return to Due South: season 2 episode 6 "Mask"

Mask
air date January 19, 1996

( Scene 1 )

There really was an Anglican priest named Duncan who was sent to convert the Tsimshian, but according to this Wikipedia article he was booted from the Church Missionary Service in 1881 for being too controlling of his flock. He might well have appropriated religious relics, as was indeed the custom at the time; I expect it's a vaguely good thing that he sold the objects (which did not belong to him) to museums rather than destroying them. Here's Wikipedia on repatriation of cultural property (specifically focusing on settler-colonial plundering of Indigenous communities) and on this topic in Canada. Why these particular masks that were stolen from the Tsimshian by an Anglican priest in a pre-Canadian colony and sold to Canada and France are being reunited and displayed in a museum in Chicago is anybody's guess, but for once it does make sense that Fraser should be involved in the security and anti-theft efforts here, as this does seem to be up the Liaison Office's street.

( Scene 2 )

Okay so, Mr. Robinson the Curator, the Mounties are also police, you know that, right? I guess he's thinking of them as Canadians first and police second, but dude. Anyway the main purpose of this scene is for Thatcher, who apparently did some posing as a student in Paris that she now regrets (!), to hurl herself at the curator and for him to hurl himself back. At this point in Fraser's career, after Francesca and after Katherine Burns and after Victoria, for heaven's sake, how does he still not understand what a woman signaling her availability to a man looks like? "For what?" Please.

( Scene 3 )

Okay so Fraser knows this guy, apparently? HUH.

Credits roll.

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

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Camilla Scott, Lee Purcell, Rodney A. Grant, Denise Virieux, Nathaniel Arcand, Deborah Tennant, Lindsay Merrithew, Chris Earle

( Scene 4 )

That's a pretty quick back-track from Fraser, from "I think I knew him" to "I don't know what I saw." Also a pretty big overgeneralization from Vecchio, from "I've never seen you fall" to "Mounties don't fall," eh? Especially given that one week ago it was Vecchio himself who saved Fraser from falling? Grand jeté is a ballet term (meaning "leap"), so how the hell is Vecchio using it in conversation?

The young person who got stuck at the end of the nonfunctioning winch is not an art thief but an Indigenous youth, making this a complicated situation, no?, because on the one hand, you can't go stealing things, but on the other hand, that's what the white man did who took the masks in the first place, so what, from what I presume is that young man's point of view, the fuck?

( Scene 5 )

Thanks to several degrees in linguistics and the miracle of the internet, I found that the Tsimshian (better: Sm'álgyax) for water is aks and then I shook this website until it coughed up Gooyu hasa̱g̱n dm aksn? What do you want to drink?—and/so it looks like dm is a near-future particle; goo is what, and hasa̱x is want, and I can't possibly conjugate that verb based on what I can find on this internet; I'm going to conclude that -n is an infinitive suffix of some kind. I also find, miraculously, Dm xdiini? Would you have tea? in an entry telling me that dii is tea and xdii is have tea with, eat with, so it seems ni is an interrogative particle. With all that, it sounds to me like Fraser says something like "dm aksni?", which seems to in fact mean something like "Are you thirsty?"

Anyway, Nakina is in Northern Ontario (remember that that doesn't mean what "northern Ontario" would mean), but there's evidently also a Nakina River in northwestern British Columbia.

So, look, the kid can be from wherever he wants (and the Tsimshian can live wherever they want), and I am not Indigenous nor an expert on anything to do with Indigenous peoples, but according to my inexpert research the Tsimshian are historically a people of the Pacific Northwest (mostly northern British Columbia and coastal Alaska), which makes sense with Fraser's Yukon-and-western-NWT background; Nakina, Ontario, was amalgamated in 2001 into Greenstone, which is the administrative center for the band government of an Ojibwe First Nation, a whole other Indigenous people. But there isn't a community called Nakina anywhere near the Nakina River, as far as I can tell. I fear we are once again in Fictitious Canada when it comes to these people and their artifacts. (I'll buy the masks as Tsimshian basalt carvings, though. Here's a real-life Tsimshian stone figure in a maul or hammer head, so it's not as if the northwestern coastal peoples only decorated cedar bark and salmon skin.)

I'm extremely disappointed in Vecchio for "Some form of secret Canadian that you only speak to one another," as if he's never heard of other languages before. This is a level of bad writing we haven't seen since "Now we got two people noticing?" and I don't want to be as mad at this episode as I was at that one. I particularly don't want the episodes with the worst and clunkiest writing and the dumbest attitudes from our heroes to be the only ones that deal with issues of specific importance to people of color. (Not totally fair, because "Chinatown," but Vecchio wasn't exactly a polyglot rockstar in that one either, was he.) Let's clear this right up pronto, This Episode, shall we?

