Kevin says. "Some things never change."
The climactic scene plays out to Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms." And that question, of brothers, is all through the critical exchange between Bruce and Kevin:
BRUCE: Was it a boomerang?
KEVIN: Bruce, in six days I stand in front of the Senate, the Senate of the United States of America!
BRUCE: It wasn't a boomerang?
KEVIN: I am talking about a directorship! Don't you understand that?
BRUCE: They're gonna ask about me? They'll ask about me and then . . . and you won't know what to say?
KEVIN: I can't carry you anymore.
BRUCE: You could say that you're my brother, that you love me, you could say that. Just say that you love me.
KEVIN: They'll find out about the robbery. You'll tell them, you won't be able to help yourself, and I will lose everything that I have worked for. I can't let that happen, Bruce. I do love you. Get in the car. We'll work it out.
BRUCE: No, Kevin, I can't do that.
Notice that, once again, Kevin has shifted the blame onto Bruce. It's Bruce's fault that he would tell the truth about Kevin's part in the robbery, not Kevin's fault for having masterminded the robbery in the first place. And notice that Kevin's reaction when Bruce does stand on his own two feet is to try to kill him. Although Kevin can't shoot Bruce himself, not face to face, which could be a moral qualm or could just be squeamishness--Kevin's been very careful, in all his history that we know of, not to get his hands dirty. Bruce (like Melissa in "Some Like It Red") chooses his loyalty to Fraser, who has been kind to him, over the loyalty that Kevin (like Celine) has been exploiting and abusing. Our Heroes are rescued by their Brothers (and Sisters) in Blue, and then there's this odd little exchange, which I think highlights the problem of brothers (and sisters):
FRASER: You know, Elaine, my graduation marked the beginning of one of the most exciting periods of my career. I received my first posting. It was to a very remote community perched on the edge of an--
RAY: Ice floe. Love ya like a brother, Fraser, but let's not hear about that right now.
FRASER: Understood.
Now, Ray may not be thinking about the relevance of the idiom, but I think we can safely assume the show is. What does it mean to love someone like a brother? Is that like Bruce loves Kevin? Or like Kevin loves Bruce?
As so often in Due South, we're being encouraged to compare Fraser and Ray's relationship with the relationship between the characters in the A-plot. But whereas with Fraser and Ray Vecchio, their relationship is most often a touchstone (this is what friendship looks like, this is a standard against which we can judge Celine and Melissa, or Tyree and Reggie), with Fraser's new Ray, the comparison is a way to show us more about both sides.
Because let's think about the comparison. The show establishes and emphasizes likeness between Fraser and Bruce: they're both orphans, they were both Boy Scouts, they share an intellectual bent. Bruce, like Fraser, can't help correcting people. So how does the comparison between Kevin and Ray look? Kevin Spender is a bully. Ray, in this episode, is certainly bullying, particularly in his interrogation of Bruce. Kevin is impatient with Bruce, and certainly Ray Kowalski can be known in all situations by his impatience. He is, specifically, impatient with Fraser in the opening scene of the episode.
But.
Ray != Kevin.
1. When Bruce stands up for himself ("And I can tie my shoes"), Ray is pleased.
2. When Fraser asks if Kevin was a Boy Scout, Bruce instantly says no, with the obvious implication that Scouting would somehow be demeaning to Kevin. I think it's safe to assume Ray wasn't a Boy Scout either, but look at his reaction to the Scouting conversation:
FRASER: I see you've had some experience with bedrolls.
BRUCE: Well, I was a Scout.
[Bruce gives Ray a defiant look]
[Ray just smiles]
FRASER: Really? So was I. Mind you, our troop was very small. There was just me, my friend Innusiq, and his sister, June.
BRUCE: A girl? A girl was in Boy Scouts?
FRASER: I know, but, you know, you can't really have a troop with only two boys, and she had very short hair, so--
RAY: I got short hair.
FRASER: Well, we're lucky. We're a troop.
RAY: Woo hoo.
The sarcasm in that "woo hoo" is lip service to Ray's image (shake, bad guys, shake); I think the truth is in Ray's desire to put himself into the community Fraser is imagining. Unlike in "Eclipse," where he says definitively, "I'm not the woman," here Ray is willing to be, metaphorically, June. (Which since Fraser stays Fraser, makes Bruce Innusiq, again reinforcing the connection between Ray and Kevin.) Ray's self-importance doesn't prevent him from being a Scout, in this weird little recreation of Fraser's weird little childhood troop, and that means he isn't Kevin Spender. If Ray loves Fraser like a brother, it's like Bruce loves Kevin.
