return to Due South: season 1 episode 20 "Victoria's Secret, part 1"

DUE SOUTH
air date May 11, 1995

Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Daniel Kash | Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier | Ramona Milano
Melina Kanakaredes
Denis Forest
Shay Duffin
and Gordon Pinsent as Fraser Sr.

(plus Lincoln the dog)

( Scene 1 )

This is the same style of opening credits we had in the pilot movie, rather than a usual opening scene followed by same-same credit sequence. (And Gardino and Huey are sharing billing, as are Elaine and Francesca; plus Pinsent's credit is "and/as" as it was in the pilot but hasn't been since then.) Something is Up.

( Scene 2 )

We also don't normally get the episode title up front or in fact on the screen ever. 🤔

I'm frankly impressed that Fraser is carrying U.S. cash at all, though it turns out he doesn't have enough to redeem his neighbor's vacuum cleaner. (The question, of course, is why Fraser is paying to repair his neighbor's vacuum cleaner in the first place, although I stand by my position that he probably does better financially than many or most people in his neighborhood.) I'd say GET A CREDIT CARD, FRASER, but there's probably an even chance this repair place is a cash-only business. (I do think Vecchio is right that he could buy a new vacuum for $80. I don't know why, but I have a very clear memory of paying $100 for a vacuum in 1999, which I still have.)

( Scene 3 )

We haven't seen the brown uniform in a while, have we. (The last time I remember is when he's watching hockey with his upstairs neighbor in "The Blue Line," but I haven't been keeping track of every costume in every scene.) Also, there are a lot of extras with long, dark, curly hair in this scene. Nice attention to detail.

Apparently Vecchio, rather than his mother, owns the house.

( Scene 4 )

It's safe at this point to assume that this is the woman he was in love with once, right? They were trapped in a snowstorm for a day and a night and a day, and she recited a poem to keep them both from freezing to death, hence "Your words keep me alive," right? Who else could she possibly be?

In his memory or dream or whatever this is at the snowy atrium, he is glad to see her, and he seems to be surprised and sad that she's not glad to see him. I think I'd like it if the other people in the atrium didn't have snow on their hair or their shoulders—if they'd managed to have the snow effect on Fraser and on the woman (and on the floors around them if necessary) but not on the other people nearby. (I know it was doable at this point in film and TV history, because in a rainstorm at the end of Heart and Souls [1993], Robert Downey Jr., a living person, gets drenched while Kyra Sedgwick, a ghost, stays dry.)

( Scene 5 )

We do not see Mrs. Vecchio in this scene, but we do see Maria, Tony, Francesca, and two children who are too old to belong to Maria and Tony if they have only been married five or six years (a boy who seems to be about nine and a young teenage girl). The house has a winding central staircase that goes up at least three levels.

Francesca may not have established an ongoing relationship with Fraser, but I don't think it's out of line for her not to want him to see her Like This. That level of undress—cold cream, hair in rollers—is just for family, right?

( Scene 6 )

Vecchio's complicated feelings about his late bad dad continue. Meanwhile, Fraser is distracted, and Vecchio can tell. Is he preoccupied with the woman he thought he saw on the street?

( Scene 7 )

The actor who plays Fr. Behan was from Dublin, as we've seen. That's not at all the same accent as Belfast, but for North American audiences, never mind, I guess? Having him be Catholic and from Belfast and in his 60s in the mid-1990s is definitely a choice.

The timing of the music against the story is really nicely done here. It comes to a point of harmonic tension at "as the storm closed in around us," and then there's a resolution at "aware that I was dying" so that right as he says "And then I heard her voice" the next section begins with a high entry in the sopranos. As he says "the most beautiful voice," the choir sings "my beloved;" the fourth repeat of the full text ends as he says "we were alive," and after that the choir repeats "my heart's desire" three more times. The music ends at "I could just let her go." All in all, great work, sound editing team.

This is another monologue in which we can't really see Fraser's face clearly; he's on the other side of the confessional screen the whole time. (It's interesting to note the details he didn't include when he was telling Vecchio this story the first time. Doyle-wise, that may be because they hadn't written the whole bank-robbery angle yet; Watson-wise, it's like glacial ice cracking a tiny bit at a time and then, in the confessional, suddenly calving a huge iceberg all at once, isn't it.) There's a long push in, as there was when he had his back to the camera and was looking out the window, and by the end we can see his expression a little more clearly than we could then, but he's still obscured. (There are also a couple of cuts to reaction shots of Fr. Behan, which, as when Vecchio was talking about Marco Mitrani silently begging him for help, I think was a bad decision.) He is badly distressed. Is it because he did let her go or because he didn't? Given that in his imagination she was not pleased to see him and repeatedly asked him "Why?", it's clear that he did not.