( Scene 6 )

You see, we knew Vecchio had heard of other language before, so I don't know what the fuck was up with his snark about Fraser busting out a couple of words of Sm'álgyax. Right away I don't like this French woman very much; when she says "makes sense" I'm sure she means it makes sense that an Indigenous Canadian might be motivated to recover the masks from settler governments, but it sounds like she also could mean it makes sense that someone stealing things would turn out to be brown, and that's gross. (Also, based on the way Fraser described it, it doesn't sound like the Tsimshian sold the masks to goddamn anybody, but that Anglican priest did, and practically everyone in the room is overlooking the fact that they weren't his to sell.)

Meanwhile, Vecchio is apparently going on a date on Saturday with Louise St. Laurent, and that's bound to end well, isn't it? . . . I have no feelings about Thatcher's casual mode of dress or Vecchio's comment on it, but I am sort of wondering why this whole business is Welsh's problem? Maybe he's in charge of both Violent Crimes and Property Crimes in his area, but if that's the case, how come his guys are always the ones investigating homicides?

( Scene 7 )

I don't know what "pedal him" means in this context. Does Vecchio mean they're going to soft-pedal the kid's criminal actions? I think they'd do that when they brought the charges, not between now and then. I'm stumped by the jargon.

( Scene 8 )

I know it's called the el, but parts of the transit system in Chicago do go underground.

( Scene 9 )

So those new door locks didn't last that long, I guess?

( Scene 10 )

It's not that cramped, Fraser's apartment, although I guess it would be if he had any stuff. But it's not outdoors, that's true.

Eric doesn't say to whom he's going to return the masks after he finds them (and David). Neither, for that matter, does Fraser, who of the white people in this episode is the most sympathetic to the Indigenous point of view. 🤔

Raven stealing the sun is a tale with many versions in the Haida, Tlingit, and other northwestern coastal traditions. (I googled "raven steals the sun" and got a half-dozen slightly different retellings on the first page of results alone.) He's not usually stealing it from the sky but from someone who was hoarding it, and Raven's theft is how it ended up in the sky, but there's no reason Eric's version couldn't also be a thing.

( Scene 11 )

Victoria and Albert? After Diefenbaker, Mackenzie King, Esther Pearson, Arnold Benedict, and Jefferson Adams, I suppose I should have expected something like this. Other than that, though, I don't really understand what's happening here, and neither, it appears, does Fraser.

( Scene 12 )

When the cardinals meet in conclave, they burn the ballots after each round of voting and throw in something—apparently nobody knows what—to make the smoke burn black if no candidate has the two-thirds-plus-one majority they need to elect a new pope. (And then when someone does win, they throw in something to make the smoke white.) This is a joke it makes total sense for Vecchio to make, although probably the Tsimshian don't give a shit about the pope.

( Scene 13 )

Okay so this Vecchio-and-St.-Laurent thing is B plot shoved in like a square peg in a round hole, innit? (Is that why both restaurants Vecchio mentions start with B, or is that just me going a little stir crazy this afternoon?) I admit my dating-as-an-adult days are behind me, and I was never that good at it when they were all around me, but the idea that Vecchio is consulting a restaurant guide to find a place to take St. Laurent feels very strange to me. And if he takes her someplace he goes all the time and it doesn't work out, why wouldn't he be able to go back there for a couple of weeks? That would make more sense to me (I mean, not a lot more, but any at all) if he were thinking about taking her someplace she goes all the time, where he couldn't go back there for a while if it didn't work out with her. Or I guess maybe by "if it doesn't work out" he means he expects the non-working-out might be pretty spectacular?

( Scene 14 )

First of all, I don't love that the clerk is just coughing up this information just because Vecchio asked for it one time, because I have been trained by Law & Order and similar programs to expect people in his position to at least make a gesture toward requiring a warrant. On the other hand, car rental history isn't library membership, is it, and the fact that the credit card was used is already known to the authorities, so.