So what, exactly, is going on with Ray and his aggressive hostility toward Bruce in the interrogation? (Hostility that gets transferred to Kevin Spender very promptly on his appearance--thereafter, Ray is both protective of and gentle with Bruce.) I don't have a definitive answer, but there are a couple things I think are suggestive. One is the particular expression of Ray's hostility toward Kevin: "'Confer' with you? What is that? What kind of talk is that?" (Notice, too, that this is an echo of his reaction to Fraser's vocabulary in "Eclipse": "What the hell kind of word is that?") The other is his reaction to the 3D puzzle that Bruce assembles: "I could do that. I choose not to." Both times, I think we're seeing Ray's inferiority complex talking. So Ray is hostile toward Bruce because Bruce makes him nervous. I also think Ray reacts with anger to being confronted with things he doesn't understand, and he doesn't understand Bruce (both in the sense that Bruce's cognitive impairments make him opaque to Ray and in the sense that this little mouse of a guy with the gun and the fistful of fake IDs doesn't add up). And (this is my personal hobby-horse again) Ray--like children--has an intuitive sense of weakness, and--again like children--his instinctive reaction to weakness is to mock it, and to hit it until it goes away. He exhibits the same childlike gratuitous cruelty in this exchange with Fraser:
FRASER: I'd like to talk to him.
RAY: Torture. That's a good idea. I never thought of that.
FRASER: That's . . . that's very funny, Ray.
And Ray is grinning at him; Ray said it to be funny--and possibly because Fraser has been talking him to death for a month--not deliberately to hurt Fraser's feelings.
Following Ray, I also want to note the difference in the way Welsh interacts with this Ray than with the old Ray. Welsh is chewing Ray out in his office--but he's not behind his desk, either sitting or standing. He's in Ray's face, and then there's the quasi-avuncular (quasi-paternal, even?) hand on Ray's neck. He is literally close to Ray Kowalski in a way he never is to Ray Vecchio. And Ray Kowalski's reaction to being chewed out is also completely different. With Ray Vecchio, there was always a little air of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, token attention (in much the same way as Welsh, on the phone with Commander Murphy, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir." [covers the mouthpiece] "Three bags full, sir."). But Ray Kowalski--he isn't making eye contact, he isn't mouthing off. For all that he projects a much more "bad boy" attitude than Ray Vecchio on a moment to moment basis, Ray Kowalski doesn't have that insouciant indifference, or the reflexive resistance, to authority figures that Ray Vecchio does. Just as Ray wants Fraser to like him, even if he doesn't know how to show it, he wants to please Welsh.
And I like the way the episode, without making a big deal of it, keeps hitting the note of Ray's intuition. In the interrogation, he is anti-Bruce:
FRASER: Something's not right.
RAY: Yeah, he's nuts.
FRASER: No, he's frightened.
RAY: 'Course he's frightened. That's me. That's my thing. On the inside, I'm a poet. On the outside, shake, bad guys, shake.
FRASER: Hmm. Does he seem like a bad guy to you?
RAY: He's polite. Big deal. I mean, Jack the Ripper was polite.
Just as Ray distrusts people who use fancy words, he distrusts people who are overly polite (I think this is another class marker: mincing etiquette is for the upper classes). And so another possible reason for his hostility toward Bruce is displacement from Fraser, just as some of his hostility toward Kevin may be displacement from Welsh as authority figure: "Well, maybe we made a mistake, maybe we didn't, but one thing I know, I hate when someone tells me to go to my room, not when I'm in the middle of something." But later, after he's had time to observe Bruce, he reassesses:
RAY: That figure to you, Fraser?
FRASER: Does what figure to me?
RAY: That he masterminded the heist. 'Cause when I look at him, what does not come to mind is "arch-criminal."
Ray's instincts get him to the right place just as Fraser's analysis has. Also, I love:
RAY: Something's queer.
FRASER: What?
RAY: I dunno. Something's queer. Just move it.
And Fraser doesn't argue with him. Moreover, Fraser's supernaturally good hearing bears him out mere moments later:
RAY: What is it?
FRASER: Two men just entered the building.
FRANNIE: Well, they didn't follow me.
FRASER: Well, that may be true, but I believe that one of them just put a thirty-two round clip into a machine pistol. A Mach 10, if I'm hearing the mechanism correctly.
Even without strong continuity between episodes, they're building the grounds of the argument to come.
Elaine, like Ray, is what Welsh would call a "real good cop." She proves at least three times in this episode that the content matters more to her than the form.
Ray's problems with language continue: he loses the thread in the middle of the Miranda warning, and then, when put on the spot:
POLICE ACADEMY COMMANDANT: What do we do after we've controlled the suspect?
