Due South: "Dr. Longball"
Feb. 19th, 2012 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepenny"Dr. Longball" (DS 4.1)
Original air date:
Favorite quote:
RAY: Hey, y'know what they call third base?
FRASER: The hot plate?
RAY: No, the hot corner. You know why they call it that?
FRASER: I've no idea.
RAY: Well neither do I, but it does not sound good.
[Ray turns to go]
FRASER: Ray!
[Ray turns and Fraser throws him his glove. He drops it.]
FRASER: Oh dear.
It's taken me almost two years to get from the end of Season 3 to the beginning of Season 4. I apologize. Partly, this long hiatus has been due to excessively exciting health problems; partly it's been due to the fact that Season 4 is my favorite season, and it's a lot harder to analyze something you love than it is to analyze something you like a lot. And, you know, once I finish writing up the thirteen episodes of Season 4, we're done. There is no more Due South.
So fair warning: my love for Season 4 is unreasonable. I don't love every episode equally, but two of my three favorite Due South episodes are Season 4 ("The Ladies' Man" and "Say Amen"--the third of my favorite episodes, for anyone who's curious, is "A Hawk and a Handsaw"), and in general, really, I love Season 4 more than is good for me.
And a reminder: this is an Equal Love For Rays zone. If you want to talk about how much you hate Ray Kowalski, please do it somewhere else.
Okay. On with the show!
ObDisclaimer: (1) Spoilers.
(2) I'm using this transcript site, to which I am very grateful
And, good grief, two more caveats. (1) I am a baseball fan; (2) I am a nut for the doppelganger/doubling trope (the only thing that could make me happier in this episode is if Beau Starr played both Welsh brothers).
And the episode really uses the idea of doppelgangers, of mirrors and foils and negatives, from the doubled cast members, to the way in which the evil mayor carefully sets up a patsy for every crime he commits, to the aggressive way in which both Welsh brothers emphasize the difference between Chicago and Willison. That binary between Chicago and the rest of America is something the episode examines rather skeptically. At the beginning, Huey and Dewey react to the idea of leaving Chicago much the same way Ray does in "Burning Down the House":
RAY: Fraser! Buddy! You have a good time up there in the Northwest Areas?
FRASER: Territories, you mean?
RAY: Wilderness, huh? Exactly. Me personally, I leave the city, I come down with this skin condition.
***
WELSH: How about you, you look like you could use some fresh air.
DEWEY: I hate fresh air.
***
WELSH: What's going on here? I'm talking about a day off with pay.
HUEY: Yeah, but it's the country, lieutenant.
Welsh, selling hard to Fraser, describes it as "the heartbeat of America" (which, of course, was Chevrolet's advertising slogan in the late '80s, and yes, that can be taken as a sign, because as soon as Welsh has his driver, he reverts to the same contempt Huey and Dewey show) and invokes apple pie--at which Fraser neatly explodes the binary--and reminds us that there are more places in the world than Chicago on one hand and small-town America on the other: "Hm, sounds like home. Of course, we tended more towards brown lichen tarts." The doubling isn't stable or trustworthy--the more Wilson Welsh tries to emphasize that Willison is nothing like Chicago (the word "community" gets bandied about endlessly), the more it becomes apparent that the people of Willison are just as unprincipled and nasty as the people of Chicago. Fraser, again, provides the pin to pop the balloon:
OLIVIA: The Mayor and I were just discussing a business transaction.
FRASER: So I heard.
OLIVIA: Oh. Well, y'know [nervous laugh] small towns. We know everybody. We can speak frankly.
FRASER: This is true. Although you know, I have heard young ladies on the streets of Chicago discussing business deals in very similar terms.
The binary between Chicago and "the heartbeat of America" is a false one, but the two can still be played off against each other.
The episode also uses the idea of "bringing in the pros"--the bank robbers from Chicago, the detectives from Chicago, Ace Leary (who is also from Chicago even though his cover story, in a twisty bit of meta, makes him Canadian)--to make parallels between the baseball plotline and the mystery plotline. And the idea of doubling as rivalry is ALL OVER the relationship between the Welsh brothers--both named for presidents, both officers of the law, country mouse and city mouse, both sons of an alcoholic and emotionally abusive father:
WILSON WELSH: You just haven't outgrown it have you?
HARDING WELSH: What's that?
W. WELSH: Competing with me.
H. WELSH: Competing for what?
W. WELSH: Everything. For... for Susie Delessen. For who's gonna be quarterback on the football team. For who can sit on the railroad tracks the longest.