Secondly, Fraser's use of "vis-à-vis" and "said vehicle" pings my spidey-sense. It's unusually, I might even say unnecessarily, fussy language. It reminds me of "An Eye for an Eye" when Fraser was inexplicably whittling at Vecchio's desk, which it shouldn't, because he wasn't being all fancy with his ninety-cent words in that scene, but it feels the same somehow. Like someone was writing Fraser's dialogue who didn't entirely understand how everyone else has been writing him for the past two years. The (solo) writer for this episode, Jeff King, was also on the writing team for "An Eye for an Eye"—but it's not as simple as blaming him for both of these episodes:

• Pilot - written by Paul Haggis (series creator, obviously, so it's safe to assume his Fraser-voice is accurate and what everyone else is aiming for, right?)
• Free Willie - written by Kathy Slevin & Paul Haggis (and I understand that in the WGA the ampersand is very different from the word and; it means these writers wrote the episode together rather than that they both worked on it)
• Diefenbaker's Day Off - written by Kathy Slevin
• Manhunt - written by Paul Haggis
• They Eat Horses, Don't They? - written by Stephen Neigher (a detail I never noticed before; Neigher? on the episode about horses? oy vey)
• Pizzas and Promises - written by David Shore
• Chinatown - written by David Cole
• Chicago Holiday - written by Jeff King & Paul Haggis
• A Cop, a Mountie, and a Baby - teleplay by Kathy Slevin (story by Peter Colley & Kathy Slevin) (and the "story" vs. "teleplay" credit is a whole other WGA barrel of fish)
• The Gift of the Wheelman - written by Paul Haggis
• You Must Remember This - written by Peter Lefcourt
• A Hawk and a Handsaw - teleplay by David Shore & Paul Haggis (story by David Shore)
• An Eye for an Eye - teleplay by Carla Kettner and Kathy Slevin & Jeff King (story by Carla Kettner) (so you see this one was a giant mess, which was probably mostly Kettner's fault and needed Slevin & King to clean it up, is my uninitiated guess)
• The Man Who Knew Too Little - written by Frank Siracusa
• The Wild Bunch - written by Kathy Slevin & Jeff King
• The Blue Line - written by David Shore
• The Deal - written by Peter Lefcourt
• An Invitation to Romance - written by Deborah Rennard & Paul Haggis (the same Deborah Rennard who plays Dr. Esther Pearson? that Deborah Rennard?)
• Heaven and Earth - written by Phil Bedard & Larry Lalonde
• Victoria's Secret - written by Paul Haggis & David Shore
• Letting Go - written by Jeff King & Kathy Slevin
• North - written by Jeff King
• Vault - teleplay by Kathy Slevin (story by Jeff King & Paul Haggis & Kathy Slevin)
• Witness - written by Peter Mohan
• Bird in the Hand - written by Paul Haggis
• The Promise - written by Michael Teversham
• Mask - teleplay by Jeff King (story by Nancy Merritt Bell & Michael McKinley and Jeff King)

So it's hard to say what's going on here. I have no serious complaints about any of the other episodes Jeff King is credited as a writer (or story writer) on—or, critically, about "North"—but this one line bugged me so much that I just spent 20 minutes verifying the writing credits on every episode we've seen so far to see what link I could find between "Mask" and "An Eye for an Eye" (question now is, do I go back and put additional creative credits on all the episodes up to now?) because that was the last time the writing bothered me to this degree. I don't know, maybe it was just a blip.

( Scene 15 )

Why conclude it was the clerk who was lying? Unless he had the same idea I had about the police not being entitled to that information without a warrant, I guess.

Mukluks are soft-soled leather boots that probably do leave different indentations than anything with a hard external sole. (David wasn't wearing mukluks when he bolted from one train to the other, but never mind, I guess.) Apparently a rez runner is a beat-up old car from a native reservation. I suppose that would be hard to track because it may have been so heavily modified over its lifetime that someone like Fraser, who can track a car as if it were a caribou (especially if he has the manual), wouldn't be sure what he was looking for? Even though every such car is probably unique?

Much more trivially, they can't be tracking a Happy Meal, because the special sauce (which aren't we pretty sure that's just Thousand Island salad dressing?) is only used on the Big Mac (and the protein in the Happy Meal is a hamburger, cheeseburger, or chicken McNuggets). I'm sort of wearily dismayed that I know this, but I'm sure Vecchio knows it as well and is just speaking figuratively. (Now I've got the clapping game ditty stuck in my head, so you have to also: "Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, Quarter Pounder, french fries, icy cola, thick shakes, sundaes, and apple pies. You deserve a break today at McDonald's, and the dish ran away with the spoon." You're welcome.)

( Scene 16 )

So . . . Eric didn't miss anything at all, right? The rental car clerk did say rooming house, and Eric walked right by it. He must have done that on purpose, and Fraser must be onto him?

