return to Due South: season 2 episode 11 "We Are the Eggmen"

We Are The Eggmen
air date February 29, 1996

( Scene 1 )

I'd have said Diefenbaker was an omnivore, but I'll allow carnivore if we're going to insist he's a wolf rather than a dog.

It's sort of sweet and sort of unhinged that Fraser takes Diefenbaker out for practice and drills (and gives him instructions in complete sentences rather than single-word commands, although what do I know from dog training).

Credits roll.

Paul Gross
David Marciano
Beau Starr
Tony Craig
Catherine Bruhier

(plus Lincoln the dog)

Ramona Milano, Camilla Scott, Louis del Grande, Alan Peterson

( Scene 2 )

Some nice reaction work in this scene from both Fraser and Thatcher. In particular, I draw your attention to Fraser realizing as the words are coming out of his mouth that "While I was hunting with my wolf" is a ridiculous thing to say.

Thatcher's makeup is a much more appropriate shade today.

( Scene 3 )

Of course the many fans in this part of the internet are sure they know exactly what Fraser is thinking, but NEVER MIND.

"In this country, the guy who brings the suit doesn't have to pay the costs" is not entirely correct, is it? The guy who wins the suit doesn't have to pay the costs, usually, I believe. But it does cost money to bring the suit in the first place, and of course it costs money to defend yourself against it, which is why it is often cheaper for everyone to settle. Grr.

I didn't get how "besides" made sense in this conversation Vecchio and Francesca are having, because how does his running out of toothpaste and thus being destined to win the lottery have anything to do with being able to afford one of Francesca's sandwiches? Only I think he means, "I've only got five bucks and even if I had six I need to buy a lottery ticket instead of a sandwich." Sigh. Lottery tickets. Once in the bluest of moons, Himself and I buy a couple dollars' worth of Powerball tickets. It improves our odds of winning the Powerball from nonexistent to actually nil, if you follow my math (because if we don't buy the tickets, we're not even in it, it's a divide-by-zero error). The few hours of entertainment we get from contemplating what we'd do with our winnings are worth the price (cheaper than a movie single episode of a streaming TV show). Crucially, though, we don't actually expect that we will win, and we never spend money we don't have. (And if we do happen to win five or ten bucks on a scratch-off, we don't turn around and buy more lottery tickets with it.) But then, neither of us has a gambling problem.

( Scene 4 )

So it sounds like Mr. Buxley does, unlike my husband and myself, have a gambling problem. For sure he owes this Sneed fellow a pile of money, which he doesn't have, and he's about to lose his farm as collateral; I conclude it's a gambling issue rather than a straight-up predatory loan issue because "you pay your dime, you take your ride" to me means "you shouldn't have played the game if you weren't prepared to lose".

( Scene 5 )

It is a tax on the gullible or optimistic, not on the poor, because poor people don't have to buy lottery tickets the way they have to e.g. buy small amounts of food at high markups rather than buying large amounts in bulk, or the way they have to take a whole hour to get to their job ten minutes away because they can't afford a car and there isn't a direct bus route. That's a poor tax. But good for Vecchio; after he pays the actual taxes on that $25k, he'll probably take home about six months' pay. Not bad for a ten-dollar investment.

( Scene 6 )

I can't find Yathkiat Flats or anything like it (Yavkiat, Yakyat, etc.) in the googles or any freely available databases of Canadian place names, so for the first time, I can't update my map. 😢 Let's talk about chickens instead. The Houdan is a French crested bird with five toes; it lays smallish white eggs, apparently somewhere around one gross per year. The Andalusian (and its eggs, also white) are a little bigger. The Brahma is a much larger chicken laying large brown eggs. I don't know why trying to have Andalusians in your Brahma flock should be hilarious. . . . This was also not a productive topic for annotation.

( Scene 7 )

So these are brown eggs, and as we learned, the Houdin lays white eggs; not sure what other kinds of chickens Buxley has to have got these brown ones. Also, surely Adam is not relevant all of the time, because most of the eggs ought to be unfertilized, no? (Not all of them, or else how are you going to raise the next generation of layers. But.)

Buxley is right that he and Fraser should probably not be conferring, as they're parties on separate sides of a lawsuit. But Fraser is right that a criminal charge is a very different matter than a civil suit. So. (And then Buxley sends him away with a dozen eggs, which is charming.)