H. WELSH: Oh I always could stay the longest.
W. WELSH: For Dad's approval.
H. WELSH: I never needed his approval.
W. WELSH: Oh no?
H. WELSH: No. Let me tell you something. [with a maginficently sarcastic gesture] How could I possibly compete with all of this?
The way in which Wilson and Harding mirror each other is made even more explicit in a later part of the same argument (which they pick up and put down all episode long):
W. WELSH: Look, I know he was a lousy father, and he treated us hard.
H. WELSH: Hard on you? There was nothing I could do to please that guy. Every other day he was telling me how you were his only real son.
W. WELSH: And every other day he told me how you were his only real son.
Given that this is Due South, it's no surprise that Harding Welsh has daddy issues--like Fraser and Ray Vecchio and Ray Kowalski--and one of the themes of "Dr. Longball" is Welsh's relationships with his family, both the brother he can't stop competing with and the father he can't forgive:
WELSH: Constable. Can I ask your advice?
FRASER: My advice sir?
WELSH: Yeah, your advice.
FRASER: If I can help...
WELSH: If you had somebody you were trying to forgive, no matter how hard you tried to forgive 'em, you just couldn't forgive 'em. What would you do?
FRASER: Keep trying, sir.
And, by the end:
FRASER: Sir, if I may. Y'know, he is your father, he's your only father. There are probably sides to him that you don't know about. I only say this because I had a father, my only father, and well, my advice to you is not to wait until he's dead to discover those sides. It tends to be somewhat disorienting.
WELSH: Constable.
FRASER: Yes, sir?
WELSH: Giving advice to your elders is....
FRASER: Unbecoming?
WELSH: Unbecoming.
FRASER: Understood.
Welsh goes, in a completely typical Welshian way, from asking for Fraser's advice to telling him off, albeit mildly, for offering it. Fraser's advice, on the other hand, remains consistent--and is one of the very few windows the episode offers us into Fraser's interiority. Fraser Sr. does not appear in this episode, and although Dief is very present, Fraser only has one conversation with him--and it seems utterly, beautifully appropriate that they're arguing the call on Fraser's terrifying cut fastball:
DIEF: [barks]
Fraser: What are you talking about? It was a strike on the corner.
DIEF: [barks]
FRASER: Oh great, blind and deaf.
But other than that, Fraser is very distant in this episode, very Mountie, very correct. "Did you grow up in a public service announcement?" Huck Bogart asks him, and, yeah, this is the Fraser that did. Dief, on the other hand, is emoting all over the place: objecting to Woody the mascot ("a wolverine with a goiter"), to Wilson's pink flamingoes, to the mayor discussing trading cheese for beaver meat ("Diefenbaker feels a particular kinship with the beaver. It's as if we were discussing, well, eating a member of the family.")--there very possibly acting as a cover for Fraser's dislike of the repellent mayor--shamelessly wooing the fangirls. And there's a lovely, tiny parallel between Superego-Fraser and Id/Ego-Dief in relationship to Rusty-who-won't-stop-crying: Fraser produces a handkerchief out of nowhere for him in his initial interrogation; later in the episode Dief fetches him a box of Kleenex. (I'm with Ray: you gotta love this wolf.) Fraser's clearly even more alien in Willison than in Chicago, and he clearly feels it. There is no Fraser parallel in Willison, no brother, no Ace Leary for him to step into.
And speaking of Ace Leary brings us to the baseball plot, wherein what we're seeing is a happy mishmash of baseball story tropes, mostly Bull Durham. Huck and Woody echo Skip and Larry; Fraser tells Ray, "Above all you must try not to think," just as Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh, "You just got lesson number one: don't think; it can only hurt the ball club"; and Ray's interview with Toni Lake is just about word for word the string of clichés that Crash tells Nuke to memorize (and which, at the end of the movie, we see Nuke reeling off like a champ). There are other clichés thrown in there, too: Ray gets both to make the final out (defense) and to hit the winning grand slam (offense)--and the way Ray's face lights up as he starts rounding the bases is seriously what baseball is all about. The baseball plot isn't entirely coherent (the thing with Kelly Olsen has no follow through because Ray's arc steals the clutch homer), but it doesn't need to be--the baseball storyline is mostly there to infuse the episode with eau de baseball: we only touch on it at pivotal moments. For non-baseball fans, that's probably about as much as they can tolerate; baseball fans can fill in the rest of it on their own, because we all know how the story goes.
(Also, I love Tony Craig and Tom Melissis' riff on Who's On First?:
COSTELLO: Look, you gotta first baseman?
ABBOTT: Certainly.
COSTELLO: Who's playing first?