How did he know she was up there in the first place? A light airplane was forced down because of weather and the pilot abandoned the passenger; I guess the local RCMP detachment would keep track of that sort of thing?

( Scene 8 )

The only woman he ever loved, he calls her, though he knew her for a week. I mean it was a solid week, it's not like he saw her a few times over the course of a week, the way you'd say you met someone a week or so ago; they were together around the clock for five or six days. It's orders of magnitude longer than Vecchio knew Suzanne Chapin, for one thing. But I'm not sure that's long enough to know you love someone. Like—I know people who have met people and fallen in love quickly and got married and stayed that way happily for a long time. I don't think it's completely unheard of to form a deep connection on a very short acquaintance. But these kids were delirious and half-dead with cold, at least until they gorged themselves on whatever he had in his pack when they found it the day after the storm broke. Presumably that's when she told him the story of her life, such as that she had been living with one of the men who planned the robbery (the one who died, or the one who fled south?)—I don't know, Fraser, it seems like you might be losing the plot just a bit. It makes me think a little less of your caution to Vecchio that he'd only known the mystery woman for a few seconds while he had a concussion, is all I'm saying.

Meanwhile, Bob says he's been dead for 14 months, and it's May 1995, which means he was shot in late February or early March 1994, which I really think doesn't make sense given what Chicago has been like and the length of time Fraser has been living here. He also says he was 57 when he died, which means he was born in . . . carry the one . . . around 1937, making him about five years younger than I thought, so I don't know, maybe the RCMP started issuing those watches in 1950 and were still doing so in 1956ish when he must have joined up? Because he sure didn't join the force at age 13. He has seven stars on the left sleeve of the uniform Fraser is seeing him in, which is apparently the uniform he was buried in. Fraser has two stars; Frobisher had six; and the show hasn't commented on them at all, but Uncles Google and Wiki tell us each star denotes five years of service, which is consistent with what we do know (that Fraser's been in for 13 years as of the pilot)—meaning Frobisher has been in for at least 30 years but not 35, if his rented uniform is accurate, and therefore we know Bob was in for at least 35 years but not 40. Which works out if he joined between 1954 and 1959. (Pinsent himself was born in 1930, so he was in his mid-60s at this point—closer to the age he was playing than Nielsen was by a few years.)

Bob writing his wife a speeding ticket from the passenger seat of the car is pretty diagnostic, isn't it? I love her for speeding up and daring him to do it. On the one hand, 45mph isn't that fast, but on the other hand, it's half again the speed limit, which is a big percentage to be going over. The whole episode would be additionally hilarious if they'd been talking about her doing 45kph in a 30kph zone (about 30mph and a little less than 19mph, respectively—basically hurrying through a school zone), but Canada didn't adopt the metric system until 1970, and we're pretty sure she had died before then.

Though while we're on the subject, how can Bob's ghost tell Fraser something he's never known before? I guess one of the first things they talked about when Bob first appeared was Uncle Tiberius, which was Bob answering a question Ben Fraser asked. But in general he seems to be a way for Fraser to puzzle out issues from more than one angle, doesn't he? He's in Fraser's mind. He can only know things Fraser knows (or has read in the journals, I guess, though he may not have internalized the information until it comes out when Bob is talking about it; or has repressed).

( Scene 9 )

So in case there was any doubt—look, I'm committed to only knowing what we learn from the show as we go—this is the titular Victoria. (And she has a secret, which I assume is not to do with her underwear; the title of the episode is slightly regrettable, isn't it.) We don't know what sort of old business she has in Chicago that needs finishing up. We know that bank robbery is always a federal crime, so she'll have been in a federal prison, of which there are none in Alaska—so the Alaska-and-Fortitude-Pass thing isn't the cold she wants to get away from; presumably the prison she was in was in a cold place also? There are federal women's prisons at Danbury, Connecticut, and Waseca, Minnesota (both low security); Pekin, Illinois (medium security, but that's downstate enough that it starts to look like upper south to me, which is a lot milder than north/Great Lakes/New England, climate-wise); and Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Seattle/Tacoma (all administrative security, which the website tells me means "institutions with special missions, such as the detention of pretrial offenders; the treatment of inmates with serious or chronic medical problems; or the containment of extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates"—such as, perhaps, one who had fled across an international boundary? I'm spitballing here).

