Due South: "Perfect Strangers"
Mar. 19th, 2009 09:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Perfect Strangers" (DS 3.10)
Original air date: November 30, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: Okay, so a stewardess in Canada--
FRASER: Flight attendant.
RAY: A waitress in the sky in Canada is killed. Her pin shows up in the hand of a loser like Sonny on the South Side of Chicago in this dump? What is the deal?
WELSH: Well, that's why we have detectives, Detective. You are going to figure out that troublesome problem for us.
RAY: Oh.
(Did Paul Gross have a cold when they were shooting this episode? He doesn't sound like himself at all.)
Spoilers.
This is the episode in which the role of Toronto is played by Toronto, which I suspect is an in-joke that delighted the entire crew of Due South. They don't hammer the point unnecessarily, but certainly the inverted echo of Fraser's experiences in the pilot is intentional. (Fraser, yielding taxi after taxi to the pushy Americans, finally gave up and walked; Ray, after watching the two Canadians play "After you my dear Alphonse," cuts the Gordian knot by stepping out into the street and flashing his badge.)
This is also, like "Letting Go," a blatant Hitchcock homage, taking its plot from Strangers on a Train--and I liked the way they emphasized their tribute to Hitchcock with the excessively high production values of the police recreation of Chantal Bowman's murder:
RAY: [boggled] That's a police recreation?
FRASER: It's interesting, isn't it? The government funding of the arts in Canada produced a glut of filmmakers at the same time as American domination of Canadian cinemas left these enthusiastic young artists with very few arenas in which to ply their craft.
WELSH: That's a human tragedy, Constable.
(I love watching Ray Kowalski boggle at things in the same way I love watching Ray Vecchio's slow motion double-takes.)
The joke is about Canada, but the effect is to insert a sliver of black and white noir into Due South's brightly colored and clair world.
I admit, given the complete lack of any attempt to camouflage the A-plot (and given that I've seen Strangers on a Train), I don't find a lot of reason to pay attention to the quote-unquote mystery in this episode, except for a couple things:
1. This episode firmly establishes that Ray is a good detective. Not just intuitive, and not just good at backing up Fraser, but a good detective. It's there particularly in his interview with Chad Maxwell, but it's consistent throughout--and notice that Fraser even acknowledges it:
FRASER: That's good work, Ray.
RAY: Thank you.
Like Ray Vecchio, Ray Kowalski is solid as a cop.
2. In keeping with the noir, I noticed this time how patiently the episode refuses to let us sympathize with any of the characters. Sonny Dunlap gets murdered, but he's a blackmailer. Chad Maxwell is a blackmail victim, but he's also a perfectly cold-blooded murderer. Nick Evers is pretty much a waste of carbon, and even Chantal Bowman . . . her roommate tells us that it was important to Chantal to have a rich boyfriend. Not to mention that whole ethical issue with the dating-a-married-man thing. But conversely, while I don't find General Bowman's abrasive arrogance appealing, his grief is genuine and moving.
And segues us into the emotional side of the episode, the things that it's really "about": the desire for children. General Bowman is a man haunted by the memory of his dead daughter; Benton Fraser is a man haunted by the ghost of his dead father--his dead father who won't shut up about the possibility of grandchildren. And Fraser, as we know, genuinely loves children.
About Thatcher, I'm not so sure, and I think the episode is very careful to make certain, so to speak, of my uncertainty. Thatcher's friend's baby shower is both a reason for Thatcher to be thinking about children and an opportunity for the show to demonstrate just how abstract her thinking is. Her choice of gifts, her referring to the child as "it," the fact that she obviously has not thought about what adopting a child will mean for her career--"we'll have to be very discreet," she tells Fraser, but really, Thatcher, it's not going to be something you can hide, and if it is, it shouldn't be. I don't think Thatcher is cut out for motherhood ("I think you would make a crackerjack mother" is one of the most glaringly obvious lies Fraser tells in the entire run of the series, and that strange adjective choice, "crackerjack," just highlights it), and the show makes that plain without condemning her. But just at the moment, she's preoccupied by the idea, and thus forces awareness of his own childlessness--and hence loneliness--on Fraser. "This was your baby bag," his father tells him. "It was good for forty below. 'Course, a little sixty below never hurt anybody 'less they were wearing Bermudas." The PD is suddenly, bizarrely, full of children.
