return to Due South: season 1 episode 2 "Diefenbaker's Day Off"

Diefenbaker's Day Off
air date September 29, 1994

( Scene 1 )

That's a lot of teaser. Okay, here we go.

I'm glad Fraser's comprehension of Diefenbaker's communication runs to understanding what he's driving at and there's no suggestion that the dog is actually speaking to him. They're not Timmy and Lassie.

Lucy says "Upper cut, hook, poke 'em in the eye," but she does two jabs before she and her dad do a Three Stooges–style eye poke. I'm just saying.

I can't quite make out the number of their apartment. It's possible that it's 2F.

I will bet a certain amount of pretend money that (a) the line "Oh, very unhappy!" was not scripted, but (b) they didn't have a lot of time to shoot the scene with the baby multiple times, so (c) they just went with it. Paul Gross's kids were little in 1994 (I'm not digging super deep to find birth dates; it's possible his youngest was still fetal at the time this was filmed), so he'll have had recent lived experience of babies crying the moment you look at them. (Method actors, man.)

Credits roll.

Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Daniel Kash
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Madolyn Smith-Osborne, Brendan Kelly, Azura Bates, Tony Cacciotti, David Eisner, Marvin Karon

( Scene 2 )

Why in the world has Fraser picked up and toted a man who was just hit by a car? Shouldn't he be holding c-spine until an ambulance arrives? I suppose we could assume that the dude came to and wanted to get up and go on about his day, so not moving him wasn't really an option? It's also not an impossible supposition that an ambulance would take an unacceptable length of time to reach that part of town. But if Benton Fraser doesn't have first aid training, I will eat my shoe. Carrying someone with a head or back injury (or both, plus the possibility of internal bleeding) over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes? Bro.

( Scene 3 )

When the doctor says "You're kidding," I do like the way Fraser says "No," as if he means not only is he not kidding, but he doesn't get why a person would even be kidding about that sort of thing.

It's nice of the driver to come and check on Charlie. Doylist-wise, he seems to be here because they were already paying a minimum for that actor so they might as well get their money's worth out of him, and also to show the nurse on the phone being curt with him and sweet as pie to Fraser.

( Scene 4 )

It makes no sense for Fraser to be calling Vecchio with this wolf-license issue from the medical clinic rather than waiting until he gets to work. Was there no other way to set up the suspicious-nurse-dropping-an-x-ray business?

( Scene 5 )

Changing clothes in your car is one thing, but doing it in a convertible with the top down doesn't really seem to me like a situation in which you can reasonably expect any privacy.

Fraser never does give her the x-ray she dropped.

( Scene 6 )

So the suspicious nurse is actually a reporter, and she hates cops, and she shares an office with her boss for some reason. How does she get interested in the string of dead prizefighters in the first place? There will have been a lot more than three fatal car accidents in eight months, surely. How does the fact that three of them involved prizefighters? And why does she need x-rays to show that the death certificates were signed by the same doctor? Why does she need to go undercover in the clinic at all for that? Aren't death certificates public records?

( Scene 7 )

Okay I know milk in Canada often or maybe even usually comes in bags rather than in cartons or jugs, and everyone has a pitcher or milk-bag-holder that you load the bags into for serving. (At least this was true when I was a young teenager and went to summer camp in Canada. "But what if you didn't have a pitcher?" I asked someone, and he explained patiently that it was not a specialty item but a normal thing to find in a kitchen, like plates.) What I don't know is, is most milk in Canada shelf-stable? I think of that as a European thing, only maybe putting the milk in the cupboard isn't supposed to be a laugh about how absent-minded Fraser is but rather a moment of showing how he's not yet accustomed to life in the United States, where there is shelf-stable milk, but it comes in boxes, and the type of milk jug he puts in the cupboard will absolutely spoil if he doesn't put it in the refrigerator, even before it's opened.

( Scene 8 )

Fraser's building apparently has no better than one bath per floor, if the queue in the hallway is any indication. Zounds. (I stayed in a very cheap hotel in Paris once where there must, I suppose, have been a basin in the room, but there was probably a WC in the hall—I don't remember—and I had no access to a shower or bath of any kind. It was okay as a place to be safe indoors for one night. As an adult not in a dormitory or a barracks, I couldn’t live like that.)