It's not reasonable of Fraser to figure he owes her anything, but we've already seen that he's not reasonable where she's concerned—not just that he loved her after only knowing her for a few days (and still loves her however much later this is; assuming her friends stole more than $1000 but she didn't go in and rob the place herself, I think she'll have been sentenced to up to 10 years, same as William Porter), but literally, just so far in this episode, the way when he thinks he sees her he drops everything and runs into traffic. He is not rational about her.

They do make a very nice-looking couple.

( Scene 10 )

He is wearing the same blue henley and blue buffalo check flannel he was wearing at choir practice. I like that they're reusing outfits; this is a guy who wouldn't have a super full closet. Nice work, wardrobe department. As for being prepared for "not quite everything"—🤨—and save me from people with a candle fetish—please let's not go there again.

What are ground beans? I must have listened to that moment fifteen times, and that's definitely what she says. I want it to be "ground beef" or "green beans," but it is neither. Today I'd assume "ground beans" was some kind of beanmeal or grain-free flour substitute, but I'm not sure Fraser would have such a thing in his kitchen in 1995? (What he would have in his kitchen in 1995 is skills, though. I dispute the suggestion that he is incompetent to even stir a pot without it boiling over and causing a kitchen disaster. Guy's been living on his own for a long time, and both he and the dog are well nourished. That particular moment is gender-stereotyping bullshit.)

( Scene 11 )

In North by Northwest (1959), Cary Grant inadvertently gets mixed up in a lot of international intrigue and is fleeing from the bad guys and the police when Eva Marie Saint agrees to help him—but she is double crossing him, because she's in league with the bad guys, only she's also double crossing the bad guys, because she's actually a government agent. Once he knows this, he helps her with her operation, and when the bad guys realize she's double crossing them, he helps save her. The film ends with them on their honeymoon on a train. It seems to be the first double cross, where EMS appears to be in league with the bad guys, that Fraser and Victoria are referring to.

Trivially, we now also know that Mr. Mustafi is using Fraser to get all his stuff repaired. Hrmph, Mr. Mustafi.

( Scene 12 )

I can't follow all the genetics in the question of how the earliest Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been suggested (determined?) to be genetically linked to peoples of east and north Asia, but I guess I don't see why some folk couldn't have gone from mainland China to Taiwan at the same time (very broadly speaking) some other folk went from mainland China through Russia to Alaska. Of course the point of this is that the guy selling soap learned some stuff in school about land bridges, and Fraser is giving him an A for effort, basically.

( Scene 13 )

It's so important that she's the one who initiates the kissing, because the last thing she said before that was "No."

The kissing is pretty good. They're in silhouette a lot of the time, but they sell the mutual desire all the same. And then when she wakes up next to him, her makeup is absolutely undisturbed. Ah, well—we're not actually after stark realism, are we? At least she is no longer wearing those giant hoop earrings. . . . I don't know from where she gets the red shirt she puts on. It seems to just be there next to the bed, but it wasn't what he was wearing before they went to bed, and he doesn't seem like a clothes-just-lying-around-on-the-floor kind of guy. (And it's just a red chamois or flannel overshirt, not his red uniform tunic—which would also not be lying on the floor next to the bed, in any case.)

I personally would wash the dishes and then clean the counters and sink and whatnot, because drips.

( Scene 14 )

Hey, looks like someone installed those new door locks, finally.

It's hard to know what time it is, but it's still morning, so Fraser hasn't even missed half a day of work, and Vecchio is already doing a wellness check because no one can fathom that he might miss work for any other reason. Which is sweet of Vecchio and kind of appalling about Fraser, really. Although in further fairness to Vecchio, when Fraser answers the door he continues (that is, after not turning up at work that morning, which is Not At All Like Him) to seem Not At All Himself. I point out these fairnesses to Vecchio because I'm not sure it's being a great friend to be so surprised that your friend had a date. I mean I guess what Vecchio is surprised about is not that Fraser could bring a woman home with him—he's been fighting them off since he and Vecchio met—but that he did (and that, he assumes, it is not Francesca). Benny is human after all, film at eleven.

Fraser (that is, Paul Gross) has a smallpox vaccine scar on his left arm, which just sends me off on a tangent that goes straight into the Sports Night scene where Isaac points out that he has a smallpox scar and Casey (or Dan, I can't remember which one right now) doesn't, because in his lifetime the thing was utterly eradicated. (I can't find it now and I've just spent longer than I'm happy about looking; I thought it was the same scene where he talks about how he's obsessing over whatever the next big thing is because he knows he won't be alive to see it, but it turns out that's a conversation with Dana about how they're terraforming Mars. Anyway, RIP Robert Guillaume. Loved him.)