And then there's the other side of the problem, the confusion between having sex and having children, and the question of how much either activity involves a relationship between two people. Fraser Sr. is emphatically unhelpful here (proof, if we needed any, that the dead in the DS universe are not omniscient), but even before the confusion gets started, I think Thatcher demonstrates exactly why she and Fraser will never be able to have a relationship deeper than the one they have at this moment: "It's comforting to know that I can think of you as a partner as well as a subordinate." The point the show is going to make explicitly with Ray Kowalski in another few episodes is that that doesn't work. Subordinate and partner can't be treated as synonyms. "Partners," as Ray says in "Spy vs. Spy," "means sharing." But Thatcher can't let go of seeing Fraser as her subordinate. I think the bit of stage business with the door is also emblematic: Fraser always holds doors for people, but Thatcher shuts the door in his face. (I haven't been paying attention to Ray and Fraser and doors, but now I will be.)
But the meat of the matter is this terrible, and very carefully set up, misunderstanding between Thatcher and Fraser:
FRASER: I think you would make a crackerjack mother.
THATCHER: Thank you, Fraser. It's an enormous undertaking. And you know me--I wouldn't even know how to start. That's where you come in. [Fraser shifts uncomfortably, as a man who would be leaving in a hurry if he weren't stuck inside a moving car] Is your seat wet, too?
FRASER: No, sir.
THATCHER: Anyway, I was thinking, with all your experience in the field, that you might be the kind of man who would know a thing or two about this sort of business. I was hoping to involve you in the process.
FRASER: In the process?
THATCHER: We'd have to be very discreet. And naturally I'd want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.
FRASER: Naturally.
THATCHER: So. I can count on you, then, to be up for this?
FRASER . . . Oh, well, look! Look where we are! Good old police station!
This scene needs to be discussed on two quite different levels. There's the literal level, on which Thatcher is talking about adoption and Fraser misunderstands her (because he's been set up by his father's unnecessary warning: "When a woman gets that stirring in her loins, watch out"). This level is the kind of comedy of errors farce is made of (a little raw for P. G. Wodehouse, but much the same mechanism)--although even here, notice that by the end of the payoff scene, it isn't funny at all--and is indicative both of Thatcher's inability to get out of her "managerial" box and of her penchant for Freudian slips, which is well established in previous episodes ("Seeing is Believing") and earlier in this one. Thatcher's libido doesn't play along with her career ambitions.
But there's a second level, which we get to because, as viewers, we don't know that Fraser is wrong. And on that level, it becomes important, or at least thought-provoking, that--as I said in some earlier write-up--there is a sense in which Thatcher is a reflection or splinter of Victoria Metcalf. "Your experience in the field" looks like a direct reference to Victoria, who is Fraser's only canonical experience in the field of sexuality. And with that in mind, "naturally I'd want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible," aside from being a very unflattering comment on Fraser himself, is like an echo of something Victoria herself might have said about her seduction of Fraser. Certainly the lady did not waste any time. And on this level, what this conversation highlights is Fraser's repression, which is very much what his later confrontation with his father is about:
BENTON FRASER: Dad, you cannot have grandchildren. You are dead.
ROBERT FRASER: So you keep telling me! With overmuch glee, I might add.
B. FRASER: Oh for god's sake.
R. FRASER: Oh, come on, son. Is it going to kill you to give her a leg over?
B. FRASER: A leg over? . . . Dad, I really don't have time for this.
R. FRASER: That's what I said, and look what it got me.
B. FRASER: Well, that's a different story. There you are. [stalks off muttering] Leg over. Foot down. Thigh up. Lunatic.
Fraser does not want to deal with sex. (And there's that other buried jibe about parents and children: "That's what I said, and look what it got me"--Fraser Sr. certainly was a father who never had time for his son.) He rebuked his father earlier, "Dad, we are not in a locker room," and I think he's focusing on language in order to have an excuse; he uses it in this scene to make his escape.
