return to Due South: season 2 episode 8 "One Good Man"

One Good Man
air date February 8, 1996

( Scene 1 )

So the building has a super, but Fraser took it upon himself to wrangle all his neighbors into a cleanup crew and make himself the manager? Well, that's not at all patronizing, is it. And to impress the new landlord, as well. Whose meter he pre-emptively feeds. Kiss-ass. And if that wasn't already rubbing me every possible wrong way, the new landlord turns up and is so slimy the slime gets on Fraser too. Ugh. I don't like it. (I also don't like that Vecchio changes his 1971 Riviera to a 1972 with no acknowledgment. WTF?)

I've seen this episode occasionally subtitled "a.k.a. Thank You Kindly, Mr. Capra," but I don't see why it should be when "Letting Go" wasn't subtitled "a.k.a. Thank You Kindly, Mr. Hitchcock," so I don't know. But the fact that the departing landlord is named Mr. Potter is certainly a big old wink in the Capra direction, isn't it.

This is not the first time Fraser has attributed a common Chinese philosophy aphorism—this one is from Lao Tzu—to his own family. Once, in an episode called "Chinatown," is vaguely cute in a dopey sort of way. Twice is starting to feel appropriative.

( Scene 2 )

Fixing the elevator was indeed a liberty, Fraser, you smarmy sycophant. You don't get extra credit for initiative when your initiative saves the boss money but he only finds out about it after the fact. It might have worked if Fraser had said "How about if I arrange to have the elevator repaired?" but even then, that is not a tenant's job, fucking stop it.

We don't know Fraser's rent, but we know Charlie Pike's was more than $200/month and Mrs. Gamez's was $375/month including utilities. A thousand-dollar increase per month would be an unmanageable increase for your fancy big-city apartments renting at $2500/month now; obviously for Fraser's neighbors it's literally impossible. If these people had another thousand dollars a month, wouldn't they be living somewhere else?

Apparently Illinois abolished rent control in 1997; it looks like even before that, there was no rent control in Chicago, and all the 1997 state law did was make it impossible for the city to impose a limit, but I can't find anything on what kind of restrictions Taylor might have had under the terms of a month-to-month or a fixed-term lease. Today, there's no limit on the amount of the rent increase, and the only limits that do exist seem to be that for non-fixed-term leases, notice has to be given within the period of the lease—7 days' notice for a week-to-week lease, and 30 days' notice for a month-to-month lease. You'd think if you had a full-year lease there'd be some required notice period of the increase to give you time to decide whether to renew, but I can't find any information on that from before 2020, when a lot of things changed—just that they couldn't raise the rent during the term of your lease, which makes sense and is probably what Vecchio was talking about.

But how do you rent without a lease? I mean, literally: What arrangement have Fraser and the others been renting under all this time? What, if any, guarantee have they had that their apartments would continue to belong to them? How does Taylor know whom to address these rent-increase letters to in the first place? Probably just lets Dennis handle it, because he's the super and he's the one who knows who lives where? But if they don't have a lease, why alert them of the rent increase in writing at all? Why not just throw them out? Does "a lease" refer specifically and only to a fixed-term lease? Is a month-to-month rental arrangement not a lease?

Credits roll.

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

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Kash is still in the opening credits. I don't make this stuff up.

Maria Bello, Robert Clothier, Karl Pruner, Katayoun Amini, Johnie Chase, Ann Medina, Marvin Karon

I also don't understand the guest credits. Dennis the Super has appeared before and been in the opening credits both times, but he's obviously in this episode and yet does not appear in the (extensive) opening credits. I am stumped.

( Scene 3 )

Fraser is right that he's the one who got his neighbors into the fix that they're in. I don't know that simply refusing to pay the increased rent is an effective method of protest against Taylor; probably they should have been doing a rent strike against Potter in the past to get the place up to habitable standards, but this isn't the same thing. All the same, everyone does have the right to a roof over their head, and the only thing that depends on their ability to pay rent is which roof, which is probably what Vecchio means, but he's not really thinking clearly, because here's a decidedly-not-mint-condition 197[&nbsp] Riviera he's trying to buy and he's haggling with his twice-removed cousin over it? (That means whatever ancestor they have in common is two generations different for him as for Al—Al could be Ray's first cousin's grandchild or vice versa. With a couple of extra-long generations that can happen; my great-grandmother was young when my grandmother was born, and her much younger sister was older when her only child was born, and my grandmother had had her own children in the meantime, with the result that my grandmother had a first cousin who was a little younger than my father. That cousin's older daughter is only three months older than me, but she's my father's second cousin, that is, they have great-grandparents in common. So she and I are second cousins once removed, and the removals aren't getting closer in age because after her grandmother and my great-grandmother, who were sisters, the generations evened out—but if there had been another nuclear family with a big age gap in it and another later-in-life child somewhere in there, we could have twice-removed cousins as agemates.)