Also, in this scene Fraser may be wearing even more mascara than Victoria. I mean I'm not saying they don't both look good, but the makeup team may have gone just a little overboard at this particular moment.

( Scene 15 )

The hat thing is charming. The sergeant on the phone looks to me to be the station chief from scene 2 of the pilot, which doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense as (a) there was a sergeant under him at that time and (b) that station was two thousand miles to the northwest of Bob's cabin, but maybe the guy got demoted and transferred, who knows. The flower in the box is almost invisible to me. It's fairly clearly a long-stemmed rose, but it doesn't seem to be red. Is it purple? Blue? Black? What's going on here?

( Scene 16 )

I feel like Fraser having a Canadian girlfriend is less of a thing to nod knowingly at than usual, being how he is himself Canadian.

( Scene 17 )

Vecchio is only being a little bit pissier than I think is called for here. He'd made it pretty clear that Friday night was a special thing that he was looking forward to, and he wanted his buddies together; completely forgetting about it was fairly shitty on Fraser's part, and the fact that he didn't pay him back the money he'd borrowed is really only a tiny symptom of that. Like I don't think Vecchio couldn't afford a pizza and a deli platter. It's just that he didn't get cash out for it because he was sure it was coming, so by the time it was time to get them, he didn't have it on hand. So he was slightly embarrassed because he had to offer his boss jarred capers as a snack, more embarrassed because in fact the pool table doesn't fit in the room and is not in as great shape as he thought, and ultimately annoyed that his party sucked and his best friend didn't even show (and didn't even let him know he wasn't going to show!) because he got a better offer.

That is lousy best-friending from Fraser right there (and it's not great boyfriending either—you do not bring your best friend in to meet the woman who is sleeping naked in your bed at four in the morning, Benton), and the only thing that saves him is that he realizes it.

( Scene 18 )

You do not. Fuck. With. The wolf.

( Scene 19 )

[snif] (I guess we should be glad he survived, although this doesn't seem like a show that kills one of its leads, even if the lead we're talking about is a dog. Nevertheless: [snif])

One of the other transcript sites, which I check against sometimes to see if they have thoughts about things I maybe can't hear clearly, has a few more lines here:

VECCHIO: I put out a description. She might have gone to a police station.
FRASER: She wouldn't.
VECCHIO: I got them checking the hospitals too.
FRASER: Oh - I called.
VECCHIO: You have any idea who might have done this? She's okay. She's okay. ("Victoria's Secret 1-2" at nicede.se)

It would make sense to have something like this between the animal hospital and the next scene! But this dialogue absolutely does not occur anywhere on either of my DVDs (the allegedly complete first season which lacks the pilot; the complete season 1 with the pilot which lacks any subtitles or extra features of any kind) or in the full episode on YouTube. Is it on the UK DVD?

( Scene 20 )

I really want to believe that he's mad that she left his apartment because Diefenbaker was shot—oof, bracketing difficulties—I mean, I want to believe that the fact that Diefenbaker was shot is the reason he is angry that she left his apartment, not that he thinks she left his apartment because Diefenbaker was shot and he's mad about that—but the way he's been acting in this episode, I think he may be madder that she left than he is that Diefenbaker was shot, and I'm not feeling great about that.

I assume Jolly is the smoking man across the street; I'd assume he was the bank robber who fled south, but so he's out now—out of what? I guess he fled south but didn't get far?

( Scene 21 )

Why are they at the zoo?

I feel like when she has just said "I don't know why he's doing this," it's a little tone deaf of Fraser to ask "What does he want from you?" Obviously he goes on to be clear that he thinks she's not telling him everything, but I think he could have skipped to that rather than detour through asking a question she has literally just answered with her previous line.

So Jolly is in fact the other surviving bank robber, and apparently the three of them hid their takings before they ran (or the two of them did after the third one died).