( Scene 8 )

First things first: Fraser is right and Ray is wrong and that's all there is to that.

So. He called her "Jane Paul Getty," because J. Paul Getty was an industrialist who was for a while the richest man in the world. The Merc is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, that is, the stock market, that is, a major downtown office building, and Francesca should probably have expected that she needed a permit to sell food in public; even pushing a cart around the police department was probably risky. But "maybe ask someone" is bad post-hoc advice to someone who didn't even know there was a question that needed asking. (Yes, I have just described Francesca as the Fourth Child at a Passover seder, the One Who Does Not Know How To Ask.)

Fraser need not have taken guilt lessons from Vecchio's mother to be laying guilt on him now; his passive-aggressiveness has been well documented and commented on by Vecchio before. I don't know why Catholics think they have a monopoly on guilt. Ditto Jews, for that matter, or why someone who's half Catholic and half Jewish thinks that's somehow twice the amount of guilt as someone who is not the child of a mixed marriage. By me, that's .5 guilt on the Catholic side and .5 guilt on the Jewish side and that adds up to 1.0 guilt, same as everyone else. If you really want to eat your heart out, you don't want guilt and guilt; you want what I've got, which is half Jewish and half Puritan: guilt and shame.

( Scene 9 )

Inspector Thatcher's given name is Margaret. I just can't. I'm so tired.

Okay but so. It's a nice bit of performance from Camilla Scott, this scene, in which she makes it clear that she's not comfortable with this Cloutier fellow. He literally follows her around her desk; she keeps the coffee pot between herself and him; she was not aware they had dinner plans until he said so. So she tries to pretend she has a relationship with Fraser—we know she doesn't, but Cloutier doesn't know that, so her hope is evidently that he will back off because he thinks he's trespassing on another man's turf. (UGH. It is absolutely realistic that he would think this—the fact that a woman is not interested in a man's attention is not enough reason for the man to leave her alone, but the "fact" that she has some sort of commitment to another man is—and it wasn't any less gross in 1996 than it is now.) Unfortunately, Fraser doesn't pick up what she's laying down, and they apparently haven't had a chance to establish any type of code word for this sort of situation. I'm also a little uncomfortable with the degree to which she is almost treating Fraser the way it's obviously not okay Cloutier is treating her. The whole situation is icky.

( Scene 10 )

The performance showing Thatcher's horror at Fraser's building is good (and her asking, incredulously, "You live like this?" is a nice callback to Mark Smithbauer asking exactly that), but the rest of the scene kind of knocks my socks off. It's a handsome apology that she makes for putting him on the spot, making it awkward and uncomfortable—exactly what I was complaining about in the last scene—but my god, the absolute agonies she goes through trying to explain her history with Cloutier in the first place.

I believe that in fact, what Thatcher has occasionally had to do was permit the attention of male superiors. I believe she slept with either Cloutier or someone like him, because she felt like she had to, and she has dealt ever since with a great deal of self-directed rage and shame over it (neither of which she deserves, of course). I believe she has never told anyone, because blowing a whistle on Cloutier (or whomever) for sexual harassment would inevitably harm her reputation more than his. (That's because of the nature of sexual harassment cases, but she probably also knows a thing or two about how the RCMP treats whistleblowers in general.) I believe she is desperately grateful to Fraser for hearing the pause where she was trying to bring herself to use a verb (thus making what happened to her real) and filling the silence with "deflect;" I believe she grabs onto "deflect" like a lifeline. I base these beliefs on the length of the pause after she says "Yes" and the look on her face during that pause.

I admit this interpretation relies on implicit performance choices rather than entirely on explicit text, but I don't think it's at all far-fetched, and I'll stand by it. It's not a huge step from there to either or both of two further things:

1. Thatcher specifically asked for the transfer to Chicago to get away from Cloutier.
2. Fraser really believes "deflect" was the word Thatcher was reaching for, bless him.

I am less convinced of the second thing than I am of the first; Fraser gives good clueless when he has a mind to but he's not actually in fact ignorant, is he. He could have believed she was going for "deflect" and not getting there; but I think it's more likely that he's a lot more tuned in to what's up and how much Thatcher (in this case) doesn't want to talk about it, so he gives her that verbal escape hatch on purpose. (Is it? Does he? I'm coming back now to where there isn't really a reading of "Bird in the Hand" where he understood that Vecchio was offering to give him a gun and look the other way while he shot Gerrard and was only pretending not to. So do I have to conclude that he was just supplying the word "deflect" because he thought she was having trouble remembering it?, and abandon the idea that what he actually meant but would never say out loud was "We don't actually have to talk about this until you're ready"? Help me, someone.)