Which probably means the special sauce is a crock of shit also? And Fraser's been pretending to agree with him (and gaslighting Vecchio, but it can't be helped if he wants Eric to believe he believes him) ever since he said "footprint"?

( Scene 17 )

Okay so Fraser doesn't believe there is a Joshua Springer, that much is clear. But if Eric was trying to miss this building on purpose, that is, to lead them on a wild goose chase, why did he sound so genuinely surprised when he said "David was here"? And if David was there and has already split, why would he leave the masks behind when they were the whole reason he came to Chicago in the first place? . . . And okay, they found the masks, but they didn't find David, and doesn't Eric care about that? His nephew is still missing?

( Scene 18 )

PUT FRASER IN BLACK TIE YES PLEASE?

Ahem. Sorry, excuse me. I can't read the four bullet points on the display card; anyone else? Also, it's kind of shitty of Thatcher to say there are no Indigenous people who are impartial with respect to those masks, but why should they be?, and if that's true, what does that tell you about what the right thing to do with them is? I bet there aren't a lot of impartial Jewish people when it comes to artworks confiscated by the Nazis and sold to the Swiss, either. Fuck off with your opening night gala—and why should the liaison office be responsible for selling a table's worth of tickets? (At a hundred dollars a pop, please; of course this was when a hundred dollars was a lot more money than it is now.)

( Scene 19 )

Okay, the "looks like we got a pope" line would have been INCALCULABLY FUNNIER if Vecchio hadn't already made a pope reference when the smoke was black. Fight me.

( Scene 20 )

Ugh, Vecchio can be exhausting. He can be xenophobic and sexist in practically the same breath and not even pull a muscle!

Fictitious Canada strikes again: The sweat lodge is not a Tsimshian tradition.

(Fraser sounds very hoarse in this scene, as if Gross was coming down with or getting over something but the shooting schedule couldn't wait any longer. 🙁)

( Scene 21 )

Very hoarse. Oof.

So Fraser and Eric have known each other at least since Fraser was 10. Eric seems to be about the same age, doesn't he? Would he have been in the same class with the otter-swinging bully in Tuktoyaktuk?

The painting on the drum appears to be in the formline style we often associate with northwestern Indigenous art, so I'm not going to call BS on that. I am utterly unqualified to have any opinion about the music or the dancing, but the cloak the dancer wears looks not unlike what is pictured on the drummer in Wikipedia's article about the Tsimshian, so hey.

( Scene 22 )

Okay so has it been a raven instead of a crow all this time? The one we saw in the vision (and what the hell else would Vecchio call it? probably a hallucination, if he's reserving "vision" for visions of loveliness) didn't look like it would have a four-foot wingspan to me.

One hundred points to Vecchio for making Fraser actually say what it is he wants.

( Scene 23 )

Anything you say may be used against you, Vecchio. May be used. (Fraser sounds fine on the way into the building and hoarse when he speaks to Mme. Duchamp. It's like forensic analysis of the shooting schedule up in here.)

( Scene 24 )

Why does Mme. Duchamp have a 9mm handgun, and why was she at the forger's sculpture studio with gloves on her hands and a hood over her hair? "I wanted to see where Fraser's loyalties lay" doesn't explain any of that. Also, does diplomatic immunity protect a person from prosecution for homicide? (I mean they determine she didn't do it, but St. Laurent doesn't know that when she storms in.) Also, it's very gallant of both Fraser and Vecchio not to include Thatcher among those they are considering for who could be the killer.

B-plot-wise, it sure sounds like Louise St. Laurent has offered to hurt Vecchio if that's what he's into. Doesn't it?

( Scene 25 )

I feel very confident about the "give me the gun" dialogue and only sort of about the "run away now" dialogue, in which I think what Eric actually says is (basically) "Okay, get out of here." But more importantly:

HOLD THE PHONE—is Eric supposed to be the Indigenous dude from the pilot, who told Fraser the caribou drank too much and blamed Bob for not doing anything about the plant and shot Gerrard before Gerrard could shoot Fraser? In previous cases where we've met characters introduced in the pilot or recurring from previous episodes, we've been able to tell because it was the same actor back again. (In order of original appearance: Bob Fraser, obviously; Fraser, obviously; Staff Sgt. Mears; Gerrard; Vecchio, obviously; Inspector Moffat; Maria Vecchio; Maria's husband Tony; Francesca Vecchio; Mrs. Vecchio; the superintendent of Fraser's building; Mr. Mustafi; Willie Lambert; the public defender (Carolyn Wilson); Mrs. MacGuffin the housekeeper; Fr. Behan; Louise St. Laurent.) The picture Fraser is looking at at the end of "You Must Remember This" is clearly not a picture of Melina Kanakaredes (presumably because they hadn't cast the part yet, possibly not even decided what they were going to do with that story), but it's not recognizably a picture of anyone in particular, so when Victoria turns up it's fine, maybe she changed her hair since he tracked her up to Fortitude Pass.