RAY: Uh, kick him in the head?
It's telling that not only can he not think of the right answer, his wild-ass guess is physical violence.
And Frannie, coming on board as the new Civilian Aide, brings another thread of wordplay to the game:
FRANNIE: A guy named John Michaels was picked up for knocking flat a convenience store.
RAY: Knocking over.
FRANNIE: Over--flat--down--sideways--God!
This is the place where Ray gets to be the one correcting someone else's mistake. Use of slang is Ray's bailiwick.
This is probably as good a place as any to make a distinction. Being a woman and a feminist, as I am, does not mean that I have to reflexively be the champion of all female characters in a text (just as it doesn't mean I have to vote for Sarah Palin, thank you very much). And Due South HAS strong and competent female characters (Elaine, Stella, Thatcher); it knows that such women exist, and it knows how to characterize them. We just need to face facts. Frannie is a spaz. She's brave and she's loyal, but she's not as smart as she thinks she is. She's frequently outright incompetent. Ray's comment, "She belongs on the Home Shopping Network, not in a police station," although again unkind, is not wrong (compare, for example, "The Duel," where Frannie's knowledge of skin-care products is clearly encyclopedic). And it's not because she's a woman--or because she's femme. Her brother-in-law doesn't belong in a police station, either (arguably, neither does Dewey). Thatcher is femme, and nobody ever questions her ability to command.
Frannie's characterization is consistent from one end of the show to the other. She's consistently a thorn in Fraser's side. And she's consistently borderline incompetent. The fact that she wants to be more--her longing for respect in "Vault," her stated ambition to become a police officer in Season 4, her series-long pursuit of Fraser--doesn't mean that she has any hope of achieving these things. "Guys like him don't marry girls like you," Ray Vecchio says all the way back in "Heaven and Earth." "That's fairytale. And girls like you get hurt and guys like him don't even know it. And that's life." And he's right. Frannie's never going to get Fraser. And that's the trope of her character. Her reach exceeds her grasp. And the fact that that's true--over and over and over again--is bleak and hard, but the show has that streak of honesty as its backbone. It goes against everything we expect from fiction, but it's rock-solid.
Once again, Ray risks his neck for somebody. This time for Bruce. Also, notice with the logistics of this transfer, that Ray is perfectly competent to command the operation. It's Kevin who (deliberately) causes the snafu. And Ray then exhibits independent initiative and gets Bruce the hell out of there.
Fraser spends the entire last scene COVERED IN MUD. Ray Vecchio would die of glee.
Original air date: September 28, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: Oh come on, Fraser, we don't really have to sleep on the floor, do we?
FRASER: Yes.
RAY: Look, I do this, I want a badge. A Tuck In On The Floor, I Hurt My Back Badge.
FRASER: I'll get you one.
RAY: Okay.
Spoilers.
(N.b., this episode takes place one month after "Eclipse," per Elaine saying in that episode that she's only got a month before she becomes a real cop.)
We have to start with the boomerang.
BRUCE SPENDER: We just moved. New place, new town, new everything. We were in a gang, boys in a gang, and they didn't like me. But Kevin knew it. And the leader of the gang, his brother always wanted a boomerang. Can you imagine that?
FRASER: I can. I always wanted a bolo.
BRUCE: Yeah. Yeah. Same thing, same thing. Yeah. So one day Kevin found a boomerang. Found it in a closet, and he gave it to me so the other guys would like me. A beautiful boomerang. But the leader's brother wanted it. So we had to fight for it.
FRASER: You had to fight because that was the code of the gang?
BRUCE: Yeah. Kevin didn't like it. Didn't like it at all. But I had to stand on my own two feet. I had to. But I couldn't. And I disappointed him. I did. Because I got hit. I got hit a lot, and I lost. And I lost it. I lost my boomerang that Kevin gave me.
FRASER: Did you say he found it in a closet?
BRUCE: Yeah. Fancy boomerang. Found it. Found it in a closet.
FRASER: It was made of wood?
BRUCE: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful wood.
[Fraser shows Bruce a wooden coat hanger]
FRASER: Did it look sort of like this?
BRUCE: Sort of.
[Fraser pulls the metal hook out of the hanger]
FRASER: More like this then.
BRUCE: Just like that, yeah.