And here's a moment of pure metatheatricality. The screen goes black, the end-credit music starts, and Fraser Sr. interrupts: "It's not over yet, son." Fraser really was trying to use the confrontation with his father as an excuse to get out of facing Thatcher, to let this conversation be the structural end of the episode and therefore avoid the conversation that is its necessary thematic end, and his father (who is, in this episode, a weird amalgamation of Id and Superego--only fitting given the way Frannie's mangled information from her psychology class is infecting the police station) won't let him do it. The farce has to play out to its bitter end:
THATCHER: Yes, Constable. [off Fraser's uncomfortable silence] What is it, Fraser?
FRASER: Well, sir, I've, uh, I've given considerable thought to your proposal, and I . . . I mean, I have nothing against . . . well, I have nothing against . . . you know. It's just that I'm not by nature impulsive, although I have been known, you know, to really let my, to let my hair . . . well, no, that's not strictly speaking true. I've never even let my hair grow--
THATCHER: Is there a point to this, Constable?
FRASER: Yes, sir. The point is that . . . I just think things like this should be taken incrementally. Perhaps we could start with conversation and--although you and I have talked, so I suppose we could bypass that and just move on to the next increment--dancing, possibly. [off her flabbergasted look] Oh, not now. Not now. Of course, because there is no music. Although, you know, my parents used to dance without music all the time. I recall a time in my childhood when--
THATCHER: Fraser.
FRASER: Sir.
THATCHER: You didn't think that I . . .
FRASER: I don't think that you--?
THATCHER: Well, when I asked that you be part of the process, you didn't think that I was suggesting . . .
FRASER: That you were suggesting--?
THATCHER: Well, that you . . .
FRASER: That I . . .
THATCHER: Because that--
FRASER: No that would be--
THATCHER: I meant adoption, Fraser.
FRASER: Um. Sir, may I . . .
THATCHER: May you what?
FRASER: Be dismissed.
THATCHER: If you wish.
FRASER: Oh. Um. [hands her the flowers he's been clutching throughout] I found these.
The saddest thing about this scene is that Fraser and Thatcher miss each other. By the end of the scene, she's clearly ready to step out of her superior officer persona, but by the end of the scene, Fraser is too mortified to see it. Possibly too mortified even to want it.
There are several things going on, as with the set up conversation; I'm not sure I can tidily separate them out into levels, so let's just go with a numbered list:
1. Fraser's childhood memory of his parents dancing together without music is unexpectedly lovely and touching, and offers support for my theory that Bob and Caroline were partners in their marriage. Rotten father, maybe not much as a husband, but an excellent partner.
2. Everything that Fraser says about himself and his beliefs about sexual relationships is simultaneously true and false. It's certainly what he believes but it is also contradicted in every particular by his behavior vis-a-vis Victoria. On that occasion, he was impulsive and there was nothing incremental about the progress of their relationship at all.
3. Without his father's "locker room" vocabulary, Fraser seems to have no vocabulary to talk about sex at all. And Thatcher's no better--she can apparently only talk about sex when she's talking about something else.
4. And Fraser ends the episode alone. Even more alone. Unlike "The Bounty Hunter," Ray isn't here. There's no happy ending, not even the suggestion of hope. Only the knowledge that life goes on and there will be another episode next week--or, given the actual air dates, next month. The bleakness that underlies Due South's clarity--and clairity--in this episode comes out on top.
Original air date: November 30, 1997
Favorite quote:
RAY: Okay, so a stewardess in Canada--
FRASER: Flight attendant.
RAY: A waitress in the sky in Canada is killed. Her pin shows up in the hand of a loser like Sonny on the South Side of Chicago in this dump? What is the deal?
WELSH: Well, that's why we have detectives, Detective. You are going to figure out that troublesome problem for us.
RAY: Oh.
(Did Paul Gross have a cold when they were shooting this episode? He doesn't sound like himself at all.)
Spoilers.
This is the episode in which the role of Toronto is played by Toronto, which I suspect is an in-joke that delighted the entire crew of Due South. They don't hammer the point unnecessarily, but certainly the inverted echo of Fraser's experiences in the pilot is intentional. (Fraser, yielding taxi after taxi to the pushy Americans, finally gave up and walked; Ray, after watching the two Canadians play "After you my dear Alphonse," cuts the Gordian knot by stepping out into the street and flashing his badge.)
