The Man Who Knew Too Little
air date February 9, 1995
( Scene 1 )
I can find no evidence of an event called the Cross-Canada Rally. There was a Trans-Canada Rally in the 1960s; the last one was in 1971, apparently not being held since then because the existence of the Trans-Canada Highway meant it wasn't fun anymore. (That article is a fun read. My favorite quote is "Well, of course everybody cheated. It was sport." It also says the race mostly ran between Montreal and Vancouver or vice versa, which isn't precisely trans-Canada, now, is it:
I'll agree that Vancouver is on the west coast of Canada, but there's quite a lot of Canada to the east of Montreal, is there not.)
( Scene 2 )
Welsh and Dr. Pearson must have been on their way to Ivanhoe in "Chicago Holiday," then, eh?
( Scene 3 )
So Fraser's guy is trying to start something, is he? Between two guys he is cuffed to? Smart.
( Scene 4 )
Nice reactions by Huey and Gardino when the window breaks.
Credits roll.
Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Daniel Kash
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier
(plus Lincoln the dog)
Rino Romano, Dean McDermott, Joseph Griffin, William Dunlop
( Scene 5 )
Google Maps says from Chicago to Miami is 1,381 miles without tolls and 1,349 with and suggests both of those drives are about 21 hours. Fraser's estimate has Vecchio doing an average of 53.35 mph the whole way. But here's the important question: Why isn't he flying? I realize the event is apparently imminent, which is a whole other question—what manager assigns an employee to a work trip with so little lead time? Welsh should have decided who was going on this thing three weeks ago, in time for someone in purchasing to make the arrangements. (Or I suppose someone in purchasing could have made the arrangements and then they could have transferred the ticket to whomever Welsh picked, if his original pick had to be changed. I think in the mid-90s you could still do that without incurring a fee worth the price of a whole other ticket.)
What about Fraser needing five days' notice? He couldn't have known five days ago that his guy was going to get picked up for running a red light and need extraditing right away (an expedited extradition; say that five times fast). Before 1995, didn't commercial airlines transport nonviolent prisoners all the time? Don't they still? The five days' notice thing puzzles me.
( Scene 6 )
Whoa up, now, all the cars on the lot are reserved and that means the car rental place won't rent them to someone else? HUH. No okay of course that's what "reserved" ought to mean, but the reason that 1991 Seinfeld clip landed with so many people was that it was so true to life. Anyway: It could make sense that they won't rent Fraser a car if he's told them he's going to drive it to Canada, and the prisoner-transport aspect wouldn't enter into it. (I don't see why Fraser shouldn't be able to transport a prisoner by train, either.) It looks like most rental places allow U.S./Canada border crossings now, but I have definitely rented in the past (in northern states like New York) where they expected me to stay in the United States.
"Everything going on" with the EC (European Community) in 1995 was that the EC had ceased to exist, having been replaced by the EU in 1993. Lest one think there is a single grain of anything reasonable in anything this suspect has said so far. (The Rockefellers were among the first really offensively wealthy American families, the moral ancestors to your Gateses and Bezoses and Musks (I am aware that the latter is not American; the point is about offensive wealth). They were also great philanthropists, but of course it's problematic when any individual has that much to give.) Anyway, Spiro T. Agnew, 39th vice president of the United States and (lying, cheating, racist, antisemitic) all-around rat bastard, was indeed born in November. This suspect who's running his mouth at Fraser and Vecchio is a young guy, probably in his mid-20s, so he'd have been born in the early 1970s, when Agnew was VP. There is no suggestion in the general record that Agnew's assholery extended to fathering illegitimate children; and in any case, I don't think such a child would be ineligible to join the Secret Service on those grounds alone (see p. 21). This particular dude might even pass the polygraph, although he should not.
( Scene 7 )
Is a car still mint condition if it's had at least two of its windows shot out and replaced? In any event: I've said before that I shudder to think about Fraser driving a car, and apparently Vecchio does as well. But the most important reaction to this scene is this:
DOES THE POLICE DEPARTMENT NOT HAVE A MOTOR POOL? The fact that Fraser has to make his own travel arrangements to extradite this prisoner from Illinois to Canada is even more ridiculous than the fact that Vecchio has to make his own travel arrangements to go on this work trip to Florida. If the Canadians want the guy, they should cough up some of the money and leg work involved in getting him back, and Fraser is the (acting) Deputy Liaison Officer with the consulate; it's not like he's a random Canadian who happens to have been in the right place at the right time. His boss should be the one making the arrangements and assigning Fraser to accompany this prisoner, and the arrangements his boss is making might involve borrowing an official police vehicle from the local police department. So we're almost 10 minutes into the episode and so far both setups make no actual sense.