"If I was wearing a dress I'd be a woman" is bullshit, but I'm exhausted with the world we're living in now; we didn't expect better in 1996, did we?

Good grief, it looks like 60 Minutes is still on the air. This is a "news magazine" TV program that has, whether earned or not, a reputation for probing investigative journalism whose subjects sometimes change their wicked ways under scrutiny. Vecchio is suggesting Fraser's neighbors name and shame their new landlord into backing away from the rent increase.

Just as a matter of trivial interest, the woman who comes into the garage is played by Katayoun Amini (Mrs. Marciano).

( Scene 4 )

So . . . I'm with Fraser here in that something other than what's obvious (losing a second Riviera to explosion in less than twelve months, and this one taking a human friend with it, to say nothing of the accidental shooting death of his high school girlfriend) is clearly bothering Vecchio, and he is not acknowledging what it is.

( Scene 5 )

It can sometimes be hard to tell when Fraser is deadpan snarking at Vecchio or quietly, passive-aggressively trying to get Vecchio to back into agreeing with him, but in this case he is so genuinely uncomfortable with the idea of asserting himself in any way that he actually can't do it and needs Vecchio to take over. I think that's sweet enough that I can almost overlook "responsibility to govern and protect all of its citizens whether they vote or not," which I suppose City Hall does have, whether the people it's governing and protecting are citizens or not. (Fraser, we've been over this.) (Oh! I guess we haven't. Obviously Fraser isn't a U.S. citizen, so it's not that he doesn't vote but that he can't vote, and in fact it would be wrong of him to try. But he's right that he deserves equal protection under the various laws and regulations with those who do vote, and so do those who could but choose not to.)

( Scene 6 )

How long has it been since they got the notice of the increase in their rent? Feels like one or maybe two business days, right? Every lease I've ever had has had a five-day grace period in it, but (a) that doesn't mean the rent was on time if I didn't pay it until the second or third day, just that they couldn't start charging me more until after the fifth day, and (b) as we've established, Fraser and his neighbors don't have a lease, so I guess the rent is late when the landlord says it's late? Or he doesn't actually need a reason to turf them out in the first place?

( Scene 7 )

If it's a green 1971 or '72 Riviera, wouldn't Vecchio buy it without test driving?

( Scene 8 )

This is plainly, utterly, in no way the same woman who played Mackenzie King last time we met her. But we can tell it's Mackenzie King because Fraser and Vecchio said so in the car and then Warren called her by name to her face. That's how you bring back a character you haven't seen in more than a year when they're being played by a different performer! . . . Assuming the recurrence is even necessary. I guess it might have lost something if Fraser had gone to try to get Mackenzie King to cover his story and had to settle for one of her colleagues on account of the actress who played her last time wasn't available?

Warren can fuck off with the Orientalism, though.

( Scene 9 )

Ugh, let's just get the Dona1d Tr*mp of it all out of the way right now, shall we? If that line were written today, it would invoke E1on M*sk. In the mid-90s DT's name was still a popular shorthand for "more wealth than you can imagine." (Say it with me now: "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit." A little Han Solo to get the taste of 2016–2020 out of your mouth.)