ABBOTT: That's right.
***
HAYSEED #1 (Melissis): Have they got a first baseman?
HAYSEED #2 (Craig): Certainly.
HAYSEED #1: All right. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Who?
HAYSEED #1: The first baseman. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Certainly.
I'm not sure which I love more: that they're quoting Who's On First? or that they're taking the same joke in a different--but equally logical--direction.)
And finally, the piece that didn't quite fit in anywhere else, but which has relevance to all of it: Ray's initial absence. At the start of the episode, Ray has vamoosed to Mexico:
WELSH: Vecchio's on holiday.
DEWEY: Oh yeah, where?
HUEY: At a Club Couples place, in Mexico.
DEWEY: Vecchio, Club Couples? Who with?
HUEY: Remember that chick he busted last month for passing bad checks?
DEWEY: Oh man, that's low. I mean, I grovel once in a while, but to bust a chick for a date? The man has no standards.
Ray's initial absence is actually necessary, plot-wise, for a couple of reasons:
(1) like Welsh's broken foot, it gets Fraser and Welsh off on this adventure together
(2) it lets Ray to be introduced as a ringer, Fraser and Welsh's "ace in the hole," to make a bad pun
It also permits a Clint Eastwood homage (clearly there as a throwaway gag), and it offers a reminder, again, that romantic comedy tropes do not work in Due South:
FRASER: So you didn't get the girl, then?
RAY: Nah. Got this poncho.
FRASER: It's very fetching.
There's no romance in this episode--Olivia has been having affairs with everthing in Willison with a dick--but Fraser and Ray's partnership is still working like a charm: Fraser talks Ray into trouble (because of his touchingly naïve faith that Ray is as honest as he is about everything), but he also coaches him into winning the game.
Original air date:
Favorite quote:
RAY: Hey, y'know what they call third base?
FRASER: The hot plate?
RAY: No, the hot corner. You know why they call it that?
FRASER: I've no idea.
RAY: Well neither do I, but it does not sound good.
[Ray turns to go]
FRASER: Ray!
[Ray turns and Fraser throws him his glove. He drops it.]
FRASER: Oh dear.
It's taken me almost two years to get from the end of Season 3 to the beginning of Season 4. I apologize. Partly, this long hiatus has been due to excessively exciting health problems; partly it's been due to the fact that Season 4 is my favorite season, and it's a lot harder to analyze something you love than it is to analyze something you like a lot. And, you know, once I finish writing up the thirteen episodes of Season 4, we're done. There is no more Due South.
So fair warning: my love for Season 4 is unreasonable. I don't love every episode equally, but two of my three favorite Due South episodes are Season 4 ("The Ladies' Man" and "Say Amen"--the third of my favorite episodes, for anyone who's curious, is "A Hawk and a Handsaw"), and in general, really, I love Season 4 more than is good for me.
And a reminder: this is an Equal Love For Rays zone. If you want to talk about how much you hate Ray Kowalski, please do it somewhere else.
Okay. On with the show!
ObDisclaimer: (1) Spoilers.
(2) I'm using this transcript site, to which I am very grateful
And, good grief, two more caveats. (1) I am a baseball fan; (2) I am a nut for the doppelganger/doubling trope (the only thing that could make me happier in this episode is if Beau Starr played both Welsh brothers).
And the episode really uses the idea of doppelgangers, of mirrors and foils and negatives, from the doubled cast members, to the way in which the evil mayor carefully sets up a patsy for every crime he commits, to the aggressive way in which both Welsh brothers emphasize the difference between Chicago and Willison. That binary between Chicago and the rest of America is something the episode examines rather skeptically. At the beginning, Huey and Dewey react to the idea of leaving Chicago much the same way Ray does in "Burning Down the House":
RAY: Fraser! Buddy! You have a good time up there in the Northwest Areas?
FRASER: Territories, you mean?
RAY: Wilderness, huh? Exactly. Me personally, I leave the city, I come down with this skin condition.
***
WELSH: How about you, you look like you could use some fresh air.
DEWEY: I hate fresh air.
***
WELSH: What's going on here? I'm talking about a day off with pay.
HUEY: Yeah, but it's the country, lieutenant.