I'm guessing the scenes were filmed in one order and edited together in another, hence the boot-shining bit being out of sequence.

( Scene 9 )

So Fraser doesn't know how to go on a date. First of all, wrist corsages, oh my god, that's adorable. Secondly, I don't know Chicago well, but I assume that in Chicago in the 90s, 10 minutes late was not late, socially.

Meanwhile: William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950) was an important Canadian prime minister between the world wars and during WWII (the longest-serving PM in Canadian history). He never married and had no children, but his brother (1878–1922) had a grandson named William Lyon Mackenzie King III (whose parents were married in 1939 and whose father died in 1943, so there's the math on his birth date), so it's not impossible that a journalist in Chicago in the mid-90s could be the original William Lyon Mackenzie King's (I'm counting on my fingers now) great-grand-niece (that's right: the brother's son, William II, is the nephew; the nephew's son, William III, is the great-nephew; the great-nephew's daughter, if Mackenzie were the great-nephew's daughter, would be the great-grand-niece; whew). Apparently she is not, but she gets the question often enough to anticipate it?

( Scene 10 )

First of all, you just said "deduct 38 percent," which makes me suspect the current exchange rate is $1 CDN = $0.62 USD. Secondly, it doesn't matter, because you are not going to pay in Canadian dollars, Fraser.

In addition to not knowing how to go on a date, Fraser does not know how to be in a restaurant. Although in fairness—I don't eat lobster, but in a piano-music-and-tablecloths place like this, shouldn't they either provide the tools you need to dismember it gracefully or do it for you before they put the plate down? I mean maybe they did bring him the correct tools and he didn't know what they were for so he went at the thing with a butter knife. What does he know from lobster? My guess is he ordered it to signal that she should feel free to order whatever, assuming the traditional assumption that the lobster is the most expensive thing on the menu and what I also assume are his old-fashioned (learned-from-a-book) (wrist. corsage.) ideas about what part of the menu the lady should order from and who's going to pay the bill. Which, incidentally, she should be paying, because she did the inviting, or at most they should split it once it turns out it's not really a date, so her sticking him with the whole check is tacky. But it doesn't appear she actually had any dinner, so maybe it works out okay. (I mean, he didn't, either. All that work for zero bites of lobster.)

He pronounces the T in "at all" very firmly: "a tall."

( Scene 11 )

There's also a parent out walking with a little kid. Weren't we supposed to understand that this was a very bad neighborhood? What's with all the pedestrians just out enjoying the night air?

( Scene 12 )

Okay, Lucy, you just heard Fraser offer to help your father, and you heard your father tell him to buzz off. Making like Fraser is the one letting you down here is a little bit advanced, isn't it? I mean to say, a person young enough to believe her father's only name is "Dad" is probably too young to exercise that level of emotional manipulation, right?

( Scene 13 )

Okay I am missing the "on my word as a transvestite" "Chicago thing," so if there's something deeper there than Vecchio goofing around with making a promise to Fraser, I'm going to need someone to explain it to me. Also, I do not believe that little girl playing Lucy is a day younger than eight. But that aside, in this scene we learn that Vecchio continues to assume (a) all women are tossing themselves at Fraser but (b) Fraser doesn't know what to do about any of them (see "don't they have women in the Yukon?"). We also learn (c) that Vecchio has not yet learned to be nicer to Hugo.

And then Fraser is fretting about the legality of going after the bigger bad guy and letting Charlie slide. Let's reflect. Charlie is taking payoffs to deliberately get hit by cars. Presumably the drivers' auto insurance is paying settlements to the bad guys making the arrangements, and Charlie and the doctor are each getting a small cut. So who's getting hurt here: Charlie, of course; potentially the drivers; and the insurance companies. But Fraser is worried about leaving Charlie—a single dad—be in the interest of justice, just one week after he let Willie go with a stern warning after Willie had stolen at least two bags in 24 hours (though he did return one of them) and threatened him and Diefenbaker with a stolen handgun. Fraser. GET IT TOGETHER, BRO.

( Scene 14 )

The zygomatic arch is the cheekbone. Why can't you just say "cheekbone," Fraser? Why can't you say "jaw" instead of "mandible?" Sigh. Also, the dude who threatened Charlie was wearing a golf or polo shirt, not a t-shirt, so there. (It had an emblem on the left chest, as such shirts often do; I'd have guessed that was an alligator or a polo player or who knows what, but I'll buy that it was a gym logo or that there was something on the back of it if Fraser says so. We didn't see the hole in the "garment buyer's" shoe either, so the show doesn't always show us every clue Fraser picks up on.)