But now here's this guy we could clearly see when we met him in the pilot, and this is clearly not the same actor, but . . . are we meant to recognize him anyway? Even though the dude in the pilot was never called by name? The actor in the pilot was Eric Schweig, but he's credited in IMDb as "Inuit hunter," so I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect us to know that a character identified as Tsimshian—which is not Inuit—and named Eric is meant to be the same guy. If it was important that they be the same guy, they should have used the same actor; assuming the same actor wasn't available, it should have been made clear much earlier in the episode that this was the same character. (Were we supposed to get it from the fact that he calls Fraser "Mountie" a few times, something the guy in the pilot did precisely once?) In short: SHENANIGANS.

Meanwhile, okay, one set of masks is here in the briefcase and the other has gone. I assume the ones we can see are the fake ones Eric put in there from the display case, and he took the real ones with him?

( Scene 26 )

So was Vecchio just not paying attention when Fraser was talking about the fake masks? Did he not notice that there were two identical briefcases? Did Fraser put the fake masks back in the display case and not tell anyone (because clearly "everything's where it should be" means the real masks are back with the Tsimshian, where Fraser and the Tsimshian but none of the other white people in this shit agree they belong)?

( Scene 27 )

Last part first: I think it's clear Thatcher knows perfectly well that Fraser knows exactly what she's talking about and is doing a very diplomatic bald-faced lie when he says he doesn't. Which is not a super easy thing to convey with a limited amount of dialogue, so nice work, Scott.

But why on earth would anything about her "communication" with the curator be in Fraser's report? Is she suggesting that her work as the liaison officer was compromised by going on a couple of dates with someone the liaison office was working with in an official capacity? Wouldn't that preclude her dating . . . anyone at all, basically? Seems unreasonable. So I feel like the fact that she saw him socially once or twice is irrelevant to the case. Is she just panicking because he turned out to be in on the forgery? Maybe because she missed it? I don't know, I think they all missed it, except Eric. And finally: Hasn't she read Fraser's files from front to back? Doesn't she know about Victoria? Don't you think she could guess that Fraser is probably the last person who would ever throw stones about an officer's personal indiscretions with a suspect (especially in a case like this where the suspect was barely suspicious and the officer wasn't even that indiscreet)?

First part last: Her makeup is about three shades too light in this scene, which we can tell because it's only blended about halfway down her neck. Her face looks like a porcelain doll.

( Scene 28 )

I'm rolling my eyes fairly hard over here, but sure, why shouldn't Vecchio and St. Laurent get lucky? I assume Fraser knows Vecchio is entertaining in his living room, although I'm not sure why Eric and his whole family wouldn't have disassembled the sweat lodge and taken its parts back home with them. (It appears Vecchio and St. Laurent went to the gala before retiring back to Fraser's apartment, though—although why would Fraser and Thatcher have been at the office rather than at the gala themselves?)

( Scene 29 )

So . . . it is right for the Tsimshian to have their sacred objects back in their possession. I don't even feel like that's controversial. I don't even mind David and Eric not getting in any trouble for liberating them. The fact that they're just a couple of guys and not (as far as we know) any type of Tribal Government isn't frankly any of any white person's business. But has Fraser really put the fake masks on display in the museum and gone on about his life without telling anyone? That . . . doesn't really seem like him, does it? He'd have made a serious effort to persuade someone that there's nothing shameful about a display card with the word "replica" on it, at the very least. Maybe the fact that the museum curator is under arrest for forgery and fraud means the gala was actually cancelled, which would explain why Thatcher wasn't there (and why Fraser wasn't in trouble for not selling a whole table's worth of tickets), and Vecchio and St. Laurent can have been dressed up fancy for the first part of their date somewhere else. Also, what ever happened to Mme. Duchamp? Also also, what's going to happen to Mrs. Kelly? Is the fact that they brought her a slam-dunk murder case why St. Laurent is so agreeable to Vecchio at this point? (I was going to say "swoony," but I'm sure it's the steam that's doing that.)

All in all, the ending of this episode is not unsatisfying? But it is a bit confusing and sort of "Oh. All right, then."

Cumulative body count: 18
Red uniform: Checking out the museum's security system, chasing the thief on the roof, at the station the next morning

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