Meanwhile, here's the world we're living in now, in 2022: I'm having the hardest time thinking of "over half a million dollars" (so $500–750k, probably, or she'd have said something like "almost a million dollars") as an impressively large amount of money. I don't mean it's not a lot of money. Of course it is. But for the fuss that Victoria and Jolly are apparently making, I'd be expecting seven figures at least. Assuming they meant to split it evenly (assuming none of them meant to double-cross the others), they'd each be ending up with maybe as little as $170k. At that time you could buy a house for that much even in the major cities, but even then, even in a less urban environment, it wouldn't have gone a lot further than that, would it? Sigh. I can't tell whether I'm sadder about how I'm living pretty comfortably during this world-burning era of late-stage capitalism (In 1995, the Waltons were the richest people in the world, and their net worth was $23.5 billion. Bill Gates was in second place at $12.9. The ten biggest fortunes in the world would have added up to 101.4 billion, which today would just squeak in at #9. Figure Victoria and her friends stole their half-mil some years before 1995, and yes, that was a lot more money then than it is now.) or that 1995 was such a long time ago.

Anyway, Skagway, Alaska, is in the northern panhandle, right on the border with British Columbia.

( Scene 22 )

Vecchio seems completely sincere when he says "hurt him and I'll kill you," and yet he says it in exactly the same tone in which he goes on to say "that's my room across the hall." It is clear to me that he means it literally, in contrast to Francesca's threat earlier in the episode to kill him if Fraser saw her with her hair in rollers. I think he still doesn't know Victoria's backstory—even if he was only pretending to be asleep when Fraser first mentioned her, as I noted, the bank robbery wasn't part of the story Fraser told at that time, and Fraser hasn't talked about that in this episode except with the priest and his father's ghost—but Vecchio knows that Victoria makes Fraser behave Not Like Himself. He was happy for him the first morning, but once it turned out Fraser was serious enough about her to forget him, he went from bro to big brother in a hurry, didn't he.

( Scene 23 )

I don't know how many times I've seen this episode, and this is the first time it has occurred to me that although Fraser spent just those few days with Victoria in the first instance, it probably didn't end the hot minute he turned her in. If she got a lighter sentence for testifying against Jolly (who we can now confirm didn't get far after he fled south, and who'd have been eligible for the death penalty on account of he killed someone in the course of the robbery), she probably took a plea rather than going to trial herself, but while Fraser could know that because he asked someone or read about it somewhere, isn't it equally possible he was there and attended Jolly's trial, particularly when Victoria testified? Being all supportive, which she will not have wanted? Shit, he probably worked to arrange the plea deal with her testimony rather than just letting her walk in the first place. File that under "half a loaf," eh?

( Scene 24 )

You live with your mother, Vecchio; I'm not sure you can throw stones at this guy.

Do Canadian cigarettes smell different than American cigarettes, or is this just Fraser's magical senses? Also, why would Jolly—who robbed a bank in Alaska and then fled south and then went to trial and will have escaped from a federal prison—be smoking Canadian cigarettes? Why is that a thing?

( Scene 25 )

( Scene 26 )

I don't know why they didn't just kick the door down—they've obviously done it before—but I guess they do need the excuse to dump out the trash in the shower and find the cigarette box, although they could have just bashed their way in and rooted around in the trash can, couldn't they?

I also don't know why the zoo. I mean at this point I guess it's because they went there before and it's a familiar place for her to meet him. But I still don't know why they went there before. "What the fuck, my wolf has been shot and you just split?" "Jolly's out!" "Okay let's go to the zoo." ???

( Scene 27 )

The license plate on Jolly's car is RCW 139. That's obviously the real mystery running through this whole series.

( Scene 28 )

Hard to say whether it was Ed or Jolly she was living with before the robbery. Anyway, her knife is just little; she stabs him with it, but it's a scratch. He is easily able to regroup and follow her.

( Scene 29 )

I love how even though he doesn't like Victoria at all, Vecchio is right here with Fraser trying to keep her safe.

( Scene 30 )

What are those adobe things in the zoo, and what are they for? The animals don't normally climb them, because they're out in the human pathways. Anyway, I don't know if it's Fraser's ass or the stunt man's ass that the camera focuses on as he's climbing, but that's sure a moment of ass-cam, all right.

Victoria looks very different with her hair not framing her face in the held-over-the-waterfall bit.

( Scene 31 )

Buh buh buh bzuh?

She didn't seem scared at all just now. She seemed to be completely in control of the situation, in fact. And she just shot Jolly with the same gun that was used to shoot Diefenbaker. It had a distinctive sight on its nose; this is clearly the same gun. She just shot Jolly with the same gun that was used to shoot Diefenbaker.

Luckily, I suppose, for viewers, the second part aired immediately after the first part rather than a week later.

Cumulative body count: 12
Red uniform: Bringing the pool table up from the basement (without jacket), in the confessional, at lunch and the rest of that day but not that evening, at work the next day

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