Letting Go
air date June 1, 1995
( Scene 1 )
Credits roll.
Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Daniel Kash
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier
(plus Lincoln the dog)
Melina Kanakaredes, Laurie Holden, Jennifer Dale, Frances Hyland, Gordon Pinsent as Fraser Sr.
Apparently 8.0 is a standard gauge trach tube for an adult man. This is a pretty good flashback/trauma sequence. I'd stack it up against The West Wing season 2 episode 1 "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen part 1." The West Wing one would probably win, but I think it'd be a fair fight.
All the guest credits are women! Except Pinsent, who's back to an "as" credit after two episodes in a row of "and/as".
( Scene 2 )
Poor Fraser; being in the hospital is a drag. It's hard to say how much time has passed since the shooting; Diefenbaker is well enough to have left the animal hospital and be no help to him now, but Fraser still has a bandage on his left hand where Jolly cut him.
( Scene 3 )
We never see the therapist. I feel like that reminds me of something.
T8 is pretty high up, about even with the bottom of the shoulderblades.
( Scene 4 )
Seems like if Fraser were concerned about prying, he could close the blinds, close his eyes, or lie on his other side, hm? (Time has been passing: Diefenbaker's bandages are gone, but the bandage on Fraser's left hand is still present.)
( Scene 5 )
Poor Fraser. He's still hung up on Victoria, and he's in the hospital where it's impossible to sleep restfully.
( Scene 6 )
This scene is so accurate. As much of a drag as it is being in the hospital, visiting people in there is also wretched. Literally no one can be comfortable, ever. However: This is a much less awkward hospital scene than in "Manhunt"—yay, I feel like they are growing.
I'm glad to note the implication that the investigators now agree there was such a person as Victoria. I suppose the fact that Welsh and Huey and Gardino saw her with their own eyes (and also she'd just shot up a train station) probably helped.
(The bandage is gone from Fraser's left hand now, so apparently the major passage of time happened between scenes 5 and 6.)
( Scene 7 )
This was a lot! At least two scenes in one, really, but there was no break in between them, so. First: Bob visits, and after he chides Ben for being soft, he is visited in turn by the ghost of his mother. (The ghost of the ghost of his mother?) Aside from the comedy value of this—the jammies she's bringing in have, like, sheriffs' stars and cowboy boots printed on them, adorable—I am interested by what it means about Fraser's subconscious. One argument could be (and has been by me!) made that the ghost of one's parent represents one's subconscious mind, so Grandmother visits Bob because he doesn't really believe Ben is showing weakness by still being in the hospital three weeks after being shot. BUT as we are reminded when Jill arrives, even Bob isn't really there. He represents Ben's subconscious mind, so his seeing his own mother's ghost—Ben's seeing Bob's seeing his own mother's ghost—is, what, Grandmother representing Ben's id? (She's bringing him warm pajamas. What else could she be? But she's inaccessible to him.) Bob tells him he's going soft, so that's Ben worrying on some level that he ought to be back up and at 'em by now and reminding himself out loud that he had massive nerve and muscle damage and was lucky to survive. And he's so right about that that when Grandmother comes along to tell Bob that Ben's going soft, Bob immediately defends him. (I haven't read a lot of Freud, but this is all making fantasy-TV sense to me right now.)
And then Jill Kennedy comes in, and she's an attractive woman who makes Fraser profoundly uncomfortable, although a little less so when he realizes that she's interested in him only as a patient. He still feels the need to be extra distant and clinical while she's looking at his body so diagnostically, which, fair enough, when you close up one distance it makes complete sense to open up another one. It's nice of her to give him the "cold hands" out the third or fourth time he flinches when she touches him; she might have gone with that sooner. He's still kind of touchy about the otter incident, apparently, and we don't know the stories of the broken leg (from jumping off a 57-foot cliff or the time before) or the tempered glass door (though that scar doesn't look like makeup and may be Paul Gross's own; they may just be using it the way they had River Phoenix cut himself with a bullwhip in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to explain the scar on Harrison Ford's chin). But mainly, he seems to have met his deductive match, and she's also interested in what's going on in the office across the way, so he's got another (besides Diefenbaker and Vecchio, I mean) buddy. That's cool.
Particular shout-out to
resonant, because here is nursing staff close enough that the patient can smell their shampoo, but it's okay this time. 😉
Do we think she's teasing him about appreciating the other aerobics instructor's "pectoral muscles" or sharing his appreciation? I could buy Jill liking women just as much as if not more than she likes men. What do others think?
The bullet wound on Fraser's back seems very well healed to me for only being three weeks old.
