The Blue Line
air date March 8, 1995
( Scene 1 )
I read a thread some time in the past few months on Twitter about what a jerk Lou Ferrigno is, but I can't find it now. Which is a bummer: It was very funny. [Many months later: I found it: Twitter user
ursulav on January 26, 2022: "Okay, you’ve all heard my trampled Neil Gaiman at the nacho bar story, so let me tell you my weirdass Lou Ferrigno story. Right, so I was at a con. A terrible doomed con. A con which was held in an abandoned department store in a small town in North Carolina, organized by a local comic shop that was…ah…peculiar. Somehow or other, the con organizers had convinced Lou Ferrigno, the former Incredible Hulk, to come out, and believed this would be a big draw. Also the guy who played Captain Marvel on Shazam! in the Seventies, and a couple other even more obscure actors. And the local webcomics collective I was in had all gotten free tables, we were young and hungry, etc. Three days in an abandoned Belks will definitely warp your sense of reality. As no one showed up, we eventually started wandering around the back rooms. Very weird. Many old display cases. I liberated some of them in the name of the People’s Republic of Webcomistan. But all that is neither here nor there. I was sitting directly across from Ferrigno. I did not speak to him, nor he to me. He was charging twenty bucks for an autograph, and I did not particularly need one. As only two actual attendees showed up, the con organizer was begging staff to buy his autographs. See, he’d arranged a deal where if he made, say, 5K, then great, but if he did not make 5K, the con would make up the difference. This is how the organizer got him there. Obviously there was no way anybody was making five grand at this con, but the less that Ferrigno had at the end of the day, the more the con would pay him. So he starts, let us say, attempting to disguise his part of the take. And that is how I watched Captain Marvel catch the Incredible Hulk stuffing twenties into his socks. The comic shop went out of business, the con organizer was exceptionally bitter about how it ruined his life, and to this day, I have an autographed SHAZAM! photo pinned to my corkboard in my studio."]
Credits roll.
Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Daniel Kash
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier
(plus Lincoln the dog)
Rick Rossovich, Miguel Fernandes, Tracey Cook, Gordon Pinsent as Fraser Sr.
Yay! Bob's back!
( Scene 2 )
A, hockey is nothing like figure skating, with or without clubs; B, figure skating is also very physically demanding. I know who needs to shut his yap, and it isn't the dog.
( Scene 3 )
On Murder, She Wrote, by now we'd know this guy was going to be the murder victim. There's one person sitting in an armchair that we haven't yet seen him be an asshole to, but I bet he has done while we weren't looking.
( Scene 4 )
I thought the two-hands thing was a signal for "stall him for ten minutes," but then Fraser didn't do ten minutes' worth of snooping; instead he's just feeding Vecchio lines to feed Welsh, like Cyrano de Bergerac.
( Scene 5 )
They do a decent job beginning to rehabilitate this guy's reputation in this short scene—from "national treasure" (barf) to "the only dream I ever had" is a pretty long way, but Fraser gets you halfway there with the remember-when-we-were-kids stuff and Slider here sells it with his reactions. (I don't care for his enunciation; I'd have assumed he was an athlete who got the gig because he could more or less bumble through the dialogue, but in fact he's a real actor who just kind of mumbles and that's his thing, I guess.) (He is not Canadian, and his use of "eh" does not sound natural to me. 🤷♀️) Anyway, here's a hint that Smithbauer has had some money trouble, because he sold his own rookie cards. But then he basically conscripts Fraser into working for him.
Having moved to Alert from Inuvik when he was eight, and thence to Tuktoyaktuk, Fraser and his grandparents apparently moved from Tuktoyaktuk back to Inuvik before he was 13.
( Scene 6 )
Another suggestion that Smithbauer has money problems. (Does he call Fraser "Barney" as a reference to deputy sheriff Barney Fife of Mayberry, NC?)
( Scene 7 )
Aaand he's back to being a jerk.
Looks like both actors did a lot of their own skating, though I'm sure the checking and falling was left to stunt guys.
( Scene 8 )
Fraser is not uncomfortable with this woman's attention to him as much as he is unimpressed. Maybe because her attention is plausibly professional rather than entirely social. Like, he's still not interested, but he has something else to focus on, so he's not a complete stammering wreck.
( Scene 9 )
Okay, did Fraser not just finish promising Dawn he wouldn't involve the police? I know he's made promises he shouldn't have made before because he should have known he wasn't going to be able to keep them, but this sure looks to me like he deliberately went ahead and did the opposite of what he promised her he would do. Which is new.
( Scene 10 )
Has anyone wandered in who is too young to remember what a VCR was?
( Scene 11 )
So apparently Mr. and Mrs. Brewer live in Fraser's building. That's probably why it's okay for Diefenbaker to stay and watch more hockey? I'm glad he's getting to have positive relationships with his neighbors instead of their just slamming doors in his face all the time.