This is also, like "Letting Go," a blatant Hitchcock homage, taking its plot from Strangers on a Train--and I liked the way they emphasized their tribute to Hitchcock with the excessively high production values of the police recreation of Chantal Bowman's murder:
RAY: [boggled] That's a police recreation?
FRASER: It's interesting, isn't it? The government funding of the arts in Canada produced a glut of filmmakers at the same time as American domination of Canadian cinemas left these enthusiastic young artists with very few arenas in which to ply their craft.
WELSH: That's a human tragedy, Constable.
(I love watching Ray Kowalski boggle at things in the same way I love watching Ray Vecchio's slow motion double-takes.)
The joke is about Canada, but the effect is to insert a sliver of black and white noir into Due South's brightly colored and clair world.
I admit, given the complete lack of any attempt to camouflage the A-plot (and given that I've seen Strangers on a Train), I don't find a lot of reason to pay attention to the quote-unquote mystery in this episode, except for a couple things:
1. This episode firmly establishes that Ray is a good detective. Not just intuitive, and not just good at backing up Fraser, but a good detective. It's there particularly in his interview with Chad Maxwell, but it's consistent throughout--and notice that Fraser even acknowledges it:
FRASER: That's good work, Ray.
RAY: Thank you.
Like Ray Vecchio, Ray Kowalski is solid as a cop.
2. In keeping with the noir, I noticed this time how patiently the episode refuses to let us sympathize with any of the characters. Sonny Dunlap gets murdered, but he's a blackmailer. Chad Maxwell is a blackmail victim, but he's also a perfectly cold-blooded murderer. Nick Evers is pretty much a waste of carbon, and even Chantal Bowman . . . her roommate tells us that it was important to Chantal to have a rich boyfriend. Not to mention that whole ethical issue with the dating-a-married-man thing. But conversely, while I don't find General Bowman's abrasive arrogance appealing, his grief is genuine and moving.
And segues us into the emotional side of the episode, the things that it's really "about": the desire for children. General Bowman is a man haunted by the memory of his dead daughter; Benton Fraser is a man haunted by the ghost of his dead father--his dead father who won't shut up about the possibility of grandchildren. And Fraser, as we know, genuinely loves children.
About Thatcher, I'm not so sure, and I think the episode is very careful to make certain, so to speak, of my uncertainty. Thatcher's friend's baby shower is both a reason for Thatcher to be thinking about children and an opportunity for the show to demonstrate just how abstract her thinking is. Her choice of gifts, her referring to the child as "it," the fact that she obviously has not thought about what adopting a child will mean for her career--"we'll have to be very discreet," she tells Fraser, but really, Thatcher, it's not going to be something you can hide, and if it is, it shouldn't be. I don't think Thatcher is cut out for motherhood ("I think you would make a crackerjack mother" is one of the most glaringly obvious lies Fraser tells in the entire run of the series, and that strange adjective choice, "crackerjack," just highlights it), and the show makes that plain without condemning her. But just at the moment, she's preoccupied by the idea, and thus forces awareness of his own childlessness--and hence loneliness--on Fraser. "This was your baby bag," his father tells him. "It was good for forty below. 'Course, a little sixty below never hurt anybody 'less they were wearing Bermudas." The PD is suddenly, bizarrely, full of children.
And then there's the other side of the problem, the confusion between having sex and having children, and the question of how much either activity involves a relationship between two people. Fraser Sr. is emphatically unhelpful here (proof, if we needed any, that the dead in the DS universe are not omniscient), but even before the confusion gets started, I think Thatcher demonstrates exactly why she and Fraser will never be able to have a relationship deeper than the one they have at this moment: "It's comforting to know that I can think of you as a partner as well as a subordinate." The point the show is going to make explicitly with Ray Kowalski in another few episodes is that that doesn't work. Subordinate and partner can't be treated as synonyms. "Partners," as Ray says in "Spy vs. Spy," "means sharing." But Thatcher can't let go of seeing Fraser as her subordinate. I think the bit of stage business with the door is also emblematic: Fraser always holds doors for people, but Thatcher shuts the door in his face. (I haven't been paying attention to Ray and Fraser and doors, but now I will be.)