Of course from there it's fair to wonder why even though Fraser knows he didn't do anything wrong, he won't sign the settlement as a favor to her.

( Scene 11 )

She hasn't known Fraser long, but she's got his number, that's for sure.

How can Fraser know that this egg is lower in cholesterol than other eggs? What sort of lab analysis has he been able to do in the past, I don't know, 12 hours to determine this?

( Scene 12 )

I was impressed when I first saw pasteurized raw eggs. So who knows, maybe Buxley is farming eggs that are enough better than ordinary eggs that people will pay extra for them.

( Scene 13 )

When it comes to classical music I'm pretty conservative. Mozart's "Ave Verum" is of course an explicitly Christian text (Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary, Who truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross for humanity, from Whose pierced side the Blood flowed; be for us a pre-taste in death's trial), which is not my religion, but I feel like that's the text he set to that music, and shoving new text in there is pretty bold. (I also always bristle when I'm expected to sing a descant on the Ode to Joy, because I feel like if Beethoven had wanted one he'd have written it himself.) But here we are. The full text is "All praise be to thee/ Source of all glory/ Source of glory and majesty/ Source of glory/ And of majesty/ Of glory and majesty/ From all eternity thou didst rule creation/ And thou wilt continue forevermore/ There is none other God but thee,/ None other God but thee, all praise/ To thee, the source of all glory/ And majesty." I can't help it: Even if you find the meditation by the Bahá'u'lláh inspiring, it is shoehorned into the musical setting in a way that I simply do not think is beautiful.

The music, anyway, is one of Mozart's (1756–1791) final compositions, and it's quite serene and lovely. The music of Shostakovich (1906–1975) is, as you might expect, quite different—no wonder Buxley thinks a chicken might respond differently. (I'm thinking now about Fraser's childhood pastor's two favorite films being It's a Wonderful Life and The Passion of Joan of Arc.) Stéphane Grappelli (1908–1997) was a jazz violinist, a different style yet. The idea that he'll find something for the chickens to listen to, whether it's Classical or modern or jazzy, is pretty funny.

Montblanc is a brand of very expensive pens; they apparently also do watches and other jewelry and luxury items. And why would you hold a gun to a chicken's head? You'll blow your own hand off if you shoot it. Can't you just (threaten to) wring its neck?

( Scene 14 )

Vecchio's protest that he is treating Francesca exactly as she'd treat him if the shoe were on the other foot is the first point he's made that has any weight to it. Thinking people everywhere will agree that absent a specific agreement that this ticket is yours and that ticket is mine, when you buy lottery tickets with pooled money, each person who contributed is entitled to a share of the tickets equal to the percent of the purchase price they contributed. If Francesca gave Vecchio five bucks and he bought ten dollars' worth of tickets, every one of those tickets is half his and half hers. "Possession is nine-tenths of the law" (a notion Vecchio has brought up before) is probably true—he's got the lottery ticket, so it's fair to assume it's his—but irrelevant, because he doesn't have the winnings yet, which is what they're arguing about. (Fraser's use of "prima facie" is exactly the same, only in Latin. It means "at first glance.")

( Scene 15 )

The glamorous life of a TV star, am I right? Live chickens. Honestly. (Also, Milk Duds again!)

( Scene 16 )

Point-spread betting is so goofy. In this case, as I understand it, the bets are that the Raptors will either win outright or lose by less than three; that the Timberwolves will win by two or more; that the Kings will win; and that the Clippers will either win outright or lose by less than eight, the last of which Vecchio thinks is a lousy bet because the Clippers are doomed to lose by a mile (which: fair).

( Scene 17 )

I guess Sneed means he didn't know Buxley was going to get nailed for fraud.

( Scene 18 )

"Eat it because it's nutritious, you don't have to like it" = what we say to our five-year-old most days as we plead for him to eat something more than cinnamon toast

( Scene 19 )

Mucho gusto is Spanish for (approximately) "my pleasure," and do I believe Vecchio's pop would have gone to a barber who wasn't Italian? I do not. I also don't know what "a swisher on somebody's book" means, though it's clearly to do with gambling. I do like the idea of little Ray Vecchio using his pop's betting time to eat crullers and do nothing else. Heh.