So: Is Mackenzie King a reporter or a photographer? Most journos aren't both, right? And we've had references to three titles in this scene:

1. Mother Courage and Her Children is a Bertolt Brecht play about a war profiteer who loses all of her children to the very war (the Thirty Years' War) she was hoping to profit from. The connection to Fraser's neighbors' picket line is not obvious; probably Mackenzie is just snarking about how they're bundled up against the cold.
2. We referred obliquely to It's a Wonderful Life before, but now we're coming right out and hanging a hat on it: In that movie, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) gets the fuzzy end of every lollipop his life long, and it still seems like it's not going to be enough to save his community from ruination by the heartless miser Mr. Potter; but when George wishes he'd never been born, his guardian angel shows him how without him the community would have been orders of magnitude worse off. This one is a fairly on-the-nose reference for Mackenzie King and Fraser to be making.
3. The Passion of Joan of Arc is a French silent film about, well, the passion of Joan of Arc. It is very good, but excruciating to watch. It is basically the anti-Capra, which is the joke here, that Fraser's childhood minister should have had these two polar opposites as his favorite films. I recommend watching The Passion of Joan of Arc with the Voices of Light soundtrack featuring Anonymous 4.

There is no such place as Oopik (or Upik), of course, because Mackenzie King is just being ridiculous and racist (I was going to say xenophobic, but that's not right at all, is it, when you're talking about a White person's attitude toward Indigenous North Americans) about Inuit place names; but there is an Inuit handicraft known as the Ookpik. Go figure.

And finally, Taylor. Ugh, this guy. As far as I can tell, the "five full days allowable by law" to which he refers is a provision in Chicago ordinance whereby if a landlord intends to evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent, they have to give them five days from the eviction notice in which to make the payment before the eviction is carried out. I think he is still supposed to have given reasonable notice of the increase in the first place—seven days for a week-to-week tenancy, 30 days for a month-to-month—but if they don't have a written lease, it's hard to say what reasonable notice would have been, so assuming all of this is happening on or around the first of the month, I guess the increased rent is the next payment he's entitled to expect, but it doesn't feel to me like five days have passed between his notifying them that they're going to be evicted and anybody actually being chucked out of their apartment, which (as I said) is what I think the five-day thing means.

Eat the rich.

( Scene 10 )

That's not at all what happens in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, of course. Goldilocks was trespassing, which I'm sure it is not Taylor's intention to suggest he is asking Dennis to do; he's been pretty careful to be sure he's doing everything exactly by the book.

The camera doesn't focus all the way in on Dennis here, but it's hard to look at him standing at Taylor's shoulder so far above ground level, hear him protest that it's cold out (so maybe he shouldn't shut off the tenants' heat), and not think about Grima Wormtongue realizing maybe he shouldn't have thrown his lot all in with Saruman the White after all:

( Scene 11 )

What on earth is Fraser cooking? Why is he shaving at night? (Maybe that's something face-shaving people do. I don't know. My dad shaved in the morning, and I think my brother does too? My husband wears a beard, but before he grew it I think he shaved in the morning also.

Anyway, "These are the times that try men's souls" is the first line of The American Crisis no. 1 by, as Fraser says Thomas Paine:

THESE are the times that try men's ſouls :  The ſummer ſoldier and the ſunſhine patriot will, in this criſis, ſhrink from the ſervice of his country ; but he that ſtands it NOW, deſerves the love and thanks of man and woman.  Tyranny, like hell, is not eaſily conquered ; yet we have this conſolation with us, that the harder the confliƈt, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we eſteem too lightly:–––'Tis dearneſs only that gives every thing its value.

I'm not going to go off on an examination of Paine here, except to say that it's a little surprising to think of Fraser as a revolutionary. Here's Paine in Common Sense:

Society in every ſtate is a bleſſing, but Government, even in its beſt ſtate, is but a neceſſary evil ; in its worſt ſtate an intolerable one :  for when we ſuffer, or are expoſed to the ſame miſeries by a Government, which we might expeƈt in a country without Government, our calamity is heightened by refleƈting that we furniſh the means by which we ſuffer.  Government, like dreſs, is the badge of loſt innocence ; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradiſe.  For were the impulſes of conſcience clear, uniform and irreſiſtibly obeyed, man would need no other law-giver ; but that not being the caſe, he finds it neceſſary to ſurrender up a part of his property to furniſh means for the proteƈtion of the reſt ; and this he is induced to do by the ſame prudence which in every other caſe adviſes him, out of two evils to chooſe the leaſt.  Wherefore, ſecurity being the true deſign and end of government, it unanſwerably follows that whatever form thereof appears moſt likely to enſure it to us, with the leaſt expence and greateſt benefit, is preferable to all others.