But the meat of the matter is this terrible, and very carefully set up, misunderstanding between Thatcher and Fraser:
FRASER: I think you would make a crackerjack mother.
THATCHER: Thank you, Fraser. It's an enormous undertaking. And you know me--I wouldn't even know how to start. That's where you come in. [Fraser shifts uncomfortably, as a man who would be leaving in a hurry if he weren't stuck inside a moving car] Is your seat wet, too?
FRASER: No, sir.
THATCHER: Anyway, I was thinking, with all your experience in the field, that you might be the kind of man who would know a thing or two about this sort of business. I was hoping to involve you in the process.
FRASER: In the process?
THATCHER: We'd have to be very discreet. And naturally I'd want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible.
FRASER: Naturally.
THATCHER: So. I can count on you, then, to be up for this?
FRASER . . . Oh, well, look! Look where we are! Good old police station!
This scene needs to be discussed on two quite different levels. There's the literal level, on which Thatcher is talking about adoption and Fraser misunderstands her (because he's been set up by his father's unnecessary warning: "When a woman gets that stirring in her loins, watch out"). This level is the kind of comedy of errors farce is made of (a little raw for P. G. Wodehouse, but much the same mechanism)--although even here, notice that by the end of the payoff scene, it isn't funny at all--and is indicative both of Thatcher's inability to get out of her "managerial" box and of her penchant for Freudian slips, which is well established in previous episodes ("Seeing is Believing") and earlier in this one. Thatcher's libido doesn't play along with her career ambitions.
But there's a second level, which we get to because, as viewers, we don't know that Fraser is wrong. And on that level, it becomes important, or at least thought-provoking, that--as I said in some earlier write-up--there is a sense in which Thatcher is a reflection or splinter of Victoria Metcalf. "Your experience in the field" looks like a direct reference to Victoria, who is Fraser's only canonical experience in the field of sexuality. And with that in mind, "naturally I'd want to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible," aside from being a very unflattering comment on Fraser himself, is like an echo of something Victoria herself might have said about her seduction of Fraser. Certainly the lady did not waste any time. And on this level, what this conversation highlights is Fraser's repression, which is very much what his later confrontation with his father is about:
BENTON FRASER: Dad, you cannot have grandchildren. You are dead.
ROBERT FRASER: So you keep telling me! With overmuch glee, I might add.
B. FRASER: Oh for god's sake.
R. FRASER: Oh, come on, son. Is it going to kill you to give her a leg over?
B. FRASER: A leg over? . . . Dad, I really don't have time for this.
R. FRASER: That's what I said, and look what it got me.
B. FRASER: Well, that's a different story. There you are. [stalks off muttering] Leg over. Foot down. Thigh up. Lunatic.
Fraser does not want to deal with sex. (And there's that other buried jibe about parents and children: "That's what I said, and look what it got me"--Fraser Sr. certainly was a father who never had time for his son.) He rebuked his father earlier, "Dad, we are not in a locker room," and I think he's focusing on language in order to have an excuse; he uses it in this scene to make his escape.
And here's a moment of pure metatheatricality. The screen goes black, the end-credit music starts, and Fraser Sr. interrupts: "It's not over yet, son." Fraser really was trying to use the confrontation with his father as an excuse to get out of facing Thatcher, to let this conversation be the structural end of the episode and therefore avoid the conversation that is its necessary thematic end, and his father (who is, in this episode, a weird amalgamation of Id and Superego--only fitting given the way Frannie's mangled information from her psychology class is infecting the police station) won't let him do it. The farce has to play out to its bitter end:
THATCHER: Yes, Constable. [off Fraser's uncomfortable silence] What is it, Fraser?
FRASER: Well, sir, I've, uh, I've given considerable thought to your proposal, and I . . . I mean, I have nothing against . . . well, I have nothing against . . . you know. It's just that I'm not by nature impulsive, although I have been known, you know, to really let my, to let my hair . . . well, no, that's not strictly speaking true. I've never even let my hair grow--
THATCHER: Is there a point to this, Constable?
FRASER: Yes, sir. The point is that . . . I just think things like this should be taken incrementally. Perhaps we could start with conversation and--although you and I have talked, so I suppose we could bypass that and just move on to the next increment--dancing, possibly. [off her flabbergasted look] Oh, not now. Not now. Of course, because there is no music. Although, you know, my parents used to dance without music all the time. I recall a time in my childhood when--
THATCHER: Fraser.