It took me a while to work through Bruce's story--and, by the way, if you're confused by the idea of an unreliable narrator, this is a beautiful example, because the story Bruce is trying to tell, and the story of what actually happened are very distinctly not the same thing. Bruce's story is a story about how Kevin took care of him, and on the first go-round it even kind of looks like that's the truth. I didn't get, at first, the import of Kevin's lie. But ignore what Bruce says about Kevin's motivations and feelings, and focus on what actually happens. Kevin and Bruce are new. They're in a gang. The leader's brother wants a boomerang. (Brothers are very important in this episode, but I'll come back to that in a minute.) So what does Kevin do? He "finds" a boomerang and he gives it to Bruce. Kevin Spender's clearly a smart and devious minded weasel, and you have to figure he knew exactly what would happen. The leader's brother would demand the boomerang. And Bruce had to fight. Because it was, Fraser says, "the code of the gang." Because, Bruce says, he had to stand on his own two feet. And he says Kevin didn't like it. But let's consider a couple things.
1. Bruce is echolalic: he repeats things. ("I repeat myself when under stress." Ray's observation is unkind, but accurate.) And he repeats things that have been said to him, like mantras or formulas. "I had to stand on my own two feet" doesn't sound to me like Bruce speaking for himself. It sounds like Bruce ventriloquizing Kevin.
2. Kevin doesn't like it, but then Kevin is "disappointed" in Bruce when Bruce gets the crap beaten out of him. These two things don't go together. And I think if Kevin really didn't like it, he would have made sure it didn't happen.
That's why it matters that the boomerang was only a coat hanger. Because it wasn't Bruce who wanted a boomerang to begin with. It was the other kid. Ergo, Kevin set Bruce up. Kevin gets his exhausting and exasperating brother beat up--without laying a finger on him--and he makes Bruce feel like he's the one who's done something wrong. Very slick.
And notice the pattern repeat itself. The bank robbery is Kevin's idea. Bruce makes it work and takes the fall. Get him to turn State's Evidence, and he doesn't have to go to jail (which since Kevin is a selfish asshole but not actually evil, we assume he doesn't want), but hey! He has to go into the Federal Witness Protection Program and Kevin doesn't have to deal with him! For seven years! Once again, Kevin Spender gets exactly what he wants.
Until Fraser and Ray enter the mix.
Brothers are thematically all over this episode, and so are sisters. And best friends.
"Are they good friends, howling wolves?" Bruce asks Fraser. "Loyal companions," Fraser says. And then we have this conversation, in which another of Fraser's "best friends" enters the canon:
BRUCE: Do you have a mother and a father?
FRASER: No, they're both dead.
BRUCE: Like me. Dead. Both of them. Dead. Dead. . . . Sister?
FRASER: No, I was an only child. Although, you know, I had a best friend in the village I grew up in.
BRUCE: Best friend, huh? Was he like your brother? So he took care of you, looked after you, like he was your brother? Was he like your brother?
FRASER: Yes, he was.
(It's quite obvious why they have to invent Innusiq: Mark Smithbauer just is not eligible--although he's quite like Kevin Spender, come to think of it.)
And then, after some very convincing brother-and-sister sparring between Ray and Frannie (in which, if you notice, Ray also repeats himself when under stress), this conversation:
RAY: I'm doomed.
FRASER: I don't understand this, Ray. I thought you liked Francesca.
RAY: Are you from another planet, Fraser?
FRASER: Not that I'm aware of.
RAY: Of course I like her. That's why I'm doomed. I gotta work with her in the same office every day and pretend like she's my sister.
FRASER: This makes no sense, Ray. All women are our sisters.
And before we get Ray's answer, they're interrupted. By Bruce's brother.
"It's my brother, my responsibility," Kevin says. "Some things never change."
The climactic scene plays out to Dire Straits' "Brothers in Arms." And that question, of brothers, is all through the critical exchange between Bruce and Kevin:
BRUCE: Was it a boomerang?
KEVIN: Bruce, in six days I stand in front of the Senate, the Senate of the United States of America!
BRUCE: It wasn't a boomerang?
KEVIN: I am talking about a directorship! Don't you understand that?
BRUCE: They're gonna ask about me? They'll ask about me and then . . . and you won't know what to say?
KEVIN: I can't carry you anymore.
BRUCE: You could say that you're my brother, that you love me, you could say that. Just say that you love me.
KEVIN: They'll find out about the robbery. You'll tell them, you won't be able to help yourself, and I will lose everything that I have worked for. I can't let that happen, Bruce. I do love you. Get in the car. We'll work it out.
BRUCE: No, Kevin, I can't do that.