Oh and just so no one thinks I'm sleeping on this: Yes, if it wasn't clear beginning in scene 4, the arrival of the pretty blonde physical therapist—combining Grace Kelly with the nurse—cements the fact that we're actually in Rear Window here.
( Scene 8 )
Okay, so she gets back to business and the first thing she does is hurt him? I mean we don't see what she does, so maybe that would have hurt even if she wasn't in a slight snit about not having a gossip buddy. I prefer that to thinking she's like coercing him into joining her Rear Window speculations by withholding proper care until he does.
( Scene 9 )
Gossiping with your patient is not professional misconduct. Jill is keeping it totally professional here. I guess the fact that they're not talking about other patients probably does make it okay. (I mean this is before HIPAA, but even then, discussing other patients should have been off limits.)
( Scene 10 )
Jill sounds very much like she is teasing Fraser with that "see a good man go to waste" remark, so I'll let it pass rather than going OH FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE JILL KENNEDY. The dialogue seems to be working pretty hard to make Fraser think she's talking about Victoria rather than about the doctor in the office he can see through the rear window, but I suppose Victoria is enough on his mind that everything reminds him of her, so.
The song Bob is singing is "Rose Marie," which is from a 1924 operetta about a young woman who is in love with a miner rather than the city boy her brother wants her to marry (it's got a Mountie in it). There's also a 1936 film (apparently the best known of the three films by that title) with a completely different plot but some of the same songs and also a 1954 film of the original musical with an almost entirely new score, but the song "Rose Marie" is in both (all) of them; it was also a hit single in 1955 by Slim Whitman. So Bob could know it from either of those movies or from the radio, I suppose.
(Oh Rose, my Rose Marie
Oh sweet Rose Marie, it's easy to see
Why all who learn to know you, love you
You're gentle and kind, divinely designed
As graceful as the pines above you
There's an angel's breath beneath your sighs
There's a little devil in your eyes.)Oh Rose Marie, I love you
I'm always dreaming of you
No matter what I do, I can't forget you
Sometimes I wish that I never met you
And yet, if I should lose you
Would mean my very life to me
Of all the queens that ever lived, I choose you
To rule me, my Rose MarieThe movie version has both verses; Slim Whitman apparently only recorded the second. I've taken the time to go down this Rose Marie rabbit hole because having asked Uncle Google about the lyrics Bob was singing, I think the odds that someone said "Okay, Gordon, float in the pool and have a bit of a sing" approach zero, don't you? They picked exactly that song for him to sing for precisely the reason that Bob is Ben's subconscious and Ben can't stop thinking about Victoria. [flailhands] Even the silly bits of this show are right on point.
( Scene 11 )
So after this scene it's probably time to talk about Fraser and Vecchio's relationship, huh. I'ma cut this because it is Very Very Long.
( They have been best friends and bros )
And that's the Vecchio offering to come up north and help rebuild a cabin he did in fact hate in the few hours he spent there and to retrofit it with indoor plumbing. Is this a massive gesture of goodwill by someone who is consumed with guilt, or is it a massive gesture of she-didn't-really-love-you-but-I-do by someone who is trying to get his head around being in love with his best friend? What does he mean when he says "put Victoria behind us"—was she really between them? Or does he mean "put the gunshot wound behind us?" Whichever it is, of course the shattering snow globe in Fraser's flashback is also a thing. I mean he is slowly coming to terms with the fact that Victoria is gone (as she should be!). Look, the episode title is "Letting Go;" the shattering snow globe is not subtle.
( Scene 12 )
I don't . . . think I care much about the rear-window intrigue? It's the B plot, or it should be, based on the title and therefore the subject of the episode, but it gets a disproportionate amount of the air time. Anyway, Jill brings chili dogs (and burgers, it looks like, because what she tosses to Diefenbaker is a round package rather than oblong), which sounds delicious, but it is my understanding that Chicago Dogs have mustard, onions, relish, tomatoes, peppers, a pickle spear, and celery salt—but not chili. Chicagoans please advise.
( Scene 13 )
"Benny, not every woman with long dark hair tries to kill their lover" is so sad. It could be ridiculous, but it's not; they play it like this is something Fraser genuinely needs to have pointed out to him, and he really sits and thinks about it after Vecchio leaves. By that point, the fact that Vecchio has pointed out that Jill is very pretty seems entirely irrelevant, which I think it always has been. Like I'm with Fraser on that: Sure she is, but so what? And it looks like Vecchio got there too; at first he though okay, Fraser is going down this blackmail-is-happening-back-there path because he wants to keep hanging out with the attractive therapist, but once he realizes what's going on in Fraser's head, he pivots to the women-with-long-dark-hair-are-not-universally-dangerous angle. (It is also, of course, not a coincidence that Jill is blonde. For one thing, she's in the Grace Kelley role from Rear Window, but also, she's the anti-Victoria. Straight blonde hair rather than dark curls. She's healing him rather than his saving her. Add to the list as you like.)