FRASER: Sir.
THATCHER: You didn't think that I . . .
FRASER: I don't think that you--?
THATCHER: Well, when I asked that you be part of the process, you didn't think that I was suggesting . . .
FRASER: That you were suggesting--?
THATCHER: Well, that you . . .
FRASER: That I . . .
THATCHER: Because that--
FRASER: No that would be--
THATCHER: I meant adoption, Fraser.
FRASER: Um. Sir, may I . . .
THATCHER: May you what?
FRASER: Be dismissed.
THATCHER: If you wish.
FRASER: Oh. Um. [hands her the flowers he's been clutching throughout] I found these.
The saddest thing about this scene is that Fraser and Thatcher miss each other. By the end of the scene, she's clearly ready to step out of her superior officer persona, but by the end of the scene, Fraser is too mortified to see it. Possibly too mortified even to want it.
There are several things going on, as with the set up conversation; I'm not sure I can tidily separate them out into levels, so let's just go with a numbered list:
1. Fraser's childhood memory of his parents dancing together without music is unexpectedly lovely and touching, and offers support for my theory that Bob and Caroline were partners in their marriage. Rotten father, maybe not much as a husband, but an excellent partner.
2. Everything that Fraser says about himself and his beliefs about sexual relationships is simultaneously true and false. It's certainly what he believes but it is also contradicted in every particular by his behavior vis-a-vis Victoria. On that occasion, he was impulsive and there was nothing incremental about the progress of their relationship at all.
3. Without his father's "locker room" vocabulary, Fraser seems to have no vocabulary to talk about sex at all. And Thatcher's no better--she can apparently only talk about sex when she's talking about something else.
4. And Fraser ends the episode alone. Even more alone. Unlike "The Bounty Hunter," Ray isn't here. There's no happy ending, not even the suggestion of hope. Only the knowledge that life goes on and there will be another episode next week--or, given the actual air dates, next month. The bleakness that underlies Due South's clarity--and clairity--in this episode comes out on top.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 05:21 pm (UTC)Fraser's childhood memory of his parents dancing together without music
And with the sheet music in the car, Fraser has music without dancing -- and without music. So alone!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 07:18 pm (UTC)And now I shall be watching for "doors and their metaphors" as well. Interesting.
I honestly COULD ship Fraser/Thatcher, if it weren't for this episode. At the end when they "miss" each other, which you deconstruct so well, it is like a death knell to anything that has happened or could happen between them. At the very moment Thatcher might see Fraser as "not a subordinate", Fraser is back peddling for his life. It is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the series, IMHO.
One aspect that you hit upon and explain so well is the bleakness inherent in dS overall: Fraser is very, very alone, and is a loner, and prefers isolation. I think the majority of fanfic is devoted to trying to "fix" Fraser, while this episode highlights the tremendous hurdles that type of "fix" would involve (which many fic gloss over). I'm not literate enough to know if Fraser is the prototypical "Heroic Loner" but I see many aspects of that about him, which is both sad and romantic in the best ways. Nothing quite as inspiring as a broken hero...
I admit, though, that Fraser's relationship to the concept of sex is a confusing one. As you point out here, he can't even TALK about it; yet he falls into bed quickly enough with Victoria, and makes out with Lady Shoes, and is quite sanguine about Dief's reproductive successes. He can dress as a woman and dance with Vecchio, and while he often seems uncomfortable with being hit on, he certainly knows how to use that to his advantage when he wants too. I can't make up my mind, from watching the show, where Fraser's sexuality falls in the spectrum of activity and comfort level. Because talking and doing? Two separate things. I'm of the mind he talks a shy and conservative game, but is more than willing to put out when he wants to. I think his issues with Thatcher stem more from his "loner" status and his issues with romantic love as opposed to his sexuality.
