return to Due South: season 2 episode 1 "North"

North
air date November 9, 1995

( Scene 1 )

So Fraser and Vecchio are off on their summer vacation. (Gross and Marciano have evidently already had theirs; it sure looks like they've both had some sun, and Vecchio has also cut his hair in that way that guys who are losing their hair tend to just buzz most of it quite short. Looks good. Fraser's hair has grown out a bit; it's a little fluffier than it was in season 1.) Off up to who-knows-where to rebuild Bob Fraser's cabin, and Vecchio is having some buyer's remorse? Or felt like the offer was made as a gesture and didn't expect Fraser to actually take him up on it? (It's not a deathbed confession, of course. What was he actually going for? Dying declaration?)

( Scene 2 )

The prisoner and the officer are supposed to be flying somewhere at 11. I can't make out where. Packenham Ops? Pekinamomsett? I got nothing, and the fact that the officer is OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) isn't really any help. He needs someplace for the prisoner to chill until his flight at 11 and he thought maybe Jack would let him just hang out in one of the planes? Couldn't keep him in the car? The cop wasn't going to go somewhere else and leave the prisoner unsupervised, was he?

( Scene 3 )

Uh-oh, our heroes are in a certain amount of peril.

Heading 298, as I understand it, means flying at a direction of 298 degrees from your starting point, that is, a little north of west-northwest (or a little west of northwest by west; about halfway between those compass points, in fact). Figuring a plane that size has a range of about 800 miles, and knowing they're starting from Ontario, (a) they're already well far north in Ontario to begin with and (b) they're not going to get very far into the Territories on this flight, are they? (Recall that what's marked as Nunavut was still NWT until 1999.)

(Those are straight lines and this is a conic projection map, so the heading isn't perfect and thanks for being cool.) I split the difference between the north-south borders of BC/Alberta and Alberta/Saskatchewan, called that "vertical," and made the 800-mile plane routes 62 degrees west from there.) That lake they could be landing near the eastern tip of is the Great Slave Lake, with Yellowknife, the capital of NWT, on its northern shore. Could be a transfer point. Of course I have no idea where their final destination is, because as we've seen, Bob Fraser's cabin exists in some other dimension where it is both in the Yukon and two thousand miles southeast of a point that is still in Canada, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯

( Scene 4 )

Four hours at the average 140 mph that sort of plane apparently pulls would make their distance more like 560 miles than 800.

( Scene 5 )

There's a noticeable difference—at least I noticed one—between (a) the way Fraser says "It's a moot point, Ray. He has a gun, we don't" in a calculated way to get Vecchio to admit he does have a gun with him and (b) the way he talks about learning to fly a Sopwith Camel by reading most of a flight manual at the library and figuring that theoretical knowledge will transfer to practical abilities in the cockpit of a modern light airplane with absolute sincerity. It's sometimes hard for us to tell when he's (doing passive aggression and when he really means "no, you go ahead, I'll get this" sincerely, which I can't put my finger on an example of right now) doing deadpan irony, because his deadpan is so dry (until he makes himself laugh so hard he cries) and because some of the things he's serious about are so ridiculous, but I think this scene shows how the distinction is visible to the naked eye.

I'm guessing there are a lot of similarities between a Sopwith Camel and a Cessna or whatever that is, but maybe not as many as Fraser suspects. He doesn't say how old he was when he read this incomplete flight manual in his grandmother's library, but he sure does seem to be sincere in his assumption that it will have taught him what he needs to know. For example, that a plane that size isn't going to take them from Canada to Lebanon.

Vecchio's "Beirut" comment feels like a relic now, but it might not have been yet in 1995. (In fact I have a pretty clear memory from September 11, 2001, of a reporter calling back to the studio from the financial district and saying "It's like Beirut down here, Peter.") TWA 847 was supposed to fly from Cairo to San Diego via Athens, Rome, Boston, and Los Angeles but on June 14, 1985, had only made the first leg when it was hijacked (apparently by Hezbollah operatives) and flown to Beirut, Algiers, Beirut, Algiers, and Beirut over the next three days with the hostage passengers released in dribs and drabs (except one member of the U.S. Navy who was killed). The specter of ~Islamic Jihadi hijackers~ hung over international air travel in the late 80s and early 90s, almost certainly out of proportion with the actual level of risk, but it was the Reagan administration, Lebanon was in a civil war from 1975 to 1990, Iran and Iraq were at war from 1980 to 1988, and what can you do. By 1995, what seemed like a sort of rash of middle east–related hijackings had dried up, but I can see it still being on Vecchio's mind when the plane he's on is literally being hijacked, so fair enough. (Is it possible that he's also thinking of the Ryan delegation's disastrous visit to Jonestown in 1978?)