Notice that, once again, Kevin has shifted the blame onto Bruce. It's Bruce's fault that he would tell the truth about Kevin's part in the robbery, not Kevin's fault for having masterminded the robbery in the first place. And notice that Kevin's reaction when Bruce does stand on his own two feet is to try to kill him. Although Kevin can't shoot Bruce himself, not face to face, which could be a moral qualm or could just be squeamishness--Kevin's been very careful, in all his history that we know of, not to get his hands dirty. Bruce (like Melissa in "Some Like It Red") chooses his loyalty to Fraser, who has been kind to him, over the loyalty that Kevin (like Celine) has been exploiting and abusing. Our Heroes are rescued by their Brothers (and Sisters) in Blue, and then there's this odd little exchange, which I think highlights the problem of brothers (and sisters):
FRASER: You know, Elaine, my graduation marked the beginning of one of the most exciting periods of my career. I received my first posting. It was to a very remote community perched on the edge of an--
RAY: Ice floe. Love ya like a brother, Fraser, but let's not hear about that right now.
FRASER: Understood.
Now, Ray may not be thinking about the relevance of the idiom, but I think we can safely assume the show is. What does it mean to love someone like a brother? Is that like Bruce loves Kevin? Or like Kevin loves Bruce?
As so often in Due South, we're being encouraged to compare Fraser and Ray's relationship with the relationship between the characters in the A-plot. But whereas with Fraser and Ray Vecchio, their relationship is most often a touchstone (this is what friendship looks like, this is a standard against which we can judge Celine and Melissa, or Tyree and Reggie), with Fraser's new Ray, the comparison is a way to show us more about both sides.
Because let's think about the comparison. The show establishes and emphasizes likeness between Fraser and Bruce: they're both orphans, they were both Boy Scouts, they share an intellectual bent. Bruce, like Fraser, can't help correcting people. So how does the comparison between Kevin and Ray look? Kevin Spender is a bully. Ray, in this episode, is certainly bullying, particularly in his interrogation of Bruce. Kevin is impatient with Bruce, and certainly Ray Kowalski can be known in all situations by his impatience. He is, specifically, impatient with Fraser in the opening scene of the episode.
But.
Ray != Kevin.
1. When Bruce stands up for himself ("And I can tie my shoes"), Ray is pleased.
2. When Fraser asks if Kevin was a Boy Scout, Bruce instantly says no, with the obvious implication that Scouting would somehow be demeaning to Kevin. I think it's safe to assume Ray wasn't a Boy Scout either, but look at his reaction to the Scouting conversation:
FRASER: I see you've had some experience with bedrolls.
BRUCE: Well, I was a Scout.
[Bruce gives Ray a defiant look]
[Ray just smiles]
FRASER: Really? So was I. Mind you, our troop was very small. There was just me, my friend Innusiq, and his sister, June.
BRUCE: A girl? A girl was in Boy Scouts?
FRASER: I know, but, you know, you can't really have a troop with only two boys, and she had very short hair, so--
RAY: I got short hair.
FRASER: Well, we're lucky. We're a troop.
RAY: Woo hoo.
The sarcasm in that "woo hoo" is lip service to Ray's image (shake, bad guys, shake); I think the truth is in Ray's desire to put himself into the community Fraser is imagining. Unlike in "Eclipse," where he says definitively, "I'm not the woman," here Ray is willing to be, metaphorically, June. (Which since Fraser stays Fraser, makes Bruce Innusiq, again reinforcing the connection between Ray and Kevin.) Ray's self-importance doesn't prevent him from being a Scout, in this weird little recreation of Fraser's weird little childhood troop, and that means he isn't Kevin Spender. If Ray loves Fraser like a brother, it's like Bruce loves Kevin.
So what, exactly, is going on with Ray and his aggressive hostility toward Bruce in the interrogation? (Hostility that gets transferred to Kevin Spender very promptly on his appearance--thereafter, Ray is both protective of and gentle with Bruce.) I don't have a definitive answer, but there are a couple things I think are suggestive. One is the particular expression of Ray's hostility toward Kevin: "'Confer' with you? What is that? What kind of talk is that?" (Notice, too, that this is an echo of his reaction to Fraser's vocabulary in "Eclipse": "What the hell kind of word is that?") The other is his reaction to the 3D puzzle that Bruce assembles: "I could do that. I choose not to." Both times, I think we're seeing Ray's inferiority complex talking. So Ray is hostile toward Bruce because Bruce makes him nervous. I also think Ray reacts with anger to being confronted with things he doesn't understand, and he doesn't understand Bruce (both in the sense that Bruce's cognitive impairments make him opaque to Ray and in the sense that this little mouse of a guy with the gun and the fistful of fake IDs doesn't add up). And (this is my personal hobby-horse again) Ray--like children--has an intuitive sense of weakness, and--again like children--his instinctive reaction to weakness is to mock it, and to hit it until it goes away. He exhibits the same childlike gratuitous cruelty in this exchange with Fraser:
FRASER: I'd like to talk to him.