( Scene 15 )

Diefenbaker can apparently read English.

( Scene 16 )

Vecchio has workout gear he can change into, including a helmet, not that it does him any good when his sparring partner punches him in the nose. Fraser has removed his jacket, shirt, and tie and is sparring in his undershirt and suspenders, with white sneakers and his uniform trousers tucked into tube socks, so I guess they both had gym bags in Vecchio's trunk? Fraser is the only boxer not wearing a helmet, so it's lucky that nobody managed to hit him.

( Scene 17 )

( Scene 18 )

The trainer did sort of go "ptui" right after he told the boxer to spit (it's not clear why he wanted the boxer to spit, though; the guy wasn't frothing at the mouth or anything), and he also drank from a water bottle as Fraser and Vecchio were leaving the locker room. But I'm with Vecchio this time: I think this deduction of Fraser's is a reach.

( Scene 19 )

I think we're meant to understand that there is no gig with a trucking company where the driver is in on it; the bad guy in the polo shirt is going to be driving the truck, and he's going to hit Charlie harder than usual.

( Scene 20 )

Does Vecchio not lock his car when he parks it?

( Scene 21 )

I'm not sure the abseiling was actually necessary, but probably climbing down the crane the same way he climbed up would have taken extra time. It's also not entirely clear how Vecchio was supposed to know which way Fraser had gone when he ran off out the other end of the construction zone. But never mind.

( Scene 22 )

This is all before HIPAA, of course.

( Scene 23 )

When did she tell him this? The man was unconscious. He's never laid eyes on her. But sure, Mackenzie King is deputized to take care of the kid, because she is a girrrl. Sigh. I do like Lucy's "duh, lady" line reading here.

( Scene 24 )

Lucy's line reading is "I wish Fraser was my daddy," as though he were someone else's daddy, and that doesn't make a ton of sense; they should have had her say "I wish Fraser was my daddy," because apparently the message is that she's had it with her own dad, and whoa, that's harsh, Lucy.

( Scene 25 )

That's a nice speech of Charlie's, where the only thing that matters to him is that his daughter loves and trusts him. Alas he doesn't know that she already knows what he does for a living, so letting Fraser help him wouldn't be out of line.

( Scene 26 )

Another point for Vecchio. Monumentally frustrating for Fraser to disappear without a word like that.

( Scene 27 )

I'm going to guess that kid is not less than fifty pounds (based on the completely scientific method of comparing what appears to be the height and build of a child on television next to some adults on television with the height and build of my five-year-old, who is about forty-five pounds), which is a lot to throw that high in the air without much wind-up, but Charlie's a big guy—taller than Fraser, so probably at least 6'2"?—and a trained athlete, plus he's highly motivated, and I think saving the life of your child can reasonably give a person a burst of strength for sure. Even a person who has just left the emergency room maybe against medical advice. I'll buy it.

( Scene 28 )

Okay, it wasn't Vecchio who did anything to the animal control guy's van.

No, right, fair enough, that's not the point of this scene. Is this the first genuinely dishonest thing we've seen Vecchio do? Pretending to be a shady garment seller in the pilot: maybe a routine part of police work, although IA was trying to bust him for illegal entrapment, so if it was technically okay he was skating very close to a line. Lying to his mother about being on a stake-out? Anh. Pretending like he was a guy with a criminal record in the boxing ring? Anh. But this here is a straight-up forged document. And Fraser . . . takes it because he needs Diefenbaker not to be animal controlled out of his life. . . . Picture me looking over the tops of the frames of my glasses right now.

( Scene 29 )

( Scene 30 )

How disappointing that Diefenbaker doesn't go to a Cubs game, look at paintings at the Art Institute, jump up on a parade float, etc. A whiffed pitch when you have a "Day Off" title set in Chicago, am I right? (The reference, of course, being to the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.) I mean maybe he did those things and we just didn't see them because we followed Fraser the whole time, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Hamlet's Day Off or something. Still.

Cumulative confirmed body count: 2
Red uniform: Out to dinner (and on the way home from same)

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