"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil"? Benton Fraser? Something something people's basic respect for the law? That Benton Fraser? Constable Benton Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police? The whole point of him is that the "impulses of conscience" are not "clear, uniform[,] and irresistibly obeyed." Does . . . does he think of himself as a necessary evil? (Yes, I put in the serial comma. I will die on this hill.)

In unrelated news, Fraser appears to have bought a new light blue henley and blue plaid flannel shirt, because his favorites from season 1 were, as we've noted, ruined when he was shot.

( Scene 12 )

Although we didn't know until now that Vecchio was married once, it is inconceivable that Fraser also didn't know this. Right? Right?!

( Scene 13 )

The elevator was already dropping before they got the little kid out of it, so when the mom is not able to come close enough to grab Fraser's hand and be pulled up, I mean, of course he has to get in so he can reach her to help get her out, but what you've done here is subtract the weight of a small child and add the weight of a grown adult, which can't possibly be helpful.

I expect the doll is supposed to make this scene extra poignant and alarming, because there's often a kid-goes-back-for-a-toy thing that is at minimum an additional heartstring puller and at maximum the moment everything actually goes irremediably wrong (I am thinking specifically of Edmund Pevensie wanting a picture of his dad as they're rushing into the bomb shelter in the 2005 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—another title that ought to have had one more comma in it, damn you, Lewis—and, though I can't imagine how I am remembering this, the Christian Bale character losing a model airplane and getting separated from his family in the evacuation of Shanghai in Empire of the Sun (1987)). Or maybe it's supposed to highlight the danger. I don't know, I feel like it's plenty dangerous, and there's no actual chance the little girl is going to dive after her doll, so. Maybe it's just one more symbol of what's happening to Fraser's neighbors; if she's living in that building, that kid likely doesn't have a lot of toys, so losing that doll will hit her harder than losing a favorite doll would hit many other kids.

In any event, I don't actually give a shit about the doll, because the actual incipient-disaster stuff is convincingly upsetting to me. I'm sure it's because I am myself the mother of a young child; I've acknowledged before and I will always admit that I am not able to be totally rational about scenes of little kids in peril. Not that you have to have kids to feel this way—I've always had this weak spot, even before my son was born (I am now thinking of [The Incredibles0(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredibles) (2004), [a] where Elastigirl is on the airplane radio begging Syndrome to call off his missile attack, "there are children on board, say again, there are children on board this plane" and [b] where she tells Dash to run for help as fast as he can, and he's delighted because he's never been allowed to do that before, and I have goosebumps because the whole point is that she doesn't want him to understand how much danger they're in)—but something in my brain chemistry seems to have changed with the new-baby hormones and not changed back, and I am genuinely rattled by this elevator scene, even though the thing is only falling from the third floor to the basement, so what is that, 50 feet? The (uncredited, as far as I can tell) woman playing the sobbing mother nails it as far as I'm concerned. The fact that they bothered to have someone tell the kid her mom's okay is a nice touch.

Trivially, in this scene Fraser is wearing a red-based plaid flannel jacket that flatters him much less than the blue shirt did.

( Scene 14 )

♫ What do we leave? Nothing much, only Anatevka . . . ♫

There's an ambulance in this scene also, though Fraser was probably the most seriously injured and he's not being seen to in it. Maybe the woman and her daughter are getting checked out, evaluated for shock, whatever. In the fashion report, Fraser has replaced his red plaid jacket with a dark cadet henley sweater that I like a lot.

( Scene 15 )

Well, asking the guy to buy the building back is indeed stupid. But I'm a little puzzled by the effort this scene makes to make Potter even a little bit sympathetic. "Tell a man he's going to die, he can accept that" is, in the circumstances with all these pill bottles, evidently him talking about himself. He doesn't want the burden anymore of owning that building. But he's also an asshole, caring more about his profits and taxes than about the people who live there. Why have both? Fraser's comment that it must indeed be cold in that room would have landed a lot harder, I think, if Potter himself hadn't realized the metaphor and yelled at him for it. This scene gets a C-plus.

( Scene 16 )

This is not, of course, actually a reasonable way to gain access to a room you're barred from, Fraser. In fact the whole idea of gaining access to a room you're barred from seems kind of un-Fraserish, doesn't it? But never mind: The important thing is, yes, Fraser does expect too much from people, but when "people" are Ray Vecchio and they always come through for him, why would he expect any less? ("We furnish the means by which we suffer," indeed, eh, Vecchio?)