( Scene 8 )
Windsor to Miami is 2,228 km by the fastest route and 2,186 by the shortest (which takes longer but has no tolls). That's either 1,384 or 1,358 miles. Pretty close, Fraser. (Chicago to Windsor is about four and a half hours across southern Michigan, but I'll buy that Vecchio could do it in a little less.)
( Scene 9 )
So these guys are coming from Windsor and trying to intercept our heroes about halfway.
Who are they? Who is informing them about our heroes' movements? Whoever they are, there's a signpost for I-94 West as they pull out of the gas station, so well done location team.
( Scene 10 )
Wow, please do not follow Fraser's directions anywhere. Leamington is east of Windsor; the Pelee Island Ferry does not run between December and April, and when it does it takes four hours to get from Leamington, Ontario, to Sandusky, Ohio, which I haven't marked in on the map but which is on the Lake Erie coast a little to the west of due north of Milan; and in general you'd be much better off just going back across the bridge to Detroit and taking interstates to Toledo and thence south all the way to Florida. (OR JUST FLYING TO FLORIDA BECAUSE WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE.)
Fraser pronounces schedule British-wise, with a /ลก/ rather than a /sk/. This seems to be even more of an affectation than his pronunciation of lieutenant, but maybe he's Just That Old-Fashioned. He's right, although nobody in the car cares, that Milan, Ohio (birthplace of Thomas Edison), is pronounced "MY-lan" by locals and "mih-LAHN" (like the Italian city) by damn near everyone else. He can also probably fuck off with his five-eighths rule and just give Vecchio the figures he needs in miles, if he's so bilingual about it. Given how much this guy prides himself on being courteous, I have some notes about Fraser's adherence to Dr. Grice's maxims.
The "guy who invented kilometers" was probably Jean-Charles de Borda (1733–1799), so no, this guy in the back of Vecchio's car doesn't know him. Also, you can't drive to Machu Picchu, although you can drive to Aguas Calientes, and there's a hotel near the ruins, but what are the odds there'd be a peace conference held there? Slim, I feel.
Vecchio is being ridiculous about Canada in general (snow chains, please) and about Windsor and Winnipeg in particular, and his state-by-state countdown isn't going to involve but Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan:
( Scene 11 )
It is vaguely hilarious that these guys have no qualms about killing the gas station attendant and whatever other thuggery they have planned but are invested in maintaining a safe speed.
( Scene 12 )
I think it's generally true that cops don't ticket other cops, and also that a state trooper traveling in one direction probably can't get a good read on the speed of a car traveling in the opposite direction. But here we are. (The sign Vecchio swerved to avoid hitting said we are 47 miles from Battle Creek, heading east.)
( Scene 13 )
The speed limit is 70 in Michigan, except in congested urban areas, which I don't think you'd be in 24 miles east of Battle Creek on the interstate, but I don't know the speed limit in that spot for sure. [eta:
boxofdelights reminds me that the national speed limit was in effect until 1995, which I had thought was only a thing when I was a kid but gone by the time I learned to drive (in the early 90s).]
( Scene 14 )
The thing is they are not traveling west at a rate of speed high enough to cross one time zone every hour. (And also you don't have to require someone to eat when you make food available to them to eat; that's just silly.) I'm with Vecchio here; if I step from one time zone into another time zone, an hour has not passed. If it's been five hours, it doesn't matter that they started in Central time and now they're in Eastern.
I'm not a lawyer and I can't find any easily-googled information about meal break entitlements for prisoners being transported. I assume McDonald here is full of shit, but experts are welcome to clue us in.
( Scene 15 )
My sympathies in this scene are with the waitress, followed by Vecchio. I am neutral at best on Fraser and obviously annoyed by McDonald. Why am I neutral at best on Fraser: Well, for one thing, depending on the time of year, five hours from "the crack of dawn" would be lunchtime, wouldn't it? So on what basis is he contradicting this twerp on his Kitchener-to-Battle-Creek story? (It apparently is about a five-hour drive. Christ, I'm doing a lot of maps on this episode, innit.)