Welsh, selling hard to Fraser, describes it as "the heartbeat of America" (which, of course, was Chevrolet's advertising slogan in the late '80s, and yes, that can be taken as a sign, because as soon as Welsh has his driver, he reverts to the same contempt Huey and Dewey show) and invokes apple pie--at which Fraser neatly explodes the binary--and reminds us that there are more places in the world than Chicago on one hand and small-town America on the other: "Hm, sounds like home. Of course, we tended more towards brown lichen tarts." The doubling isn't stable or trustworthy--the more Wilson Welsh tries to emphasize that Willison is nothing like Chicago (the word "community" gets bandied about endlessly), the more it becomes apparent that the people of Willison are just as unprincipled and nasty as the people of Chicago. Fraser, again, provides the pin to pop the balloon:
OLIVIA: The Mayor and I were just discussing a business transaction.
FRASER: So I heard.
OLIVIA: Oh. Well, y'know [nervous laugh] small towns. We know everybody. We can speak frankly.
FRASER: This is true. Although you know, I have heard young ladies on the streets of Chicago discussing business deals in very similar terms.
The binary between Chicago and "the heartbeat of America" is a false one, but the two can still be played off against each other.
The episode also uses the idea of "bringing in the pros"--the bank robbers from Chicago, the detectives from Chicago, Ace Leary (who is also from Chicago even though his cover story, in a twisty bit of meta, makes him Canadian)--to make parallels between the baseball plotline and the mystery plotline. And the idea of doubling as rivalry is ALL OVER the relationship between the Welsh brothers--both named for presidents, both officers of the law, country mouse and city mouse, both sons of an alcoholic and emotionally abusive father:
WILSON WELSH: You just haven't outgrown it have you?
HARDING WELSH: What's that?
W. WELSH: Competing with me.
H. WELSH: Competing for what?
W. WELSH: Everything. For... for Susie Delessen. For who's gonna be quarterback on the football team. For who can sit on the railroad tracks the longest.
H. WELSH: Oh I always could stay the longest.
W. WELSH: For Dad's approval.
H. WELSH: I never needed his approval.
W. WELSH: Oh no?
H. WELSH: No. Let me tell you something. [with a maginficently sarcastic gesture] How could I possibly compete with all of this?
The way in which Wilson and Harding mirror each other is made even more explicit in a later part of the same argument (which they pick up and put down all episode long):
W. WELSH: Look, I know he was a lousy father, and he treated us hard.
H. WELSH: Hard on you? There was nothing I could do to please that guy. Every other day he was telling me how you were his only real son.
W. WELSH: And every other day he told me how you were his only real son.
Given that this is Due South, it's no surprise that Harding Welsh has daddy issues--like Fraser and Ray Vecchio and Ray Kowalski--and one of the themes of "Dr. Longball" is Welsh's relationships with his family, both the brother he can't stop competing with and the father he can't forgive:
WELSH: Constable. Can I ask your advice?
FRASER: My advice sir?
WELSH: Yeah, your advice.
FRASER: If I can help...
WELSH: If you had somebody you were trying to forgive, no matter how hard you tried to forgive 'em, you just couldn't forgive 'em. What would you do?
FRASER: Keep trying, sir.
And, by the end:
FRASER: Sir, if I may. Y'know, he is your father, he's your only father. There are probably sides to him that you don't know about. I only say this because I had a father, my only father, and well, my advice to you is not to wait until he's dead to discover those sides. It tends to be somewhat disorienting.
WELSH: Constable.
FRASER: Yes, sir?
WELSH: Giving advice to your elders is....
FRASER: Unbecoming?
WELSH: Unbecoming.
FRASER: Understood.
Welsh goes, in a completely typical Welshian way, from asking for Fraser's advice to telling him off, albeit mildly, for offering it. Fraser's advice, on the other hand, remains consistent--and is one of the very few windows the episode offers us into Fraser's interiority. Fraser Sr. does not appear in this episode, and although Dief is very present, Fraser only has one conversation with him--and it seems utterly, beautifully appropriate that they're arguing the call on Fraser's terrifying cut fastball:
DIEF: [barks]
Fraser: What are you talking about? It was a strike on the corner.
DIEF: [barks]
FRASER: Oh great, blind and deaf.
But other than that, Fraser is very distant in this episode, very Mountie, very correct. "Did you grow up in a public service announcement?" Huck Bogart asks him, and, yeah, this is the Fraser that did. Dief, on the other hand, is emoting all over the place: objecting to Woody the mascot ("a wolverine with a goiter"), to Wilson's pink flamingoes, to the mayor discussing trading cheese for beaver meat ("Diefenbaker feels a particular kinship with the beaver. It's as if we were discussing, well, eating a member of the family.")--there very possibly acting as a cover for Fraser's dislike of the repellent mayor--shamelessly wooing the fangirls. And there's a lovely, tiny parallel between Superego-Fraser and Id/Ego-Dief in relationship to Rusty-who-won't-stop-crying: Fraser produces a handkerchief out of nowhere for him in his initial interrogation; later in the episode Dief fetches him a box of Kleenex. (I'm with Ray: you gotta love this wolf.) Fraser's clearly even more alien in Willison than in Chicago, and he clearly feels it. There is no Fraser parallel in Willison, no brother, no Ace Leary for him to step into.
