return to Due South: season 1 episode 11 "You Must Remember This"

You Must Remember This
air date January 5, 1995

( Scene 1 )

Okay, for a start, the end of Fraser's sentence, "As a matter of fact, Rev. Naismith was working at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, of all places, when he —" is invented basketball. So Fraser is correct that basketball was invented by a Canadian, but not that basketball originated elsewhere. Don't tell me technicalities. 😛

Meanwhile: I take it back, it is not true that there is no outfit Fraser can't make work. I'm sorry. The jacket is fine, the hoodie is fine, even the sweatpants are probably fine, but the gym socks pulled up over the cuffs of the sweatpants just look ridiculous. I'll allow that it probably looks better on him than it would on a lot of other people, but that's as far as I can go. Oh-so-calmly threatening the driver that he'd break his window with the signpost and thread a fire hose through his car is hot! He looks good running! But the pulled-up gym socks don't look good, even the way he wears them. Apparently that's where my line is drawn.

It didn't look like Vecchio hit his head hard enough that he'd have stopped breathing, but what do I know from diving over the hoods of cars. I get it, I get it, they needed the "kiss," but I think if you're driving and someone jumps out of your way and falls down and doesn't get up and you go check on him, he's probably just bruised, maybe got his bell rung, but almost certainly still breathing? And she shouldn't move him, really, until it can be determined he doesn't have a head or neck injury, but if he's moving his head on his own, it's probably a little more okay?

Credits roll.

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

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Susan Gibney, Michael Shaner

( Scene 2 )

It is very sweet how Fraser makes sure Vecchio is okay when the second officer comes to tell them there's something they should see. Helps him up, hand on his back until he's sure he's steady.

( Scene 3 )

ELAINE. STOP. I was so hopeful that she'd moved on after Chinatown, but it looks like she licked her wounds and is sallying forth again. Stop sallying, Elaine!

( Scene 4 )

( Scene 5 )

So their plan is to take Fraser off his coin, I suppose.

( Scene 6 )

Gambling is illegal in Illinois, even private games where the house doesn't take a cut.

When Huey is super impatient with Vecchio for talking about cheesecake, Gardino gives him a little be cool, man kind of wave-down. Maybe the first sympathetic moment we've seen from either of them (though I also give Gardino credit for "Hey, Dief, how's it going").

It's a little incongruous how fondly Vecchio seems to be speaking of his father, given how he's talked about him previously ("he pretty much thought I screwed up everything I ever touched;" what he learned from his father was that hitting a kid doesn't teach the kid anything), but I can appreciate that people's relationships even with abusive parents can be complicated. Also, he is speaking more fondly of his mother. Meanwhile, though, I know no one who eats cheesecake with their fingers. What the hell goes on at Vecchio family weddings?

( Scene 6 continues. )

So Gardino has been married three times, and Huey lies right to Fraser's face to get him to fold a straight flush. Tsk.

( Scene 6 continues again. )

Gardino suggests that being married is "all over," which is cynical, but maybe not surprising from a guy with three failed marriages. Vecchio immediately agrees and comes back with "what about love," suggesting that he thinks love and marriage are incompatible. Fascinating.

Notice that Fraser has barely spoken in the three poker scenes. He takes no cards, agrees he'd have to turn everyone in if they played for money, asks if a straight flush is a winning hand, takes the pot with jacks full of tens, and tries to intellectualize the discussion of love; on the actual subject at hand, he suggests a long-ago (presumably) girlfriend of Vecchio's was being prudent to ask about their relationship and asks how you know when you're in love. This is probably not super surprising, given how ill at ease he's been with women so far; raising his eyebrows over Elaine asking about his reading habits is the least uncomfortable reaction we've seen to a woman's interest in him. He's not laddish at all, is he, so it's not unexpected that he'd mostly stay quiet in this sort of conversation.

( Scene 6 continues to continue. )

THIS MONOLOGUE. This is at least half the reason I am here doing annotated transcripts, right here. (A lot of the rest is "where the heck are we" and "Julie Frobisher would not call Benton Fraser 'Fraser'".) I cannot get over how he gives this whole speech with his back to the camera; I just love that, and I want to get kooky with the director who decided to film it this way, because it is bloody brilliant. (The whole shot is a long push in so by the end of it we can see the reflection of his face in the window.)

So okay, artistic decisions aside: There does not appear to be a real place called Fortitude Pass. The border between the United States and Canada over there in the Pacific and prairie regions is the 49th parallel; the border between the provinces and the territories is the 60th; the Arctic Circle is about 66.5 degrees north. Keeping in mind that I'm using Photoshop and not ArcGIS, this map has blue lines at parallels 49 (for sure), 50 (approximately), 60 (for sure), and 70 (approximately) and a green line at (approximately) the Arctic Circle, and the red line is my best guess for more or less the 62nd parallel.

The story begins "In the end." The end of what? He doesn't say. He begins at the end and takes us with him past that. Why was she up there? He doesn't say. Why did he track her up there? He doesn't say, but that far north in a mountain pass in a storm can't have been safe, as he describes, so even if she was going over that pass to get away from him (we don't know!, but it was the end of something), it could make sense that he'd have followed her to bring her down so she could leave him safely. And then after that it ended badly. How much later was that? He doesn't say, but tracking her up to the pass was "in the end," so probably not long. So what do we know about this woman: He saved her from freezing to death, she had a beautiful voice, and something happened to split them up because she had a darkness inside her.