With an 800-mile range, they're not going to make it to Mexico, either, of course. From the southernmost blue starting point in that first image above, if they went bang south for 800 miles it looks to me like they might reach . . . well . . . Chicago.

Credits roll.

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

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Red Green, David Calderisi, Gordon Pinsent as Fraser Sr.

Red Green is a pretty good bit of stunt casting, don't you think? The opening credits have a couple of new clips in them.

( Scene 6 )

Well, I'm glad Diefenbaker was unaffected by the plane crash. Buddy wasn't belted in at all. (The ELT is the emergency location transmitter.)

I'm no arborist; it looks like the white ash has ridged bark on the trunk, but I guess it could have that smoother bark on the branches such as the one Fraser hit his head on. Uncle Wiki says this is the natural range of F. Americana, which of course makes me continue to wonder where the hell this plane came down, because the northern edge of that range isn't really very far outside civilization at all, is it (and it's more than a two-hour Cessna flight from wherever the hell Red Green's airport was).

Traumatic optic neuropathy is apparently rare, but it's a real thing, so Fraser's banging his head hard enough in that plane crash to lose his vision isn't completely out of left field. Seems like he probably wouldn't be up and about so soon afterward, though, stiff-upper-lip upbringing ("no point in making a bad situation worse") or otherwise.

( Scene 7 )

At this point you're just notifying the family that this situation is ongoing, right? We're still at search and rescue, not search and recovery, right?

( Scene 8 )

"Westward ho" is what Thames boatmen called to let passengers know they were pulling out and heading west along the river; it's what Viola-as-Cesario says when she wants to get away from Olivia in Twelfth Night; it's the title of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play satirizing contemporary London society; it's the title of a 19th-century novel about Elizabethan explorers colonizing South America, which was made into a silent film in 1919. But probably Vecchio is referring to the 1935 Western with John Wayne and conflating it with The Searchers, a later picture in which John Wayne's character is named Ethan Edwards but nobody ever (that I can tell) says "westward ho". (I assume he is not referring to Ethan Edwards aka Moral Man, the Marvel Comics superhero, but I guess that would work too, so.)

( Scene 9 )

I don't think "wise men walk while fools sleep" is a real proverb. "The Cremation of Sam McGee," on the other hand, is a real poem by Robert W. Service, which Uncle Wiki says is "a stable of campfire storytelling" and has been widely read in Canadian elementary schools since the mid-1980s (inevitably reminding me of the scene in the stage version, at least, of Tom Sawyer where Ben Rogers tries to recite "The Wreck of the Hesperus" and just can't do it—"It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the windy sea. Blue were her eyes as the."—and also of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", though it probably doesn't deserve the latter and it's just the meter that has Coleridge in my head). It begins and ends:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales ⁠
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, ⁠
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge ⁠
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠ I cremated Sam McGee.

And it tells the tale of how Sam knows he's going to die and asks the narrator to cremate his remains, which the narrator finally does, and goes away rather than watch, but when he comes back to be sure the job is done, he sees Sam's ghost enjoying the warmth of the fire.

"The Shooting of Dan McGrew" is a different Service poem from the same volume (The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses), in which Dan and a piano-playing stranger shoot each other dead in a tavern apparently over the attention of Dan's (and maybe formerly the stranger's) girlfriend Lou.

( Scene 10 )

I agree there's a difference between being lost and not knowing where you are. Also, Fraser's pratfalls are pretty funny, but Vecchio was right that they should have stayed with the plane in the first place.