( Scene 17 )

"The man is unconscious" / "He's resting" is a nice Monty Python "Parrot Sketch" reference. Thanks for that. Also, here's another instance of Fraser using gender-neutral "sir." (And he should have asked "whom can we trust?", but never mind.)

So obviously we're forgetting It's A Wonderful Life and moving on to the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) portion of the episode. ("Mr. Fraser Goes Downtown" doesn't have quite the same gravitas, does it?) In that film, Jimmy Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, a Boy Scout Rangers leader who is appointed to the U.S. Senate on the assumption that he will be naive and easy to manipulate. When he's framed for corruption (interestingly, for a scheme involving a dam project), he does a filibuster to expose the dam scheme (but protest his own innocence) and talk about American idealism. He does not succeed in convincing the Senate, but eventually his mentor, who had betrayed him, has an attack of conscience and comes clean, and the good guys win.

I'm going to think for a moment about how much it cost Fraser to say no when he was asked to leave the podium. Also about the line "a passing walrus." Here's what Wikipedia says about the distribution of walrus around the southern coasts of the Arctic Ocean:

That's approximately this, right?

There are no walrus habitats within a thousand miles of Inuvik, innit. And even if there were, would a walrus come far enough inland to be "passing" where six-year-old Benton Fraser could have fed it a copy of The American Crisis? In short: Hmm. Finally, can a witness do a filibuster?

Never mind: Let's just show some love for Vecchio going to get Fraser some cherry throat lozenges. ❤️

( Scene 18 )

Vecchio makes $35,580 a year. How can he be throwing hundies at enough passers-by to fill the gallery? (Also, what about Fraser's lozenges?)

( Scene 19 )

Three things: (1) The Johnny Seven One-Man Army was apparently an extraordinary toy gun that was wildly popular in the mid-1960s, and times were different then, but I wouldn't buy that for an eight-year-old either, even if I could afford it, which who knows if Fraser's grandparents could? (2) Note that what Fraser asked for on his eighth birthday was less elaborate than what he asked for on his seventh, and what he asked for on his ninth birthday smaller yet. Imagine this little boy telling himself, year after year, it was too much, what I asked for last year, so I'll scale it down a bit, and still never (ever) getting what he really wanted for his birthday. 😭 (3) What disappointment did he receive when he turned 10?

It's interesting that the grandparents supplied him with seditious reading material, though. I mean: Fair enough, librarians are generally as a group down with kids reading anything they want, right?, even if those kids are their grandson. But the kid's dad is a police officer, so giving him things to read that will encourage him to rebel seems a little . . . were Fraser's grandparents disappointed that their son was a cop? (I almost said "or son-in-law," but after "Letting Go" it's safe to conclude that the librarian grandparents were Bob's folks rather than Ben's maternal grandparents, about whom we now know exactly nothing.)

( Scene 20 )

Okay, so the cash Vecchio is handing out is the money he was going to use to buy the car. That makes a shade more sense of the visit to the garage being in the episode at all, and it absolutely tracks with Vecchio and Fraser's friendship: Vecchio would give up his chance to replace the Riv to save Fraser's home, sure he would. (I will forgive him for reusing the line "to listen to some Canadian quote an American revolutionary" because the people he's saying it to didn't hear him say it a scene and a half ago.)

( Scene 21 )

What I can hear of what Fraser says before he gets to Geronimo is choppy. He begins:

FRASER: As I was saying, as I worked through my grandmother's library, I grew to love the volumes she'd selected for the same reasons she did. I recognized that they had been chosen —

and then he's indecipherable again for a couple of seconds that include the words "their generation" before he says:

FRASER: One of the greatest of those was of course Charles Dickens, who in his great novel Barnaby Rudge wrote, "To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things—but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature."

And he goes straight into Geronimo from there.

I have not read Barnaby Rudge, and my guess is you haven't either. It is not one of Dickens's widely read works, but a librarian's grandson who had books instead of playthings could probably quote from it without notes, sure, why not.

That Geronimo quote is indeed attributed to Geronimo himself in S.M. Barrett, Geronimo's Story of His Life (New York: Duffield & Co., 1906), 215.