And it is hard for him to talk about—listen to the pain in his voice, and also look at the fact that (as greenygal has observed) he can only say something so important and intimate with his back to the person he's talking to. This is not super unusual; I know a lot of parents who've said their teenagers are most willing to speak frankly to them in the car, when they can't make eye contact. My own 5yo is most likely to tell me what's on his mind when he's snuggled up under my chin, not looking at me. We want to make ourselves vulnerable on as few fronts as possible at one time. So Fraser doesn't want to look at Vecchio (or at us!) while he tells this story. And then it turns out Vecchio is asleep and didn't hear it anyway.

Do we think Fraser knows Vecchio is asleep because otherwise he wouldn't have told this story at all? For that matter, do we think Vecchio knows that and is pretending to be asleep as a favor to Fraser, so he doesn't have to talk about it more?

( Scene 7 )

( Scene 8 )

"God, why do I love that?" is very good. It's a known fact that some things we'd hate if anyone else did them, we find charming when someone we love does them. It's the converse of bitch eating crackers. (It is, however, completely unreasonable for Vecchio to be so far gone over this woman after a total acquaintance of about twenty seconds.)

( Scene 9 )

I don't know enough about the National Guard to know if there's anything in that never-supposed-to-be-without-his-uniform thing (and I don't know how Fraser's supposed to know that either). But I'm pretty sure the eligibility requirements are the same, so if the guy was unable on morals to enlist in the army, he'd also have been ineligible for the Guard. Also, though, who says he wasn't in the army before he accumulated that rap sheet? Also also, can't you learn to make a bed with hospital corners somewhere other than in military service? In a hospital, for example? Or—speculating madly here—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police? Fraser's logic and conclusions in this scene are leaving me a little cold.

( Scene 10 )

See? The first offense in his jacket was August '89, so why couldn't he have been regular Army?

( Scene 11 )

( Scene 12 )

"Knits me muffins" is funny, but do men who like women like shorty pajamas? Huh.

( Scene 13 )

17cm is a little more than six and a half inches. I bet I could miss a target by that much, but maybe not if I were as close to Vecchio as the woman was when she shot at him.

( Scene 14 )

Hey, Rocky and Bullwinkle again!

( Scene 15 )

That newfangled cellular technology, they said, in 1995.

( Scene 16 )

( Scene 17 )

Carpentersville is about fifty miles northwest of Chicago. Uncle Wiki says it's a "village" whose population is about 37k, so presumably the word "near" is doing a lot of work in Elaine's description of the location.

( Scene 18 )

( Scene 19 )

Diefenbaker is still deaf, is he not? Just checking.

So the first kiss in the show (apart from Eddie and Janice; the first kiss involving a main character) is between Vecchio, generally the comic-relief sidekick, and this mysterious miraculous woman. I like that; interesting decision for a show that beats us over the head with how attractive women find Fraser, although it does also show him as generally uncomfortable at best with their attention (since the pilot, and what ever became of Constable Brighton?—in-universe, I mean, because out here, either the actress was no longer available or interested or they decided not to use her after all, but in the world of the show, what do you suppose happened to her?).

( Scene 20 )

Fraser is very patient with Vecchio's obsession here.

( Scene 21 )

Kane County is two counties west of Cook County. But location note: Before they turn the corner, both vehicles drive along a stretch of road with a very visible speed limit sign that says "MAXIMUM 60"—meaning this can't have been filmed in the United States, where (a) that sort of road would probably have a speed limit of 50 mph at the most and (b) the sign would say "SPEED LIMIT ##". That "MAXIMUM" signage is used in Canada because it's the same in English as in French.

Vecchio's car is a 1971 Buick Riviera, a detail that has not previously been mentioned.

Aaand it turns out the miraculous woman is an ATF agent and Vecchio has effed up her investigation by preventing Bodine from making the meet and doing the sale she was going to bring him in for.

( Scene 22 )

( Scene 23 )

I think I'm with Gardino here in that Huey should probably not have told Elaine about the pork roast thing. What happens at the poker table stays at the poker table, no?

( Scene 24 )

So Special Agent Suzanne Chapin, ATF, didn't narc on Vecchio after all. Aww.

( Scene 25 )

Vecchio apparently leaves his car in the circular driveway at the Regents Park Hotel and goes for a walk to think about this woman he's content to be in love with from afar (despite only having known her for a total of a couple of minutes).

There's nothing about Fraser's prop to suggest when the photo was taken (except that it's black and white with a white border that I associate with sort of the late 60s; maybe it's the style of camera more than anything else?), but dramatically (and musically, given the Sad Piano playout), the more I look at it the more I agree its subject kind of has to be the woman he monologued about in scene 6.

This episode has been titled "You Must Remember This," which of course is the first line of the song Elsa asks Sam to play in Rick's Café in Casablanca:

You must remember this;
A kiss is still a kiss.
A sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo,
They still say "I love you."
On that you can rely,
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by.

And of course that film famously ends with the lovers parting as they do in this episode, presumably never to meet again.

Cumulative confirmed body count: 8
Red uniform: At the station the day after Vecchio's accident

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