( Scene 11 )

I don't guess Vecchio would be desperate enough to eat bugs until, what, the third or fourth day? Maybe longer. (Rule of threes, right? You can survive three minutes without oxygen, three hours without shelter, three days without water, three weeks without food?)

( Scene 12 )

Fraser is being quite Katherine Burns–like here, is he not? And it doesn't suit him.

Given my firm conviction that Bob Fraser is Ben Fraser's subconscious, the whole motto disagreement is pretty interesting; is Fraser not confident that the real motto is the right one? (It is in fact "maintiens le droit," because mottoes are often French, aren't they, but sure, "Maintain the Right," "Uphold the Law," "This is the Way," whatever.) Also, the coueurs des bois were unlicensed French Canadian fur traders in the 17th and early 18th centuries, so it's unlikely (isn't it?) that the hijacker will have killed a whole canoe full of them today? (The "Circle" Bob mentions is the Arctic Circle, of course.) But the only really important question to come out of this scene is this:

WHO IS STEVE?

( Scene 13 )

Calderisi is (a) Canadian ("aboat," wow) and (b) well cast as Marciano's father, I think. I like how Vecchio is acknowledging that he has subconscious ideas but doesn't like them. I don't know if Bob Fraser is the angel on Ben Fraser's shoulder, but this dude is definitely the devil on Vecchio's.

( Scene 14 )

Nice to know even the laws of nature magically arrange themselves for Fraser's benefit.

( Scene 15 )

♫ Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight
Someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight
. . .
And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star
And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big skyyy . . . ♫

Look, I was precisely the target audience for Spielberg's An American Tail, and that song got in my head at a formative time in my life and will probably never get out.

( Scene 16 )

I can't get over this dog.

Nice performance here showing us that Vecchio is feeling queasy for reasons that have nothing to do with having just eaten worms.

( Scene 17 )

I'm not sure I understand "Why didn't you say something?". Fraser did say something. He said "Listen. A search plane." Does Vecchio mean Fraser should have said something like "He'll be flying in a grid pattern, so be sure to shoot as many flares as you can because if he doesn't see you now he won't come back" while he, Vecchio, was putting the flare into the gun? It's not like there was a ton of time.

A head injury isn't likely to cause temporary paralysis in the legs without affecting the upper body, I don't think, but sitting all night on that pilot's chair could have compressed something that Fraser isn't sufficiently hydrated to decompress right now. I happen to think it's also possible that this injury could be partly psychosomatic—Bob or some other part of his subconscious doesn't want him going after this hijacker, so it's trying to stop him every way it can.

( Scene 18 )

"Are you ill," Fraser asks his own subconscious, because he is in fact starting to lose it. His face is looking pale; nice work by the makeup team either before when it looked like he had a bit of a tan or now when it looks like he doesn't—one of those complexions was put on him with a sponge.

But let's all take a moment and boggle at Marciano, shall we? It's not that Gross is that big of a guy, but he's bigger than Marciano is, and remember how hard it looked like Fraser was working when he carried Vecchio up out of the lake last year? Now it's not like Vecchio is making this look easy, but if that's a dummy, it's a very realistic one; I think he's actually hauling the dude on his shoulder. Stronger than he looks.

And no matter what he says, Vecchio wouldn't leave Fraser and carry on without him, of course. (Frobisher didn't leave Bob, either.)

( Scene 19 )

I can't really tell what this is a map of. A flight plan of some sort, but what land it covers is not obvious to me.

( Scene 20 )

I'm told by the internets that in Neapolitan, pasta e fagioli is in fact pasta e fasule, which is why it's called "pasta fazool" in the United States. Bannock is a wheat- or oat-based skillet biscuit that I can well believe Fraser's grandmother would have overbaked.

This scene is notable for being the beginning of the ass-cam portion of the episode.

( Scene 21 )

I mean, if Fraser is ≥10% dehydrated, he's going to be lethargic or even unconscious, and just drinking some water isn't going to solve it—by that point he won't be telling Vecchio about his symptoms and he'll need IV fluids. But sure.

( Scene 22 )

I'm breaking here so we can talk about (a) the continued ass-cam (there's not actually a lot to say about that; there it is!); (b) the fact that Vecchio does a little dance move with Fraser on his shoulder, holy crap; and (c) the songs.