RAY: Torture. That's a good idea. I never thought of that.
FRASER: That's . . . that's very funny, Ray.
And Ray is grinning at him; Ray said it to be funny--and possibly because Fraser has been talking him to death for a month--not deliberately to hurt Fraser's feelings.
Following Ray, I also want to note the difference in the way Welsh interacts with this Ray than with the old Ray. Welsh is chewing Ray out in his office--but he's not behind his desk, either sitting or standing. He's in Ray's face, and then there's the quasi-avuncular (quasi-paternal, even?) hand on Ray's neck. He is literally close to Ray Kowalski in a way he never is to Ray Vecchio. And Ray Kowalski's reaction to being chewed out is also completely different. With Ray Vecchio, there was always a little air of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, token attention (in much the same way as Welsh, on the phone with Commander Murphy, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir." [covers the mouthpiece] "Three bags full, sir."). But Ray Kowalski--he isn't making eye contact, he isn't mouthing off. For all that he projects a much more "bad boy" attitude than Ray Vecchio on a moment to moment basis, Ray Kowalski doesn't have that insouciant indifference, or the reflexive resistance, to authority figures that Ray Vecchio does. Just as Ray wants Fraser to like him, even if he doesn't know how to show it, he wants to please Welsh.
And I like the way the episode, without making a big deal of it, keeps hitting the note of Ray's intuition. In the interrogation, he is anti-Bruce:
FRASER: Something's not right.
RAY: Yeah, he's nuts.
FRASER: No, he's frightened.
RAY: 'Course he's frightened. That's me. That's my thing. On the inside, I'm a poet. On the outside, shake, bad guys, shake.
FRASER: Hmm. Does he seem like a bad guy to you?
RAY: He's polite. Big deal. I mean, Jack the Ripper was polite.
Just as Ray distrusts people who use fancy words, he distrusts people who are overly polite (I think this is another class marker: mincing etiquette is for the upper classes). And so another possible reason for his hostility toward Bruce is displacement from Fraser, just as some of his hostility toward Kevin may be displacement from Welsh as authority figure: "Well, maybe we made a mistake, maybe we didn't, but one thing I know, I hate when someone tells me to go to my room, not when I'm in the middle of something." But later, after he's had time to observe Bruce, he reassesses:
RAY: That figure to you, Fraser?
FRASER: Does what figure to me?
RAY: That he masterminded the heist. 'Cause when I look at him, what does not come to mind is "arch-criminal."
Ray's instincts get him to the right place just as Fraser's analysis has. Also, I love:
RAY: Something's queer.
FRASER: What?
RAY: I dunno. Something's queer. Just move it.
And Fraser doesn't argue with him. Moreover, Fraser's supernaturally good hearing bears him out mere moments later:
RAY: What is it?
FRASER: Two men just entered the building.
FRANNIE: Well, they didn't follow me.
FRASER: Well, that may be true, but I believe that one of them just put a thirty-two round clip into a machine pistol. A Mach 10, if I'm hearing the mechanism correctly.
Even without strong continuity between episodes, they're building the grounds of the argument to come.
Elaine, like Ray, is what Welsh would call a "real good cop." She proves at least three times in this episode that the content matters more to her than the form.
Ray's problems with language continue: he loses the thread in the middle of the Miranda warning, and then, when put on the spot:
POLICE ACADEMY COMMANDANT: What do we do after we've controlled the suspect?
RAY: Uh, kick him in the head?
It's telling that not only can he not think of the right answer, his wild-ass guess is physical violence.
And Frannie, coming on board as the new Civilian Aide, brings another thread of wordplay to the game:
FRANNIE: A guy named John Michaels was picked up for knocking flat a convenience store.
RAY: Knocking over.
FRANNIE: Over--flat--down--sideways--God!
This is the place where Ray gets to be the one correcting someone else's mistake. Use of slang is Ray's bailiwick.
This is probably as good a place as any to make a distinction. Being a woman and a feminist, as I am, does not mean that I have to reflexively be the champion of all female characters in a text (just as it doesn't mean I have to vote for Sarah Palin, thank you very much). And Due South HAS strong and competent female characters (Elaine, Stella, Thatcher); it knows that such women exist, and it knows how to characterize them. We just need to face facts. Frannie is a spaz. She's brave and she's loyal, but she's not as smart as she thinks she is. She's frequently outright incompetent. Ray's comment, "She belongs on the Home Shopping Network, not in a police station," although again unkind, is not wrong (compare, for example, "The Duel," where Frannie's knowledge of skin-care products is clearly encyclopedic). And it's not because she's a woman--or because she's femme. Her brother-in-law doesn't belong in a police station, either (arguably, neither does Dewey). Thatcher is femme, and nobody ever questions her ability to command.