...and now I'm rambling. Sorry. Anyway, awesome overview, as always! <3
no subject
Date: 2009-03-19 07:39 pm (UTC)But I'm not at all sure that Fraser needs romantic love. In general, the show suggests that people are better off without it; Bob and Caroline's marriage/partnership is the exception to the rule proved by Fraser and Victoria, Ray Vecchio and Irene, Ray Kowalski and Stella. And Thatcher, who objectifies Fraser like crazy ("Seeing is Believing," for example) when she's not treating him like an unsatisfactory toy soldier, isn't the person who can make a partnership with him.
Which is why you don't have to accept a homoerotic reading to see Fraser and Ray Kowalski searching for the Hand of Franklin together as the happy ending. Because the show values partnership first and foremost, and doesn't value romantic love hardly at all.
[Edited for pronoun antecedents and an example to back up an assertion.]
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 12:39 am (UTC)I am here, stunned by that revelation, mostly because how could I have missed that??? It is a very strong theory, and one that completely recasts the whole series for me. In a good way. Personally, I hate how romantic love is so ridiculously idealized (as Fraser idealizes Victoria, I think it could be argued, or RayK did Stella at least for part of his life) in mainstream stories/fiction/shows and prefer the partnership issues of a romance/relationship. Which might explain my love of dS in a way: it caters to my tastes. hah! Interesting.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-20 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-03 06:32 am (UTC)Frannie probably wouldn't think of sending a new axe and whetstone as romantic. Thatcher, who's got Fraser's records can't see past his body to him. Fraser is a unreliable narrator when it comes to his parents' relationship, being too wee while his mum lived, and all too willing to paint back with the colors of his father's abandonment, not just as a child foisted onto his grandparents, but even as a man and Mountie which gets his father killed and tears Fraser from the land he loves (Fraser's got Two mistresses, his Duty and the Land. They're each demanding.)
Caroline and Bob's partnership is 'skewed' by their environment--if Bob wasn't a Mountie and he insisted living up there he might have spent nearly as much time away at lumber camps or on an oil rig. I think Benton doesn't get how his mother stood it, and he doesn't know another way either.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 01:18 pm (UTC)Well, RayK and Fraser generally open the swing doors together as far as I can tell. As for the other kinds, they are generally beside each other.
Vecchio, on the other hand, generally enters a door first, so as he can get into embarrassing situations before Fraser can stop him.
I've always been uncomfortable with Fraser as a romantic partner. As you say, he just doesn't need romance, not like that.
"she can apparently only talk about sex when she's talking about something else..."
Date: 2009-03-24 07:09 pm (UTC)Thanks. Fascinating, as usual.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 04:52 am (UTC)-- KSC
no subject
Date: 2009-04-20 04:09 am (UTC)A comment I left on the new Q&A reminded me that I'd meant to comment on this, and the reason Fraser gives for it, because I wonder if it looks more like a joke, or like a different kind of joke, to an American than it does to a Canadian.
What he says about the Canadian film industry is absolutely true, and a program to have struggling filmmakers shooting police recreations seems like exactly the kind of wacky but sorta cool but also geeky idea our government might have come up with. The Historica Minutes (http://www.histori.ca/minutes/section.do?className=ca.histori.minutes.entity.ClassicMinute) are a good example of a similar idea.
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Date: 2009-06-10 11:44 pm (UTC)(I know you're doing a lot of panels and answering online Q&As and other things that take up your time. It's just that I love learning your take on Due South, and there's a lot of episodes coming up that will be very interesting to hear about.)
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Date: 2012-04-01 08:07 pm (UTC)When he says to his father that he can't have grandchildren because he's dead he's actually saying something other than what he means. Because the first response out of his mouth to his father's request for progreny is "You can't have grandchildren..." The rest of the sentence is not nearly as true as the first part. Benny knows that he can't have children. Not because he's gay, or because he's not in a relationship, or anything like that, but because he just can't see how it could ever happen. What Benny seems, to me, to be saying is, "this ends with me." It's a form of sublimated suicide.
It's very sad too that Kowalski also wants children, but seems unlikely to have them. Much fanfic has been written to give both men the happy families they deserve, and I wish I could buy into it. But romance, as you say, is doomed in dS.
SO, yes, Fraser and Ray disappearing into the sunset is a happy ending not because it's romance, but because it's the nearest thing either of them will ever get to true love. Whether it's slash or not isn't important... what's important is that there is some hope in the end. Because at the end of this episode, there isn't.