"I Can't Get Offa My Horse" is from 1947, and Fraser sings its refrain more or less accurately:

I always thought that I would be a cowboy
A-ridin' and a-ropin' where the winds are free
But now I wish that I was not a cowboy
'Cause look what's gone and happened to me.

REFRAIN: Oh, I can't get offa my horse
All day and night I ride among the cattle
I can't get offa my horse
'Cause some dirty dog put glue on the saddle
On the saddle! On the saddle!
Some no good ornery, low down, sneakin', thievin'
Cussin', cattle rustlin', dirty dog
Put glue on the saddle.

Some day they'll bury me out on the prairie
Out there among the sage brush where the skies are blue
But when they dig a hole for me to rest in
They better dig it big enough for two

(refrain)

"California Dreamin'" is from 1965, and the leaves are brown and the sky is grey, but other than that they haven't got it:

All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
I'd be safe and warm (I'd be safe and warm)
If I was in L.A. (if I was in L.A.)

REFRAIN: California dreamin' (California dreamin')
On such a winter's day

Stopped into a church
I passed along the way
Well, I got down on my knees (got down on my knees)
And I pretend to pray (I pretend to pray)
You know the preacher like the cold (preacher like the cold)
He knows I'm gonna stay (knows I'm gonna stay)

(refrain)

All the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown)
And the sky is gray (and the sky is gray)
I've been for a walk (I've been for a walk)
On a winter's day (on a winter's day)
If I didn't tell her (if I didn't tell her)
I could leave today (I could leave today)

(refrain x∞)

(I always thought it was "I began to pray," but the entire Google says otherwise. TIL.)

The text of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is "An die Freude" by Friedrich Schiller, and Fraser has snippets of its first stanza (but his accent is . . . not good):

Freude, schöner Götterfunken
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder,
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

(Joy, beautiful spark of divinity, daughter of Elysium, we enter your sanctuary fire-drunk, heavenly being! Your magic binds together what custom has sternly divided; all people shall become brothers, wherever your soft wings hover.)

In 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a Ninth in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall in which every use of Freude, "joy", was replaced with Freiheit, "freedom." Fraser will have known that, but I bet he's too traditional to sing it that way himself except in moments of special fervor.

( Scene 23 )

I'm a little bit hrmph about Bob Fraser and Mr. Vecchio interacting with each other, but I'll survive; I'm very pleased about both Ben Fraser and Ray Vecchio telling their subconscious minds to put a sock in it because their friendship is the most important thing here. (It's pretty huge for Fraser to agree that not abandoning his friend is more important than bringing in a criminal. It's totally huge for Vecchio to tell his father to his face that he doesn't care about trying to impress him anymore. "What it doesn't make me is you." YEAH YOU TELL HIM, RAY.)

( Scene 24 )

Vecchio's knee wasn't anywhere near Fraser's lower lumbar, but whatever.

( Scene 25 )

It's like Huck Finn up in here all of a sudden. (Where did they get a hatchet?)

( Scene 26 )

TURNS HIS BACK ON HIM. Attaboy, Ray.

( Scene 27 )

Bob has been in wilderness gear including snowshoes up until now (although it's late summer), but now he appears in his red uniform.

Vecchio's story sounds typical of his father's parenting, but I don't know why he feels the need to tell it to Fraser. I mean, yes, he had been talking about how he'd been camping with his dad, but the fact that he didn't doesn't seem super relevant to his relationship with Fraser, does it?

( Scene 28 )

So I . . . guess they get home okay? From wherever they are? Which is in the north country (hence the episode title; there was a film called North in 1994, the story of a kid who decides to divorce his parents and pick new ones, about which the late, great Roger Ebert famously wrote "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it.", so the fact that the title echoes a film title is just a convenience if anything), but south of where they meant to be? And Bob's cabin stays un–fixed up, because they never got within some number of hundreds of miles of the place? Wherever it is? But they have completed the healing process begun in "Letting Go," apparently, so all of season 1 is well and truly behind us? Them?

Cumulative body count: 16
Red uniform: Does not appear in this episode

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