Frannie's characterization is consistent from one end of the show to the other. She's consistently a thorn in Fraser's side. And she's consistently borderline incompetent. The fact that she wants to be more--her longing for respect in "Vault," her stated ambition to become a police officer in Season 4, her series-long pursuit of Fraser--doesn't mean that she has any hope of achieving these things. "Guys like him don't marry girls like you," Ray Vecchio says all the way back in "Heaven and Earth." "That's fairytale. And girls like you get hurt and guys like him don't even know it. And that's life." And he's right. Frannie's never going to get Fraser. And that's the trope of her character. Her reach exceeds her grasp. And the fact that that's true--over and over and over again--is bleak and hard, but the show has that streak of honesty as its backbone. It goes against everything we expect from fiction, but it's rock-solid.
Once again, Ray risks his neck for somebody. This time for Bruce. Also, notice with the logistics of this transfer, that Ray is perfectly competent to command the operation. It's Kevin who (deliberately) causes the snafu. And Ray then exhibits independent initiative and gets Bruce the hell out of there.
Fraser spends the entire last scene COVERED IN MUD. Ray Vecchio would die of glee.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 03:59 am (UTC)Ray's hostility had really bothered me about this episode, and I like your take on it: nervous plus an intuition (borne out) that something's wrong (well, even more wrong than a set of fake IDs).
What do you make of Fraser's role in getting Bruce involved in the first place? Pursuing him like that because "people need heroes" is not just bizarre but obnoxious and disrespectful. It's like the joke about the Boy Scout (!) who needs three tries to escort the old lady across the street -- because she didn't want to go. Or like Fraser's repeated interruption of the reporter, where his apology is the only thing that causes the problem.
In one of these reviews, you mentioned that everything is alike to Fraser -- he chases across town to give someone back a dropped stuffed animal with the same zeal as he would to return a diamond necklace. And here he pursues someone to say "thank you" just as if he were trying to stop a murderer. It's like a switch gets flipped in his head, and there's no judgement, no contextualizing. Without the pararealism (or surrealism?) of the show, this would be ... well, it would be insanity. Maybe that's why we get Fraser's little gymnastic act during the pursuit: Show is pointing out "this is tv, Fraser works because we say he works, and there will be a point to this pursuit because we say so."
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 05:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 02:56 pm (UTC)The thing about Fraser's reason for pursuing Bruce--that communities need heroes--is that, you know, Fraser, that's your job. That's what Fraser is, both in the fictional world of the show and as part of how Due South understands itself. So there's a certain amount of projection there.
I'd also like to note that the problem isn't Fraser per se; it's the reporter. She's the one who pushes, she's the one Bruce is running from--and she's the one who puts Bruce's face on national TV. Fraser is wrong because he follows her lead instead of Ray's.
And, yeah, Fraser is like Dief, who will chase a car either until he catches it or until he dies. You need to be careful where you aim him. Which is a point the show will come back to ("Good for the Soul")--so I'm not sure we need to understand the show as condoning Fraser's behavior here.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-25 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-05 04:14 pm (UTC)I also think it has to do with the fact that RayK, despite his stated disregard for procedure and authority, truly values being a cop. Whenever he screws up and gets chewed out for it, he takes the necessary hits from Welsh b/c he does believe the badge means something, regardless of his cynical attitude towards it. Being a cop is an incredibly important part of his identity. As you said in earlier posts, he doesn't have much of a life outside the force, much of an identity outside it, so there's a huge need in him to preserve that part of his identity.
And I like the way the episode, without making a big deal of it, keeps hitting the note of Ray's intuition.
Though the show usually focuses on Fraser's superhuman feats of detection, my favorite bits are when RayK pulls his own weight as a cop. In BDtH, it was RayK's intuition about the bad guy (can't remember his name) that led them to the culprit. And this was despite the fact that RayK had never actually met the guy! It's a testament to how much work he put into this 'role' that he's playing that he could list off details of RayV's arrests, and narrow the suspect pool the way he did.
RAY: 'Course he's frightened. That's me. That's my thing. On the inside, I'm a poet. On the outside, shake, bad guys, shake.
One of my favorite lines from the show ever!