( Scene 14 )
Is the fact that nothing at all is hinky about the gun and the permit somehow evidence that something is very wrong up over there? Although she took the gun out of her purse, not out of a box in her desk; could she have given her intern boyfriend a different gun?
( Scene 15 )
I didn't realize until now that Jill hasn't seen any of the Carter-and-the-man-making-out stuff and Fraser hasn't told her about it—he only told her about the drugs, and she saw the burning pictures and the money-and-gun stuff.
I don't know what to say about "I was going with her"/"I know." Have we not been sure whether Vecchio knew that? I guess it could have been that he thought Fraser was running to try to pull her off the train. I mean, maybe we could have thought that, too, because he did say he wasn't going to let her go again—only then he didn't shoot her to keep her from getting on the train as it departed; he only started running after she urged him to come with her. So I think we have to admit that we've known all along that Fraser meant to go with Victoria. But this is the first time Fraser has said so out loud (healing? progress?), and it's here that Vecchio confirms that he knew Fraser was skipping out on his bail and he's here still being his best friend anyway.
Does Fraser think Vecchio shot him because he was trying to go with Victoria? Does Vecchio think that's what Fraser thinks? We know, as I've said, that he fired because he believed she had a gun and was going to kill Fraser. So here in our world, Vecchio shot Fraser by accident and is wracked with guilt about it, and Fraser was going to skip bail (effectively stealing from Vecchio the price of a large row house, plus interest) on purpose and is . . . dealing with that. I guess he performs guilt differently than Vecchio does in a lot of ways.
On the line "I was going with her, you know," the camera focuses more sharply on Fraser than I think it has ever done in the whole show so far. I mean since the pilot. I don't know from lenses and whatnot, but while I don't think this is his closest closeup, there's a sharpness we haven't seen before. It actually begins a second or so earlier—there's some in-and-out focus stuff during Vecchio's line beginning "Hey, Benny"—but when it lands on him looking out the window (not looking at Vecchio to tell him he was going with Victoria, hell no, that's something you don't say if you're Benton Fraser unless your back is turned), the level of definition and detail is a little startling. (Did you know Paul Gross had pores?)
( Scene 16 )
Grandmother Id is pleased with how Fraser is doing—what, now that he's admitted to Vecchio that he was running away? I'm just so pleased for him that he's happy he got to see her.
( Scene 17 )
I don't know what phone Fraser was waving at Jill when he was over by the window, or why he couldn't answer that one rather than rolling back to the beside table, but that's probably not super important. They're all selling the tension nicely in this scene, particularly the way Fraser is absolutely out of his element not being able to do anything. Nice face work here—the stern glare at Jill, the big anxious eyes when shit's going down and all he can do is sit there.
( Scene 18 )
Well, so there's the tie-in. Fraser can relate to the experience of loving someone you shouldn't and loving them so hard that you're not yourself. I'll buy that. I'm not sure about his second point here—"you care so deeply that when he betrayed you . . . you tried to destroy yourself." I think when the intern betrayed Dr. Carter, she tried to destroy him, didn't she? I mean that would also have destroyed her, but I think it's a reach to say destroying herself was what she was trying to do. When Victoria betrayed Fraser—harder to say. Again, I'm not sure he tried to destroy himself, but he was certainly willing to destroy himself in the effort to stop her. (And then when he didn't stop her and she didn't kill him he looped right back around to loving her so hard he wasn't himself, and it took Vecchio's bullet to stop the cycle.) Unless . . . unless he knew Vecchio was about to shoot and he leaped onto the train anyway, or not even anyway but actually for that reason. Was his only initial complaint about how he got shot ("I should be with her") that he didn't die in Victoria's arms?
Proposition: Was Vecchio trying to destroy himself because Fraser had betrayed him?
( Scene 19 )
The dialogue at the beginning of this scene is suggestive enough for anyone to conclude that it doesn’t matter whether Fraser and Vecchio are in love, isn't it,
But the main thing is that between (a) telling Vecchio he had been going with Victoria and (b) seeing Dr. Carter (kill the photographer and!) completely lose her composure over the intern, Fraser's inner torment over the Victoria episode seems to have concluded. ❤️ (The title seems just to have been a reference to what happens in the episode and not a shout out to any other movie or TV title. Prosodically it's not unlike "Rear Window," but it's not enough like it to be echoing it deliberately. I think this title just is what it is.)
Cumulative body count: 13
Red uniform: Does not appear in this episode