( Scene 12 )
I do not sign and can't even accurately describe the signs Grace uses, but anyone who can is positively encouraged to come in and tell us what her question was.
( Scene 13 )
This is like the only cop show that has ever admitted that you can't just "enhance" your way to clearer images from surveillance video (for example). (Blowup; Blow Out.)
( Scene 14 )
That kid is too small to have seen that badge through that peephole.
( Scene 15 )
Aren't most big-league athletes much more concerned when kids get hurt in the stands? I'm not going to link to stories of kids getting plonked by foul balls, but baseball players have been inconsolable over such things. Even if they don't care about injuring other people's children, it seems like most of your professional sportsball men know how their bread gets buttered; the kids are the fans they ought to care about the most. I think Smithbauer might just be an asshole.
( Scene 16 )
Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.
( Scene 17 )
Mid-30s is pretty old for a hockey player. It's not at all surprising that he's slowing down.
( Scene 18 )
Sullivan Lake is about 350 miles north of Toronto, a few miles into Ontario from the border with Quebec. There's also a Silver Lake in Ontario maybe 60 miles southwest of Ottawa and a Sylvan Lake in Alberta about halfway between Calgary and Edmonton.
Which of these is the one Mumbles is actually talking about? (And to me, "home" is your parents' house, or at least your parents' town or city, if and maybe only if it is also where you grew up. Smithbauer was a young teenager in Inuvik, so unless they moved to S___ Lake when he was 14 or 15, I don't feel like visiting his dad in the house he bought for him there is "going home." But that might just be me.) Answers on a postcard.The sorry-about-your-dad bit is a nice moment. Mind you, it seems like someone who was Fraser's best friend 20 years ago might have dropped him a note when he heard his father had been murdered. I realize friends fall out of touch and it's hard to know what to say, but if Smithbauer heard about it, the opportunity to reach out was there. (On the other hand, the tone in which he says "Yeah. Real estate fraud" is pretty funny.)
( Scene 19 )
Iiiiii don't know, I feel like Vecchio's is the more solid logic here.
( Scene 20 )
Sure, there had to be a reason Henderson was even in this thing.
I'm not sure why Vecchio doesn't bring Broda in for taking a share of the pot, as we've learned that playing poker for real money is always illegal in Illinois, but I guess that's not the point right now?
( Scene 21 )
( Scene 22 )
Between the costume changes and the nighttime darkness, it is very hard for me to follow this scene. I'm sure that's by design, because this will be where the stunt skaters earned their money this week.
( Scene 23 )
( Scene 24 )
So Fraser isn't going to turn him in only because there'd be no point—not because he absolves him in any way. Which is vaguely interesting; I think I'd have expected him to turn him in anyway.
( Scene 25 )
Look, you can't fix games. It was right to ban Pete Rose from baseball, and it was right to ban Lance Armstrong from cycling, and it was right to ban Mark Smithbauer from hockey. I don't care if there are lesser penalties for injuring people on purpose. Cheating is different, and I'm glad Smithbauer turned himself in for it. A tiny sliver of redemption (of his character; he should still be excluded from hockey).
Smithbauer is wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket when he leaves the locker room. I think for the press conference where he must have just announced his wrongdoings, he should have been wearing, if not a suit, at least a coat and tie.
( Scene 26 )
The credits have a little play-out flourish and a dedication: "This program is dedicated to the brave hockey playing members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police," with a picture of the 1935–1936 RCMP hockey team, 13 guys in hockey gear and five in uniform. I wonder who they played against? And what happened to inspire this dedication. My best Google-driven guess is something to do with the 1994 Stanley Cup riot in Vancouver after the Canucks lost to the New York Rangers in game 7, but I could be missing something else, so as usual, those with more knowledge are welcome to come in and teach me.
I was really expecting Smithbauer's answer when the kid asked him "Are you somebody?" to be "Used to be," but actually "Nah" is a much better response.
I'm confident the episode title is a hockey reference rather than a police reference. In hockey, of course, the blue line (at either end of the rink) separates the offensive from the defensive zone. A player who crosses the blue line toward the opposing goal before the puck gets there is offside (no matter how many defenders are between that player and the goal, which is a difference from the offside rule in soccer that was very confusing to me for a long time). What with Bob Fraser's journal entries being all about knowing where lines are and not crossing them, I'm sure that's the reference here, and not the idea of the police as a "thin blue line" separating civilized society from anarchy (nor the 1988 documentary that introduced the phrase, itself a reference to the Thin Red Line—at least in part because while the police have kind of always had an us-and-them attitude (see Vecchio's remark "I'm beginning to understand why people hate cops" in "The Man Who Knew Too Little"), the real crybaby Thin Blue Line stuff didn't take off until they starting whining that Blue Lives Matter in response to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014.
Cumulative body count: 10
Red uniform: At the station when Vecchio is tapdancing for Welsh; at Smithbauer's hockey event, and therefore at the PR agent's office; at Smithbauer's presser; playing pond hockey later that evening