This is probably as good a place as any to make a distinction. Being a woman and a feminist, as I am, does not mean that I have to reflexively be the champion of all female characters in a text (just as it doesn't mean I have to vote for Sarah Palin, thank you very much). And Due South HAS strong and competent female characters (Elaine, Stella, Thatcher).
Exactly! I get annoyed when feminists cry out when there is an evil or incompetent female character in a show filled with competent, heroic women. Women come in all varieties, from the ditzy to the genius, and I don't think Due South, or any other show with similar characterizations, should be criticized for one character like Frannie. If Thatcher were like that, I might get annoyed, but Frannie is one character, and there are several incompetent men within this universe, as well.
Side rant: I also loved your reference to Palin; the idea that I would vote for her b/c she's a woman is insulting, as is her assertion that she's a feminist in a feminist ticket b/c she's a woman. Being a woman and being a feminist is not synonymous. You can be a sexist woman, just like you can be a feminist man.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-01 12:02 am (UTC)Okay... sorry, MT really winds me up, just as Palin does you guys. (And I wouldn't vote for her either if you put a gun to my head, so you have my sympathies.)
Which leads me to the fact that I HATE the way that the show's producers called Meg Thatcher after that particular politician. I know it was some kind of a joke, and I know it's not as bad as calling someone Adolph Hitler, but still... there are people all over the UK to this day who are still suffering from that particular politician's policies, and it feels like nails scratching down a blackboard when I hear the name.
All of which has distracted me from the fact that, although I don't think she's very clever, and not the most morally upright character, I do actually like Frannie. Yes, her reach is further than her grasp, but 'that's what stars are for?'
And I do cringe at her, and can't imagine her ever EVER becoming a cop... Elaine is clever, smart and sassie... Frannie is not that smart, so needy that her energy is diverted into trying to snag a man, and basically wounded and stupidly vulnerable, and really, at the core of her, very sad. She'd be a dreadful cop. And when I think of her and all her babies part of me is glad that she's got somebody to love, and part of me is horrified because she's SO not the best mother in the world...
But that's a different story.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-01 12:13 am (UTC)The even worse thing that Kevin is doing is this. He knows he's not given Bruce a boomerang, and all the other kids know it too. Every single one of them is laughing at poor Bruce, and he's being beaten because his brother deliberately, and with malice aforethought, made him look a fool.
I remember the first time I saw it, when Fraser removed the hook... my heart hurt, understanding that Bruce had been betrayed.
It's a really painful betrayal, the kind of viciousness that you get in childhood. The guy acting Bruce is brilliant in this scene... for all his lack of affect, there is a look in his eyes, as though the moment Fraser reveals what kind of "boomerang" it was, something just punched a hole in him.
And this also brings into question the idea that perhaps Fraser has some kind of learning disability. My son has asperger's syndrome, and often sounds very Fraserlike... correcting punctuation, telling long stories to reveal a minor point etc. But I don't think, on balance, that Fraser has asperger's or autism (thouh Bruce clearly does.) He's too intuitive of body language, and though he doesn't play by modern social codes, he does understand them. The fact that he guessed at the nature of Kevin's childhood betrayal says a lot.
Though... I do go back and forth a little bit as to whether Fraser is somewhere on the autistic spectrum. And this episode, as you say, shows how Fraser and Bruce converge at several points. Perhaps we need a clearly autistic character to examine those traits of Fraser's which seem to fit that paradigm.
And may I say, for a show in the nineties to portray such neurological differences as a possibility in the lead character, and to make them actual attritubes and virtues is really outstanding. Even if they weren't thinking of the asperger's diagnosis as such, they were thinking of someone who clearly is not neurotypical... and they made him the hero. Another example of due South bringing the socially excluded into the fold.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-02 03:05 pm (UTC)There is in our culture a sort of gender split in kinds of sentimentality. The kinds that are related to romance tend to be coded female, and the kinds that are related to physical risk tend to be coded male (and often not referred to as sentimentality for various reasons). For a very long time I thought of myself as an unsentimental person because the "my darling, I love you" kind of sentimentality in fiction almost never does anything for me unless it's exquisitely done.
Elaine leading the police cadets over the hill to be the cavalry--at some risk to her nascent career to start the thing--brought a brief lump to my throat. I am a very sentimental person. It's just that I am mostly susceptible to the kind that shows up in cop and military fiction. And I am deeply, deeply pleased that both of the times it has shown up in my watchings of Due South, one of the key roles in the "brotherhood" has been played by a woman, without pause or special marking.
no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 10:35 am (UTC)So I've lurched into your essay series towards the end, and will now go back and read from the start. Damn - wish I'd known about these when I started the big watch.