( Scene 20 )

Okay so maybe Thatcher managed to avoid sleeping with Cloutier specifically, but based on that earlier scene I continue to believe she felt coerced into sleeping with someone senior to herself. Good for her for deciding she'd had enough, though! . . . A little less good for Fraser for not thinking his ruse all the way through before he began it, though.

( Scene 21 )

Illinois is more than 55,000 square miles. If they had the license number of the truck, they could go to the address where it was registered, but expecting it and its stowaway (or captive) passengers to be there seems optimistic.

How does Thatcher let her phone battery get that low?!

( Scene 22 )

Fraser really does not have especially good luck with industrial animal agriculture, does he?

( Scene 23 )

I think the ammonia and N2O are from the waste of the adult chickens, which wouldn't build up in the egg hatchery? But I guess the point is that without ventilation everything builds up everywhere.

I couldn't find any details on "Etek" or "Etech" or "E-tech" or any such brand name for the electronic lock; that name is too close to generic to be meaningful. Meanwhile, it is not clear why Fraser has switched from calling Thatcher "sir" back to calling her "ma'am."

( Scene 24 )

UGH. Are we supposed to be with Vecchio here? Because he's one of our heroes and Francesca is his annoying kid sister? Because I am one hundred percent on her side, and so (obviously) is everyone else in the show, even Huey, whom Vecchio gives no crap for saying "even-steven."

( Scene 25 )

I'm pretty sure this is the first prank we've seen from Fraser; is it only the second bit of evidence whatsoever that he has any sense of humor at all?

( Scene 26 )

It is a vat of (uncooked, of course) scrambled eggs. It's as if the next thing the guy was going to be dunked in was bread crumbs.

( Scene 27 )

They are both very good-looking, and they're warm and sweaty and close together, and all I can see is Fraser realizing where she's beginning to go at the beginning of her stammering line and deciding he has to help her not have to say what she's about to say. Is that wrong of me? The way he tunes in before the first time he looks back at her, I mean, it just looks to me like he's thinking "Oh, no, don't." Except he's the one who asked her out for coffee. So maybe he's thinking "Oh, no, you don't have to." And then the way he says "I got it" before it's obvious that he means he got the lock open; he's giving her an out on purpose, right? He's not that completely clueless?

( Scene 28 )

It's not important whether Thatcher pitched 30 complete games; surely she means over 270 innings, irrespective of how many games it took her to accumulate those innings. That 1.3 ERA means that in 270 innings she pitched, she allowed 39 runs (well, she pitched to 39 batters who scored runs, which is usually almost the same thing), which is indeed very good, though presumably she wasn't playing baseball but fast-pitch softball (in which 1.3 is still quite good but maybe wouldn't set records).

Chekov's Lottery Ticket is not in Vecchio's pocket anymore, and it looks like he's about to get some comeuppance.

( Scene 29 )

Yyyup.

( Scene 30 )

Okay this sidewalk-walking "Ahh" stuff is vintage Fraser and Vecchio the way they used to be, and I miss it. The lottery ticket B plot of this episode was entirely unnecessary except to give Francesca more to do, which I guess is a valuable goal, so that's all right; in fact the egg farming A plot doesn't seem to have gone much of anywhere either, though, now that I think about it. They dunked the nameless thug and arrested Sneed for what? Assault, probably? Like that's good, but does it get Buxley his farm back? He does seem to have signed it over legitimately and Marshack owns it now. I don't see that issue having been resolved in any way. I guess that's not really Canada's problem, and Buxley probably did agree not to sue Fraser and Thatcher and all of Canada, which is why Cloutier has commended him? (A commendation? Really? You don't think Cloutier now has as much of a grudge against Fraser as he probably has against Thatcher? Or maybe he wants to heap praise on Fraser and ostentatiously not on Thatcher; isn't that usually how it goes when a senior dude is mad at a junior lady for rejecting his advances?)

I have no insight on the title. I still think the most interesting thing in the episode is Thatcher's unfortunate history and the gentlemanly way Fraser allows her to avoid talking explicitly about it.

Cumulative body count: 20
Red uniform: Going out to investigate the hole in the road and onwards (impounding the chickens, interrupting Thatcher's dinner "date," foiling the plot at the eggery)

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