Then after that, while Vecchio is presenting Dennis's lease to the chair and Alderman Farrell is suspending Taylor's demolition permits, Fraser continues:

FRASER: The great French philosopher, scientist, and nuclear theorist Gaston Bachelard spoke eloquently about the need for a secure haven in his work The Poetics of Space. He wrote, "This being the case, if I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

Look, at least all of Fraser's filibustering is relevant to the topic he wants to discuss and for which he is refusing to yield. Not like Senator Howard Stackhouse (D-MN), whose filibuster on a bill about health care for families included a full reading of David Copperfield, a recipe book, and Hoyle's Rules of Games. (That's a West Wing reference, for those who didn't see it—season 2, episode 17 "The Stackhouse Filibuster"—and in Sen. Stackhouse's defense, he went on for more than eight hours, which, if Fraser had spoken for that long, he might have had to wander off the point eventually as well.) Here's what Wikipedia has about Gaston Bachelard and about his La poétique de l'espace. Someone in the writer's room did a lot of research into Bartlet's Quotations for things about houses and homes, didn't they?

Anyway, the next time we check in with Fraser, after Farrell is done gaveling, he's quoting from Milton:

FRASER: Of Man's first Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal Taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our Woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing, Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret Top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning, how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent'rous Song,
That with no middle Flight intends to soar
Above th'Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.

This first sentence of Paradise Lost (which I can't read for the rest of my life without thinking of Words, Words, Words by David Ives: "Of Man's first disobedience, and the Fruit of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal Taste brought Death into the blammagam. Bedsocks knockwurst tinkerbelle.") begs the Holy Spirit to inspire the poet by singing of the Fall and of the state of depravity that will persist until humankind is redeemed by the death and resurrection of Christ. Comparing Fraser and his neighbors' eviction, even as unjust as it is, to the expulsion from Eden, which can only be healed by salvation, is . . . a lot.

Also a lot is the way Fraser and Mackenzie King are looking at each other (and the tones in their voices while they are speaking quietly and meaningfully to each other in front of a live microphone, hello), which he doesn't seem to realize he's doing at all. So we're back to Fraser not having the first idea about the effect he often has on women (the paragraph beginning "In the same time" is basically a litany of women Fraser could have pulled if he'd wanted to).

In the midst of all that, Vecchio's "perception is nine-tenths of the law" is a riff on the old adage "possession is nine-tenths of the law", which is frankly also apt in the present episode, is it not?

( Scene 22 )

I don't know what favorite item of Diefenbaker's was sacrificed for the cause, but Mr. Mustafi bringing the neighbors in to clean up is charming. Fraser is touched, maybe even a little choked up.

( Scene 23 )

It turns out Vecchio can get the car even though he disbursed all that cash to get an audience for Fraser's civil action at City Hall, so I'm back to not being sure what the point of the car and the ex-wife is in the first place. If he had loved the car the way he did because it was a relic of his marriage, that would be one thing—but it was his dream car before he bought the first one, so I continue to be stumped.

It must be winter in the flashback, because Vecchio is wearing a hat (to hide Marciano's hair loss, of course, but never mind). For what it's worth, it looks like Ange is in uniform as a patrol officer.

The whole episode is one big Capra homage, as we've said. But isn't the title actually a reference to the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which (Genesis 19) God is going to destroy those cities because they are full of wickedness but Abraham begs him to spare them if a quorum of righteous people can be found; Abraham fails to find a full ten righteous citizens of Sodom but can only find one good man, so the angels save Lot and his family—only Lot's wife looks back at the ruination of the Plain and is turned into a pillar of salt. This is an odd connection; there's no sense in this episode that Taylor or the City Council will choose not to tear down Fraser's building if enough righteous people can be found among the residents (who are not presented as being generally "wicked" in the first place, except by Taylor, who is himself a bad person, and in any event even the "wicked" deserve housing, so this is not a productive line of analysis). And in the Bible story, just one good man isn't enough to save the cities, but in this episode, it just takes one good man to get the demolition permits suspended and the building spared—and that one good man is not Fraser but Dennis the Super. So the whole thing is, as most of the episodes whose titles are references, a little inexact.

Cumulative body count: 20
Red uniform: Doing the inspection, meeting Mr. Potter, going to City Council

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