And speaking of Ace Leary brings us to the baseball plot, wherein what we're seeing is a happy mishmash of baseball story tropes, mostly Bull Durham. Huck and Woody echo Skip and Larry; Fraser tells Ray, "Above all you must try not to think," just as Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh, "You just got lesson number one: don't think; it can only hurt the ball club"; and Ray's interview with Toni Lake is just about word for word the string of clichés that Crash tells Nuke to memorize (and which, at the end of the movie, we see Nuke reeling off like a champ). There are other clichés thrown in there, too: Ray gets both to make the final out (defense) and to hit the winning grand slam (offense)--and the way Ray's face lights up as he starts rounding the bases is seriously what baseball is all about. The baseball plot isn't entirely coherent (the thing with Kelly Olsen has no follow through because Ray's arc steals the clutch homer), but it doesn't need to be--the baseball storyline is mostly there to infuse the episode with eau de baseball: we only touch on it at pivotal moments. For non-baseball fans, that's probably about as much as they can tolerate; baseball fans can fill in the rest of it on their own, because we all know how the story goes.
(Also, I love Tony Craig and Tom Melissis' riff on Who's On First?:
COSTELLO: Look, you gotta first baseman?
ABBOTT: Certainly.
COSTELLO: Who's playing first?
ABBOTT: That's right.
***
HAYSEED #1 (Melissis): Have they got a first baseman?
HAYSEED #2 (Craig): Certainly.
HAYSEED #1: All right. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Who?
HAYSEED #1: The first baseman. What's his name?
HAYSEED #2: Certainly.
I'm not sure which I love more: that they're quoting Who's On First? or that they're taking the same joke in a different--but equally logical--direction.)
And finally, the piece that didn't quite fit in anywhere else, but which has relevance to all of it: Ray's initial absence. At the start of the episode, Ray has vamoosed to Mexico:
WELSH: Vecchio's on holiday.
DEWEY: Oh yeah, where?
HUEY: At a Club Couples place, in Mexico.
DEWEY: Vecchio, Club Couples? Who with?
HUEY: Remember that chick he busted last month for passing bad checks?
DEWEY: Oh man, that's low. I mean, I grovel once in a while, but to bust a chick for a date? The man has no standards.
Ray's initial absence is actually necessary, plot-wise, for a couple of reasons:
(1) like Welsh's broken foot, it gets Fraser and Welsh off on this adventure together
(2) it lets Ray to be introduced as a ringer, Fraser and Welsh's "ace in the hole," to make a bad pun
It also permits a Clint Eastwood homage (clearly there as a throwaway gag), and it offers a reminder, again, that romantic comedy tropes do not work in Due South:
FRASER: So you didn't get the girl, then?
RAY: Nah. Got this poncho.
FRASER: It's very fetching.
There's no romance in this episode--Olivia has been having affairs with everthing in Willison with a dick--but Fraser and Ray's partnership is still working like a charm: Fraser talks Ray into trouble (because of his touchingly naïve faith that Ray is as honest as he is about everything), but he also coaches him into winning the game.
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Date: 2012-02-20 06:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 07:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-20 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-15 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-20 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-03 11:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-05 02:31 pm (UTC)I don't believe that this is an "Equal Love for Rays Zone" because you previously admitted that you ship F/K, so you prefer Kowalski over Ray Vecchio. If you loved the Rays equally, you would not ship one of them with Fraser, because you wouldn't want Fraser to choose between them. And a lover is always more important than a friend, even a best friend. Do you really think Fraser would drop everything and go to RayV if he was in trouble, and ignore his lover Kowalski? Fraser DIDN'T do that in "COTW!" He chose to go away with Kowalski instead of spending time with RayV, his best friend, who was recovering from being undercover and being shot. And Fraser ignored RayV to be with Victoria too.
Please don't do any more analysis because you do NOT love both Rays equally, and you will have more favorable impressions of Kowalski. TYK. Someone who doesn't ship either Ray with Fraser and dismisses the "slash subtext" as all in viewers' minds and not "close to text" is more qualified than you (or me).
no subject
Date: 2014-09-05 02:33 pm (UTC)You HAD to state that! Are you trying to start the Ray Wars again?
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Date: 2016-03-13 04:41 am (UTC)