( Scene 16 )
The restaurant is called the Salty Dawg, which strikes me as an unusual name for a restaurant as far inland as Battle Creek, but what do I know. Third Guy (Norman) is right about the license plates, though:
( Scene 17 )
First of all, a roadside restaurant can have windows on all four walls if it wants, irrespective of which way the road runs. So Fraser's basic premise is mistaken from the off. Secondly, U.S. 12 is technically the most direct route from Detroit (where Fraser assumes you'd cross into the United States if you were starting from Kitchener and heading for Indiana, which is fair enough) to South Bend, but it runs east-west, so Fraser's specific premise is also mistaken. (It takes a jog about 20 miles west of Hillsdale, which you'll see I put in on the map in scene 15, and runs northeast-southwest for about 15 miles before flattening out again, but so what?)
( Scene 18 )
In fact, this very restaurant has windows on adjacent walls; our heroes are at a table against a different wall than the front door of the place. So Fraser is right that west-facing windows would warm the syrup, I guess, but not, as I said, that west-facing windows can only be found in a diner by the side of a north-south road. (I couldn't find lyrics online for this song, so if anyone knows the bits I missed, I'm all ears.)
( Scene 19 )
Vecchio has a cell phone, so I don't see why he can't call the Michigan State Police to tell them about the shoot-em-up at the restaurant. But failing that, of course Fraser is right that reporting this crime is more important than driving to Florida. He could probably also get some MSP help getting Ian to Canada (although if they were willing to use police vehicles for that purpose he'd just have borrowed a car from the motor pool like I said and we wouldn't be here right now).
Apparently the RCMP height requirement used to be 5'8" for men. If Brock is in his mid-50s and that means he'd have been subject to the height requirement, that means he was 18 or 19 about 35 years ago, or in about 1960—by which time Bob Fraser had been a Mountie for about 10 years, meaning he, too, would have been subject to that height requirement. Uncle IMDb says Gordon Pinsent is exactly 5'8", so well done, Bob Fraser qualifies, but that does make me wonder how small or undernourished Ben Fraser was at the age of seven if he couldn't even reach Bob's belt—even if that means the top of his head didn't come up to his belt, because damn.
Vecchio's possibly deliberate misconceptions about Canada continue. Sigh. Meanwhile, it looks like the Basque separatists dissolved their organizations more than 10 years ago. Huh.
Vecchio's little complaint about one shooting with eight bullets or eight shootings with one bullet each is a bit of bracketing-error fun but not really likely; "plainclothes toreadors" is also just something that sounds fun, right? Bullfighters?
( Scene 20 )
Is Ian a psychopath or a sociopath? I can never keep them sorted.
( Scene 21 )
( Scene 22 )
Fraser has apparently never heard of an abandoned building.
( Scene 23 )
Picture me looking over the top of my glasses at the writers' room at "fine Canadian programming".
( Scene 24 )
I counted ten shots from Vecchio, and I don't know what kind of gun has an 11-round clip, but whatever. Also, I gave you Sarnia for free on the map with Kitchener and Hillsdale in it up in scene 15. I always used to cross at Sarnia when I had the option, because driving in Port Huron, Michigan, is so much less of a pain in the ass than driving in Detroit.
Anyway, the main point is: See, Fraser? Buildings can be abandoned. Why didn't that enter your calculus in scene 21, huh? (Probably the same reason using a motor pool car never occurred to anyone in scene 6. IF THEY'D TAKEN A CAR FROM THE MOTOR POOL RAY VECCHIO WOULD STILL OWN A RIVIERA.)
Late edit: I've had this tab open in my phone for weeks and keep forgetting to note it here, but in 2004, the Mythbusters demonstrated that shooting a car's fuel tank does not cause the car to explode (and in 2005 they demonstrated that the car might explode if its fuel tank were shot with a tracer round from a sufficient distance.
( Scene 25 )
( Scene 26 )
Okay I don't know if these cops who come get Ian are from a city police department, Ontario Provincial Police, or RCMP themselves, but there's no excuse for them not to know how to get back to the highway they just came in on; and also, after all that the way you're doing a prisoner transfer is to meet at Tim Hortons and hand him over? I mean I guess that's as far as the mallrats could take them, and if they'd had their own wheels they'd have brought Ian (and the bad guys) to an actual police station. But the local police didn't bring enough cars to help the good guys get home, either? I have a lot of notes about procedure here!
The title is a reference to one of two Hitchcock films called The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934; 1956). Or, based on their descriptions, on neither (or, you know, both, because title only).
Cumulative body count: 10
Red uniform: The whole episode, because apparently transporting a prisoner is a special occasion rather than routine police work?